Hurting Less Is Not Helping Mother Earth

We need to go back to heal the living planet

How climate science deniers are misusing Bill Gates’ COP30 statement. A reaction to Matt Ridley’s NY Post OpEd.

[Disclaimer:  I am a product of my time and culture.  I drive cars, shop in supermarkets, and use copious electricity from a utility.  I am neither perfect nor a model.  The only thing is, I will not lie to myself to feel better about just getting on with making money.  Why speak?  Because this level of idiocy hurts my head and society and worse, the ecosphere.]

In 1987 a journalist named Matt Ridley wrote in the Economist about the dangers of CO2 build up in the atmosphere.

On Dec 5 2025 he wrote an opinion piece cerebrating the end of green initiatives, an excoriation of the costly failure of “green economy” efforts, in the NY Post.

Ridley’s smug certitude mirrors the business class of the world.  All will be fine, this climate crisis is a hoax, or at best overstated.

Are the glaciers melting?  Are dolphins dying in hot water?  Are coral reefs dying? Is the planetary heat gain doubling and doubling and doubling again?  Is all of this, somehow, not happening?

In earnest?

Ridley is right in his analysis, though, in several ways.  Banks and oil companies have cast aside performative green policies. (Since they invested over ten trillion in new oil and gas extraction since the 2014 Paris Accords, I will call it performative.)  People and political parties, exhausted and propagandized, indeed are talking about climate breakdown less.  Societies also really are getting more resilient to flood disasters, thanks to technology.  

But, as in 1987, he is right for all the wrong reasons.  This is the false dichotomy the discussion has largely been mired in for generations, as we race toward total ecocide.  Foote explained CO2’s heating capacity in 1856, then Arrhenius proved carbonic acid’s atmospheric effect in 1896.  CO2’s role has been long understood.  Worse effects from methane and other gasses only became clear by 1980.  In the late eighties when Hansen testifies, Ridley writes, and U.S. President H.W. Bush calls global warming an existential threat, the science had been pointing that way for a century.  Hansen’s remarks are only the final declaration of scientific certitude after decades of careful observation.

First, Ridley misrepresents Bill Gates’ essay quite broadly, through a simple if not disingenuous lens.  Gates neither dismisses not disputes the danger of climate change and the need to decarbonize the economy.  As the author celebrates banks and oil companies washing their hands of climate concern, quite the opposite Gates argues for effective actions to mitigate human suffering, improve human quality of life, and improve carbon and other greenhouse gas profiles in, “cost effective”, ways.  

Yet, Gates has never expressed an understanding of the true scope of our mistakes, because it is contrary to his life labors, his client’s desires, and his conception.  He is a capitalist striving in the exploitative system.  Is the whole system, and his money, mansions, jets, and all his client’s business and work wrong?  Impossible to conceive.  Are the superhighways and commuting and stock and bond markets a terrible idea?  How could he grasp that fact, while embracing the death culture?

Fail Up

Second and this is important for Ridley, Gates, and society to comprehend: The reason decarbonization efforts fail is because the runaway feedback loop that took climate change out of human’s capacity to alter only by reducing emissions happened long before 1987.  The time to totally alter the economy and society to stave off catastrophe was likely between 1910 and at the very latest 1970.  We have labored to make every metric ten times worse since, in absurd and tragic fashion.  An agony of garbage and jets and death for short term grasping, when everything lies in our hands. (Relativity. Quantum Mechanics.)

Third, neither Gates not Ridley speak to habitat destruction and the collapse of the natural world.   It is the biota of the planet that made, over billions of years, the milieu within which life best thrives.  These systems learned to cope with and maximize survival in the face of solar storms, meteors, and volcanos.  Those systems are in free fall collapse.  Seventy five percent of animal life has been exterminated in the last fifty years alone. (WWF)  That is one ten millionth of the time that animal life has been around.  Wiped away, replaced by monocultures, pigs, cows, and people at best.

Ridley makes absurd claims about sea ice.  Yes, the poles still freeze, but that ice has gone from between three to ten feet thick down to three to five inches thick.  And the short term business and national interests are gleeful at the shorter northern passage shipping routes, because breaking up what little ice there is must help, right?  That wouldn’t speed ice melt more, right?  The cognitive dissonance and denial astounds as it bores.  So boring indeed, how can the population engage with the madness?

Neither Gates not Ridley address environmental methane much, which with nitrous oxide is one of the worst gasses, and as much of a problem as CO2.  This is the run away scenario we are in now, where the heating and melting have unleashed stored methane releases that will not stop and will only increase and outstrip anthropogenic production by orders of magnitude.  It is great to stop ruminants burping, but it’s too little, too late.

Check, Please!

