Fact Check: Video Does NOT Show Bill Gates Advocating Destroying Agricultural Land — Portions Of Gates’ Remarks Have Been Cut

Does a video prove Bill Gates suggested destroying agricultural land? No, that’s not true: A convoluted post on social media cut out portions of Gates’ response to a question, changing the context of what he said. The edited clip of Gates speaking at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., in 2019 was merged with an unrelated video showing cattle running from a wildfire in Texas in February 2024 to give the impression Gates suggested something which he did not. Gates was not speaking favorably about burning land to release carbon, and while did he suggest that cattle production adds methane to earth’s atmosphere, he did not suggest that herds of cattle should be destroyed with wildfires.

The video clips appeared in a post (archived here) where it was published by @jakegtv on March 2, 2024 with the caption:

Smokehouse Creek Fire, second-largest in U.S. history, merges with another to stretch across huge swath of Texas Panhandle. 🔥

+1,000,000 acres burnt and the numbers are rising. 🗣️ ITS TIME WE SPEAK UP ⚠️

Protect our farmers. Just look how EU is handling the Agenda 2030 regulations.

#wakeup #protectourfarmers #truth #theydontwantyoutoknow #wildfire #fire #texas #panhandle #tx #fyp #explore #trending #viral #reels

This is how the post appeared on Instagram at the time of writing:

(Image source: Instagram screenshot taken on Mon Mar 11 15:36:51 2024 UTC)

The scope of this fact check will be on the edited video of Gates speaking and will not extend to the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is mentioned in the caption. The United Nations page on Agenda 2030 can be found here.

Text captioning over the video says, “Deadly Texas wildfire torches 1,000,000+ ACRES” The voice of a newscaster says:

As Jason had talked about the wildfires impacting a lot of livestock as well, some 80% of their land we’re told is scorched in what they call an unparalleled loss.

Forest Service investigators with Texas A&M issued a report on March 7, 2024, that concluded the Smokehouse Creek Fire was “ignited by power lines” (archived here). Scenes in the video do show the fires that burned in the Texas panhandle in Late February 2024. The herd of cattle running in smoke was filmed near Stinnett, Texas, and posted on Facebook by Katlyn Butler on February 27, 2024, The firemen walking in the smoldering rubble was posted on YouTube by the Independent US channel on March 1, 2024.

The clip of Bill Gates speaking was taken from an appearance at the Economic Club of Washington on June 24, 2019. The 1:27:48-hour-long video is posted on YouTube showing Gates being interviewed by the club’s chairman, David Rubenstein. At 47:24 minutes in, Rubenstein asks a question — an Environmental Protection Agency report, “Global Greenhouse Gas emissions Data,” shows a pie chart with the statistics mentioned. He asks:

Now a large part of the carbon we have in the atmosphere now is caused by the electricity grid which is about twenty five percent or so. So, twenty four percent comes from agriculture and forestry, why is that causing such a big increase in carbon?

Gates responds:

Well the nat category is a variety of things, when you clear land you’re taking in the carbon that’s stored, say in the trees of plants there, and you’re releasing all of that like burning the land, say in Indonesia for palm oil plantations, another thing is that, uh, cows and other grass-eating species, uh, have a digestion system that emits methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and so cows alone account for about 6 percent of global emissions and so we need to change cows just cows alone uh…

The video clip presented on Instagram is missing several seconds of footage. The portions of the above excerpt that were omitted in the video are reproduced with a strikethrough below:

Well the nat category is a variety of things, when you clear land you’re taking in the carbon that’s stored, say in the trees of plants there, and you’re releasing all of that like burning the land, say in Indonesia for palm oil plantations, another thing is that, uh, cows and other grass-eating species, uh, have a digestion system that emits methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and so cows alone account for about 6 percent of global emissions and so we need to change cows just cows alone uh…

So Gates was speaking of two different environmental impacts, methane from cattle and from burning forested land to clear it for an agricultural purpose. Gates mentioned palm oil plantations in Indonesia, but in the Amazon basin, rainforests are also burned to make grazing land for cattle. Gates was speaking of the harm of intentionally burning forests for agriculture — he was not suggesting to kill cattle and destroy ranches with wildfires.

Lead Stories has published several fact checks on a variety of claims about Bill Gates (here) as well as the Texas wildfires (here).