Part 1: Climate change’s misaligned narrative

In September 2025, Ani Dasgupta, the President of the World Resources Institute (WRI), launched a new book, The New Global Possible, intended to counter the prevailing mood of climate pessimism. It lays out the immense progress that has been made in tackling climate change, and how much more could be done, if only leaders (in government, business and civil society) redoubled their efforts to the challenge. It is a deliberate attempt to reject the narrative that says that “it can’t be done” by showing concrete examples of how the transition is already happening. As the global climate summit (COP30) gets going in Belem, Brazil, there is no question that action to tackle climate is needed more than ever. It is also true that immense changes have already taken place, from the exponential growth of renewables, to the falling cost of battery storage and the rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) around the world. Yet the narrative that the WRI book encouraged made me uncomfortable. It felt like yet more urging in a world that has fundamentally changed; it felt deaf to the shift in the cultural narrative. 

Of course, the main reason that shift has occurred is the climate vandalism of the Trump administration. The US President openly calls climate change a scam and has systematically unwound support for (and indeed actively penalised) clean energy while promoting and subsidising fossil fuels. His stance has encouraged nativists around the world to label action on climate change as synonymous with support for the ‘urban, liberal, elites’ which populists like to blame for all problems. Action on climate change, which used to have cross-party consensus, has been dragged into the culture wars, with many right-wing parties now claiming that trying to achieve Net Zero is not worth the costs involved. Since the science is now incontrovertibly against such claims, populist leaders such as a Trump are doing their best to defund and delegitimise science itself, characterising it too as an emblem of liberal, elitism. This allows them to dismiss all facts that don’t agree with their political narrative.

The response of most governments committed to climate action has been to hunker down. Repeatedly we are told that, while the COPs may not have achieved as much as hoped, there have been major successes – not least the Paris Agreement – and that it is the only forum where all countries can come together to discuss and debate what should be done. In effect, that COP is the only game in town. 

Then, on 28 October, Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, dropped a small bombshell. In an open letter, he argued that, while climate action was important, the focus of public action should be on investing in health and developmental activities in developing countries, both because these save more lives in the short term, but also because such actions boost the resilience of poor households and communities to the climate changes that are coming.  Gates is no climate denier. He has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that are trying to create and scale new technologies for reducing emissions. Nonetheless, his comments were greeted with dismay by some climate scientists, and delight by Donald Trump who wrote on Truth Social that he had “just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Gates had “finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.” (Gates described this as a ‘gigantic misreading’ of his letter).

The challenge for us all is that I think Bill Gates is right – but not for the reasons he thinks...

Click here for Part 2.