As wildfires get worse, government spending is rising sharply. Research firms that report on the global wildfire defence market are projecting annual growth rates that range from 8.4% to 12.6%, much of it driven by public funding. For example, the United States’ budget for wildland fire management was $1.9 billion in 2025, a 10% increase from the previous year. For 2026, the U.S. Department of the Interior has asked for $6.55 billion – a 245% increase – citing the increasing frequency of wildfires and devastating disasters like January’s fires in Los Angeles, where losses are estimated as high as $131 billion.

In fact, climate-related disasters have become a major economic driver. Andrew John Stevenson, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, has recently produced research showing that 36% of all the growth in U.S. gross domestic product is from spending on disaster preparedness and recovery.

On October 22, a consortium of national organizations in Canada published an open letter to the federal government asking for a five-year investment of $4.1 billion in wildfire defence. Signatories include Nature Canada, Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Mining Association of Canada, Protect Our Winters Canada and World Wildlife Fund Canada.

Across the world, unprecedented conflagrations have spurred federal investments to new heights.

South Korea

This past spring, one of the worst wildfires in South Korea’s history killed 30 people, injured dozens of others and displaced 40,000 people. The fires consumed a 1,300-year-old Buddhist temple. Five thousand personnel and more than 80 helicopters were mobilized to fight the fires. South Korea’s acting president called them the worst in the country’s history.

Coupled with U.S. auto tariffs, the wildfires prompted South Korea’s government to quickly assemble a US$8.6-billion supplementary budget, of which nearly a billion was earmarked for wildfire recovery. The funding nearly doubles the disaster-response wallet and includes major investments for firefighting equipment like helicopters and AI-enabled surveillance cameras.

“We took into account the fact that the scale of wildfire recovery continued to increase and domestic and international uncertainty has greatly expanded since the announcement of the U.S. reciprocal tariffs,” Vice Finance Minister Kim Yoon-sang said at the time.

Australia

The horrendous bushfire crisis of 2019/2020 in Australia affected 80% of the population and caused AUD$2.4 billion of insured loss. More than 17 million hectares were burned and a billion animals are estimated to have perished, along with 33 people.

The fires prompted the Australian government to establish a dedicated National Bushfire Recovery Agency, with an initial $2 billion focused on community resilience and economic resurgence.

In 2023, Australia was struck again by another round of devastating bushfires, which burned substantially more area than the “Black Summer” fires a few years previous, primarily in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

Australia’s 2025 federal budget now provisions $1.2 billion for disaster recovery payments. For its part, the northern state of Queensland allocated $4.357 billion over four years for a fire disaster and recovery package emphasizing front-line services. (New South Wales outlined a similar amount over the same period for disaster recovery, albeit primarily addressed instead to major flooding.)

Brazil

In the spring of 2025, Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands were visited by what NASA’s Earth Observatory called “unusually early and intense” fires, which consumed more than 1.3 million hectares.

That fall, the government allocated the equivalent of US$95 million for firefighting efforts. The 2024 fires were so bad, the government declared a nationwide environmental emergency ahead of the 2025 fire season and hired an additional 250 federal firefighters.

Read more of our wildfire coverage

Canadian groups call for dramatic increase to wildfire defence funding

Canada is under attack by wildfires. It’s time to respond like it’s national defence.

Emerging research reveals stark health threats from wildfire smoke

The fight against wildfires is getting increasingly high-tech

The added capacity seems to have helped. So far this year, the country reports that it has experienced the lowest number of wildfire outbreaks in the past 12 years. Brazil’s forest secretary at its Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change attributes the decrease to improved weather conditions and “efforts mobilizing local stakeholders, municipal and state governments, with investments in fire departments and an increase in federal-level initiatives.”

This September, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a US$1-billion investment in the multilateral forest conservation fund called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility. Lula has promised that the Brazil-led fund will become operational at this year’s COP30 in the Amazonian city of Belém. The ambition is to raise $125 billion.

But preserving the Amazonian rainforest is only getting harder. Mongabay reports that “rising temperatures and erratic rainfall rendered parts of the western Amazon up to 30 times more fire-prone than pre-industrial levels.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights. He is based in Montreal.

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We are now in the “find out” phase of climate change: 2024 was a record year for insurance claims in Canada at about $9.1 billion, driven by extreme weather, and a fraction of the more than $24 billion in uninsured damages.

