A Tale Of Two Bills
Bill Gates’ rebuke to climate catastrophism has thrown the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex into a sphincter-puckered snit. Why? Follow the money.
Nov 03, 2025
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Pictures available see substack below
The Bill on the left claims you should ignore the Bill on the right. Credit: Wikimedia
This is a tale of two Bills. Both Bills went to Harvard. Both have Harvard-size egos. Both are published authors and have large audiences. Both are Baby Boomers. (Bill McKibben is 64. Bill Gates is 70.) And both Bills are among the highest-profile Americans in the debate over climate and energy policy.
But the two Bills aren’t friends.
Last week, Gates published a 5,600-word essay, “A New Approach For the World’s Climate Strategy,” in which he declared that the “doomsday view of climate change” — Gates’ words, not mine — is “wrong.” He continued, saying that the doomsday outlook and claims that “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” are misplaced because people will “be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Then, the kill shot: Gates said climate activists are putting too much focus “on near-term emissions goals” and that effort is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Thus, Gates is saying that McKibben’s catastrophist narrative about climate change — the narrative McKibben has been peddling for decades — should be discarded, and that policymakers should adopt a humanist approach to energy and climate issues.
To be clear, that’s a very abbreviated summary of Gates’ essay. For one of the best analyses, read Roger Pielke Jr’s. Substack piece, “Bill Gates Shakes Up the Climate Discussion,” which was published last Thursday. Pielke’s said Gates’ essay is a “a welcome contribution to a growing chorus of climate realism and energy pragmatism.” I completely agree with that summary.
But as you might imagine, the response — or rather, the outrage — from the climate Left has been telling. Indeed, Gates’ essay has sent McKibben, climate activists, academics, and climate reporters into a sphincter-puckered snit.
Jeffrey Sachs, an academic at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, called Gates’ essay “vague, unhelpful, and confusing.” He went on to claim that proverty reduction and climate transformation are “utterly feasible…if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control.”
A headline published in Politico claimed that Gates “soft-pedals climate.” In the New Republic, Laura Mauldin, an academic at the University of Connecticut who works in the department of “social and critical inquiry,” declared that Gates’ essay was a “great example of why we shouldn’t be listening to people like him.” She continued, “Reporting the thoughts of billionaires as news is as grotesque as the amount of wealth they’ve been allowed to accumulate.” Michael Mann, the climate catastrophist at the University of Pennsylvania, who may be the most discredited academic in America, told CNN that Gates “got all this backwards” and that there is “no greater threat to developing nations than the climate crisis.”
Why are the catastrophists so upset? Follow the money.
Remember, the first rule of the bureaucracy is to protect and extend the bureaucracy. And that’s what the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex is — a vast bureaucracy that employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom are taking home hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in compensation. If policymakers adopt Gates’ humanist view — and recognize the world’s poor need hydrocarbons, and lots of them, to escape poverty — then catastrophists like McKibben, Mann, and myriad climate-focused NGOs could see their budgets shrink or disappear. In fact, that’s already happening. In February, one of Gates’ philanthropic arms, Breakthrough Energy, announced that it would reduce the grants it was providing to climate policy and advocacy groups.
On Friday, McKibben wrote an indignant response to Gates’ essay in which he declared, “I feel quite strongly that we should pay less attention to billionaires” and that “It was wrong of him to write it because if his high-priced pr team didn’t anticipate the reaction, they should be fired.”
The conflict between the two Bills provides a good opportunity to take another look at the staggering amounts of money that climate activists and climate NGOs are spending to promote the doomsday, anti-energy/anti-hydrocarbon agenda that Gates is now saying should be abandoned.
Thus, I’ve compiled four new or updated charts that detail some of the richest anti-energy NGOs in the US, the lucrative pay packages awarded to their leaders, and the staggering increase in revenue that is going to anti-hydrocarbon groups like the Climate Imperative Foundation and Rocky Mountain Institute. Let’s take a look.
McKibben’s irate reply to Gates is almost amusing. After all, McKibben’s fame — and his fortune— has been built on the catastrophist narrative that Gates is now debunking. Furthermore, McKibben is the living embodiment of the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex. His credentials reveal a trifecta of the climate alarmist complex. He has founded two activist NGOs: 350.org and Third Act. He’s a contributing writer to the New Yorker, which gives him a prominent platform in the legacy media’s climate-alarmist echo chamber. And he’s an academic. As his bio at the New Yorker explains, McKibben is the “Schumann Distinguished Scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College.”
McKibben’s new NGO, Third Act, is aimed at organizing people over the age of 60 “for progressive change.” What does that mean? As Influence Watch notes, the group “advocates for a total transition towards weather-based energy sources.” Furthermore, Third Act is a dark money group. It doesn’t reveal its funding, its funders, or the payments to its leaders. McKibben gets away with this because Third Act is a sponsored project of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, a New York City-based NGO that reported $49 million in revenue in 2023. McKibben’s patron doesn’t disclose the names of any of its donors.
