Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy 248
An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he's written an article for Quartz explaining why: "I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century's progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem." He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren't doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions.
"...those in poor countries will suffer the most." (Score:3)
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http://www.theguardian.com/env... [theguardian.com]
Does anyone remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
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That was before he was sufficiently rich that he could be noticeably philanthropic without effecting his quality of life.
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sort of like the rest of us.
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.
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Would this be of the nature: we will give you these drugs if you agree to enact a law that prevents you from cloning them and making more?
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That was when he was running a corporation in a competitive business world.
(OK, he kept it up for a bit longer than strictly necessary after Microsoft had "won", but that's another story. Plenty of CEOs do worse things than that.)
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He is still the largest shareholder in the 'Evil' company.
He still has the power to set right the source code of Windows, so as to completely remove any necessity of running any anti-virus software, just like on Linux PCs and Macs. Around 2 billion devices are said to be running Windows, so this single "Good Deed" alone will result in energy savings of atleast 2000 MWhrs per day.
But Bill will not do that. Instead he will criticise governments and pay lip service to poverty alleviation and the Press will lap
Two months ago. (Score:3)
Yeah, I think it was less than two months ago when he announced he was still not going to divest from fossil fuels. http://www.washingtontimes.com... [washingtontimes.com]
So maybe he's moving from evil to hypocrite?
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Divestment is a political posture. It's the kind of thing you print on leaflets to hand out to the Freshmen. Then they can march on the Administration building chanting 'Divest Now!'
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So on the one hand we have the anti-environmentalists screaming that we can't live on renewables alone, and on the other we have people criticising Gates for agreeing and not giving up on making the necessary evil of fossil fuels less evil.
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If he's taking money earned from fossil fuels and putting it toward renewable energy R&D, then that's a net gain. Besides, if they sold the stock, it would just create a buying opportunity for someone else; someone who wouldn't necessarily use any profits for altruistic efforts.
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"Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?"
It's the rules. Every rich person who is not arrogant has to be guilt-ridden.
OR...maybe he's a nerd who, having more money than most of the other nerds, can indulge his geekly interests in a more world-changing way than installing the newest release of Debian and vainly looking for something useful to run on it.
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Every rich person who is not arrogant has to be guilt-ridden.
I don't believe that for a second. I guess I've met non-arrogant rich people who are super lovely and moral people.
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" I guess I've met non-arrogant rich people who are super lovely and moral people."
A know a billionaire couple who are the nicest people you would ever want to meet. They own a closely held company whose name most of us in here would know. Fortunately my town doesn't play by "The Rules" I mentioned above.
Let the politically frantic stew in their own treasured assumptions.
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...can indulge his geekly interests in a more world-changing way than installing the newest release of Debian and vainly looking for something useful to run on it.
Wow. That's...a little too close to home. Please think of other people before saying such hurtful things.
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
No. He once ran a company that attempted to push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior, but that wasn't evil.
If you don't follow, remember that in American law, anything that is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. And the only way to know if something is forbidden is to :
1) Do it
2) Be challenged (a) by someone who can show harm
3) Have it upheld by the Supreme Court
Anything else means it's legal, or legal in some part of the country, or technically legal while violating the spirit of the law.
I remember when Bill Gates was evil, but I was ignorant then. I have since learned the law, the constitution, and relevant ancillary information.
Challenge for you: Sadeep Napreeka (based on memory, not intended to be an insult) runs the company now, and Windows 10 kinda seems like a privacy nightmare. Comparatively, billg seems tame.
So if someone should down mod you, it seems natural and fair. Up mod seems kinda shill reinforcing shill.
Or maybe someone does not understand America.
Nothing is illegal. Oh, yeah, that should be. Oh and that, and maybe that recent thing. Oh, and let's add that to the list.
America has allowed numerous terrible behaviours, until they demonstrated social harm.
Land of the free, and all that.
Evil has a spiritual connotation. Care to defend?
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He once ran a company that attempted to push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior
They attempted, and were convicted of being a monopoly. [wikipedia.org]
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Thanks for the improvement.
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Note that this is true for pretty much any legal system that is not arbitrary and capricious.
If the government can nail you for anything that is not explicitly allowed, then you have a lot bigger problems than a few billionaires.
As an example, did you know that there's not a law in the USA that explicitly states that you're allowed to own a home?
