Lecture 2. The Life and Times of Bill Gates, Eco-Warrior

The Birth of Entrepreneurs

In my last lecture, I examined the environmental hopes placed in the nation-state, which has come to be (and likely always already was) imagined as the key actor in the struggle to address climate change. It’s obvious why many would see the nation-state in this way. Nation-states are imagined as having the resources necessary to take substantive action on climate and to do so at the scale and with the speed demanded by the crisis at hand. My examination of the way in which discourses of nations and nationalism are being mobilized for climate action today suggests that, unfortunately, nations are unlikely to play the role one might have hoped. Appeals to nationalism as a mechanism to get people to act on climate—often imagined as akin to mobilizing them for war—come at a time when populist nationalisms have unnerved the belief of liberal nationalism in its own powers. The only guarantee that nation-states will use nationalism correctly as a mechanism for climate change is that nations understand and undertake their mission in the right way—that is, via the values and qualities typically associated with liberalism. The lack of significant action to date by liberal nation-states; the questionable, easy equation of liberal capitalism with “good” nationalism; and the present crisis of nationalism all suggest that climate hopes placed in the nation-state are unlikely to be rewarded with substantive and effective climate action.

If not the nation-state, then what? If nations are unlikely to generate new eco-possibilities, either on their own or due to citizen pressure, where are we left? What other arguments have been made to establish control over narratives of energy transition, climate action, and the shape of our renewable futures? Are any other actors able to instigate impactful environmental change with the speed and at the scale needed to make a real difference? Who are they, and why might they be interested in doing so?

To answer these questions, one must dig into the historical damp and humus from which contemporary eco-actors have grown and the conditions of possibility that would permit them to continue to flourish. Accounts of the recent fate and state of nations (and the nationalisms associated with them) are inevitably told through narratives of their rise and fall. The period following World War II is characterized by triumphant nation-states competing against one another to establish the global hegemony of individual nations (e.g., the United States, the USSR) or groups of nations (e.g., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Warsaw Pact); nation-states expressing a commitment to internationalism after the trauma of war (e.g., the UN); postcolonial nationalisms (e.g., India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Organisation of African Unity), which challenged the physical and psychological violence of colonialism to create new collectives, some more successfully than others; and social democratic nation-states (in whatever form and to whatever degree) that were the result of decades of workers’ struggles to create polities attentive to the needs of all their denizens. These different modalities of nationalisms—and still others I haven’t named—sometimes supported and reinforced one another (e.g., the Cold War and postwar Keynesianism; Cold War competition and the birth of postcolonial nation-states) and sometimes threatened each other’s viability (e.g., exuberant postcolonialisms put the lie to the Cold War rationality that played a role in bringing them about).

And so, the rise—but what of the fall? The way in which the upended chessboard of the Cold War system was put back together is captured in a single word: globalization. But chess played without an opposition, with pieces of a single color, turns out to be no game at all: globalization suggests that following the Cold War, nation-states are no longer necessary. This promise of a postnational world was, we know, a ruse.1 Even if borders disappeared for the movement of capital and goods, they only ever allowed some bodies to move through passport checkpoints with the freedom enjoyed by financial markets. What is certain about globalization is that the deterioration of the postwar system of competing nation-states generated possibilities for capital that had not previously existed. Neoliberalism—the ideology at the heart of the global era—predates the birth date of globalization; after a successful test run in Chile in the 1970s, it was already being put into play by the governments of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Brian Mulroney in the 1980s. But neoliberalism could become hegemonic only because of the openings that globalization created for crafting postnational political subjects shaped by new rationalities (or if not entirely new ones, older ones put into play with more intensity). In place of the citizen—a subject with obligations to the nation-state, but also vice versa—was born the entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism, to which nation-states owe no obligation other than the assurance that they will get out of the way to allow this new subject to do its work.2

Writing about entrepreneurial subjects has focused in the main on the tragic deformation of social and political life that their existence represents.3 Where once there was a space of democratic deliberation and decision-making (to whatever degree and extent; ruses abound in political life) that took place in a sphere deliberately set aside from the market, all aspects of social life had become subject to the logic of economics. This was a political project built with a specific intent, however messily and imprecisely this may have been (and continues to be) executed: to limit the capacity and the political necessity of the state to provide social goods.4 This withdrawal of aspects of the state from public life has happened throughout the world, with different consequences in each polity where neoliberalism has taken hold.

