@verdantsquare
The best thing Gates could invest in is saving/restoring US democracy.
The sitting administration, like the other world autocracies, is a petrostate with no interest in addressing Climate Change. In fact, it wants to undo progress to date and deny/hide Climate Science.
We The People will hopefully vote otherwise, but the machinery of voting by the time that happens will be compromised, and that's unlikely to fix the problem. At this point, the only votes that count are those of billionaires.
If the greedy billionaires line up behind profit at the expense of all else, and the less greedy billionaires fritter away their funds on issues that are individually important but that collectively sap any hope of a long-term future for humanity, we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if we cured cancer and solved myriad other societal ills, if the Climate Crisis isn't solved, society will melt down anyway and humans may well go extinct, so what was the point?
Also, unless he puts unexpected safeguards on things, I'll bet quite a bit of this goes to using or investing in AI, which at this point means a hugely more energy-intensive and fresh-water-consuming world at a time when we can least afford it. In effect, it's an investment in hastening the Climate problem.
I'm sure he'll put some of it into specific Climate efforts, but the thing is this: While it's useful to do some amount of research on climate, we know what we really have to do and are not doing it. A sustainable future means ramping down energy use and consumption-based economics.
The problem with research isn't that it might not produce some wonderful discovery, but that we don't know that it will, and we don't know the timeline. As such, we need to start in earnest doing things we DO know how to do and that we DO know the timeline for. He is not promising to do that.
I see no serious leadership on Climate here, just a giant hunk of monetary inertia on a path that is sinking humanity. I'd love it if someone could convince me otherwise, but I'm not optimistic. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing where just "trusting the process" is enough.