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You seem to be equating the law with morality. Or you're being really really sarcastic. I'm not sure which. You can be evil while staying within the letter of the law, and you can break the law daily while retaining your morality. The law, as you correctly identify, does not promote or enforce good morals, not does it prevent bad or evil acts, it merely forbids some things that cause proven (and typically financial) harm. So your post could be paraphrased as follows:
(1) I'm going to state that his acts
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Legal and illegal are not synonyms for good and evil.
In secular, free countries - quite deliberately so.
Legal and illegal exist to maintain social order and allow society to continue to function.
Good and evil are measurements of behavior based, primarily, on the consequences of that behavior.
There can be overlap between the two, but they are not the same.
While there can be a lot of philosophical debate about this (and how ideas of good and evil differ between different subgroups in society) there is a funda
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Careful there partner, ignorance of the law is no excuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. About the dumbest thing you can do is experiment with what is illegal and what is legal upon a trial and error basis. Best way to find out if something is forbidden, do some research or pay a lawyer to do it for you.
The Evil in relation to M$ was a relative evil based upon technological and social uses, so not to be confused with the serious evil of the military industrial complex or the corrupt pharmaceutical co
Re:Does anyone remember... (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
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Don't [techrights.org]
tell [latimes.com]
me [neosmart.net]
you [liberationnews.org]
believe [infowars.com]
the [infowars.com]
mass [infowars.com]
media [liveactionnews.org].
Yes because funding BP, Exxon, Monsanto etc [sourcewatch.org] is really honorable.
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I'm a total Linux die-hard, but... (Score:2)
I for one welcome Bill Gates, our new overlord. So far he seems better than the old overlord.
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Does anyone remember when Bill Gates was evil?
Well, if we are to believe the Gospel, we all have the chance to seek redemption, I guess. It isn't exactly a new phenomenon that ultra-rich people end up growing the conscience they should have learned from their parents in childhood - the same happened for Rockefeller and Carnegie, just mention two, and for a number of those that grew rich on exploiting their workers or slaves during the industrial revolution in England.
I suppose a major factor is also that when you grow older, you discover how futile it
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I'm not so sure. Her last big idea was Microsoft Bob after all...
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You must have never actually experienced Clippy whose full names were, I believe, Lucifer Satan Beelzebub Clippy o'Doom.
To be fair though. Clippy was not the main thing we saw him as evil for, in the grand scheme of things it's probably his least significant crime (which is a bit like saying Hannibal Lector's least brutal slaying but nevermind). What we saw him as evil for were the EULAs and the false marketing and the embrace-and-extinguish approach and trying to claim patent ownership over the kernel etc.
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Most global diseases involve energy and water (Score:3, Interesting)
Having consistent power to refrigerate vaccines and medicines, and sterilize needles is critical to curing diseases worldwide.
Moving to a more decentralized approach of clean power generation allows areas with major health problems from disease to leapfrog past other countries. And because they're not that useful in warfare, if done on a mass produced level and inexpensively, it makes it easy enough to maintain (just train people to fix them and install them, and set them on resupply and maintenance runs, with text messages for "out of supplies" or "power running low" or "diagnostic error code physical problem") using burst relay communications.
Same goes for water. The Gates Foundation has demonstrated they could mass produce clean water supplies from ... basically sewage (human wastes). They just need power supplies to run those. If you roll out solar worldwide in mass quantities you drop the cost to maintain and install low enough. And you can use such devices to charge phones that use low energy communications. Most diseases in poor nations involve lack of clean drinking water. If you can't get clean drinking water locally but you can get it free from one of these devices, you'll use that. Nobody wants their babies to die.
Doesn't matter if it won't charge your phone at night when it needs power to run the fridges, so long as you make it modular.
Very good idea.
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The problem is that "healthy" does not mean "peak human free of diseases", it just means "somebody who is not crippled".
In a really shit country, you get a disease, are crippled while having the disease, and die if its bad enough.
In a western country, you get a disease, are crippled if the disease is bad, and rarely die.
The rest of the population stays healthy, and small things like coughing, cold, and lower height isn't that relevant.
What is hilarious is also that the since quality metal weapons existed, t
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Iran-Iraq is a recent counter example. Care to play again ?
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You seem to misunderstand my example. Iran won against Iraq because of a large and disposable population, that it was willing to expend relentlessly against better equipped troops.
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My bad I meant to phrase that differently.
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efficiency... (Score:2)
didn't we just have an article posted on here where someone pointed out that the efficiency from end-to-end of charging a mobile phone is something like *16* percent? ... so why is bill gates investing in an area of least efficiency? it makes me wonder, y'know - when people get a lot of money (like google throwing money at project ara to help create and entrench existing monopoly positions around the UniPro standard), they often don't think "how can this problem be solved in a way that *doesn't* need a lot
Re:efficiency... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fairness to Bill Gates, he's talking about poor farmers in poor countries where there is no real electrical grid.