Although a great deal has been written about neoliberalism and its impact on the subjects who have had to use its ideologies and rhetoric as the framework for their existence, less has been written about another figure that neoliberalism has produced. This is what I will call meta-entrepreneurs, composing that class of celebrity billionaires whose success and power both affirm the legitimacy of neoliberalism and provide entrepreneurial citizen-subjects with evidence of what they can accomplish if they just try hard enough. As the grand political end product of neoliberalism, meta-entrepreneurs possess powers that states do not, and not only because they have gained social and economic dominance in the wake of the withdrawal of the state. Their powers arise from their ability (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) to make things happen. States are slow to act, even now seeking and requiring consent from citizens before they can enact grand social transformations, for example, the establishment of a society committed to climate war. By contrast, meta-entrepreneurs, figures connected to companies with monikers that sound as if they are taken from science fiction novels (e.g., Alphabet, Meta, Apple), can largely do what they want: there remains remarkable little state oversight on what these companies do given their astonishing social, political, and economic power.5

To date, only a few meta-entrepreneurs have concerned themselves directly with environmental issues. Among these, one figure is playing an outsized role in defining what our energy and environmental futures will look like: Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. Given the contemporary neoliberal political landscape and the weakness of the liberal nation-state, how Gates imagines addressing climate change and engendering energy transition needs to be taken seriously. Gates’s postnational account of best-case climate scenarios and views on what to do and what comes next is giving shape to an environmental common sense that may well prove to be difficult to challenge or unnerve.

Let me say it again: if not the nation-state, then what? For some, the answer is the socially concerned meta-entrepreneur, exemplified par excellence by Bill Gates. But before we get to Gates, we need to grapple with the ways in which one of the most important dimensions of climate change—energy—has been sutured into the imaginaries of the ruling class, past and present.

From Steam Fetishism to Solar Fetishism, 1825–2025

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies constitutes the second modern energy transition, the first being the shift that took place in response to the mass adoption of fossil fuels. That there are historical differences between the two transitions is obvious enough; the two hundred years between 1825 and 2025 are different enough to render weak even broad analogies. For a start, the circumstances of the present transition have been shaped profoundly by the earlier one; for this reason alone, to see the transition to and from fossil fuels as being an energy transition in the same sense is a category mistake. Nonetheless, understanding the structural and ideological forces guiding the first transition is a useful way of grasping just what’s different this time around—and of understanding, too, the broad outlines of the energy worldview within which Gates and other meta-entrepreneurs operate.

Malm’s Fossil Capital provides one of the best accounts of the first energy transition.6 The book endeavors to offer a counternarrative of the birth of energy by mounting a protracted challenge to dominant narratives that position the steam engine as the protagonist of energy history and, indeed, place it at the origin of modernity itself. The arrival of the steam engine in 1776 (so perfectly aligned with the American Revolution that one can’t help but think someone impish is pulling the levers of history behind the scenes), so the story goes, set into motion a series of historical developments that led inevitably to the creation of fossil-fueled modernity. Malm mounts a detailed, multifaced challenge to this narrative, anchored by a fact of history that is impossible to refute. He notes that the steam engine—which is to say, the use of coal as a source of energy—did not become the prominent source of energy in the cotton industry (a primary site of energy use in the early nineteenth century) until well after its invention. Steam was adopted in fits and starts by factory owners and industrialists mostly after the economic crash of 1825. It wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that coal truly became the primary source of energy—some seventy-five years after the date most often marked as the beginning of the fossil fuel era.7

It’s easy to see why steam was so slow to be adopted. The original sources of energy used for cotton production—water and wind—were free, whereas coal was not. Water also produced far more power than early steam engines. A complex set of factors resulted in the adoption of steam power as the predominant form of energy. At heart, however, steam was adopted despite its greater cost because it allowed factory owners to better manage the labor necessary for expanded cotton production, especially in the wake of the powerful labor movements engendered by the economic crash. Unlike water, coal could be transported to sites of production in cities, where labor was ample and competition for jobs fierce, and where striking workers could be replaced by other workers desperate for income, or by children and women, whose labor proved easier to exploit.8 Although transporting coal was expensive, bringing coal to factories also eliminated the need to transport labor to water mills, where manufacturers would have to bear the costs of housing and feeding them, often with disastrous results for production.9 Far from being the protagonist in the story of fossil-fueled life, Malm relegates the steam engine to being little more than a plot device—important to moving along the story of fossil fuel transition, but hardly the main actor.

