'People are dying': how the climate crisis has sparked an exodus to the US | Hacker News Reader

'People are dying': how the climate crisis has sparked an exodus to the US

theguardian.com

69 pointsciconia10 comments

I feel bad just reading this, we failed as civilisation so badly. Apart from short term help, I think these people need education - how could both growing up hungry, living in famine and having children at 13 seem like a good idea is beyond me.

Afaik it makes perfect sense in a third-world country: There is no social security net so your only security is your children taking care of you when you get old / become unable to work. Probably there is a high chance some of these children will either not grow up to take care of them, or not grow up at all. Solution: hedge your bet by having as many children as possible.

If people stopped having kids every time there was a famine, there'd be nobody here. History is littered with war, disease, and famine, and yet people have been born throughout it. Maybe it wouldn't have seemed a good idea to have kids during the cold war (impending nuclear apocalypse), the spanish flu, WW2, the dustbowl, the great leap forward, the civil war, various genocides of the past century, etc.

And yet, in most cases, the survivors and descendants are better off, not worse off, than the people of the time.

"Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. "

In the end, voting is the only thing that matters. Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual without governments setting policy so that doing the right thing is also doing the most profitable thing.

But despite you being wrong in your core point, in my opinion, you're absolutely right about the method.

The reason that voting is useless is because voters don't care about the environment. Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.[1]. Fix that, and then voting might make a difference. And you do that by making it clearly visible that it's important to you, and by convincing others that it's important to them.

1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-health...

[edit: sorry, this was supposed to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20552145]

In my more paranoid moments I wonder- Despite the appearance of ineptitude and racist undertones, is the US government's push to build a Wall actually part of a long-term strategy put in place by the true strategists in the US government, intelligent people who accept the science and understand the tremendous challenge of climate change. Have they already evaluated the projections and concluded that the only way for the US itself to survive is to create a barrier?

Sixty points in two hours and rank 500? I guess someone doesn't like the title?

HN readers quickly flag stories that are political or tend to produce heated discussions. Climate change stories are both, yet for a brief time there were 3 of them on the front page. Strong evidence that climate change actually is important to HN readers.

Likewise the flagging is strong evidence that plenty of high karma users object to taking it very seriously.

It's not like stories about blocking online ads get flagged down very often, despite generating a lot of controversy too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20551615 has been on front for 10 hours, yet has # comments exceeding # points, which usually buries a story quick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com