AI Will Only Intensify Climate Change. The Tech Moguls Don't Care.

"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 UN 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."

"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"

Hurricane Melissa struck western Jamaica with 185-mile-an-hour winds, destroying roofs, municipal buildings, hospitals, telephone poles, and crops, and triggering torrential floods that caused about $8 billion in damage. The storm's unprecedented ferocity resulted from an overheated Caribbean Sea driven by 275 years of industrial carbon emissions. A prominent billionaire publicly characterized climate concern as hysterical and urged critics to "chill the hell out," reflecting a privileged Silicon Valley stance. That rejection framed climate fears as exaggerated and attacked a straw man, aligning with narrow wealth-class interests rather than acknowledging the scientific basis for escalating extreme weather risks.

Read at The Nation