Bill Gates Shifts on Addressing Climate Change 10/28/25

0:00Bring in show music please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod, Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist, is out with a new surprising memo about allocating resources for climate change. If we stop putting all vaccines and that, you know, saved you 0.1 degree, would that be a smart tradeoff? That's the kind of question we have to ask. Gates is taking a hard look at our global priorities and at artificial intelligence. What else? It is so profound and therefore its influence is hard to overstate. What kind of AI bubble are we in? Some of these companies will be glad they spent all this money.

0:48Some of them, you know, they'll commit to data centers whose electricity is too expensive, you know, that it could be done overseas. That big conversation plus Hurricane Melissa approaches Jamaica, President Trump is in Asia, October baseball. Did they put a guy on second last night? Are they doing that or are they not? Maybe they are. I wasn't up watching it. And PayPal teams up with OpenAI on a chat GPT payments deal. PayPal used to be the only game in town. There are so many different alternatives now. It's Tuesday, October 28th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one.

1:31Cue it, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. President Trump is in Japan this morning. He's expected to begin a reception with business leaders this hour. Eamon Javers joins us now from Washington with the latest. Good morning, Eamon. Yeah, good morning to you, Joe. President Trump's summit in Japan got into full swing overnight as he engaged in a bilateral meeting and signing ceremony with Japanese Prime Minister Takeichi at the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo.

2:08The president saluted his Japanese counterpart and praised her for becoming the first female prime minister of Japan. The first female prime minister in the history of Japan. The two leaders signed documents, including a new agreement to pursue critical minerals together. And the president saluted the terms of the new trade agreement between the two countries, under which Japan will invest$550 billion in the U.S. and get a lower 15 percent tariff on imports to the U.S. from Japan. We're just signing a new deal and it's a very fair deal and we look forward to welcoming Japan into the United States and a continuation.

2:52And it's something that everybody is very, very excited about. Now the prime minister began her remarks noting that they were slightly delayed because the two leaders were watching last night's World Series game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays, which featured several Japanese players on the field. Then the two leaders flew to the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in Yokosuka, where they inspected American fighter jets and were greeted by the U.S. Navy sailors' 7th Fleet Band. President Trump said he'd approved new missiles to be sent to the Japanese self-defense forces and emphasized the strong alliance between the two powers.

3:33And later this hour, guys, as you mentioned, we are expecting the president to attend a reception and a dinner with business leaders in Tokyo. We're not sure yet how much of that we're going to see or how many corporate CEOs we'll be able to identify in the room, but it should be a high-powered gathering there in Tokyo. Back over to you. Two games, basically, last night, right? Aiman, nine times two. I bet you there is a lot of interest. I had to go to bed super early, Joe. I don't know how you guys do this morning shift. We didn't stay for much after that. No, we heard about it, though. But I'll bet there's a lot of interest in Japan.

4:09the Dodgers and everything else. He's pitching tonight. That guy. Yeah. I know. Yeah, I won't get... It's a night or tomorrow. Whenever the next game is, he's pitching. I like Toronto. I like the Blue Jays. I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to say anything. Suddenly, I'm a Dodger fan. Yeah, not a bad way to spend the day, hanging out with the prime minister, watching baseball, and then going to an aircraft carrier. Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. All right, Eamon, see you later. Thanks. The National Hurricane Center is warning of catastrophic and life-threatening winds, flooding and storm surge for Jamaica this morning.

4:46Hurricane Melissa is lashing the island nation as a powerful Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds near 175 miles an hour. Forecasters calling for the hurricane to move over Jamaica today across southeastern Cuba tomorrow morning and then hit the Bahamas later tomorrow morning. But the storm surge, the winds and the long sustained time period that it's expected to be sitting over these islands is raising lots of concerns about how much damage it's going to do. That it is. That it is. I love Jamaica. Let's hope it doesn't get hit, but or at least doesn't get hit as hard as some of the expectations.

5:26Amazon is planning to cut 14 ,000 jobs across its corporate workforce again. Wow,$14 ,000. It outlined plans in a message to employees early this morning. A senior executive wrote that the company needs to be organized, in their words, more leanly to capitalize on opportunities from AI. That's a nice way of putting it. Amazon has been conducting rolling layoffs since 2022 as part of CEO Andy Jassy's cost-cutting campaign. Since then, about 27 ,000 employees have been let go. Paramount Skydance plans to cut a thousand jobs in its first round of layoffs beginning tomorrow. That's according to a Bloomberg report.

6:09A second round is expected later. Multiple outlets previously reported that Paramount was planning to lay off a total of about 2 ,000 people. Meantime, a separate Bloomberg report says that Paramount Skydance plans to keep much of Warner Brothers' discovery intact if its merger bid for the rival studio is successful. The report says that CEO David Ellison wants to keep the creative teams of the two studios while consolidating some of the marketing and distribution. Warner Brothers stock this morning off by about nine cents. We've got some breaking news to bring you right now. PayPal has a new deal with OpenAI.

