For decades, the Democratic Party has elevated the fight to stop climate change above every other economic concern. Jobs, energy prices, economic growth, and even inequality all took back seats to climate change in influencing the party’s public policy priorities. Now, in a truly dramatic reversal, one of the party’s biggest funders, including $50 million to 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign alone, Bill Gates has done an about face, embracing, without acknowledgement, the Trump administration’s position that while climate change is a challenge, the best way to address the problem is through economic growth, not an all-out push to reduce carbon emissions.

Gates wrote an essay describing the narrative peddled by environmentalists that “cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization” and that “nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.” Gates flatly rejects this premise, writing, “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”