For a long time the excuses hinge on:  A) If we don’t do it (mine it, build it, sell it) they will.  B) We can’t and won’t stop thoughtless industrial production, so at best let’s find better ways. C) Thus follows the illogic lie, the insane fantasy, that hurting less is helping.  Utility scale wind, solar, and millions of electric cars do not help the earth, or the crisis, at all.  They just hurt less intensively.  If we have raped and defiled mother earth, launching a new industrial consumption cycle does not in any tiny way help.  Improved air quality in a city?  Sure.  That is nice.  Are superhighways a good idea?  Terrible.  Cities?  They only take, without a possibility of giving back to this living earth.  Meanwhile all emissions continue to rise dramatically.  Let me restate this critical point that the, “Tesla”, and utility scale solar and wind clowns elide, HURTING LESS IS NOT HELPING.  (The  actual geniuses who ran Home Power Magazine mathematically proved over and over the only halfway decent path to a sustainable technologic society was to live simply and generate power at home for local use.  Even that is not helping, but it did have a very good profile, unlike any utility systems.) Of course, hurting less is better than hurting more, and we should hurt less, if hurt we must, it is simply not helping.

So, stop all human economy today (as we should have done in 1911 or before) and live a super simple life of contemplation, conservation, and high tech intellectual development.  (Iterate on paper, not in product cycles for quarterly returns). Hard working and striving people do not much want to hear that almost every career and every commute of theirs and their grandparents has been a wasteful, ill-conceived mistake.  That we have developed in the wrong way going down the wrong path for generations.  That the people lauded as, “high achievers” or, “high net worth” are the greatest of failures, achieving ruin for all.  That the story undergirding the idea of a “net zero green economy” and, “carbon capture” is indeed a lie, because it will not save us, though it may reduce harm.  So Ridley is right, most of the green initiatives have been ill considered, but not a bit as ill considered as the entire death economy he lauds in revolting fashion.  

Witness the agonized questions of what people will do when AI takes their so called, “job”.  They will be.  They will live and love, as we have done for hundreds of thousands of years before wage slavery, or slavery, or rulers.  AI can not watch the sunset for me.  AI can not love my family or community for me.  It is welcome to join in though!

Gates wants to invest our, “limited funds”, into helping people and green technology.  Ridley wants to drill baby drill.  Both refuse to see that make believe money is the unbalanced synthetic fuel that is being poured over mother earth’s raped and dying body.  Money a delusion of right, of success, an easy cult fantasy that those who want power over others and the earth refuse to let go of.  Ridley also fails to see his prized oil companies are in danger, as global diesel demand is already staring to collapse.  Give it two years.

Common sense prevails?  Sure, Bezos and Musk build bunkers and space havens to escape to a later horror. (Ben Elton: Stark) That is where the heroes of the death culture head.  Three degrees by 2100, indeed, catastrophic, with wild cold and hot swings tempered by no natural systems.  But Hansen says five to six degrees is more likely, my youngest kid says six seven, and, in fact, it could be ten degrees, and it will not stop there, because of the ruined natural systems.  We are on course to become Venus, and then Mars. (At least a Mars with useful gravity.)  

So mirrors in space to block the sun?  Maybe.  I, for thirty plus years, am a nanotechnologist, because I too see no way to stop grabby humans.  So let us develop Quantum AGI to run nano fabrication and replace the entire economy clean and brute force equilibrium, or, well… grey goo.  It is this mind bending potential that makes primitive profit seeking so embarrassing and tragic.  There are also many other horrible swords of Damocles dangling, man made and otherwise, but let us just stay with ecocide and gas imbalance causing energy disequilibrium for this essay.  

(This graph shows disequilibrium in planetary heat gain measured in the odd, “Hiroshima bombs of energy a second” scale.  From COP 1 to 30 we went from four a second to eight, with ever increasing rate of gain. A graph of intellectual and moral failure.)

One Shot

I understand why people do not want to face the scale of our failure, why people want to deny reality and dream of their achievements and importance. (Often reenforced by money and accolades.)  I understand most people are short sighted, caring for their families and status and mutual funds as their society recommends, and are unable to deal with systemic issues.  That is why it has always been a systems issue, and canards like, “personal carbon footprint”, have intentionally distracted efforts to change industrial and infrastructural scale operations.

Ridley, you smug tool, reflection of every hustle culture suit and tie grifter I have known, Gates is not joining you, he is puttering on with many kind efforts to help people, which will all mean little if we do not stop habitat ruin, correct the gas balance of the planet, and reestablish energy equilibrium with our lovely star.

Should we have changed the whole economy in 1911?  Certainly.  1970?  Without doubt.  1987?  You bet.  Today, yes, indeed, reducing harm is always better than worse.  We possess incredible power, and we must apply it artfully, not in a quarterly earnings race.  The fantastical stories of, “reduce our footprint”, personal climate action, or the proud embrace of the, “free market” economy are both half mad at best though, and studiously ignore the trend of complete failure under a blanket of make believe money, and are nothing to gloat about.

(Gavin McKee is a writer, rebel, personal change guide, and nanotechnologist who lives with his family on an organic blueberry farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Occupied Turtle Island.