Bill Gates's recent comments about the importance of adaptation echo former World Bank chief economist Larry Summers's response to the concept of “sustainability,” the moral rock on which the church of climate change was built.

Though still a “serious” problem, Gates no longer regards human-caused climate change as an existential threat. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates said. “Surprisingly, excessive cold is far deadlier [than extreme heat], killing nearly ten times more,” he admitted.

The Hoover Institution’s Bjorn Lomborg also notes that, “climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods, and fires have declined by 97% over the last century from nearly 500,000 annually to fewer than 15,000 in the 2020s. That’s a real human cost but far from cataclysmic.” 

Over the centuries, religious doctrines have shifted with changes in the science of the times.

Medieval Christian societies shifted their perspectives following the discovery that the sun does not revolve around the earth and eventual recognition that the profit motive contributes to economic growth and higher living standards in market-driven economies.

This is where the perspectives of the younger Summers, who later served as President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and chaired President Obama’s National Economic Council, become relevant.

He, too, was and is........

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