BILL GATES’ CONUNDRUM
Reconciling Carbon Dioxide Removal, AI Energy Use, Net Zero Goals, and Donald Trump – TURNS OUT YOU CAN’T
To the surprise of many, Microsoft, which is still very much an extension of Bill Gates, decided in recent weeks to pull back from helping fund one of Gates’ favorite futurist enterprises, geoengineering’s carbon dioxide removal project. This followed Microsoft’s decision several months before to make dramatic reductions to its own climate program.
Gates and Microsoft had long been at the center of the carbon removal fraternity of entrepreneurs, speculators, and investors. This included Microsoft’s $100 million pledge in 2021 to support Gates’ major carbon removal initiative, Breakthrough Energy.
That same year, Microsoft decided to partner with Open AI as an investor. It subsequently, with Bill Gates cheering the company on, jumped into the AI sweepstakes by financing and building its own Data Centers.
It was also in 2021 that Microsoft’s sustainability agenda expanded to include a net zero carbon footprint goal to be achieved as early as 2030.
Gates, always ready to proclaim his own environmental and climate roles, saw the Microsoft net zero goal and his own carbon dioxide removal (CDR) initiative as helping lead the way towards a green capitalism future, marked by plentiful carbon credits.
But then came the 2024 election and Donald Trump 2.0. Climate denier, AI champion, and fossil fuel advocate, Trump pushed the tech bros and would be climate champions like Gates and Microsoft, to reconsider their earlier commitments.
This sequence has presumably created a conundrum for poor Bill Gates. While he’s of course so very, very rich ($107 billion, according to Forbes’ April 2026 estimate) and always ready to seek the spotlight, he now must reconcile his and Microsoft’s earlier climate and sustainable pledges and advocacy, given the paths now taken.
Can this conundrum be resolved? Were they ever real in the first place?
Carbon Removal
Start with the decisions about carbon removal and related geoengineering approaches. They first make their appearance in 1992 in a National Academy of Science report in the wake of the growing fears about the speed at which climate change impacts were happening. The idea of geoengineering solutions then received a major boost with the 2015 Paris UN COP Conference and the pledge to limit climate impacts to no more than an increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade. Some argued that, given fossil fuel dominance in the global economy, such a pledge could only be met with strategies like carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or solar radiation management (SRM). And it also meant a status quo or status quo plus as the focus turned to geoengineering’s unproven and potentially dangerous approaches to carbon removal.
These approaches themselves became a form of “overshoot;” that is, since alternative solutions like solar and other system changes were assumed not likely to reverse or even halt climate emissions from reaching the 1.5 centigrade threshold, better then to advance CDR or SRM or related technologies. They, in turn, could eventually, when such approaches presumably became feasible and operational, tackle climate change, even as emissions continued to increase and create an even warmer planet. The fossil-fuel dependent economy could remain intact, without the disruptive changes that a solar and alternative energy and stranded fossil fuel assets scenario would require.
As overshoot became increasingly put forth as the only plausible solution, in jumped Bill Gates. In 2015, he founded his new enterprise, Breakthrough Energy, whose stated goal was to fund and champion “net zero technologies” like CDR.
For Gates, geoengineering, and particularly CDR, hit all the right buttons. It presumed big (eventual) emissions reductions. It offered industrial-scale technology solutions. It was more politically feasible since you didn’t have to mess with the fossil economy. And it was a Big Climate Change Idea that reinforced the overshoot hypothesis: don’t rely on alternative strategies like solar (too expensive, too limited in scale, so it was wrongly assumed).
Yet by postponing any climate reductions into the future when CDR could be deployed, it risked what Andreas Malm and Wim Carton have called “double overshoot.” Simply put, the more you postpone emissions reductions, the greater increase of carbon dioxide emissions continue to occur. That, in turn, creates a second, additional overshoot scenario. As Malm and Carton put it, “Overshoot imposes on us the obligation of removal, and, at the same extent, it seems to rob us of the ability to fulfill it.” And that’s already what had been happening, even before AI exploded on the scene.
AI: an Energy Sink
The double overshoot scenario has now been further compounded by the very rapid rise of AI and its voracious appetite for energy. This has been the case particularly for those hyperscalers who race to build bigger Data Centers, with greater needs for more energy, more water to cool them, and more infrastructure to make the energy available.
The amount of energy required for these new AI Data Centers is of a magnitude that fundamentally alters the climate change picture. This is due to both the amount of energy required and the sources of energy utilized.