He's not talking about whiny punks in rich countries and their damned cell phones. Or rich assholes with private yachts and jets.
Oddly enough, people in poor and remote areas are the ones who would stand to benefit from solar power the most, and they aren't the people who would be looking at reducing their energy consumption ... they're the people who don't have lights and really basic things.
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I know why... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.
Carnegie was a horrible horrible human being, he tried to buy his soul back with all the "giving back".
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Re:I know why... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the United States, we like a good redemption story.
Or don't you believe in redemption?
It's not like that at all. (Score:2)
Just like most really rich guys. Trying like hell to clean his dark soul from what he did to get that rich.
The entrepreneur --- the empire builder --- has more fun than almost anyone and accomplishes more than most. He tends to exit the stage as exuberant and self-confident as when he entered it.
New York Architecture Images - The Chrysler Building [nyc-architecture.com]
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Storage (Score:3)
I hope he is investing in storage technology. Too many solar panels don't help at night.
Re:Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
It does if the power is being used for water purification, or to run simple productive machines like saws and drills. Most of the places that are in desperate poverty have very little productive capacity beyond the healthy person. the goal is a sustainable way to replicate industrial revolution.
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You've got it back to front. The benefit here is that poor people won't all die because of famines/droughts/floods induced by climate change. It is not so they can have new electric tools and solar powered houses. The rich countries are the ones who will have the new stuff, while the poor will get the 'benefit' of not dying due to our voracious consumption of the earth's resources.
Yes, the life of poor people in developing countries really does suck that much.
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They still have refrigerators, lights, heaters, fans, machines, etc. Also only a very small percentage of the population are farmers any more.
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Going to need it to compete with NSA (Score:3)
Collecting and exploiting everyone's private data from most of the worlds desktop users requires energy... lots of it. Ask the NSA about their troubles with the grid. Bill is just doing his portfolio a favor by working to make more sources of energy available.
--
"Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary."
Why? (Score:2)
(a) he can afford it, (b) it keeps his name in the news. In a good way, I mean.
On the surface... (Score:5, Interesting)
this seems like a noble thing to do. So why am I left with this feeling that he is still a crooked, slimy sleazeball? I've said this before but this is straight out of the Robber Baron playbook.
Act 1 - make as much money as humanly possible. If you have to screw people over or even break laws along the way, so be it.
Act 2 - turn into a philanthropist and give some of it back. Note: not ALL of it, SOME of it.
In the end, most people have short memories and will only remember the last act not the first.
I'm not saying that he hasn't done anything good with his money. He has. But he's still a crook.
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this seems like a noble thing to do. So why am I left with this feeling that he is still a crooked, slimy sleazeball?
Really I have no idea why people hate Bill Gates so much other than limited cerebral function. He was immensely successful in business, one of the most successful in history, and has used that success for the greater good of humanity. Yet you choose to overlook all that because he forced you to manually install another browser on your computer to bypass the default?
Churchill, Jefferson, Newton, pretty much every major character in history broke some eggs to make their omelettes. Gates is no different and
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"Churchill, Jefferson, Newton, pretty much every major character in history broke some eggs to make their omelettes. " - You are forgetting Carnegie, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Venderbilt and others. They broke a lot of eggs too.
Gates also broke laws. You may remember that he is a convicted monopolist. Just like Rockefeller. And, just like Rockefeller, he turned to philanthropy late in life so that people like you would forget his evil deeds earlier in life. This is the Robber Baron playbook that I referred to.
G
Because $1 billion isn't a lot of money to him? (Score:2)
What happened to Bill the Borg? (Score:2)
The poor and CO2... (Score:2)
Sadly -- and I do mean sadly -- the effect of CO2 on "the poor" is never accurately or fairly tallied.
If it were, the tally would have to begin with the massive amount of greenhouse research on the positive effects of CO_2 on plant growth, research that demonstrates (for example) that it is easily cost-beneficial to buy apparatus to maintain a CO2 concentration over 1000 ppm in actual greenhouses. By raising atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm, we have in fact raised crop yields worldwide by between 10 and
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If it were, the tally would have to begin with the massive amount of greenhouse research on the positive effects of CO_2 on plant growth,
Plant growth is almost never CO2 limited outside of the lab.
