Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

Billionaire invests $10B dollars to virtue signal and control the behavior of the poor, while not changing his lifestyle at all. 165M dollar environmentally excessive mansion, private jets, and a rocket program that dumps carbon into the air.

I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks.

Checks are important, but let’s be real about these people.

View on HN

What do you think actually makes the most difference:

a) Donating $10B b) Reducing his personal environmental impact to zero

You are literally more interested in virtue signalling than making actual change.

>What do you think actually makes the most difference: a) Donating $10B b) Reducing his personal environmental impact to zero

How does that Gandhi quote go: Be the change you want to see in the World... or was it pay for the change you want to see in the World?

You think Gandhi would have effected the change he did by paying others to engage in acts of civil disobedience? Paid others to break imperial laws and get arrested? Paid others to engage in hunger strikes?

Gandhi was a western educated and trained lawyer, but he boycotted western clothing and adopted the dhoti...it is not just a symbol (or virtue signaling) but it was a necessary act. Whereas $10B from Bezos for Climate change appears to be just a symbol, because he continues to head a Company that facilitates unbridled consumerism and global consumption and he seems unwilling to make personal sacrifices to his lavish lifestyle.

I dislike gross displays of privilege. Being rich and advocating for everyone else to reduce consumption while maintaining your own lavish, polluting lifestyle simply because you have the money to “offset” it is obscene.

I don't see any mention of Bezos agitating for consumption reduction in that article. I don't see any mention of his personal consumption habits so I'm curious where you got the data on which you are basing your claims (for all your know he has made personal sacrifices). Your entire argument appears unsound as a single individual's consumption has basically negligible impact on the environment (so it is trivial to "offset" it and massively reducing quality of life is basically just virtue signaling) whereas a cash grant of this magnitude could actually have an outsized impact.

> I dislike gross displays of privilege.

You appear to simply dislike people who have much more money than you.

Isn't it possible that Bezos is not a hero due to moral complications, but also that this effort of his will have a positive impact?

Yes, absolutely. No argument there.

Better to encourage it then, surely. If rich people are doing good things in order to win praise, what's the point of denying it to them? If enough of us react that way, we won't diminish the power of the rich people, we'll just get to watch them spend their money more selfishly.

This doesn't mean staying silent about the bad things they do. But if we only respond to the good things by bringing up the bad things, we end up perversely being more critical of the ones who do some good, and diverting our scrutiny away from those who don't even bother.

(I haven't looked into this pledge, so I'm just speaking on the hypothetical case where it is likely to do good, as you've acknowledged is at least possible.)

edit: I just noticed that you say in another comment you 'do not believe in climate change'. In which case I guess this line of reasoning won't have any force for you. But maybe you can understand why people who do see climate change as a serious problem are going to take a pragmatic view, and treat the investment of $10b as vastly more important than the lifestyle sacrifices of a single person.

I dislike when the planet is being ravaged and most people who with vast accumulations of wealth are sitting on their hands/fortunes.

"Gross displays of privilege" are a distant second.

I dislike when we have two standards of behavior. When someone is not destitute they are expected to conform to a multitude of societal norms, when they are poor every vice and misbehavior is excused.

I propose one standard of expectation and we make everyone follow it.

What does changing his lifestyle have to do with anything. He's just giving 10 billion dollars to a good cause and somehow you're using it to fuel an arbitrary vendetta with someone you've never met.

Maybe that is not a significant change in his spending account, but how many of us are truly making lifestyle sacrifices to support these causes? I think it's a very small number, and most people haven't given 10 billion dollars to the cause (or done any of the other amazing things Bezos' has done for this society).

You do have a point, but on the other hand, when some girl decided she had enough of the hypocrisy and sailed a yacht to cross the Atlantic, people still made fun of her for using plastic dishes in a train.

So, I think some people just don't like the message and will find any and every excuse to talk about the messengers instead.

I'm not that impressed by Jeff Bezos either, but I'll take a billionaire pledging $10B living in a lavish mansion over a billionaire pledging nothing and still living in the same mansion. It's a step in the right direction.

Sacrificing isn't going to solve the problem. Saying that people need to do that seems to be it's own virtue signal.

Climate change is billions of people over decades. Bezos can't sacrifice enough to make a difference.

I do not believe in climate change. I also do not believe in a ruling elite advocating reduced consumption by others while consuming and emitting all they want simply because they have the money to “offset” it. It is an obscene display of privilege.

If this commenter opened with “I do not believe in climate change” many people here would have saved time and not responded to this quasi-trolling

Because all dissenting opinions are trolls? I genuinely dislike being preached to about climate change by mega-consumers like celebrities.

Discussing the proper response to a problem with someone who denies its existence is rarely productive, so people might have saved some time if they had known your position from the beginning.

I do not believe in gravity, and yet.

>I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves, rather than just write checks.

Why? Jeff Bezos donating that much money to combat climate change will have a much larger positive good than the negative things you outlined that he does.

He's also switching majority (I'm unsure as to the amount and the timeframe of his delivery trucks to electric). With pressure from someone like Bezos putting vehicle fleets on electric, that could put the US on the path to build a much needed electric vehicle infrastructure.

;) Maybe given Bezos' character, the endowment and the fleet upgrade is actually, well aside from being more cost effective for a lot of reasons .. also .. his best vehicle for scoring some long term points against the Saudis, since they 'didn't hack his phone, or whatever.

So then, at this point, there's nothing he can do to win you over that you can't come up with some conspiracy theory with an ulterior motive where he's bent on world domination?

Let me ask a more clarifying question, then, I guess? What could he do where you wouldn't think he was up to no good?