Malm’s exploration of the forces and dynamics guiding the transition from water to coal—from what he terms the energy of flow to stock—stands in contrast to the solar transition currently under way—which is a return move, from stock back to flow. Whatever else one might say about the transition from water to coal, it was never conceived as a sociopolitical project deliberately and directly focused on transfiguring energy use to a determinate end in the manner of current energy transition—that is, a project focused on producing energy differently and doing so on a global level and in short order. It is also hard to see the current transition as emerging from the need to manage labor struggles.10 The struggle to adopt solar power isn’t in the main the outcome of labor problems connected with the use of fossil fuels, due in part to the general suppression of the labor movement in the neoliberal era. Nor is the shift to solar everywhere and only an elite project dedicated to ensuring that industrial processes work without impediments or disruptions. Comparisons between the first and second transitions turn up few similarities but many differences.

The forces driving the current energy transition are to be found elsewhere. The causes are as complex as those mapped by Malm with respect to the first transition. Energy cost is once again part of the story. Coal was adopted despite being more expensive than its alternative. By comparison to fossil fuels, solar power (taken here as a synecdoche for all renewables) is cheap once capital is invested to develop and install it, and so one might imagine capital racing to adopt solar power to lower production costs. Several things stand in the way of the rapid adoption of solar power. These include barriers erected by industry and the weight of the physical and social infrastructures developed over two centuries around the use of fossil fuels.11 Solar power also threatens low returns on investment. The inversion here is important to note. Capitalists were once dragging their feet to leave flow behind, until the benefits of its use in production became evident. Now some are dragging their feet to return to it, despite potential cost advantages and the environmental consequences of not doing so—and the growing import of being seen by consumers as on the right (i.e., green) side of energy history.12 The reasons have less to do with labor than they do with the sheer amount of power provided by fossil fuels and the desire of every industry to squeeze as much revenue as possible from its sites of extraction.

Even if slowly to date, the adoption of renewables is now beginning to accelerate, and for reasons wholly absent in the transition Malm examines.13 In addition to the potential for cost savings, solar transition has been mobilized and sustained—cynically at times, deeply felt at other moments—by ethical and eschatological considerations, by a sense of responsibility to future generations and other inhabitants of the planet, and by the goal of deferring or delaying the end times that constitute the ultimate threat of climate change.14 Commitments to ethics and reflections on eschatology might seem far afield from the core principle of capital: the accumulation of profit. But remember, if using fossil fuels didn’t generate carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide didn’t make fundamental changes to the planet’s atmosphere, it’s unlikely there would be much, if any, interest in a transition from stock back to flow. There would be no climate problem to address and no crisis to manage. Might the biggest distinction between the first and second transitions—between the shift to fossil fuels and the shift away from them, between the one Malm maps and the one in which Gates participates—be the introduction of a set of values into capitalism that one would never have expected to find there, values that some have thought might unnerve the accumulation of profit?15

In a crucial chapter of Fossil Capital, Malm describes the process by which steam became an essential component of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology and thus deeply embedded in narratives of the modern.16 The bourgeoisie understood in multiple ways the power that steam technology generated. It was simultaneously a utopian project, the perspective of a governing class, and a reflection of an emergent modernity—a folding together of grand narrative, ideological outlook, and raw history that is now difficult to pry apart. An explicitly class project, this (what Malm names) “steam fetishism” connected technology and science to progress, wealth, private property, and freedom—that is to say, to a liberal capitalism both propelled by and legitimated through technological innovation.17 The language of solar transition depends on the selfsame set of equivalences (i.e., progress, freedom, wealth, and the rest), with one important difference. Those who commit to solar transition can claim to bring an ethical perspective to energy history. An emergent green bourgeois ideology now disavows steam as an energetic mistake due to the civilizational and environmental consequences of its use. But remarkably, doing so doesn’t thus unnerve the original connections established in steam fetishism between technology and wealth, science and freedom, or steam and history. One might have expected the shifts and realignments of liberal ideology from dirty to clean energy to have unnerved the underlying fantasy of liberal capitalism, once the energy lie of modernity is revealed, as many critics of capitalism’s long-term role in climate crisis expect it should be.18 Instead, a commitment to solar transition manages the feat of transfiguring capitalism from the principal cause of eco-collapse into the one force that has both the infrastructural capacity and the ethical authority to do something about it—a reaffirmation of liberalism’s capacity to unfold toward a greater good, figured this time in relation to the type of energy in use.