Anything that raises the cost of electricity and imposes barriers to its cost-effective implementation in the world's poorest countries has the direct and immediate effect of hurting the poorest people of the world far more than all of the "climate change" that has thus far been attributed to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
Even the Chinese are figuring out that the cheapest possible energy production results in living conditions that are worse than no energy production at all.
Smartest motherfucker in the room syndrome, eh?
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Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518... [fao.org]
To quote from its abstract:
The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some oth
Re:Fallacy of Climate Control (Score:5, Insightful)
So if he wants to put his money into that, it might make the world a better place. And if it ends up with cheaper energy for everybody, it will make the world a better place. The cheaper energy becomes, the better.
Re:Fallacy of Climate Control (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless you take the money you've made and do something that contradicts conservative dogma (climate change), at which point your previously unimpeachable opinions are all wrong and you are wasting (i.e. dumping) your fortune. Obviously you have had some sort of mental breakdown. You and your projects are then open to endless criticism. All that stuff about the freedom to spend your money any way you want goes right out the window (or Windows in this case).
Hypocritical much?
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Prevalent does not mean what you think it means.
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Earth is a system with nuclear energy inputs (Sun, internal decay) that in human time scales are effectively endless. Limited, but endless. That's all there is to it.
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People have been able to change the environment for ages (and the climate depends somewhat on the environment). Deforestation and overgrazing, for example. Done on a large enough scale such things will change the climate downwind. Vegetation affects the albedo and temperature and rate of evaporation and also particulates and volatile organic compounds -- global CO2 changes are not the only way to affect climate.
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Man has never had enough power to turn the weather "back" to reclaim the inland growing area of Egypt.
Man never used to be able to fly, or communicate across continents or take detailed photos of the surface of other worlds either yet here we are. And none of those feats were achieved by people who gave up trying.
Climate is complicated, but not impossible.
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One of the richest farmland valleys in the world gave great wealth to its country and did so for "eons."
Then a change in the weather caused rainfall to drop by 30% and eventually by something around 80% and the farmland wealth 'evaporated.'
This all occurred a couple thousand years or more before Christ, when the inland valley that was originally a terrific growing area suffered a natural change of world weather which dried it up. That was not caused by man-made activity. It can and will happen again. Man has never had enough power to turn the weather "back" to reclaim the inland growing area of Egypt.
Quoting you in full because you were modded "troll".
And reading Gates' piece, he exactly admits this. Wind and solar can't get us there, and the climate changes ANYWAY. So for Gates, the ACTUAL problem, which he says, is very simple: we all need cheap abundant energy.
And that's where environmentalism splits into the two threads: man is a scourge and we need to deindustrialise and stop growth, v. all human beings, wherever they are born, deserve health and prosperity.
When a natural disaster hits a poor coun
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Sorry if you are comprehension challenged and just dislike anything that might contradict your opinion.
Here are a few things that might help you in the future.
Anecdote : an account regarded as unreliable or hearsay
Speculation: ideas or guesses about something that is not known
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That would be verified historical evidence.
What you are citing as rebuttal is speculation.
"Speculation?" That's a highly disingenuous dismissal of the efforts of thousands of scientists who have devoted their careers to uncovering the truth.
Science is hard. Dismissing what scientists say is easy.
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Science is not a religion learn the difference.
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Science is not a religion learn the difference.
I assure you, I'm quite aware of the difference. More than you are, I suspect.
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I want to add if the rains never return to Calif, this will be very serious.
It seems unlikely that the rains will never return. The more serious threat of climate change over the longer term is that drought patterns may be exacerbated.
Those claiming that rains will not only find themselves discredited when the rains return (as they assuredly will), they will have provided more ammunition to those determined to stymie meaningful action on anthropogenic Global Warming. Don't do it!
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Temperatures have plummeted
SOURCE ?
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Please engage sarcasm detector, then read it again.
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"May choose"
Oh man the whole point of this is to force everyone to follow whether they need it or not.
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But, as recent history has shown, government politicians may choose to force the reset of us to follow [slashdot.org] his lead. And that should not be allowed.
Why not? If it turns out to be a good idea, then should the government ignore it at its own peril just out of principle?
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Because private generosity is supposed to decrease public expenditures, not enlarge them.
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Is that some kind of law or something?
*Why* is private generosity "supposed" to decrease public expenditures?
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O child of privilege and leisure, you really have not a blessed clue, have you?
The poor are the MOST affected by climate change. For example, they can't just turn on the A/C or hop in the SUV and drive up to the Poconos to cool off when it's too hot for comfort, like you can. And most likely do.