The industry’s response to such claims is to increase premiums and reduce coverage to remain profitable. On average, Canadians’ home insurance costs rose 76% over the past decade, no matter whether they have made claims, and insurers expect increases greater than inflation this year too. Where there have been disasters, such as a suburban Calgary hailstorm last year, rates have spiked much higher.

It’s not fair to expect either a policy holder or a taxpayer to foot the bill for damages being caused by companies making a profit by putting emissions into our atmosphere.

– Kiera Taylor and Matt Price, Investors for Paris Compliance

Unlike in the United States, home insurance rates in Canada are not regulated. Our provincial market-conduct authorities do not even publish information regarding rates or regional coverage withdrawals. Nor will you see panels on insurance affordability at the annual conference. The industry is content to quietly pass along rising costs as long as it is able. Insurance companies like Intact and Definity are even raising shareholder dividends while doing so.

Unfortunately, this is now an established cycle of damages, claims and rate increases. The global reinsurer Swiss Re estimates that because of climate change, insured losses will rise by an annual rate of 5% to 7%, which, if we take the midpoint, amounts to a doubling in 12 years and a tripling in 19 years.

Where does this end? Logically, it ends in system buckling as people’s ability to pay higher rates diminishes. We see signs of this in places like Florida and California, which are ahead of us in extreme weather impacts. That’s a pretty big elephant to ignore, not just for the industry but also for the provincial and federal regulators that are supposed to safeguard the system. And, the knock-on effects include real estate devaluations, mortgage defaults and possible contagion into the broader financial system.

The industry’s plan for climate damages

To be sure, the insurance industry acknowledges the role of climate change in driving extreme weather and higher claims. Its response can be summarized in one word: adaptation. Homeowners are being asked to flood- and fireproof homes, and the industry is advocating that new homes not be built in risky areas, which is still ongoing. This is all worthwhile.

The industry is also advocating for taxpayer dollars both for infrastructure preparedness and for directly assuming some of the risk of flood-prone homes. The problem with that advocacy is not the content, but rather the fact that the industry does not have “clean hands” in making the case. Companies like TD Insurance – particularly via its parent – invest heavily in fossil fuels, while other insurance companies like Fairfax profit by insuring fossil fuel projects around the world. This activity fuels climate change and the damages that the industry is expecting the taxpayer to cover.

Some Canadian insurance companies have made net-zero commitments and are leaders in the space, such as Cooperators. But others like Fairfax have not, and the Insurance Bureau of Canada has no stream of work encouraging net-zero by its members, nor does it advocate for emission-reduction policies. Until this changes, politicians would be right in challenging the industry to put its own house in order before granting an audience.

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Ultimately, the industry needs to acknowledge that adaptation will go only so far. As a board member of the German insurer Allianz recently said, “The damage at 3C will be so great that governments will be unable to provide financial bailouts and it will be impossible to adapt to many climate impacts.” Property and casualty insurers should be front and centre making the case for strong climate policy, both to safeguard their own industry and to protect their policy holders.

And, since we are already experiencing the financial costs of climate damages, we need to have a bigger conversation about who pays. It’s not fair to expect either a policy holder or a taxpayer – often the same person – to foot the bill for damages being caused by companies making a profit by putting emissions into our atmosphere. Some U.S. states have started to seek cost recovery from polluters. Canadian insurers and legislators should be looking at the same.

Kiera Taylor is a senior analyst and Matt Price is executive director of Investors for Paris Compliance, a shareholder advocacy organization holding Canadian companies accountable to their net-zero commitments. 

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The most recent is the heartbreaking tragedy that has taken the lives of more than 100 people in Texas due to one-in-1,000-year flash flooding. That includes the lives of 27 children and counsellors at a local girls’ summer camp. 

Here in Canada, we are still in the midst of a devastating wildfire season on track to be the second worst on record. It has left communities across the country – especially remote, northern and Indigenous communities – fleeing for safety or anxiously living in fear of what their future holds. It has cast enormous clouds of suffocating smoke on major urban centres in Canada and the United States, similar to what happened during 2023’s record-smashing wildfire season. 

And, of course, last July we nearly lost the entire town of Jasper to inferno, and this past January Los Angeles stared down catastrophic wildfires.

I could go on. But the point is that in each of these all-too-common events there is immediate and incalculable human tragedy and suffering. People’s lives are upended, they lose those most dear to them, or they are forever changed in some meaningful way. 

And there is climate change. 

Natural disasters are where the typically bloodless, scientific term of “climate change” meets reality. They are the front lines of an even larger human tragedy that is playing out before our eyes, almost in slow motion. I say “almost” because these disasters keep piling up quickly as the heating of the planet accelerates. 

