In a public letter entitled “Three Tough Truths about Climate,” Gates said that carbon-emission projections are heading down and that climate change will not turn Earth into a fiery hellscape. “People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future,” Gates wrote. 

“To be clear: climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved,” he wrote. But “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been,” he added. “Improving lives” is more important than “emissions and temperature change.”

Gates’s assessment turned heads, coming from a man who wrote a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. His true passion is human health. His Gates Foundation has invested US$50 billion to improve global living standards and combat diseases. But when the Trump government is pushing “American energy dominance” through fossil fuels, Gates’s manifesto seemed dangerously counter-productive.

Climate deniers couldn’t wait to mangle Gates’s message. “Huge victory,” Florida lawyer Rogan O’Handley crowed to two million followers on X: “Bill Gates & the climate-change alarmists are finally admitting humans will be just fine.” A Fox News panel responded to Gates’s letter by concluding that “we need abundant fossil fuels, and cheap – that’s how we lift people out of poverty.” 

Climate supporters fought back, noting that health and climate are inextricably linked. We can’t address health without targeting climate. Gates’s memo “redefined the concept of bad timing,” noted U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, whose co-authored study A Planet on the Brink came out the same day as Gates’s letter. Mann’s warning that we are hurtling toward climate chaos got scant attention. 

But there could be another force at work: a cycle of confirmation bias. In 2024, Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie published a book called Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. On page 1 Ritchie writes, “It has become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change.” Her alternative message is that fixing the climate will be hard, but it’s doable. Gates called the book “eye-opening and essential.” In November, he named Ritchie’s latest book, Clearing the Air, one of his top five books of the year. 

Veteran U.K. climate activist Jonathon Porritt questions the work of both Gates and Ritchie. In a 2024 article, he ripped into Not the End of the World for Ritchie’s selective use of statistics and her “banal evocation of ‘hope’ as our best tool in the fight against climate change.” Her naïveté, he said, “is quite staggering.”

Still, Gates was hardly the first voice to dial down the climate emergency in 2025. In April, former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair fronted a  report called The Climate Paradox in which he wrote that “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” And in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney – the UN’s former special envoy for climate action and finance – is touting Canada’s energy resources to the world – including oil and gas, and maybe a new oil pipeline. These debates will likely heat up in 2026. 

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Paul Hawken, the author of the new book Carbon: The Book of Life, argues that the climate movement is thinking about its work, and messaging, all wrong. “Those who call carbon a pollutant might want to lay down their word processor,” Hawken writes. Carbon, he notes, is, after all, the building block of life, the animating force behind trees, rhinos, eyelashes, hormones, bamboo and so much more. Without it, Earth would just be a lonely, dead rock. So much for decarbonizing.

Hawken has come to believe that treating carbon as something to tackle, liquefy and pump into geological formations not only reflects the same mindset that caused climate change in the first place, but also further alienates people from the living world. There is no “climate crisis,” he argues, but a crisis of human thinking and behaviour that’s degrading the soil, wiping out entire species and changing the weather faster than people can adapt. “From a planetary view,” he writes in Carbon, “the warming atmosphere is a response, an adjustment, a teaching.”

Shifting the frame: From fix to flow

The book records a shift in his thinking. In 2017, Hawken published Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, a book that ranked 100 climate solutions by how much they could reduce carbon emissions, from refrigerant leaks to food waste. The non-profit Project Drawdown, which he launched, continues to implement these kinds of fixes around the world. But now, Hawken is forgoing straightforward metrics to focus on what he sees as a deeper cultural problem. “The living world is a complex interactive system and doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions,” he said.

The core of it is about care, and kindness, and connection, and compassion, and generosity. That’s where regeneration starts.

– Paul Hawken

The new book frames carbon as a flow – a cycle that moves through the atmosphere, oceans, soil, with the element absorbed by growing plants and exhaled in every animal breath. Hawken’s book is a lesson in what’s sometimes called “unlearning,” or letting go of old assumptions, like the idea that nature is something to fix or control. The book explores ways to repair a broken relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from Indigenous cultures and new scientific discoveries. Hawken marvels at how much remains unknown about carbon, which he dubs “the most mysterious element of all.”

The book’s poetic language offers a stark contrast to the warlike terms climate advocates tend to use to describe carbon. Hawken argues that the typical metaphors are not only inaccurate – how exactly do you battle an element? – but also provide fuel for right-wing narratives that carbon has been unfairly demonized. Last week, E&E News reported that the Trump administration is planning a federal report making the case that a warming world would be a good thing, a pretext for weakening climate regulations.

