Bill Gates’s Climate Climbdown — While Miliband Doubles Down

At long last, the high priest of climate catastrophe sounds almost reasonable. About time.

The climbdown

After years of sermonising about apocalypse and net zero at any cost, Bill Gates now says climate change won’t cause “humanity’s demise” and that the priority should be improving lives, not chasing sacred numbers. He is right to ditch the doomsday routine and talk about human welfare and trade-offs. The 1.5°C fantasy is slipping away and honest people admit it.

That is what many of us have said all along. You do not pauperise people to “save” them. You innovate, you adapt and you weigh costs against benefits like adults.

The inconvenient memory

This is the same Gates who flogged How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 2021 and flirted with solar geoengineering. Spraying particles in the sky to dim the sun. That sort of measure belongs behind glass marked “break in case of civilisation’s actual collapse,” not on the policy menu for a normal Tuesday. Now he talks about development, vaccines and real-world welfare as better uses of limited resources. Welcome to the conversation, Bill.

Reality bites

Energy and prosperity move together. We are sprinting into an AI world of data centres, chips and always-on compute. That takes power. Reliable, abundant, affordable power. You do not run a modern economy on wishful thinking and the occasional sunny afternoon. Even Silicon Valley can hear the grid groaning.

Meanwhile in Westminster: Miliband’s wind-and-solar fixation

Gates edges toward pragmatism while Ed Miliband steers Britain in the opposite direction. Labour won power then ripped up the de facto ban on onshore wind within days, fast-tracking turbines through planning and promising to make Britain a “clean energy superpower” by 2030. The government’s own pages boast of lifting the ban, accelerating consents and setting up “2030 Mission Control.” This is not a gentle nudge, it is a full-throttle push.

The programme is explicit: double onshore wind by 2030, triple solar, quadruple offshore wind, all to meet a zero-carbon electricity system by the end of the decade. Carbon Brief and the House of Commons Library both summarise the pledge in plain English. This is Miliband’s doctrine. More wind, more solar, faster planning, bigger grid. Whatever the practical obstacles, just get it built.

Supporters promise cheaper bills. Ministers repeat it like a hymn. Yet families are already wrestling with the highest energy costs in the world and a creaking grid that needs billions in upgrades before all these schemes can connect. The policy burden still lands on British households and industry through levies, transmission charges and planning risks that never seem to apply to Whitehall. Clean energy is a fine objective, but it is not free just because it is fashionable. A sane way forward

If Gates has finally twigged, here is the grown-up course the UK should now take:

• Human welfare first — health, clean water, flood defences, resilient housing and food security save lives now. Stop pretending spreadsheet targets feed a family.
• Innovation over rationing — back nuclear, grid reinforcement, advanced geothermal and cleaner industrial processes. Banning boilers and wood burners is not engineering.
• Adaptation is not surrender — plan for heat, fire and flood like a serious country rather than outsourcing hope to international summits.
• Energy abundance, not managed decline — prosperous countries clean up faster because they can afford to. Make energy cheaper and growth will do more for the environment than hair-shirt politics ever will.

No free do-overs

The people who shouted “the science is settled” now concede the famous target is slipping and the strategy must change. Fine. But you do not get to memory-hole the last decade or carry on issuing edicts like nothing happened. If your policies made energy scarcer and life dearer while you shut down debate, say so plainly then fix it.

The bottom line

Climate change is real. It is not the only problem and it is not a licence to micromanage people’s lives from Whitehall or Davos. Gates is edging towards pragmatism. Miliband is still stapling Britain to a wind-and-solar timetable that looks great in a press release and lands on the bills of British citizens. By all means build cleaner power, but do it with honesty about cost and reliability, not slogans and wishful thinking.

We will take policies that work over apocalypse theatre every day of the week.