We need to fully acknowledge both realities – both the immediate human impact and the underlying driver of climate change – and do so within a limited time window when media and the public are most attuned.

The question is: what to do about it? And how do we talk about these events in a way that respects the personal tragedy while being clear-eyed about the accelerating force of climate change?

Striking a delicate balance

At the top of the to-do list is rapidly reducing the amount of carbon pollution we send into the air and building a cleaner economy. We can also take a litany of actions to protect our communities and make sure we are better prepared for future disasters. 

Doing both at the same time will dramatically save costs and reduce human impacts, as the Canadian Climate Institute has shown in great detail. (The institute has even set up an online tool to track recent climate-related costs from extreme weather in Canada.) 

Read more by Rick Smith

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But part of the conundrum is about helping people gain a more visceral understanding of the reality we all face. Are people internalizing the link between these tragic events and climate change? It’s an important question because outside of these disasters, the reality of climate change can be much less impactful, often expressed in the more abstract language of science or policy. 

The answer seems to be that yes, a majority of Canadians are still making the connection between extreme weather and climate change, particularly with wildfire. But that’s despite a lack of media coverage linking the two. In fact, only 16% of Canadian news stories about wildfires explicitly named the connection to climate change, according to recent analysis. Much more needs to be done to make it clear that the two are inseparable.

For people working to accelerate policy change, that means it’s critical that we help make those connections. We need to fully acknowledge both realities – both the immediate human impact and the underlying driver of climate change – and do so within a limited time window when media and the public are most attuned.

To do so is not “politicizing” the weather or wildfires, as some have claimed. Of course, we need to treat the victims with great empathy. But we cannot let the moment pass without tying together symptom and cause.

Anything less risks exacerbating the current path we’re on and inviting even more danger. Future disasters will become worse and more frequent. These unspeakable tragedies will continue with the root of the problem left unspoken. And the public will remain in the dark about the true emergency we face, with climate change threatening even greater destruction in the future. 

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

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How did Trump respond? In his textbook fashion: by reducing the catastrophe to the scale of a personal grudge match with rivals. In a post on Truth Social, the social media platform he launched in 2022, the incoming leader posted a picture of the fires with the words “It’s not climate change, it’s Democrats.”

Trump’s second term of office begins next week, and his administration will face more deadly and expensive catastrophes like the wildfires in Los Angeles. Trump’s poor management of natural disasters during his first term has been sharply criticized, though his mishandling hasn’t cast the same shadow that George Bush’s failures did after Hurricane Katrina. But the rate of climatic transformation is now accelerating into uncharted territory. Each of the last two years saw huge temperature spikes beyond the range of expectations from previous modelling. “Scientists are struggling to account for the speed of this recent jump,” journalist Eric Roston writes in Bloomberg, calling it “the greatest climate mystery in 15 years.”

The climate situation Trump inherits at his inauguration isn’t the same as the one he inherited in 2016. Last year the United States experienced 27 disasters whose losses exceeded a billion dollars, just shy of 2023’s record-setting 28. His strategy of approaching every catastrophe as a venue for political warfare will be tested even more than last time. Will it continue to work?

The president’s role when disaster strikes

Although U.S. presidents sit at the top of the emergency management system, they have only one official role to play when major emergencies happen: they sign disaster declarations, a necessary first step that frees up funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other sources. The tendency among other presidents is to approve them quickly, but Trump has been known to wait. Olivia Troye, a Homeland Security adviser in the White House during Trump’s first term, said in October that Trump often delayed signing those declarations, depending on who would receive the aid.

In 2018, Trump initially refused to authorize disaster relief following deadly wildfires in California until staff showed him that Republicans live there too. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas . . . to show him these are people who voted for you,” an aide told Politico.

Beyond the initial declaration, the role of the president is mainly to provide comfort and reassurance that the federal government will help, says Thomas Birkland, a professor of public policy at North Carolina State University. “That’s the traditional thing presidents do in disasters, but like so many things, Donald Trump doesn’t behave like a traditional president,” he says. “Trump’s use of these disasters to score political points off governors is highly unusual.”

The quality of a president’s leadership does influence the success of response and recovery efforts. The president can alleviate harm and improve outcomes through swift action, clear communication and close collaboration. But Trump’s handling of past crises like Hurricane Maria and the COVID-19 pandemic has been defined by delays, misinformation, blame-shifting and political manoeuvring.