“Carbon dioxide is not an evil gas,” David Legates, a former Trump official, said in a recent video put out by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. “Rather, it’s a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It’ll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures.”

A radical rethinking of the language of climate change

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Drawing on longstanding pro-CO2 rhetoric in climate denialism, Policy Resolution #12 asks the government to scrap its decarbonization goals, remove the designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and recognize the greenhouse gas as a “foundational nutrient for all life on Earth.”

“I think it has a very good chance of passing,” says Debra Davidson, a researcher in climate change impacts at the University of Alberta. “It’s not at all out of step with the position of Alberta’s United Conservative Party with respect to climate change mitigation and the energy industry for quite some time now.”

If it passes, the effect of the policy would be mainly symbolic, Davidson says, not only because it would be non-binding, but also because the Alberta government has already signalled that it has little intention of achieving its net-zero targets. Last year, for example, the province imposed a moratorium on large wind and solar projects, which led to 53 projects being cancelled and the estimated loss of $91 million in tax revenues. In the past five years, the UCP has also repealed the former NDP government’s carbon levy, opened the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to coal mines, and withdrawn funding for a public transit project in Calgary.

As Stephen Legault, senior manager of Alberta energy transition at Environmental Defence, has said, the resolution is “already de facto policy.”

On the other hand, Alberta did release its Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan (ERED) in April 2023,  aiming for a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.  However, despite these commitments, “There is no evidence that Alberta has taken any action to regulate oil sands emissions as noted in the ERED plan,” says Simon Dyer, deputy executive director at the Pembina Institute. This summer, the Alberta Energy Regulator projected a 17% increase in oil sands production by 2033.

Instead, the provincial government “has focused on criticizing the federal plan to reduce oil and gas emissions,” Dyer says. Premier Danielle Smith is an outspoken opponent of Ottawa’s planned emissions cap and has launched a national “scrap the cap” ad campaign.

Even if the policy proposal mainly serves to underscore existing inaction on emissions, what’s truly notable, Davidson says, is “the degree to which it indicates a full-scale legitimation of disinformation.”

An energy policy based on fiction

The rationale for the proposal is largely erroneous. It takes a few grains of truth – that the carbon cycle is necessary and that carbon dioxide benefits plants – and couches them in the mistaken ideas that current CO2 levels are near their lowest in more than 1,000 years and that “the earth needs more CO2 to support life.”

But the carbon in our atmosphere isn’t even close to being at its lowest levels, says James Miller, a researcher on global climate change at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

“Except for the recent period of increase, CO2 levels have been below 300 ppm for thousands of years,” he writes in an email to Corporate Knights. The atmospheric reading of CO2 reached 420 parts per million last year, according to the World Meteorological Association, which notes in a press release that “the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3–5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2–3°C warmer and sea level was 10–20 meters higher than now.”

And while increased carbon dioxide can be helpful for plants when everything else is equal, Miller explains, “everything else is not equal, and adding more CO2 leads to increasing temperatures, which can lead to less plant productivity.”

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Davidson calls the argument that more CO2 will be good for plants “absolutely preposterous,” not only because global warming leads to more droughts, but also because crops are temperature-dependent. Above certain thresholds, plant productivity declines precipitously, she says. NASA has predicted that factors including temperature stress from climate change could lead to a 24% decline in global maize crops as soon as 2030, which the study’s author says “could have severe implications worldwide.”

The type of CO2 boosterism expressed in the UCP policy proposal isn’t novel. Climate-denying think tanks like Alberta’s Friends of Science Society have been promoting it for many years. But the inclusion in a formal policy document represents a new development.

Climate denialism has grown significantly more entrenched in Alberta’s UCP party, political commentator David Climenhaga writes in an email to Corporate Knights. “Since Smith became premier, to a significant degree the UCP has become more like a comment thread on social media and less like a conventional political party,” he says.

Climenhaga thinks that the odds the resolution will be adopted are “extremely high, like 100%.” If so, it will create a problem for Smith, who is “heavily invested in carbon capture, both as a subsidy to the fossil fuel extraction industry and as a way to win social licence for more extraction.”

“Carbon capture is a real solution – one of the best we know of,” Smith said in November, adding that “Alberta fully intends to lead the world in this critical field.” Last year, she launched an incentive program to cover some of the capital costs associated with new carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) infrastructure in the province.