6:46It's going to make PayPal the first payments wallet inside of OpenAI. IHU Sun writing that story up just now on CNBC.com. Starting next year, users are going to be able to purchase items on ChatGPT through PayPal. It also signals that ChatGPT's efforts to move more into the consumer space continues apace. And you can read more about what's happening on CNBC.com. Literally, as we speak, shares of PayPal up about 1 % this morning, but down about 15 % in the last year. But, you know, you talk about disintermediating things. In some ways, this is not disintermediating PayPal because they'll become the payments platform, if you will.

7:25But it means that a lot of folks are going to be inside of ChatGPT buying things, which may disintermediate some of the folks either selling them or how all of this is going to work. I think, you know, we talk about the Blue Link economy, the Google Blue Link economy search and the like, how that's going to disappear over time. It's so interesting because PayPal used to be the only game in town. There are so many different alternatives now. You know, Apple Wallet with the double click, a quick thing to go through. Probably very smart for PayPal to try and get there and get there first. Look, the question I have is, is this exclusive?

8:01I imagine other platforms are going to be jumping in. You're going to want to be able to buy with your iPhone and your this and your that. I don't know how often you just double click now on the phone using Apple Pay. So it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. Yeah. I still have cash in my wallet. I don't know. There's just so many online things. You use Venmo. Do you use Zelle? Do you use PayPal? Do you use the Apple Pay? Or the ShopPay, like half of the things that are tied up on online shopping with Amazon. I mean, and by the way, I use all of them. Right. I did something the other day.

8:36Whatever's the fastest. I did something the other day, and they said, no, you need to. I had the credit card out. They said, no, it's under$2. I was like, oh, my God. I think I can. You need money? I think I can. It was like a pastry. I didn't need it anyway. And then they gave me, like, these little things bag, metal things. Yes. Which, by the way, I needed a quarter to pay for a stupid parking spot, you know, like a parking meter the other day. I finally found one that was, like, stuck with Diet Coke or something to the bottom of the thing. That's old school, too, because everything else now is.

9:09Right. Most of them you could just use. Tap to pay. Tap to pay. These were old school. I was up in Westchester, and these were old school, and I literally had to take a knife to get this quarter off the bottom of the car. Don't you have changed? I might have changed. I used to. I don't anymore. Yeah, I still have. It goes in the car, put it here. I'll use it. Never do. Cheese will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, Bill Gates has written a new essay on climate and on global priorities to improve human welfare. If the aid budgets to poor countries were continuing to go up the way they did over the last 25 years, then the trade-offs between climate action and saving children's lives wouldn't be as acute as it is now that these budgets are going down.

9:57For some, it may seem like a reversal, but Gates says nope, he's addressing an issue of resources. I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist. Plus, how the co-founder of Microsoft is thinking about the AI bubble and much, much more right after this break.

10:23This is Squawk Pod. Stand, Andrew, bye. Three, two, one, up in Andrew. Cue. Here's Mike. You're watching Squawk Box. I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin, along with Joe Kernan and Becky Quick.

10:42And it was an amazing end to an historic baseball game. The Dodgers, Freddie Freeman, hitting a walk-off home run in the 18th inning to beat the Toronto Blue Jays in game three of the World Series. The game lasting, you ready for this, six hours and 39 minutes. Joe? You know, there's 162 games, Andrew. That's why most of the time they'll stick a guy on second base in the 10th inning. But not now. And this is why. This is why they came up with that. It's not that hard, you know, put a guy on second, move him over to third, you know, with a bunt. And he scores. That's a way to end these games. But if you don't do that.

11:29What did you say, 37 guys who got stuck? I didn't even. Last night? Yeah, I think it was like 37 guys who got stuck. Did they put a guy on second last night? Are they doing that? Or are they not? Maybe they are. I wasn't up watching it. I wasn't either. I just heard about it on the video. Someone can tell me on Twitter, did they really 18 innings with the guy on? Well, I don't know if it was with the guy on second or not. They went through 19 pitchers. They had 37 guys who got stuck on base. No, no. They don't. Not in the World Series. Yeah, I was watching another game where they did. Yeah, they're not.

12:02Yeah. Yeah. OK, Joe, new this morning, what could turn out to be the talker of the day, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, publishing a memo that suggests adopting a different view and changing strategy towards addressing climate change. It is a rebuttal to what he calls, quote, the doomsday scenario, which Gates says is, quote, causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near term goal emission, near term emission goals. and its diverting resources, he says, from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world. He writes, quote, this is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change, improving lives.