Let’s call this new ideology solar fetishism, an emergent twenty-first-century bourgeois ideology that, like its steam progenitor, combines utopian project, the perspective of a governing class, and a common sense now in the process of being nervously composed and imposed. Threatening to drain this fetish of its spiritual and ethical energy is the reality that for the moment, solar energy just doesn’t pay: profit largely remains tied to the continued use of fossil fuels. As luck would have it, there are creatures living among us—or, rather, looking down at us from the heights of the 0.001 percent—for whom money doesn’t matter, especially when it comes to doing the environmentally right thing. Meta-entrepreneurs, those extra- and quasi-state actors who act when states seem unable to do so, have the power to make solar profitable and, in the process, show how contemporary capitalism operates with the best interests of the planet in mind. Their efforts help to keep the magic of the fetish alive.

Which brings us back to Bill Gates, one of the (supposedly) good billionaires, a figure who has been described (by a critic!) as “unquestionably an ally to the climate movement”19 and from whom we can understand just how green ideology and solar fetishism manage to do their work.

Solar Fetishism in Action: Green Premiums, Self-Interest, and Care

For more than two decades, Gates has mobilized his wealth toward achieving social ends. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000, has supported projects to eradicate disease in developing countries—most famously through its vaccine programs—and to ameliorate what it sees as flaws and limits in the current U.S. education system. With a current endowment of more than US$70 billion and total grant payments of US$77.6 billion since its inception, the Gates Foundation has the resources to make substantial inroads in both health and education.20 The foundation has found greater success in its health program than in its educational endeavors, though both have been criticized for their framing of problems and approaches to solutions and especially for their failure to involve impacted communities in program development.21

Among the titans of the digital era, Gates stands out as one of the few who have mobilized their wealth to effect social goals.22 In New Prophets of Capitalism, Nicole Aschcoff describes Gates as a “philanthrocapitalist,” a figure who wants “to harness the forces of capitalism that made them fabulously wealthy to help out the rest of the planet.”23 A range of other organizations undertake philanthropic work on the basis of enormous endowments received from their capitalist progenitors, the most famous being the U.S. foundations established at the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g., Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller). Aschcoff draws a distinction between these foundations and some of those more recently established, especially the Gates Foundation. Whereas typical foundations “believe in old fashioned charity,” philanthrocapitalists have larger ambitions: “[they] think profitable solutions to social problems are superior to unprofitable ones because they give private capital an incentive to care.”24 Philanthrocapitalists—a small but growing brand of meta-entrepreneur—approach their missions through the neoliberal rationality from which their wealth emerges.25 They have become extraordinarily wealthy from a system that fuels their capacity to do so; this selfsame system, within which states have been drained of resources and (or so the rhetoric of neoliberalism asserts) which lacks the intellectual capacity and moral fortitude to effectively resolve problems, has necessitated that philanthrocapitalists step in for the broader social good, employing their business smarts, leadership experience, wealth, and unparalleled influence to effect change.

Gates has only recently turned his attention to saving the planet. In his best-selling 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, he names 2015 as the moment when he committed himself to saving the planet.26 Gates points to two events that finally solidified his worries about energy and the environment—concerns that had lingered in the background in much of his work with the Gates Foundation. Each moment offers a synecdoche of how Gates views the specific contribution he believes he can make to climate action as a meta-entrepreneur. In the first case, he describes how he became aware of the student-led movement demanding university endowments divest from fossil fuels. A campaign launched by the Guardian asked the Gates Foundation to do the same: to sell its investments in the fossil fuel industry.27 The foundation eventually did so, a decision Gates describes as a “personal choice.”28 Nonetheless, he chastises the students and the Guardian for what he sees as a fundamental misread of the politics of climate change, noting that divestment has little chance of effecting an actual reduction in CO₂ levels. He also suggests that divestment movements fail to attend to energy justice, arguing that he “didn’t think it was fair for anyone to tell Indians that their children couldn’t have lights to study by, or that thousands of Indians should die in heat waves because installing air conditioners is bad for the environment.”29 The link Gates draws between energy use in developing countries and stocks in university endowments is, of course, a straw man argument. But the rhetorical effect of the argument is real enough. It allows Gates to evidence his mature read of a situation and concern for the experience of others, specifically the energy challenges those living in the Global South face. This concern for the developing world is foregrounded throughout his book (and on his website), which works effectively to diffuse criticisms that might otherwise be voiced about his positions on climate action. Gates evidences common sense; the students are painted as well-intentioned creatures who don’t yet know the ways of the world.

