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Comment by sandspar | Hacker News Reader

Lol. If Las Vegas city planners can't single handedly solve climate change then they shouldn't beautify their tourist district.

You seem to dislike the article's framing, which is fine, but then you start on a crusade.

It's ok to plant trees so that hot people will feel slightly less hot. It doesn't need to fix every problem, just the small problem that there's too little shade in their tourist district.

The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs. It's just so annoying to see this smugness from online commenters. "Their solution isn't Pure enough [therefore I'm smarter/purer than them]."

Maybe the Las Vegas city planners have good reasons for doing what they did. I mean that's possible right? Could it even be possible that there's more to this story than you understand?

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> The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs.

Wrong. The unstated premise of my post is that I'm sick of articles pointing out "solutions" to the climate change problem which contributes to people believing that recycling and planting trees in their yard of their big house will help. This has to do with the person who wrote the title, not the city planners. The city planners didn't claim it was a solution. I'm not commenting on the city planners at all –– and I understand the situation perfectly.

This framing of climate change (as a problem which can meaningfully be addressed by private individuals changing their habits) must be loved by people who stand to benefit from climate change.

One night in a garage with a car with a running engine and you’re dead. Is it really that hard to imagine what happens if you have millions and millions of humans, cars, factories and other poluting items for many years? The atmosphere is not that big, that’s actually one of the main observations that astronauts have who have been to space. And if it is humans that have changed the climate by their behavior, it is also in our power to change it differently.

Sure, but the GP is referring to the tactic wherein orgs making money hand over fist from polluting substances or industries like to frame it as an individual problem to solve, not a massively systemic problem that'll require conscious collective action to resolve.

E.g., BP used to advertise in my country with ways you could reduce your carbon footprint.

You know, have shorter showers, recycle, etc.

BP is a company profiting massively from fossil fuels,and for funsies, on whose behalf the British government asked the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, and install the exiled Shah, who was much more business friendly.

So they pay clever people to try to refrain climate change as "if only you did some things, it'd go away, it's your fault, all of you."

Pay no attention to the corporation behind the curtain.

Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say anything about a tourist district. If anything, it's focused on the neighborhoods that are not in the tourist district.

That said, we need to start qualifying the phrases we use to describe climate change issues. This one (if it works) is a "climate change adaptation solution".

You’re right—based on everything I’ve heard about the development of Las Vegas by mobsters in the 1950s, it sounds like they started with a very intentional multi-decade plan focused on ecological impact and sustainability.

Not just beautification.

If people walked more because the route was actually pleasant and cooler with shade, that's less automobile miles, perhaps lower AC costs, and likely less healthcare costs in the long term. So even a relatively small number of trees in the context of "climate change" could have an oversized indirect impact.

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