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Essentially, they're funded by billionaires, and their videos show it. Here's a couple videos that go into it:
https://youtu.be/HjHMoNGqQTI
https://youtu.be/uCuy1DaQzWI
Their videos about the climate for the last few years essentially boil down to "shit sucks, everything is bad, a lot of people are going to die. But wait, here's an interesting new technology that could save the planet! All we have to do is trust capitalism to make this technology happen, and we'll be saved!"
I'm of the opinion that we should be brutally fucking honest about the climate, and that copium like this only makes people complacent. If we stopped pumping out greenhouse gases right now, we wouldn't avoid 3° of warming. Hundreds of millions of people are going to die as a direct result of anthropogenic climate change, and there is nothing we can do about that. If we get complacent, that number will be in the multiple billions. Cute cartoon birds turning into skeletons does not reflect the horror of climate change.
The Kurzgesagt climate videos explicitly encourage political action to combat climate change. I think they even encourage it as the most important thing an individual can do. They don't push 'let capitalism solve everything' , they push 'vote in green candidates + regulation'.
I saw one of those videos taking them down for receiving Bill Gates money and frankly I think it's a pretty empty hitpiece.
Don't get me wrong, the Gate's foundation does push this 'never question the market' ideology, and any organisation that relies on their funding deserves to be scrutinized to hell and back. But Kurzgesagt does not push this ideology.
' The problem with Kurzgesagt' never found any factual issues with their content, AND the broad message of their videos is ' lobby the government for regulation + here's the technology' . If Gate's Foundation money has caused them to compromise their values, it's not done a good job of it.
Funding is not the same as editorial control, and the amount recieved from the gates foundation is not even a large portion of their income, so it's not like they have much leverage.
Gate's Foundation and similar spend money literally everywhere, so I worry about people writing good orgs off so quickly.