I think these kinds of opinions are really dangerous–we cannot just expect society to go back to the stone age. It's why the average human is blocking climate change out, the changes have to come in the form of e.g. CO2 taxes and broad regulation. Climate is not the responsibility of the individual citizen. It's bad enough as it is, we don't need to feel guilty every day about small things like using a plastic straw when the scale of the problem is so mind-bogglingly large

One thing we need to stop completely is emissions trading and carbon offsetting. Carbon emissions have to be decreased drastically by most large corporations and offsetting and trading does not reduce emissions & allows corporations and governments to greenwash constantly. Here in New Zealand the governments is praised as being pro environment when it is all just greenwashing. They are portrayed as left leaning when they are neo-liberal aka climate change denying capatilists. They don't understand economic prosperity and environmental sustainability are mutually exclusive.

Sharing shit information like this is why the average human is blocking climate change out. No one is suggesting going back to the Stone Age. Your plastic straw use isn’t warming the planet. But, you should consider the impact flying a jet has on the earth.

Or eating meat. Or drinking milk. Or eating cheese. or eating corn. Or the thousand and one little things that you can do to vote with your wallet. And remember the point of the exercise doesn't have to be to stop doing it completely, but to do less of it and to consider whether you really want or need that. It's a far cry between maybe ordering the 8 oz instead of the 12 oz steak versus burning your house down and knapping flints for the rest of your days.

Why can't I just keep doing whatever I want and offset my carbon like these kinds of initiatives do?

Go for it. Just keep in mind that some forms of offsets are more effective than others.

Is that your argument?

Noone is perfect. Greta eschewed the plane for a yacht, and guess what, people like you are still complaining. This is why people are blocking it out and are angry at her. How the can anyone win with this logic?

We can't just shame ourselves into fixing the climate. Broad regulation is the only way this will get solved. It can't be up to each individual person to save the climate.

If that's your solution, we're even more fucked than we currently are. Even if everybody stopped flying or eating ribeyes or whatever, there's still a huge amount of carbon that needs to be sucked out of the atmosphere, and plenty of extremely large sources of carbon and methane that are still there. The world is going to shit and you want me to eschew the tiny bit of enjoyment I have left in the hopes that everybody else does the same thing? Not gonna happen.

Carbon emissions are fungible. Rockets are fine as long as we find ways to extract an equivalent amount of carbon. And carbon capture programs need a source of revenue to be built out, so this is more helpful than him turning down his personal emissions to zero.

It sounds more like you find it unfair that he gets to live the way he does.

No I find it unfair that many celebrity climate advocates preach limited consumption while consuming vast amounts of energy, carbon, etc. themselves.

Unfair in what way? If you wanted, you could preach limited consumption to everyone who listens and behave in the complete opposite manner of what you preach (to the greatest degree that your personal finances allow). Is it simply a matter of degree to you? Or is it a 'principle' thing? If the latter, there's plenty of hypocrisy to be found in the world - why focus on the billionaire who just pledged $10B to a cause that will benefit us all? Aren't there also wealthy people who preach limited consumption and don't make large private donations? At least Bezos is putting his money where his mouth is.

I've never seen Bezos push for personal austerity, have you? He's trying to move their fleets to EVs and transition data centers to renewable energy, those aren't a limited consumption measure.

A celebrity advocate who pays millions in offsets probably thinks it is unfair when comparing themselves to other celebrities who do not.

Who cares? $10 billion could fully fund global fusion research for the next 5-10 years.

I would be thrilled if that were the case!

It must be sad being a jealous faux woke person.

Here, by your own admission, Bezos spent 165M on a mansion and 10B on climate funding, ~70x his personal outlay, and you chide him from not making sacrifices. He did make sacrifices. You just refuse to acknowledge them because 'evil rich people'.

"I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves"

Generally, when someone gives up a significant portion of the wealth to an important cause it falls under the category of "sacrifices".

Or would you rather he just drive less or something?

> I’ll be impressed when billionaires actually make sacrifices themselves

Donating 10 billion dollars sounds like a pretty big sacrifice.

Just to cynically correct you, he hasn’t do t anything. He’s “committed “ to giving 10B. I don’t see a timeframe or a plan. This is all talk currently.

I know this is completely not your point, but do rockets actually dump a lot of carbon? I thought most rocket exhaust was mostly water.

Yes, relatively speaking, each launch contributes a "large" amount, but it is completely irrelevant when looking at the overall picture. There are ~100 launches a year, compared with 7 billion miles driven by automobiles per year [1] for example.

I don't have a source handy, but I remember hearing that each launch is the equivalent of the annual output of 2 passenger vehicles. So all rockets launches worldwide = 200 drivers.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171113006466/en/Fut...

Yes, some do. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine will run on methane, SpaceX' Raptor engine does as well, Falcon 9s are using refined kerosine instead (i.e. 'gas'). The total amount emitted is negligible compared to aviation or shipping though.

Depends on the fuel. With hydrogen powered rockets a la shuttle main engines, yes. Most of the recent pushes have been kerosene or methane fueled, though.

But in the scheme of things, it's really not worth complaining about them vs. our enormous vehicle fleets.

Depending on their fuel, they dump some carbon. I would expect that all the rockets launched since Goddard do not add up to significant amounts of carbon.

rpjguy seems to regard the rocket thing as Bezos's hobby, for his own entertainment, rather than as an actual attempt to get humanity into space in a meaningful way.

A rocket burning all its fuel dumps a lot more carbon than a plane, however, since there are so many more plane flights than rocket flights, the total amount is insignificant in comparison.

Use reclaimed methane from a landfill and you’re even having a net benefit!

Rockets do emit CO2 but it is a very insignificant amount.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com