What can we learn of Trump’s approach to disasters from his first term?

He’ll look for leverage by creating delays – with deadly consequences

Traditionally, politicians treat natural disasters as opportunities to rise above partisan politics, but Trump never retreats from the red-blue divide. His approach to disaster response can be characterized by his fascination with using nuclear bombs to dispel hurricanes, an idea he floated repeatedly during his first term. He’ll always find an enemy and give them all the blame he can.

When Michigan flooded in 2020, he threatened to withhold federal aid in order to pressure the state’s governor to retract a plan to mail absentee ballot applications.

He’s been doing the same thing in California. In September, he pledged to hold back wildfire aid unless Governor Gavin Newsom acquiesces to remove environmental protections in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. “We won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

When Hurricane Maria inflicted roughly US$100 billion in damages, Trump’s administration withheld $20 billion in aid, creating bureaucratic obstacles and “unprecedented procedural hurdles,” a report found. His officials then blocked an investigation into why the recovery funding had been obstructed. It ended up taking nearly a full year to restore power to Puerto Rico, and almost 4% of the island’s population, or some 130,000 people, were ultimately displaced.

A subsequent Harvard study showed that the slow recovery contributed to thousands of excess deaths – more than 70 times the official death toll, researchers estimated – as a result of damaged infrastructure and reduced health services. Trump rejected the higher death statistics and accused Democrats of inflating the numbers to make him look bad.

He’ll try to be the star of the show

When Hurricane Harvey dumped 1.5 metres of rain on eastern Texas in 2017, killing 88 and causing US$158.8 billion in damage, Trump’s response demonstrated a stark “empathy gap,” as he repeatedly insisted on how well things were going and treated his visit to a crisis centre like a rally. “What a crowd!” he called out. “What a turnout!”

The same impulse was evident in Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Maria, when he threw paper towels to a crowd seeking relief supplies, launching them into the air with the flair of someone tossing swag at a sporting event. Later he tweeted that it had been a “great day.”

He’ll sow confusion

In 2019, when Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas, Trump erroneously tweeted that it would strike Alabama. When the National Weather Service corrected him, Trump then used a black Sharpie to redraw a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to include Alabama, according to reporting by CNN.

With the Los Angeles wildfires, Trump has already managed to refocus the conversation for his followers on unrelated protections for an endangered species of fish called smelt, falsely claiming that conservation efforts had caused fire hydrants to run dry. 

A new phase in the climate crisis

Trump may dismiss climate change as a hoax, but as president he’ll have no choice but to contend with its effects. He bears some responsibility for the worsening conditions: in order to boost fossil fuel production during his first term, he weakened, dismantled and eliminated dozens of rules and regulations aimed at reducing pollution. And he’s promising more of the same. But even if he tries to stop production of wind turbines, as he threatened to do last week, he can’t control the weather.

The post Trump will preside over continued climate breakdown. How will he handle it? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In our rush to build new supply, will governments, lenders and developers ensure that the new housing is capable of withstanding climate-related catastrophes, or are they content to take the path of least resilience?

The steadily growing prevalence of devastating wildfires and flooding have revealed new vulnerabilities in Canada’s existing housing stock. As participants in a panel on housing resilience, held as part of the 2024 CatIQ catastrophe conference, explained, flood-related losses involving residential buildings is now about $2 billion, according to federal government data. Almost four million Canadians live in floodplains prone to one-in-200-year events. Recent studies have found that homes subject to flooding sell for 8.2% less than comparable dwellings and take longer to find new buyers.

In the U.S., meanwhile, a 2023 Nature study estimated that residential properties exposed to flood risk are $121 to $237 billion over-valued, with lower-income households in particular disproportionately exposed to those baked-in vulnerabilities. Another assessment, reported in Scientific American, projects that the risk of destruction of low-income housing by coastal flooding will triple over the next 30 years.

The challenge facing policy-makers, in other words, is to avoid past locational and structural failures, such as approving sprawling subdivisions in B.C.’s Fraser Valley floodplain.

“We actually should be thinking about resilience when we’re building,” says Kathryn Bakos, managing director of finance and resilience at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at the University of Waterloo. “We do have a housing crisis and we need to build more, but if we don’t build those homes appropriately, then we’re putting low-income households or newcomers in harm’s way, and we would be causing them more cost in the long term.”

If we don’t build those homes appropriately, then we’re putting low-income households or newcomers in harm’s way, and we would be causing them more cost in the long term.

