Politically Unstable: The climate agenda is driven by money

Video

Thursday, November 13, 2025

OPINION:

It may have been jaw-dropping, but Bill Gates deserves no credit for his stunning reversal on climate change.

Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of Power the Future, joins Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss.

[SADLER] Bill Gates has been saying that the world is going to end because of global warming, that generations will die. There will be a demise. And recently, he backtracked on those comments, basically saying that global warming will not lead to humanity’s demise, his words. And in fact, there is no doomsday risk to global warming. Why this about-face, this U-turn right now, Daniel?

[TURNER] It’s a remarkable U-term. You just used the phrase “doomsday.” There’s an actual doomsday clock. King Charles started it. He was still Prince Charles at the time. But he actually activated it. And we’re in backwards countdown mode of the end of times. So, for someone like Bill Gates, who really has been one of the leaders of the climate movement, to come out and reverse this, makes you realize something else has to be going on. And if you’re someone like Bill Gates, and you’re incredibly smart, and you see a couple of moves in the future. You realize that not only is the climate movement not the “it” thing to protest, but that the climate movement is actually hampering a lot of the technologies that he wants to get online, data centers, artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of power right now in the energy space about political power.

We see this administration, which is talking about drill baby drill, and permitting and fracking and pipelines and opening up America, offshore and Alaska, etc. So if you’re Bill Gates, your finger’s on the pulse when you’re thinking to the future, you realize that this is now the new opportunity. It’s not climate. And so it’s not really an about-face as much as it is for him, a strategic pivot.

[SADLER] So are you telling me this was never about saving humanity from our climate’s demise? There was really never any virtue in getting on this bandwagon for Bill Gates?

[TURNER] I feel bad in saying that, because I don’t want to demoralize anyone who thought that Bill was looking out for the best of humanity. But you look at the book that he wrote about the climate crisis, it was navigating the climate crisis or how to survive the climate crisis. And it came out very early in the Biden administration, early 2021. And in that book, he lays out a plan, which basically sounds like an application for government grants. We need green funding of this. We need green funding of that. We need green funding for upstarts. Bill Gates makes butter out of carbon dioxide. I would never eat it. But it’s readily available. He makes meat out of lab-grown things. And he wanted money for that. And someone like Bill Gates, he’s not going to use his own money. He’ll get government grants for that. I mean, billionaires are billionaires for a reason. So the timing of his climate enthusiasm very conveniently coincided with the outset of a Biden administration, which pledged billions, if not trillions of dollars in the climate space. And now there’s a new sheriff in town, and Bill Gates wants to be part of his posse.

[SADLER] But Daniel, you mention in your piece, even though Bill Gates has done this U-turn, he still is giving millions of dollars to these nonprofits that want to get government money. As much as Donald Trump has promised to come in and clean the swamp, it’s really hard to clean the entire bureaucratic establishment that has bought into this climate change hysteria. There’s so many people working within the bureaucracy that believe in it, and grants that have been going out.

[TURNER] Absolutely. And this is, I think, a very awful part of American political philanthropy. You see it a little bit on the left, but it probably exists on the right as well. And it’s this sort of extortion, to put it bluntly. You know, if we accuse an organization of X we’re going to mobilize our activists against you unless you write us a check. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Push Coalition are often the best examples of this, right? “We will call you a racist company unless you start writing us checks.”

The climate movement does this very well. There’s a reason why, back when Greta was one of the leading climate activists before she decided, like, hating Israel was more fun. The new it thing, right? The new climate thing.

But there was a reason why certain companies were never the focus of her wrath. And those companies knew to write enough checks to keep people off their backs, to keep people out of their boardrooms and from throwing bricks through their company’s windows. And so it’s smart for Bill Gates. Again, the guy’s worth $200 billion or something shy of that. So, a couple million dollars here and there to keep people at bay is just a smart investment. And sadly, we see a lot of that in politics. “I will send my minions after you unless you pay me enough money and then I’ll stop.”