Fact Check: Bill Gates Was NOT Caught Admitting ‘Climate Change Is WEF Scam’
Was Bill Gates caught admitting the climate change agenda is a giant scam for the New World Order? No, that’s not true: A video clip of Gates used in a claim does not show him saying the word “scam” when speaking about climate change. He never said the word, and his comments regarding solutions for climate change are taken wildly out of context in the claim.
The claim appeared an article published by NewsPunch on September 28, 2022, titled “Bill Gates Caught Admitting ‘Climate Change Is WEF Scam’ to Inner Circle – News Punch” (archived here). It opened:
Bill Gates was caught admitting the climate change agenda is a giant scam for the New World Order in a newly surfaced video in which he boasts that the term ‘clean energy’ has ‘screwed up people’s minds.’
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Bill Gates Caught Admitting ‘Climate Change Is WEF Scam’ to Inner Circle – News Punch
Bill Gates was caught admitting the climate change agenda is a giant scam for the New World Order in a newly surfaced video in which he boasts that the term “clean energy” has “screwed up people’s minds.”
An 8-minute 52-second video with the article shows Gates speaking from 0:52 to 1:22. Nowhere in this clip does he use the word “scam.” The headline of the article and the video claim that Gates is speaking to his “inner circle in 2018,” but the original footage is from the Stanford Energy Global Energy Forum in November 2018, where he was a guest. A YouTube video of his interview was posted in December 2018. He was interviewed by Arun Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
The unidentified narrator of the video claims that Gates finds global warming “hysterically funny” but at no point in the video is Gates laughing, hysterically or otherwise. During the short clip Gates says the term clean energy has been misconstrued and it is hurting the efforts to stop climate change.
Throughout the 36-minute video of his full interview, Gates never says climate change is a “scam” and never uses the word scam. Contrary to the claim, he never mentions the New World Order nor “WEF” — an apparent reference to the World Economic Forum.
The clip of Gates answering a question begins at 8:38 in the video from Stanford. He is asked if it was enough that wind and solar renewable energy costs were coming down and battery costs were coming down. He replies:
No, that is so disappointing, I mean really. Vaclav yesterday he said OK, here’s Tokyo, 27 million people. You have three days of a cyclone basically every year. It’s 22 gigawatts rate over three days. You know, tell me what battery solution is going to sit there and provide that power? I mean, let’s not joke around. Your multiple orders of magnitude, you know, a hundred dollars per kilowatt hour, that’s nothing. That doesn’t solve the reliability problem. And remember electricity is 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Whenever we came up with this term clean energy I think it’s screwed up people’s minds because they didn’t, now they don’t understand.
Gates appears to be referencing Vaclav Smill, an author whom he greatly admires and speaks and writes about frequently, by saying that if Tokyo had its solar power knocked out for three days there isn’t a big enough battery to power the city of 27 million people. During his entire interview he offers his opinion on how climate change can be solved — but does not ever say it is a scam.
Lead Stories has written many articles about Bill Gates that can be found here.
NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire) has published hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page “The People’s Voice” even lost its verification checkmark, according to a 2018 report from Media Matters For America.
The Terms of Use of the site (archived here) also make it clear they don’t really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:
NEWSPUNCH, LLC AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
RationalWiki described it as:
YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto (‘News. Truth. Unfiltered’).
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Lead Stories can be found here.