12:45Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world's poorest countries. Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else for the vast majority of them, It will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been. Now, I spoke to Bill Gates in an exclusive TV interview, and I asked him to explain what he hopes people take away from this new message. Climate is a super important problem. There's enough innovation here to avoid super bad outcomes.

13:25we won't achieve our best goal, the 1.5 or even the 2 degrees. And as we go about trying to minimize that, we have to frame it in terms of overall human welfare, not just everything should be solely for climate. How much of your own view is a function of just contextually what's happening in the world versus what I think you've thought for a long time about the climate? Well, if the aid budgets to poor countries were continuing to go up the way they did over the last 25 years, then the trade-offs between climate action and saving children's lives wouldn't be as acute as it is now that these budgets are going down, and going down quite a bit.

14:16And so the plea here is to say, okay, let's take that very limited money and not have some partitioned off for particular causes. Let's measure it all in terms of the human welfare. How do you help those countries? You were a huge supporter of the Paris Climate Accord at the time. And I wonder now, when you look back, given that you're changing sort of the metric with which you used, do you say to yourself that the Paris Climate Accord and its goals were misplaced? No, not at all. That was a key milestone because the countries of the world said, hey, this is a mutual problem. The temperature rise, the entire world will experience a temperature rise from the emissions from all these countries.

15:05So getting countries to commit was very, very important. The one thing about that accord that turned out not to be realistic was the ambitious goal of staying to 1.5 degrees. We won't be able to do that. Even if you took all the money away from health, you wouldn't be able to do that. So now the question is, okay, what temperature level are we going to end up at? Very important to minimize that, but not at the expense of everything else. Okay, but in the context of not at the expense of everything else, so many businesses, companies, including Microsoft, made pledges around being net zero, trying to get, in some cases, negative net zero, meaning going back and paying for their carbon production from earlier.

15:55Was that a mistake? Not at all. So that's not the message that you're trying to suggest? No, not at all. I mean, why have we been able to lower the future emissions? It's because companies like Microsoft and many others focused on this initiative. And it's very important that those companies help advance these new technologies. By being the early customers for things like nuclear fission, fusion, clean cement, they're driving the prices down. And that's the magic thing. When you get the clean stuff to be cheaper than the dirty stuff, then you can take that whole area of emissions and say, okay, just normal market economics works there.

16:43When the climate activists who have been very supportive of what you've done, and you've been very supportive of what they've done, read this. And if Greta Thunberg is reading this and saying to herself, my goodness, he seems like he is reversing himself, what would you tell her? I'd say wasn't the goal here to improve human lives. And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine or should we do some climate related activity? And if we could take, if we stop putting all vaccines and that, you know, saved you 0.1 degree, would that be a smart trade-off?

17:30That's the kind of question we have to ask. So I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist. So what do you think is going to be the critique of this? There are going to be people who are going to say that you are changing the goalposts because of this political climate as a way to placate President Trump, who has not been on the side of some of the net zero and obviously the Paris Climate Accord and things like that? Well, I'm glad that some of the provisions that promoted new climate technologies got preserved. I was disappointed that a lot of that was taken away. But the provisions supporting nuclear and geothermal, some of those were maintained.

18:19The U.S. has pulled back, and that's a huge disappointment. We really need all the countries working together on this, just like we need them to be generous on their aid budget. If you think climate is the only problem and it's apocalyptic, or if you think climate's not a problem at all, my memo will make no sense to you. You'll be like, oh no, it should all be climate. Or you'll be like, why are you even still talking about this climate thing? Why do you invest billions of your money into these companies? The middle position that climate is super important, but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.

19:00I didn't pick that position because it's a, you know, everybody agrees with it. It's, I think, intellectually the right answer. And guys, that is a very nuanced view. I'm so curious, Becky and Joe, what you think of it. When you read it on the page, it really is, or at least seems to be somewhat a reversal, if you will, to some of the comments that he's made in the past. Though I actually went back and looked some of the comments he'd made in the past, even about the Paris Climate Accord. He had said that he thought the goals actually were too ambitious, even at the time, that they would never be achieved.

19:40But I do know that I'm sure critics of climate issues and of his will say that this is a complete retreat, which I also think it is not. So there's sort of two ideas that maybe you can hold in your head at the same time. But I also imagine Greta Thunberg will not be happy with these comments either because it is a tradeoff. And that's what he's presenting here. I think that sums it up, Andrew, that trying to appease or, I don't know, not upset Greta Thunberg is kind of the, that kind of sums it up for me. The one thing I will say is Bill Gates has always been somebody who has measured outcomes.

20:18If you read his annual letter from year to year, he talks about how no matter what people think, the world is getting better. And he does that by measuring childhood deaths worldwide. He does that by measuring all kinds of things. I wonder if he's seen a shift in the numbers and if that has convinced him that more money needs to go to these other issues. One thing he said is climate change is not going to be the biggest issue. It's always been clear. It's always been clear that the developed countries have a much better ability to try to do all these pie in the sky initiatives and spend money where people where the starving country, the less developed countries that really need fossil fuel.

