Manu Joseph: Why activists can’t stand the middle path that Bill Gates would have the world take on climate change

He did this in a single detailed article on his blog Gatesnotes.com. He wrote that climate change is a very serious issue, even transformative, and that millions will be affected, especially the poor.

If he had just said all this, it would have looked like the text of any compassionate and alarmist climate warrior, but then he framed it in his new conviction that climate change is not the end of the world. It will not be as bad as we have been led to believe. Also, carbon emissions are coming down, and they may come down faster: “…with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further."

What would particularly disturb some well-financed climate activists was his articulation of the fact that funding for various issues is a zero-sum game—something is at the expense of something else—and all the billions going into climate action is money denied for human welfare in some of the poorest regions on earth.

An implication of what Gates said is that intellectuals and millionaires pushing for ever greater climate spending may actually be perpetrators of human inequality without either knowing or acknowledging it.

Not surprisingly, Gates’ essay has faced a severe activist backlash. “Did you hear the news? Climate concern is dead! No need to worry, because the Tech Titans have it in hand…" wrote Kathleen Biggins, founder and president of C-Change Conversations, a nonprofit organization that promotes discussions about climate science on a “non-partisan" site managed by Florida Atlantic University.

This melodramatic tone would be the least of Gates’s problems.

In the coming days, as the Epstein files flood the media, some people may wonder how Gates was entangled with the disgraced paedophile. There are consequences to challenging conventional wisdom on climate change, even for a billionaire who has given away billions to the cause.

Activists who promote a doomsday scenario detest a calm, reasonable position—the middle ground—because it makes them appear hysterical. If they say “genocide," you should not say it’s only a “massacre"; if they say genetically modified (GM) food is evil, you cannot say everything we eat is genetically modified; if they say climate change is the end of the world, you cannot say it won’t be that bad.

It is the way of the world that people who are not careful with the use of the word ‘genocide’ are usually against GM foods and think climate change is a world-ending catastrophe unless their dire plans are implemented. In my observation, they are also likely to love chamomile tea.

Mark Lynas, who was among the key activists to have created the fear around GM foods and later recanted, wrote in his memoir that activists reserve their deepest hate not for those who have always disagreed with them, but for those who were one of them and recanted. They become traitors. And Gates seems to have become one because he once did share many of the climate doomsday concerns. Now he has read fresh data and sees the matter in a new light.

The issue of climate change is yet another sign that modern activism is a form of religion and science its malleable theological foundation. For many of them, the issue is very important for their moral well-being, a worthy fight in a life without meaning. And they feel diminished every time they are told they are not fighting an apocalypse. That is why they rebuke the middle ground.

Disbelievers can be dismissed as fools or sell-outs. But someone who was on their side, and who appears to have considered all the facts and arrived at a middle ground, is destructive to their cause, especially one as influential as Gates.

But there is, I feel, a subconscious reason why activists are allergic to the middle ground. It ruins an excellent form of storytelling. Any popular story needs extreme scenarios, extreme heroes and extreme villains. Doomsday is one of our best stories. That is why we have so many of them. Religions have doomsdays. Cults that challenged religions came up with their own doomsdays. It is not surprising activism revolves around doom because it is a powerful plot device.

Some people may claim to love something called ‘nuance’ but generally, the riskiest way to tell a story is through a reasonable balance.

This is why one of the most remarkable aspects of our past is the existence and survival of one fable. It is possibly the worst story ever told, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. A girl goes into the home of three bears and has porridge that is neither hot nor cold, but just warm. That’s most of the plot. The wisdom of the middle ground, which is what the tale is about, is normally a doomed fairytale. Yet, it somehow survived. But it is rare. Almost all our successful stories are extreme events led by extreme people.

It is possible that activism, once it has spread its primary fear, can continue no matter what new science says about it. For example, the anti-GM movement is still going strong, even though it is now fairly well established that there is nothing in science to support the view that GM food harms our health. A few years ago, nearly 100 Nobel laureates, most of them in sciences, stated that the movement against GM food had no scientific basis. Yet, the fear is alive, even if it has lost some the hysteria around it 10 years ago.

Gates’s shift in stance is a blow to the enormous funding of climate change, but it is hard to kill a religion.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’