Bill Gates at TED and how NaturalNews.com got it wrong

Scanning Google news my eyes fell on a remarkable headline: "Bill Gates says vaccines can help reduce world population." I clicked the link and it brought me to the site NaturalNews.com and I read the piece.

It left me astounded! That a link on Google news could lead me to such utter nonsense. What NaturalNews.com deducted from Bill Gates' speech at TED was that he and the world's health organisations are planning to cull 10 to 15 % of the world's population to get the CO2 emissions down. I could not believe that Bill Gates, one of the greatest philanthropists in human history has an evil plan like that up his sleeve. So I decided to watch the TED talk by Bill Gates. And this proved that NaturalNews.com may have a brain behind it but they forgot to switch it on in this instance.

NaturalNews.com based their conspiracy theory on one element of Gates' speech. Bill Gates showed an equation which described CO2 output. The equation is: CO2=P x S x E x C wherein P is people, S is services per person, E is energy used to create and power these services and C is the amount of CO2 produced per unit of energy.

Bill Gates went on to state that to get the CO2 to zero, which is the target for us to be able to survive, one of the factors needs to go to zero. He spent a short time per factor to explain what they were and where these factors were heading, ending on a long talk about the last factor, CO2 which was the main hub of his talk.

Obviously the factor 'people' is going up. We're at 6.6 billion and heading towards 9 point something billion. What Bill Gates then said is what got NaturalNews.com in a twisted knickers situation and I paraphrase: healthcare and vaccines may get the world population growth down to 8 point something billion. From which NaturalNews.com deducted that Bill Gates and health care organisations are planning to cull 10 to 15 % of the population on earth. But that is not at all what he is saying. What he is saying is that people in poor areas where child mortality is high tend to have large families (something professor Jeffrey Sachs explained). So improve the living conditions and general health of people and the population reduces on a voluntary basis.

The problem is that a headline like the one NaturalNews chose, in which it is inferred that there is a large conspiracy to cull human beings, catches the eye and tickles the imagination. Further thought is drowned in the fear mongering of publications like this. While what is really the case is that hyper intelligent people like Bill Gates and many others (just watch some TED talks to become convinced) are becoming more and more aware that humanity needs to change its ways, that humanity can change its ways and that humanity is willing to change its ways. These thinkers are the leaders to follow, not the nincompoops at publications like NaturalNews.com. Shame on them!