20:56So it's been to most to a lot of people like me. It's been kind of a you know, I look at I look at it and I listen to what he said. Andrew, you know, I'm on the other side of what he said. There's people that he said are here. I'm here. I think the entire initiative is a fool's errand and a phantom menace. And I've said for so long plastics in the ocean, particulate pollution, strip mining, overfishing. You know, I can give you 50 things we could have been spending that money on instead of this fool's errand of trying to make sure we don't go to 0.041 percent CO2 versus 0.040 percent CO2. All of the faux connection between every adverse weather event and a single carbon dioxide molecule in 10 ,000 parts of the atmosphere.

21:51People laugh at it. And it's weird that it's so politically motivated. Greta Thunberg is a perfect example. To the far left, it's a secular religion that's not based on any hardcore science. That's where I come from. And Joe, I think one of the things he's trying to say is that view he's suggesting, and I think it's actually the first time he's suggested publicly, is too much. That is an extreme view and that the industry and the world has almost over-rotated towards that view. And what he's saying, and I think he's saying it in the context, and this goes to where Becky was going with the money and USAID and everything else.

22:31That's what I wonder. The cuts to USAID, did this change his mind? Yeah, well, that I think was that is exactly what he said. And I think that in the context of limited resources. To me, Bill Gates is absolutely insufferable when he's talking about some of this. I'm sorry, but he just is. I know he coded some great software, but even when he weighs in on vaccines, he means well. He means well. But on this issue, he reminds me of someone who bought Bitcoin over$100 ,000. Oh, see, I thought that you were going to say hallelujah and say here's somebody. Baby steps. Maybe you think it's baby steps.

23:09He's slowly. You know, we've had Chris Wright on. We've had other people from the administration. I could bring people on that I guess they're called heretics because it's a secular religion to the left. It really is. It is a secular. It has heretics. I don't think he's taking a political position. I think he's saying, look, it's all climate change is real. He's not denying that climate change is real. He's saying climate change is real on one end, and yet we have to work on these other issues as well, and how do we do that? And we can't take all of our money and all of our energy and focus it solely on climate change when we have all these other issues at hand to contend with.

23:48Andrew, you're Lombard. There's been people, I mean, I follow the entire area. There's been people that have been saying this for a long time, that there's no way, look at China. They're building, what, 40 coal plants a day. there's no way that you're going to stop emissions. Whether it becomes something we can't deal with 50 years from now. Did you see earlier this month the whole idea of rising sea levels? That was all game. That was a lot of the projections. Anything that went against that dogma or that narrative, you couldn't get it published. You couldn't get it published. I don't think he's taking your position, Joe, that climate change is not happening at all.

24:27I think he's saying it's real. No, I'm not saying it's not happening at all. I'm not saying it's a crisis. He's now gotten to the point where he doesn't think it's necessarily an apocalyptic crisis. And by the way, he said very specifically in the letter that there are issues that are going to affect the poorest people in the world much more drastically, that this is not going to be anywhere near the top thing that happens. I'm going to have some water from my plastic bottle, and I'm going to throw it in the ocean. That you stole from Fiji, and why is Fiji now sinking into the ocean? Only from, not from this.

25:00I also asked him if he is worried about whether we are in an AI bubble. Here's what he had to say. We need to define bubble. If what we mean is like tulips in the Netherlands, that they went, she looked back and said, what the heck, there was nothing there. Those were just tulips. No, that's not where we are. If you mean it's like the internet bubble, where in the end something very profound happened, The world was very different. Some companies succeeded, but a lot of the companies were kind of me too, fell behind, burning capital companies. Absolutely, there are a ton of these investments that will be dead ends.

25:45And you look at all the investments that are being made today by some of the big tech companies. Some companies were not making money on AI yet, but are making massive commitments to chip makers and data centers and say this math makes sense. The AI is the biggest technical thing ever in my lifetime. I mean, it is so profound and therefore its influence is hard to overstate. And the economic value, this is basically intelligence, where you can get medical advice, or you can get a tutor, or you can get somebody to help you design drugs. So the value is extremely high, just like creating the internet ended up being, in net, very, very valuable.

26:30But you have a frenzy, and some of these companies will be glad they spent all this money. Some of them, they'll commit to data centers whose electricity is too expensive, that it could be done overseas. Or they'll buy a generation of chips and they won't have captured all their value before the next one comes along. But if you want to be a tech company, you don't get to say, no, let's check out of this race. What do you think the public appetite for this is ultimately going to be? And I ask because I think there's concerns about two things that are happening right now. One is energy costs. So there's a whole bunch of places where people want to put data centers.