The second event Gates recounts is equally revealing about his view as to what constitutes effective climate action. He describes what investment in new technologies and innovation can accomplish to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. Gates recounts steps he took in advance of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (more commonly known as COP 21) in Paris to mobilize governments and investors to generate funding for green tech, a sector in which returns had become low, thus leading investors to pull out their money. By the beginning of COP 21, Gates had brought together twenty-six investors and formed a new investment fund called Breakthrough Energy (members now include Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg).30 He brought governments into the project of green energy as well, convincing French president François Hollande, U.S. president Barack Obama, and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to double the green tech funding of their respective governments. The difference between Gates’s eco-accomplishment and that of the divestment students couldn’t be clearer: in contrast to what he sees as the ineffective and misdirected protests of students, Gates shows that he has the ear of business and government and can make big things happen in a flash. The Paris Agreement signed during COP 21, which has become a touchstone in global efforts to address climate change, is never mentioned by Gates. And why should it be? The real action on climate took place elsewhere, before governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) even showed up in Paris to do their work.

In many ways, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is an unobjectionable book—which is not the same as saying there aren’t many aspects of it that are worrying.31 It belongs to an increasingly familiar genre of climate texts in which the narrative is driven by the author’s stated desire to “cut through the noise” (Gates actually uses this phrase32) of climate change by describing where things are and what can be done to resolve the climate crisis we are experiencing.33 One might draw on far worse texts to provide an account of climate change and climate action (Tom Rand’s 2020 The Case for Climate Capitalism: Economic Solutions for a Planet in Crisis is an especially bad one).34 The main point Gates wants to make is stated unambiguously and is in line with what many (perhaps even most!) environmental groups believe needs to be done. The world adds fifty-one billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere annually; it must get to zero tons as quickly as possible. In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates investigates the five main activities that produce greenhouse gases—making things, generating power, growing things, getting around, and keeping warm and cool.35 In each case, he carefully enumerates emissions, outlines the effectiveness of technological solutions, and provides ideas for possible ways forward. The book avoids any number of possible missteps. No easy solutions are proffered (the title of the second chapter is “This Will Be Hard”). It is attentive to the distinct energy and environmental challenges and experiences of the Global South. And on more than one occasion, Gates offers a mea culpa about his own privilege (“It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high”36). He repeatedly rejects degrowth strategies as ill considered, misinformed, and unethical. He believes that to enable development in the Global South, it should be possible for everyone to use more energy, not less. The climate challenge comes down to making sure that every one of the five activities Gates names is done in a way that makes zero impact, while improving the quality of life of every person on the planet.

Getting to zero is a laudable goal. It is how Gates proposes to get to zero that is troubling, especially in the context of his power and desire as a philanthrocapitalist to effect change in some ways (e.g., mobilizing huge investments in technology) while expressing disdain or disinterest in others (e.g., supporting or encouraging divestment). How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is a book that consciously sidesteps the politics of climate change to focus on where Gates believes the real action on climate change takes place. He writes,

In the United States especially, the conversation about climate change has been sidetracked by politics. Some days it can seem as if we have little hope of getting anything done.
I think more like an engineer than a political scientist, and I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change. Instead, what I hope to do is focus the conversation on what getting to zero requires: We need to channel the world’s passion and its scientific IQ into deploying the clean energy solutions we have now, and inventing new ones, so we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.37

Throughout the book, politics is viewed as the problem, while technological advances constitute the only true solution to climate change. At times giddily, Gates describes emergent technologies—often ones in which he or Breakthrough Energy have invested—and their prospects for getting greenhouse gases down to zero. This emphasis on technology comes as little surprise, and not just because of Gates’s own predilections: energy fetishisms, whether of the steam or solar variety, depend on it.

But to see this book as primarily about technology is to miss the real force of its argument and its implications for an emerging common sense on climate action. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is a book whose main concern is to explain how and why capital must play a fundamental role in creating climate solutions. The route to zero emissions passes through capital; technological innovation can happen only when investors have turned their heads toward solar transition and have made the decision to redirect financial resources from fossil fuels to solar energy. For Gates, it’s easy to explain why this hasn’t yet happened. “There’s a very good reason why fossil fuels are everywhere,” he writes. “They’re so inexpensive. As in, oil is cheaper than a soft drink.”38 Fossil fuels, whether oil, gas, or coal, are cheap, and the ease which with they can be used in existing infrastructure, combined with their affordability, means there is still little incentive to adopt green energy on a mass scale and even less incentive for investors to put their money into it. The challenge Gates sets himself is to understand how to produce the economic incentive to entice capital to throw its resources into the transition from dirty to clean energy.

