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Comment by toastednz | Hacker News Reader

I find Gates' lack of focus on environmental issues disheartening. I know he does invest in clean energy and feels strongly about climate change, but this doesn't really do anything to prevent deforestation NOW. I know that bringing people out of poverty may have a side-effect of improving some environmental parameters, but it also makes whole swathes of people start demanding more meat, more palm oil, more cars, more disposable goods. The big international benefactors don't seem that interested in rainforest biodiversity.

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I am so tired of the "yeah that's nice but what about X" posts on the internet. This foundation focuses on making life better for poor children and that's a worthwhile thing to focus on.

If you actually read the full text of the post you'd see that they're simultaneously reducing the infant mortality rate while increasing access to family-planning education and contraceptives... these are all things that actually tend to REDUCE population growth in developing nations.

So the one argument you came here to have isn't even true... and even if it was you're suggesting that we'd be better off if more poor children died, which is just some shitty roundabout eugenics.

Maybe spend your time advocating on environmental issues instead of shitposting about it.

So some trees are more important than saving 122 million children? I know I'm going to get all the nasty replies that it's a larger issue than just a few trees, that without trees there won't be people, etc. But comments like these are the reason that people dismiss environmentalists as nutjobs that care more about trees than people.

Climate change is not just about trees, but about the massive loss of biodiversity that goes along with rapid climate change.

Sure most of Europe will be covered in pine trees, but at the same time a lot of species, essentially all that are not able to migrate with the same speed that the climate changes in their habitat will die out.

This article for example claims that 1/2 of the known species have died out within this century and 1/6 will die out if nothing is done about climate change:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/30/one-in-s...

Again, you completely missed the point. Bill Gates is one man with a certain amount of resources. He chose to go after a huge problem with known solutions: hundreds of millions of poverty-induced, completely preventable, childhood deaths. Climate change may be another worthy cause, but no one has any business criticizing him for not choosing that particular one over saving a massive number of children because they might cause some additional demand for palm oil.

Find a billionaire that is doing nothing for the world and criticize them for not doing something about climate change. Bill Gates is busy doing great things for humanity.

I think Bill Gates would agree that when you control the philanthropic funds of the 2 richest people on earth then you have some obligation to spend the money in proportion to the importance of the issues being addressed.

I won't argue the relative merits of the marginal value of a human life vs. mass extinction of species because I'm sure we both have different values underlying our respective views and will never convince each other of anything.

I won't argue the relative merits of the marginal value of a human life vs. mass extinction of species

We aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and when we do, it likely won't be from the effects of preventable climate change. We may in fact have another ice age sometime in the next several million years - but no amount of money, protests, cutting back on emissions, carbon taxes, or other measures will stop it. Dinosaurs had an ice age, and as far as we know they didn't have cars.

This is precisely not about the survival of the human species, we are doing fine and humans are the most likely to be able to adapt to rapidly changing climate and collapse of biodiversity. The issue is that the biodiversity will recover only slowly (in the order of 10 million years) and probably won't completely because we have left very few natural habitats anyways.

Humans have completely bypassed all the usual regulatory mechanisms that balance the populations of all the other species and caused mass extinction simply by reproducing well beyond what a natural ecosystem could sustain. Even the ice age set in way slower than how fast we are currently changing the temperature on earth.

As much as I understand that most people have an anthropocentric outlook, especially the >30% religious fundamentalists in the US, I feel like we should value overall biodiversity over pure human survival. Most of the programs the Gates foundation are probably helpful in the long run for this as well. Lower infant mortality, better access to birth control and reducing poverty will hopefully result in slowed down population growth.

He's probably looked at it and felt that it wasn't as important in terms of the best ROI for his foundation.

His foundation takes a very analytical approach and he wouldn't dismiss that issue lightly.

They can't tackle everything. You have to pick your battles, even when you're the richest man in the world.

Except that's not true:

http://fortune.com/2016/12/11/bill-gates-john-doerr-venture-...

Think of it this way: now there are 122 million more potential climate change researchers on Earth that didn't die before the age of 5.

This is like how anti-abortion activists think that every aborted baby was going to be a doctor. In reality, abortion has likely reduced crime.

Smart people, and people in general, are more productive doing what they're passionate about. Buffett on investing, Musk on space, and Gates on curing childhood diseases.

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