Bill Gates owns a dominant stake in Republic Services, America’s second-largest landfill operator, but he’s failed to make the company live up to his own climate principles, ProPublica has found.

In November 2015, world leaders descended on Paris to negotiate a historic agreement to limit global warming. But on the summit’s opening day, attention turned to a private citizen slouched awkwardly in a chair on stage: Bill Gates.

Gates, with his characteristic flop of sandy hair, grinned impishly as President Barack Obama called him a “visionary” and a “driving force” behind a pair of pledges that both saw as key to the larger agreement. First the world’s largest economies would double their spending on research into clean-energy technologies. Then investors like Gates would back the startups that emerged. The Microsoft cofounder had already enlisted two dozen other billionaires to join the effort.

For Gates, who’d become increasingly consumed by this unprecedented threat to human well-being, the moment marked his arrival as a leading figure in the fight against climate change.

“If we back over 50 different breakthrough approaches, we know that several of those will give us the solution that we need,” Gates said during his own speech. He would invest at least $2 billion of his own money in companies developing geothermal wells, new kinds of nuclear reactors and machines that pull carbon from the air, to name just a few.

With much less fanfare, however, Gates has put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry. At the time of the Paris summit, he was already the dominant shareholder of America’s No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services. He has since increased his stake to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
    123·
    2 hours ago

    Is someone suggesting an alternative to landfills right now? Recycling is already a thing, but people aren’t interested in doing it more. But if they did, it would happen at the landfill. People and or machines would have tomsift through the trash and extract recyclables. And if that were to happen, owning landfills would be a good financial move.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      93·
      1 hour ago

      If you bothered to read the article at all, you’d see that the problem isn’t that he’s the largest shareholder of a landfill company. It’s that:

      One might imagine that a landfill operator with Gates as its largest shareholder [38%] — and with three people closely linked to Gates on its board — would lead the way in tackling those emissions. Even after seemingly softening his stance on global warming in a controversial blog post last year, Gates remains one of the world’s most prominent voices on the issue. As he did in his bestselling 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” he continues to advocate for cutting emissions, and he has called on his fellow business leaders to do their part.

      Gates, though, has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found. Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor. Republic has even lobbied against policies that could make the wider industry cleaner, including by keeping organic waste out of landfills in the first place.

      “It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic’s behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits,” said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

      This is just a summary of what the article explores; there’s more if you’d care to read it instead of just assuming this investigation can be boiled down to “landfills bad lol”.

      (Edit: That said, this is Lemmy; pretty much nobody here is reading beyond the headline, which is sad and pathetic but at least probably applies to the comments here attacking Gates for this too.)