But according to Climenhaga, the people behind the policy proposal are “increasingly suspicious of carbon capture, not because they think it’s a boondoggle necessarily, but because they believe, as per the resolution, that CO2 is good.”

Alberta’s self-inflicted economic wounds

Abandoning its net-zero targets would set Alberta on a lonely path, marking it as an outlier in the global economy. “A commitment to net-zero is table stakes, in terms of the bare minimum,” Dyer says.

The policy proposal may be mainly symbolic, but “it’s a symbolism that is damaging to the investment climate in Alberta,” Dyer argues. Calgary and Edmonton are home to many entrepreneurs in the decarbonization space, he says, and policies that discourage investment would be economically harmful.

Even Texas, Alberta’s oil-loving American counterpart, has embraced the renewables boom and rapidly ramped up its solar and wind capacity. Three-tenths of its net electricity in 2023 was generated from renewable sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The proposed measure to abandon its net-zero targets would also put Alberta out of step with its own energy sector. Most oil and gas companies see a need for energy diversification and have made commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “The industry has been very good cutting back the use of diesel and methane emissions, carbon capture – they’re very active on that side,” says Josef Schachter, president of Schachter Energy Research, in an interview with the CBC.

It was economic factors and not climate change that drove the shift toward renewables in Texas, and the same could theoretically be true in Alberta. Even if the province doubles down on science denial, that doesn’t mean it has to deny cheap renewable power.

Mark Mann is an associate editor at Corporate Knights.

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But two days before the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement in December, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg shared a sobering video statement with her 17 million social media followers: “At the current emission rate, our remaining CO2 budgets for 1.5 degrees will be completely gone within seven years, long before we have a chance to deliver on our 2030 or 2050 targets.”

Translation: We’re speeding toward climate catastrophe, and we are running out of time to act.

Forty-eight hours later, on December 12, world leaders beamed in to the virtual UN Climate Ambition Summit, what was meant to be the starting-gun event for the “sprint to Glasgow” (the location of the next big UN climate conference, next fall). But rather than demonstrating the “surge in ambition” the UN had hoped for, dozens of countries delivered a steady stream of incremental pledges and lofty 2050 targets. There was little in the way of short-term action plans aggressive enough to meet them, however.

With mass street protests not an option, Thunberg is rallying her supporters around a new strategy: a public information campaign. It doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary, but, she says, most people are still not aware of how dire the situation is, and we can’t “treat something like a crisis unless we understand the emergency.”

A growing chorus of experts says the 18-year-old is right on the money about climate change having a communication problem. But making people aware and engaged isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Communications researchers warn against telling people that their top concern should be the climate crisis when they have every reason to worry about the impact COVID-19 is having on their health and finances first. They point out that bombarding people with alarming climate facts can catalyze some to act, yes, but it can also backfire.

Psychologist Renee Lertzman tells Yale Climate Connections that frightening facts can trigger anger, anxiety and despair, making people shut down and push information away.

If there’s one thing “pandemic fatigue” has already proven, it’s that the pull to look the other way and return to the rhythm of our normal routines is strong. Isaac Newton would point out it’s the first law of physics. Inertia, after all, is the tendency of an object to resist change in its velocity.

Author George Marshall has spent years writing about how our brains are wired to ignore climate change. He co-founded the U.K.-based climate communications non-profit Climate Outreach to research the most effective strategies for engaging people of all political stripes and values. His team has led research in the U.K., Alberta, the U.S. and across Europe on overcoming polarization through public engagement. Pointing to parallels with mass COVID vaccination programs, he writes that “countries with well-informed citizens will readily accept the vaccine; countries with poorly engaged citizens will foster grassroots resistance. Opposition to vaccines mimics skepticism around climate change, often following exactly the same political fault lines.”

Those fault lines can rip through climate progress at the drop of an election. Populist politicians like former U.S. President Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Russia’s Putin deftly turned climate policy into a lightning rod for wider social discontent, he notes. Vested interests throw matches on the fire by fuelling disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories. Even France saw its gas tax overturned in 2018 after “yellow jacket” protesters rioted, chanting that government elites were worried about the end of the world while “we’re worried about the end of the month.”

Pandemic fatigue has already proven that the pull to look the other way and return to the rhythm of our normal routines is strong.