Third Act is just one of more than 100 NGOs that focus on climate change. And those groups are spending staggering amounts of money. In 2023, I took a deep dive into the anti-industry industry and found that the top 25 anti-hydrocarbon, anti-nuclear groups in the US have annual revenues of about $4.5 billion.
That figure may be too low. A 2023 study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found an even larger number. That analysis found that US NGOs are now spending as much as $9.2 billion annually on “programs and activities that address climate change.” Of that sum, about “49% was disbursed for mitigation, 14% for adaptation, and 15% was regranted to other organizations.” That analysis is key because groups like Third Act, Climate Imperative, Rocky Mountain Institute, Sierra Club, and others like them are only focused on mitigation. That is, they want to slash energy-related emissions, regardless of the cost. And as I noted above, Gates is saying that’s the wrong approach.
Graph available see substack below
Ken Braun, an analyst with the Capital Research Center, has spent years reporting on the funding that fuels the NGO-corporate-industrial-media-academic-climate complex. In August, he published “America’s Top Ten Anti-Energy NGOs.” As shown above, these 10 NGOs are now spending approximately $1.8 billion per year. Braun wrote that while the 10 NGOs “profess their commitment to a cleaner environment, their shared opposition to low- and zero-emissions fuels exposes them as more ‘anti-energy’ than pro-nature.” Braun also noted that most of the groups on the list “oppose nuclear energy, the world’s only reliable, limitlessly scalable, energy that does not emit greenhouse gases.”
Graph available see substack below
Climate activism can provide a path to a big paycheck. Last year, Greenwire published an excellent article on the pay packages of people like Fred Krupp, the longtime head of the Environmental Defense Fund, which has repeatedly expressed opposition to nuclear energy. As Greenwire noted, “Working for an environmental nonprofit can be lucrative — especially if you’re the boss.” As seen above, the leaders of 15 of the top NGOs in the US are all collecting compensation of more than $250,000 per year and the average pay of the 15 executives is about $586,000 per year.
Graph available see substack below
Over the past few years, few NGOs have grown as quickly as the Climate Imperative Foundation and Rocky Mountain Institute. Launched in 2020 by a pair of Sierra Club officials and funded by some of the richest people in Silicon Valley, Climate Imperative started with a budget of $82 million. By 2023, the group’s budget had soared to $207 million. Thus, in just four years, the new group is operating on a budget that’s larger than that of the Sierra Club.
Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Colorado-based group founded by Amory Lovins, the diminutive college dropout who has been wrong about energy policy for 50 years, continues to grow like kudzu. As I reported earlier this year, RMI is a leader in the push to ban gas-fired stoves and furnaces in homes and businesses, even though 69% of voters oppose bans on gas stoves. Furthermore, RMI continues to promote silly claims, including a recent report on net zero (co-authored by Lovins), which claimed, “the fossil fuel era is over.” Despite RMI’s terrible track record, thanks to massive amounts of dark money, corporate money, and cash from the federal government, RMI’s budget has soared 16-fold since 2012.
Graph available see substack below
Furthermore, the top officials at RMI, like their colleagues at other climate-focused NGOs, are collecting handsome paychecks. As shown above, the group has about a dozen executives who earn $400,000 or more per year.
Of course, there are numerous other examples of rich climate NGOs that I could provide here. However, the bottom line is that the climate NGO business is all about money. McKibben himself admits this in his article. He wrote that “not many people can really reply” to Gates’ takedown of the catastrophist narrative. Why not? McKibben says that “Gates money is too important to too many agencies and organizations. But since I don’t get any of it, let me say: he’s really not the guy to be listening to on this stuff. Really.”
Got that?
McKibben’s activist group, Third Act, gets its cash from a (dark money) NGO. And because his group doesn’t get any of Gates’ money, he can disagree with Gates on policy matters. As I said, follow the money.
Gates’ essay marks a turning point in the history of climate policy. Why? Gates is one of the world’s richest (estimated net worth: $124 billion) and most influential people. His foundations are distributing billions of dollars in grants every year. And now, rather than continuing to support the failed activism that has resulted in no significant reduction in global CO2 emissions, Gates is adopting an outlook on climate and energy that Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, and other energy humanists have been promoting for years. I’ll end with the final paragraph from Gates’ essay, which shows that he has joined the ranks of the energy humanists:
So I urge that community, at COP30 and beyond, to make a strategic pivot: prioritize the things that have the greatest impact on human welfare. It’s the best way to ensure that everyone gets a chance to live a healthy and productive life no matter where they’re born, and no matter what kind of climate they’re born into. (Emphasis added.)
To that, Bill Gates, I say amen.
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