The metric of capital incentive is captured in Gates’s neologism “Green Premium,” which he uses to measure the difference between the cost of fossil fuels and the forms of green(er) energy fuels that might act as substitutes. For instance, the Green Premium between the retail price per gallon of gasoline (US$2.43) and advanced biofuels (US$5.00) is 106 percent,39 while the premium for cement is calculated as a range of 75 to 140 percent (US$125 average per ton at present, US$219–300 per ton using carbon capture).40 It is certainly possible to challenge (in the examples offered) whether either advanced biofuels or carbon capture constitutes the best substitute for fossil fuels, or whether any of the energy substitutes Gates proposes are the right ones. But to limit one’s attention to this point is to miss the forest for the trees (or perhaps a more appropriate idiom would be that it is to miss the planetary climate disaster by spending one’s time complaining about the need for anyone to fly). What matters more in understanding how Gates shapes a solar fetishism appropriate to the era is tracking his proposed solutions for the Green Premiums that exist today.

Gates suggests two ways to address Green Premiums, that is, to cut them down so that the price of green energy becomes the same as or less than the price of fossil fuels. The first is simply to have consumers pay the difference. To this solution, however, he offers a quick rejoinder: the premiums would need “to be made so low that everyone”—that is, countries around the world—“will be able to decarbonize.”41 The care Gates takes to note the unequal impacts of energy costs on different communities is evidenced here again.

The second option is to somehow close the gap between the costs of oil and of green energy. Using one of the examples offered earlier, this would mean making advanced biofuels the same price as gasoline, so that airplanes can fly while drastically reducing their production of greenhouse gases. The gap can be closed in several ways. For Gates, the fundamental and perhaps only way is through developing new technologies. Green Premiums can also be made smaller or eliminated altogether by governments, which can produce policies to support the adoption of new technologies (e.g., “it’s the only way nuclear will have a chance of helping with climate change”) or, alternatively, provide investors and entrepreneurs with financial resources to offset the costs of research and development.42 In either case, closing the gap means creating a situation in which capital is willing to invest in developing new green technologies because they believe they will get returns. To date, neither business nor government in concert with business has managed to fully close the gap on its own. This is where the philanthrocapitalist comes in—a figure with the capacity to push a stalled system toward a desired goal because she can bring business and government together to common ends, as evidenced by Gates’s spur-of-the-moment creation of Breakthrough Energy in advance of COP 21. In this account, the unique capacity of the nation-state to act on climate change doesn’t necessitate new forms of nationalism; it requires meta-entrepreneurs to take the reins of power, acting for everyone’s good.

In a speech he delivered at the 2008 World Economic Forum, Gates outlined what we might take as his base understanding of the fundamental operations of sociality:

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can’t pay. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.43

These words were articulated in reference to the Gates Foundation’s support for global health initiatives; in 2008, climate change was not an issue that had yet captured Gates’s full attention. But it is easy to see how the divide between self-interest and care explicated here animates his views on climate action as well. To start to grasp how he imagines the role philanthropists—and specifically philanthrocapitalists—can play in addressing climate change, and to understand, too, the specific function of capitalism in climate action, all one need do is substitute “environment” for “the poor” in the preceding statement.

And what does this substitution tell us about climate action? It is that care plays an essential role in producing the conditions that will allow the gap represented by Green Premiums to be closed; only care—the opposite of self-interest—can initiate a process through which the power of markets to make rapid improvements can be mobilized in support of issues that fall outside of their episteme, such as the poor or the environment (neither of which can pay for anything they may need). The inability of capitalism to attend to things it should care about should constitute a substantial rebuke to its capacity to act on climate or, indeed, to deal with anything other than that which can be rendered profitable. But Gates sees things differently. He suggests that capitalism has the capacity to harness “self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way.” Gates believes that when it comes to addressing huge problems like poverty and climate change, it would be a mistake to sidestep capitalism’s capacity to generate unique solutions. In his view, the function of care isn’t to make the poor and the environment safe from capitalism but to make them safe for capitalism to do the self-interested work it does best. No class is better equipped to do just this than philanthrocapitalists. Only Gates and others like him have the power to bridge the divide between self-interest and care, which is necessary to save us from disaster.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster captures the form and characteristics of an emerging worldview on energy and environmental futures. It is a worldview that accords perfectly with existing neoliberal understandings of how the state and capital can most effectively operate together to resolve problems. Gates positions the state and the social—what was once the realm of care—on the outside looking in on the design space of technological problem solving. He concludes his book by cheerfully narrating the need for resources to flow from the public purse to the pockets of private investors, who will in turn sell their new technologies back to states in need of solutions. Care might be a way of characterizing the political motive guiding those activists, NGOs, governments, and international organizations that have worked tirelessly to ameliorate the world created by self-interest. But if care is what really matters in bringing about environmental change, the proposition is that philanthrocapitalists can care better and in the right way, in concourse with self-interest. Philanthrocapitalists can act without the need for approval, debate, or dialogue and without a mandate secured by democratic governance. At a moment of political dysfunction and climate crisis, Bill Gates’s professed ability to put capitalism to work for the environment and to suture self-interest and care positions him as a climate leader who, like a latter-day Moses, mobile phone raised overhead to get a signal in the desert, can lead us to the promised land of zero carbon.

