Bill Gates: Our grandchildren will pay if we don’t fix climate change | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates: Our grandchildren will pay if we don’t fix climate change

cnbc.com

14 pointsmfiguiere15 comments

Off-topic; some accounts come out only in these type of articles and are immediately flagged to death for their comments. Are these bots or people with notifications set to trigger at Bill Gates or covid or climate change or something?

These accounts basically have 90%+ inflammatory and flagged-to-death comments, so they must be here for this alone?

In all fairness, Gates does fly around the world in his private jet, live in huge energy consuming mansions, all the while expecting us commoners to live an ascetic life. If these people where serious in instrumenting change, maybe they could start setting an example by the life they lead?

He's not advocating for "commoners to live an ascetic life". On the contrary, he keeps pointing out that we want the few billion people who currently live in Africa, Asia, South America and consume one tenth the energy consumed by the average American to be able to increase their standard of living, and thus, their energy consumption.

Where are you on this topic?

If you then envision a doubling of energy consumption, how do you square it with achieving net zero? Bill Gates has a plan, and he bothered to write it down in details.

As for his personal carbon footprint, he's rich enough to afford carbon offsets, which he buys [1]. Does that constitute "setting an example by the life he leads" ?

[1] https://www.greenbiz.com/article/bill-gates-doing-his-part-c...

Carbon offsets are a lie that is "worse than doing nothing"[1]. They "don’t actually cancel out – er, offset – the emissions to which they are linked".[2] Instead, they greenwash additional emissions.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/484007a

2: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/the-biggest-problem-with-...

Maybe so.

But on the other hand, maybe whatever Bill Gates does, he would still be guilty in your eyes.

I'd give him credit if he actually did reduce his emissions down to that of an average American.

It's hard to take anything that Gates says seriously anymore.

Any or all of it could be a smoke screen to distract attention away from this:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gates-microsoft-...

My bet is that it is regular HN readers who use throw away accounts to post this.

Those are actual positions of people. They just don't want their regular accounts burned on them.

Since posting well thought out posts on these topics will get downvoted regardless, and they already use throwaway, they don't have any reason to expend effort.

So they just come out like this. They want the opposing voice to be heard but the structure here is just encouraging low effort inflammatory posts on throwaway on controversial topics instead of long posts on real account that get downvoted to oblivion anyway.

I might even get downvoted to oblivion for simply having some empathy to their position regardless of how politely I wrote this.

Bill spends hundreds of millions on personal PR, what you are seeing could be related in some way.

The technology to fix climate change is already in place with solar and wind both now being straight up cheaper then any other way to produce energy. The remaining areas of concrete, food and transportation have clear paths to greeness it's now just a case of will they happen soon enough. Given that green electricity is the driving force for all of these then it's very likely all will be conquered soon enough. In a year technology goes nowhere but in a decade or two you look back and can't believe the progress. Anyone here that predicted the Iphone in 2006 other than Jobs? Fifty years is a long time in technology improvement.

Here's research saying just about the same thing.

https://theconversation.com/how-putins-war-and-small-islands...

Well then Bill, why did you decided to stick with x86 in IBM PC, which is clearly one of the most energy inefficient ISA nowadays? I mean the computational power inefficiencies due to the use of x86 over the past 40 years combined may have exceeded the total energy expense of industrial revolution with all those long running POS machine, E-billboards, announcement system and servers...

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