Image by Getty and Unsplash .

In late October, Hurricane Melissa (that should have been called “Godzilla”) battered western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds. It tossed the roofs of buildings about like splintering javelins, demolished municipal buildings and hospitals, snapped telephone poles like matchsticks, flattened crops, and dumped torrential floodwaters everywhere, leaving $8 billion in damage. That Category 5 storm’s unprecedented ferocity was driven by an overheated Caribbean Sea, produced by 275 years of industrial civilization that has spewed obscene amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.

The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an “apocalypse” in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical. He urged them to chill the hell out. It was an arrogant and manipulative oracle, uttered with all the privilege of the world’s 19th richest man. A symbol of monopoly capitalism, his individual net worth rivals the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic. And when he responded to Hurricane Melissa, he did so (not surprisingly, I suppose) in the narrow sectional interests of the world’s wealthiest class in Silicon Valley.

“My House Is a Rubbish Heap”

Gates rejects the view that climate change “will decimate civilization,” insisting instead that it “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Of course, no one in the scientific community had argued that climate change would actually wipe out humankind, so he is indeed (and all too conveniently) attacking a straw man.

That he resorted to a description of such fallacious relevance shows how intent he is on engaging in a bad-faith argument. And that, in turn, raises the question of his motivation. After all, the possible decimation of civilization, as did indeed occur in parts of Jamaica recently, is quite different from the full-scale extinction of the human species, and it certainly raises questions of equity. The nearly half a million Jamaicans who will be without electricity for weeks and who may face severe food shortages because of crop damage will, of course, not be enjoying much in the way of “civilization” In the wake of Melissa. As Sherlette Wheelan of that island’s Westmoreland Parish said, “My house is like a rubbish heap, completely gone. If it wasn’t for the shelter manager, I don’t know what I would’ve done. She found space for me and others, even though her own roof was gone.”

And imagine this: the hurricanes of the future world we’re now creating by burning such quantities of fossil fuels, in which temperatures could rise by a disastrous 3 degrees Celsius, are likely to be so gargantuan as to make our present behemoths look sickly. Melissa was already a third more powerful than it would have been without climate breakdown. Heat up the Caribbean Sea even more, and the power of storm winds won’t increase on a gentle slope but exponentially. Scientists are already suggesting that we need a new Category 6 classification for such hurricanes, since our present 5 categories are inadequate, given their increasing power. Remember, at present, with Melissas already appearing, we have only experienced a global 1.3 degrees Celsius increase in temperature over the preindustrial norm. At issue is the quality of life and the degree of civilization that will be possible in a world where the temperature increase could be at least double that.

The Demand for Data Centers Cannot Be Met Sustainably

A decade ago, many of the companies in Silicon Valley seemed willing to take on the role of climate champions. Microsoft, where Gates made his career, pledged to be carbon negative by 2030. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has already put more than 30,000 electric vehicles on the........

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