 

–Kathryn Bakos, Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation

What’s more, the acceleration in disaster-related displacement – the 200 families in Nova Scotia that lost their homes to wildfire last summer, for example – is adding that much more pressure to the housing market, notes Chris Chopik, director of Resilient Homes Canada at The Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. “Unless we’re thinking of this from both what we’re losing as well as what we’re gaining, we’re not really looking at the problem completely.”

The political pressure to build shouldn’t become a licence for shoddy or shortsighted design and construction. “Excuse my language, but affordability through shitty housing is not good policy, but it’s what we tend to do,” says housing policy consultant Steve Mennill, the former chief climate officer for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. He cites incentives baked into a current rental-housing subsidy program that allow developers to outfit these apartment buildings with gas-fired boilers with relatively short life spans and a reliance on, well, gas.

The explanation: this equipment is less costly in projects expected to deliver on the promise of affordable rents. “In 10 years,” Mennill says, “we’re going to rip them all out and replace them with electric heat pump units or other technology. They’re cheaper right now if you subsidize this program, based on its upfront capital cost. But if you actually consider the life-cycle costs and the operating costs of that decision, you will probably come to a different decision.”

“Excuse my language, but affordability through shitty housing is not good policy, but it’s what we tend to do.

 

–Steve Mennill, former chief climate officer for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation

Chopik points out that governments, lenders and builders tend not to acknowledge the fact that investments in a home’s resiliency have an exceedingly high rate of return – five- to 10-times payback compared with the personal and societal costs that kick in when a disaster hits; that is, everything from property insurance claims to emergency relief funds, which come from public coffers and thus eat into the funds governments use to deliver other services. As he says, it’s the old adage about an ounce of prevention: “Does everybody need to have a heart attack before we go and start on our heart health? That doesn’t seem like the right answer.”

With governments pushing to approve new affordable housing and higher-density housing, policy-makers should be looking for ways to rewire the lending system such that resiliency is rewarded. “We need to make higher-risk things more expensive and lower-risk ones cheaper than they are,” Mennill says. “Right now, there’s very little differentiation at the individual house level or mortgage level between higher-risk and lower-risk houses in terms of the cost of financing.”

Governments at all levels, he adds, need to do a better job mapping disaster risk – for example, the precise location of floodplains or urban-forest boundaries – and then make this information available to lenders, both private and public, so they can price in this kind of climate risk when approving financing arrangements with builders or local governments. “You have to have that information readily available and widely available.”

In the rush to accelerate housing construction, planning authorities and developers may be tempted to sacrifice resilience to drive down prices, Bakos says. “You could actually say we’re moving in the opposite direction because of the need for housing.”

But, as Chopik points out, climate math dictates that shortcuts – building on marginal low-lying land, eliminating basements, ignoring the need to install basic protections, like backflow valves, et cetera – will boomerang back on everyone involved, from lenders to tenants.

“The entire housing supply chain has a motive to act based upon every actor’s own self-interest around asset protection and housing preservation through resiliency,” he says. “We know what the scientific interventions are to make buildings more resilient. We need individual homeowners and the entire housing supply chain to do a better job of investing in resiliency.”

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The government’s National Adaptation Strategy “signals meaningful progress toward a whole-of-Canada approach to climate mitigation and adaptation,” the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) said in a release last Thursday, welcoming a federal plan that was two years in the making. “The announcement included a significant investment in the Green Municipal Fund (GMF) to support, accelerate, and scale up community-based climate adaptation initiatives.”

The strategy was also well received by Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry, which held seats on two of the five advisory committees that developed the plan. The Insurance Bureau of Canada hailed the initiative as “brave” and “ambitious,” reports Canadian Underwriter.

The strategy envisions a country prepared to deal with the worst impacts of climate change, reports CBC News. While it talks about multiple targets, it doesn’t provide any hard numbers. The government says more detailed implementation plans will be rolled out later.

The bulk of the adaptation funding goes to support for communities, including $530 million for the GMF and a $491-million top-up for the government’s existing Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund (DMAF). Other budget lines include $164 million to improve Canadians’ access to flood mapping, $30 million to protect against extreme heat, $41 million for a pilot program to improve resilience in northern and coastal communities, and $70 million for a national science assessment to improve climate data.

“Just in the last few years, communities across the country have seen first-hand the devastating impacts of extreme weather events,” said Infrastructure and Communities Minister Dominic LeBlanc. “We know these events are only going to intensify,” he added, making the adaptation strategy “a key tool” guiding investments to protect Canadians from climate impacts.