Philanthrocapitalists and Common Sense

The worrisome and dangerous shift of power, wealth, and decision-making from public to private has been examined in numerous studies of the logics and practices of neoliberalism. The brute realities of climate change, now directly felt by rich and poor (though in far different ways) through extreme weather events, have been seen by some as creating an opening for a critique of capitalism as a system with disastrous ends. But what happens if capitalists themselves begin to publicly recognize the civilizational crisis capitalism has induced? What happens to the effectiveness of environmental critique if capitalists begin to commit resources to solving the problems their class has generated? Through his actions and the work of his foundation, Gates the philanthrocapitalist argues that capitalism can be caring, if only given the right incentives. The concerted pushback on energy transition by some capitalists—oil executives and the like—only further reinforces the social and environmental concerns endemic to newer, shinier, and greener forms of technocapitalism and the capacity of good meta-entrepreneurs to solve meta-problems for the good of all.

Despite its many contradictions and inconsistencies (capitalists addressing the consequences of capitalism . . . through capitalism?), there is an undoubted power to eco-ideologies shaped by meta-entrepreneurs. The articulation of solar fetishism further solidifies already prevalent beliefs in technology as the primary driver of history—the solar panel lying just a few pages ahead of the steam engine in the textbook of liberal capitalism, helping the whole narrative to remain coherent even in the face of the potential end of humanity. And the actions of meta-entrepreneurs defer the need for publics to act. In the face of a complex problem like climate change, citizens are gifted the opportunity to stop worrying: the meta-entrepreneur has the unique formula to figure out how to push stuck systems back into operation without the need to upend sociopolitical or economic apple carts in the process. How could anyone resist such a narrative? “Three Cheers for the Dull, Factually Correct Middle” is the title Gates gives to his review of Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works.44 There is no doubt about how he envisions the proposals he makes in his own book—as politically inconsequential and without harm. It is in this dull middle of correct facts where incentive to change disappears into the givenness of who can best lead us to a greener world. And it is in this middle defined by facts and figures, and thus supposedly free of all politics and ideology, that we see the construction of a common sense of eco-capitalist action.

Gates’s narrative of our energy and environmental futures is a vision shared by many others within industry who recognize the reality of climate change and want to act on it. As might be expected, this narrative is not without challengers. Those mounted against Gates and against the legitimacy of nation-states as climate actors are the subject of lecture 3, which concerns right-wing populisms and the answer they propose to the question of who owns the sun.