Despite the claims of tech companies like Microsoft, the new build-out of Data Centers is significantly reliant on fossil fuel sources, such as natural gas. As an article in Grist put it, “Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gas — and the climate consequences that come with it.” The Grist article cited numbers from the energy analysis firm Global Energy Monitor that projects totaling more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power in development worldwide — a roughly 31 percent jump in just the last year. And that more than a third of the new U.S. capacity will power data centers.
Beyond the question of what source of energy is utilized, the overall amount of energy required for existing and future AI Data Centers is staggering, with the numbers multiplying annually. According to the International Energy Agency, the global electricity demand of AI data centers grew by 17% in 2025, while electricity consumption from AI-focused data centers grew even faster, upwards of 50% in 2025. Future projected growth for AI-related electricity demand is now projected by IEA to double from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030.
These numbers seem to change almost monthly, as new, even bigger Data Center projects are announced. Increases, however, are compounded by the increased resistance of local communities and the first stirrings of regulatory action. Nevertheless, given the Data Center expansion race, AI has dramatically changed the picture about energy demand and with it, net zero and sustainability goals and projections.
Trumpian Factors: Unleash Fossil Fuels, Undermine Solar and Wind
In many ways, uncertainty also prevails, as efforts led by the Trump 2.0 administration attempt to keep in place the double overshoot scenario by undermining opportunities for a solar economy and rescuing any fossil fuel sources like coal. From literally his first day in office, Donald Trump began issuing Executive Orders and other actions declaring a National Emergency to rebolster the role of fossil fuels and undermine solar, wind, and even some of the geoengineering initiatives. While coal and nuclear were particular favorites, oil and gas remained the centerpiece. The rush to expand fossil fuel dominance even extended beyond US borders to include foreign adventures like interventions in Venezuela and Iran.
Trump also positioned himself as an AI champion and sought to deflect growing opposition by summoning the tech executives to a summit where the AI-related companies pledged to voluntarily “cover the cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades,” as the White Houe proclaimed. Nothing was said about the profligate energy use.
Thus, the Gates conundrum took shape. As the New York Times reported, Microsoft and Gates’ decision to pull back from CDR, as one example, where they had “almost single-handedly established the market for carbon dioxide removal technologies,” disoriented this nascent, future-oriented industry which had yet to become something more than a speculative venture.
At the same time, Microsoft and Gates’s AI actions favoring huge jumps in energy use, including fossil fuels, meant that these green capitalism champions had lost their cred. As one climate change campaigner said, in disappointment, “Microsoft makes great claims about its climate credentials… [but] the gap between what Microsoft says, and what Microsoft does, seems to grow wider by the day.” And that extends to Bill Gates as well, who also has his hands full answering about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. The bubble is popping.
The answer to Bill Gates’ conundrum is clear: there is no reconciliation. In fact, there might have never been.
LINKS
David Gelles and Theodore Schleifer, March 12, 2025. “Climate Group Funded by Bill Gates Slashes Staff in Major Retreat.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/climate/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy-cuts.html
David Gelles, “Carbon Removal Industry Reels as Microsoft Retreats,” April 16, 2026, New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/climate/microsoft-carbon-removal.html?emc=edit_clim_20260416&nl=climate-forward&segment_id=218334
Lucas Joppa, “Further, faster, together: Microsoft donates $100 million to Breakthrough Energy Catalyst to accelerate and scale climate tech,” September 19, 2021, Microsoft Official Blog, https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2021/09/19/further-faster-together-microsoft-donates-100-million-to-breakthrough-energy-catalyst-to-accelerate-and-scale-climate-tech/#:~:text=Microsoft%20is%20donating%20$100%20million%20to%20Breakthrough
J.P. Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck, and Andreas Malm, editors. Has it Come to This: The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2021
Naveena Sadasivam & Jake Bittle, Grist. Feb. 10, 2026. https://grist.org/energy/data-centers-natural-gas-methane-behind-the-meter/ .
International Energy Agency, “Key Questions on Energy and AI,” https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/3575ae9f-50bc-4cbb-9ca9-4b9b7f063e91/KeyQuestionsonEnergyandAI.pdf
Stand.earth. April 13, 2026, https://stand.earth/press-releases/160-data-center-carbon-footprint-increase-research-finds-microsoft-big-oil-forge-7b-partnership-as-several-ai-infrastructure-projects-push-hyperscaler-off-credible-path/
Wim Carton and Andreas Malm. The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. Verso Books, New York and London, October 2025