But so far, the funding package is insufficient to offset the costs Canadians will pay to deal with the expected impacts of climate change, even after grouping it with $8 billion Ottawa has already earmarked for climate adaptation, the Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanksi reports. The Canadian Climate Institute anticipates the Canadian economy will see $25 billion in losses from climate impacts by 2025—and $78 to $101 billion per year by 2050, depending on future greenhouse gas emissions—with individual households sustaining the bulk of those losses.

The government is describing last week’s announcement as a “down payment,” suggesting more funding will be mobilized for adaptation in the future. “Clearly, there will need to be significant investments by all orders of governments and all Canadians across the country,” Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair told media.

In addition to the funding, the adaptation strategy includes high-level policy goals and a proposal to harmonize federal, provincial, and territorial adaptation priorities. The federal government is casting the strategy as a “whole of society blueprint” that addresses five key aspects of resilience-building—disaster response, infrastructure, nature and biodiversity, health, and the economy.

The policy goals are broadly stated, without clear benchmarks for accountability—though an annex to the plan proposes explicit targets that may drive government action.

Still, the strategy “marks more progress than some had feared, after a troubled development process in which the government struggled to give adaptation the focus it deserves,” the Radwanski writes.

This article was reprinted from The Energy Mix. You can read the original article here.

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However, numbers are the biggest problem with this book, starting with the first sentence: “There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero.” Fifty-one billion was the number of tonnes of CO2 from human activity added to the atmosphere in 2019; zero emissions are what Gates says we have to aim for to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But Gates says we still need concrete, fertilizer and natural-gas power plants (others think there are solutions for all three of these, but that’s another story), so he calls for “near net-zero,” where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere with carbon-capture devices, by reducing carbon in production processes, or through some form of offsetting.

None of these exist at scale at this time, but hey, don’t worry, Bill is on it: “I’m also a technophile. Show me a problem, and I’ll look for technology to fix it.” He has put a bit of his money where his mouth is, investing more than a billion dollars in everything from low-carbon cement and steel to faux meat, and several-hundred-million dollars in next-generation nukes.

The second problematic pair of numbers in Gates’s book are 2030 and 2050. Both are targets set in the Paris Agreement; to keep the rise in global average temperature below 1.5°C at the end of the century, we have to reduce emissions by about 50% by 2030 and to about zero by 2050. Gates does not believe that 2030 is realistic and thinks aiming for it might even be counterproductive. “Why? Because the things we’d do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we’d do to get to zero by 2050. They’re really two different pathways, with different measures of success, and we have to choose between them.”

The 2030 pathway would mean starting now with the technology we have, which might take us 80% of the way. But Gates says we should be thinking big and using the time to plan for “the big technological changes that would ensure long-term success.” There is some logic to his worry about “lock-in” with investments in problematic “bridge fuels” like natural gas, when his strategy is to go zero-carbon with renewables and nuclear power, electrifying everything, and then using carbon capture to pick the remaining CO2 out of the air and then store it somehow.

The problem with these strategies is time, given another big number: 570 billion tonnes. That’s the estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2018 of the total quantity of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere if we are going to have a good chance of staying under 1.5° warming. Divide that by Bill Gates’s 51 billion tonnes and we run out of headroom before 2030, and it’s why every single molecule of CO2 emitted now matters; if we keep pushing off making changes, then his new technology is going to have to do an awful lot of CO2 sucking.

The second, bigger problem with a 2050 target is what futurist Alex Steffen calls “predatory delay.” It lets Toronto Mayor John Tory pour a billion dollars of concrete into the Gardiner Expressway or Ontario Premier Doug Ford push a highway through the greenbelt because “don’t worry, we will have electric cars.” It lets Jason Kenney and Justin Trudeau keep boiling rocks in Alberta because “don’t worry, we will have a hydrogen economy.” It lets Gates keep flying his private jet because he will be able to buy sustainable fuel. It lets us wait for some deus ex machina to drop out of the sky and save us, instead of actually giving anything up or making changes in our lives or economies now.

Notwithstanding these doubts, there is much to admire about Bill Gates. In an era of what Michael Mann calls “doom and gloomism,” he is positive, upbeat and optimistic. He really does believe that we can invent our way out of this and go from 51 billion to zero, instead of starting tomorrow with the renewable and storage technology that we have now. The problem is that we have run out of time, and the numbers don’t add up.

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and author of the upcoming book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle.

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