Similar protests in Ecuador led to fuel subsidies being reinstated there in 2019. And now that Canada’s carbon price is set to triple in the coming decade, Broadbent Institute policy fellow Brendan Haley worries that carbon pricing is unlikely to receive the required political support it needs to ever reach its 2030 level. “We’re likely to see conservative movements exploit people’s economic insecurities by directing their anger against carbon pricing, as we’ve seen in Ontario and Alberta.”

Building bridges

Besides the promise of a just transition that offers good blue- and green-collar jobs, psychologists, social scientists and communications experts agree that building and sustaining broad public support across the political spectrum will need opportunities-based communication that doesn’t gloss over the hard realities of the challenge ahead, particularly for the working class.

In 2018, Climate Outreach worked with the Calgary-headquartered Pembina Institute and 75 partner organizations to hold 55 workshops that explored ways of engaging Albertans in a constructive climate conservation, looking for common ground and new ways of talking. They were sensitive to the reality that Albertans have been struggling through successive recessions and many have felt angered and alienated by the climate movement. What worked? People responded most positively to cooperative language, respectfully recognizing the contributions fossil fuels made to the Canadian economy, acknowledging the need to diversify the Albertan economy to shift away from overdependency on oil’s boom–bust cycle, and emphasizing that while an energy transition will “not be easy,” renewables could offer the next big economic “boom.”

It’s partly why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s campaign south of the border got political traction by going into Rust Belt states and talking green jobs for the working class and building back better while noting that the “road ahead will not be easy.” But without a vision for the future and a clearly articulated plan for how all Canadians fit into it, as Climate Action Network’s Catherine Abreu recently cautioned, many Canadians won’t know where their prosperity and jobs will come from as we shift away from fossil fuels. “Politicians who are standing in the way of climate action [will] have a leg to stand on as long as those Canadians are convinced that they won’t be able to profit in that future.”

“To generate lasting engagement, we need to deeply engage with people through information and imagery that’s consistent with their values.”

— Yale’s Matthew Goldberg

Social scientists at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have been studying the science of climate-crisis communication since 2005, with the mission to help governments, media, companies and advocates communicate more effectively. Researchers there recently reviewed key insights from the literature on what leads to enduring change. Yale’s Matthew Goldberg summed up his findings in a nutshell: “To generate lasting engagement, we need to deeply engage with people through information and imagery that is consistent with their values, disposition and group identity.” His advice: “Emphasize personally relevant reasons to care about the environment and emphasize that most other people feel the same way.”

Will 2021 be the turning point for the climate?

Climate scientists are clear that we need to go much further, much faster. Social scientists say we won’t get there without building a broad social mandate fuelled by thoughtful, well-funded public engagement strategies that are tailored to both communities and regions.

Canada, luckily, has a head start. Nearly 80% of Canadians agree that the world is facing a climate emergency, and recent Environics polling revealed that “six in 10 Canadians believe now is the time for the federal government to make major changes to fix long-standing problems in society” such as inequality, racism and the climate crisis.

But as Marshall writes, “If we are realistic about the challenges of reducing emissions, we need to be realistic about what will be required from people. Achieving these targets, transforming personal behaviours and dismantling the global fossil fuel industry will require an exceptional level of public understanding, support and a broad-based mandate for action.”

It turns out that all signatories to the Paris Agreement, including Canada, committed to Article 12: “enhancing climate change education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information.” So far, no wealthy nations have delivered ambitious or well-funded policies for climate change engagement. But as COVID-19 has proven, this would be money well spent, Marshall concludes.

As Bill McKibben recently wrote in The New Yorker, “If civilization is to have a chance … the big, hard breaks with the status quo have to come in the next nine years … It’s clearly physically and financially possible to do what needs to be done. (Much of the cost of the transition can be covered simply because each year we will be spending less to buy fuel.) But beating both inertia and vested interests will be, as usual, the trick.”

The financial clout of those vested interests wanes with each passing year. But as McKibben adds, the rapid action needed will require going far faster than economics alone can push us, and far faster than politicians will find comfortable – even though more of the world’s governments are increasingly saying the right things. “They will need the forces of the past decade – the engineering triumphs and the movement-building – to keep accelerating in order to provide the required push.”

With 10 months until world leaders gather for the next big climate summit, Corporate Knights asked nine luminaries to share their thoughts on how we can break though our climate inertia, mend emerging fault lines and deepen the foundations of public support for the kind of rapid climate action that scientists are calling for. The clock is ticking. If 2021 is to be the turning point for the climate, we’ll need every citizen, business, banker and politician to join the race.

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