Notes

1. For a review of the limits of globalization, see Imre Szeman, “Globalization,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, 458–65 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
2. With respect to neoliberalism and subjectivity, see, e.g., Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Boston: Zone Books, 2017); Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (New York: Verso, 2017); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010); and Annie McClanahan, “Becoming Non-economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” Theory and Event 20, no. 2 (2017): 512.
3. See, e.g., David Chandler and Julian Reid, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), and Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
4. The now classic articulation of this can be found in David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
5. See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2020). I would argue that this remains the case, even given laws instituted in the European Union and elsewhere intended to provide some oversight of companies like the ones just mentioned.
6. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (New York: Verso, 2016).
7. Analyses from other perspectives offer a similar account of the slow speed of transition. Roger Fouquet writes, “Since the Industrial Revolution, it has taken, on average, nearly fifty years for sector-specific energy transitions (i.e., the diffusion of energy sources and technologies) to unfold in the United Kingdom.” Fouquet, “Historical Energy Transitions: Speed, Prices and System Transformation,” Energy Research and Social Sciences 22 (2016): 7.
8. See Malm, Fossil Capital, 121–64.
9. Malm, 165–93.
10. On labor and energy, see Huber, Climate Change as Class War, and Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2013).
11. On the significance of infrastructure for energy, see Jean-Paul Deléage, Jean-Claude Debeir, and Daniel Hémery, In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization through the Ages (1991; repr., London: Zed Books, 2021); Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); and Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (New York: Verso, 2014).
12. The 2022 U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) foregrounds the need for government to invest in renewables to make them profitable. See Pippa Stevens, “First Solar Announces New U.S. Panel Factory Following the Inflation Reduction Act,” CNBC, August 30, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/30/first-solar-to-build-new-panel-factory-following-inflation-reduction-act.html. Matt Huber offers a very different read on the imperatives driving the IRA. See Huber, “Mish-Mash Ecologism,” New Left Review Sidecar, August 18, 2022, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/mish-mash-ecologism.
13. In its 2022 World Outlook Report, the International Energy Agency noted that for every US$1 investment spent globally on fossil fuels, US$1.50 is now spent on clean energy. The IEA scenarios for future energy investments show this difference growing by as much as 1:5 by 2030. See https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2022/executive-summary.
14. See Allan Stoekl, “‘After the Sublime,’ after the Apocalypse: Two Versions of Sustainability in Light of Climate Change,” Diacritics 41, no. 3 (2013): 40–57.
15. As but one example, see Hermann Scheer, Energy Autonomy: The Economic, Social and Technological Case for Renewable Energy (New York: Routledge, 2018).
16. See Malm, Fossil Capital, 194–222.
17. For a variation of this argument, see Matt Huber, “Refined Politics: Petroleum Products, Neoliberalism, and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 295–312.
18. See, e.g., David Schwartzman, “Solar Communism,” Science and Society 60, no. 3 (1996): 307–31. For another variant of this argument, see Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism, trans. Zachary King (New York: Verso, 2021).
19. Leah Stokes, “Bill Gates and the Problem with Climate Solutionism,” MIT Technology Review, February 16, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/16/1017832/gates-robinson-kolbert-review-climate-disaster-solutionism/.
20. See the Gates Foundation fact sheet at https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/foundation-fact-sheet.
21. For recent criticisms, see Linsey McGoey, “How Bill Gates Makes the World Worse Off: Interview with Nathan J. Robinson,” Current Affairs, July 29, 2022, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/how-bill-gates-makes-the-world-worse-off, and Valerie Strauss, “Um, Who Are Melinda and Bill Gates Trying to Kid?,” Washington Post, April 16, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/04/16/um-who-are-melinda-bill-gates-trying-kid/. McGoey is author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (New York: Verso, 2016).
22. By comparison, the Bezos Earth Fund, established by ex–Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has distributed only US$1.4 billion. See Rachel Sandler, “With Jeff Bezos’ Latest Grants, Here’s How Far along He Is on His $10 Billion Earth Fund Giving,” Forbes, December 6, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2021/12/06/jeff-bezos-just-gave-433-million-to-climate-groups/.
23. Nicole Aschcoff, The New Prophets of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), 108.
24. Aschcoff, 108.
25. A recent example of a plunge into philanthrocapitalism is the much publicized decision by Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard to turn the company into a nonprofit foundation. See Matt Ott and Glenn Gamboa, “Patagonia Founder Gives Company Away to Environmental Trusts,” Associated Press, September 15, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/patagonia-founder-donation-environment-55eaba4b90c9c6a271e75fc8d906545e.
26. Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (New York: Knopf, 2021).
27. “Keep It in the Ground” campaign, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/mar/16/keep-it-in-the-ground-guardian-climate-change-campaign.
28. Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, 10.
29. Gates, 9.
30. See https://breakthroughenergy.org/. Criticisms of the group’s commitment to nuclear energy were raised almost immediately upon its creation. See Linda Pentz Gunter, “Is Gates’s ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’ a Nuclear Spearhead?,” Ecologist, December 6, 2015, https://theecologist.org/2015/dec/06/gatess-breakthrough-energy-coalition-nuclear-spearhead.
31. See, e.g., Million Belay, “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need,” Scientific American, July 6, 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bill-gates-should-stop-telling-africans-what-kind-of-agriculture-africans-need1/. The nonprofit investigative research group U.S. Right to Know keeps track of reports and news articles critical of the Gates Foundation’s health and agricultural projects in Africa. “Critiques of Gates Foundation agricultural interventions in Africa” can be found at https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/critiques-of-gates-foundation/.
32. Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, 20.
33. See, e.g., Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis (New York: Vintage, 2021), and Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation (New York: Penguin, 2021).
34. Tom Rand, The Case for Climate Capitalism: Economic Solutions for a Planet in Crisis (Toronto, Ont.: ECW Press, 2020).
35. These five descriptors are used on the Breakthrough Energy website.
36. Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, 14.
37. Gates, 14.
38. Gates, 39.
39. Gates, 144.
40. Gates, 107.
41. Gates, 61.
42. Gates, 191.
43. Bill Gates, “A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century,” speech at the World Economic Forum 2008, Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2008.
44. See Gates on Smil, in a review published on the former’s website: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/How-the-World-Really-Works.

Lecture 3. From Convoys to Commons