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Comment by Peckingjay | Hacker News Reader

After reading this article you're quoting I can't help but think you are either a troll or you just couldn't understand what the article was talking about. The article doesn't say that racism is the root cause of climate change, it merely draws a parallel between the behaviours of denial found in people who refuse to believe in climate change or that racism is present in our societies/institutions. In fact, you could probably have guessed that just from reading the title.

EDIT: This was relevant to article https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/what-denie... originally linked. (After 2 successive link changes it does feel like OP made his point and then tried to fish for an article justifying it)

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21083712 and marked it off-topic.

Huh?

"Addressing climate change could help us decrease racial inequality, if we seize the opportunity. If we don’t, racism will continue to exacerbate climate change, while climate change fuels racism."

He just editted his link. Not sure if he mistakenly listed the first article or not, anyways, this was the article he linked originally: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/what-denie...

Yes sorry about that.

That quote in no way says that racism is a “root cause” of climate change.

It should be obvious that the impacts of climate change impact different races differently, but also, there are actually pretty good arguments to be made that racism makes climate change worse (e.g. segregation of poor minorities leads them to do desperate things to survive...like burn down rainforest). The quote isn’t irrational.

" If we don’t, racism will continue to exacerbate climate change"

“exacerbate” does not mean “is a root cause”.

I interpret root cause to mean a causal variable that is not dependent on other examined causal variables. If racism can exacerbate something, it is playing a causal role. Since the racism does not depend on other mentioned variables, (racism is not a product of co2 emissions) it would then have to be a root cause given the context.

no matter how much you torture your logic to redefine “root cause” as “cause”, your interpretation is wrong.

> climate change impact different races differently

Not it doesn’t. The climate doesn’t care if your black or white. And assuming some countries are one uniform kind of people is so wrong on so many levels.

Facts disagree with your theories: non-white people disproportionately live in parts of the world that are prone to droughts, flooding, famine, etc.

My country was also, for many centuries (and before climate change), prone to droughts, flooding, and famine. It's not that its climate became better, it's that during the centuries we deviated entire rivers, built ten metres-high embankments around them, built dams and irrigation canals. We drained marshy areas to fight malaria and to allow for new cultivations, and we cultivate industrially, with machines and fertilizers. We also keep maps of the hydro-geological risk to either prevent people from settling in risky areas or to manage the risk of existing settlements. (We also have a problem with rare but catastrophic earthquakes, that are especially hard on towns and villages that are almost a thousand years old. We try to reinforce existing buildings and build quake-resistant ones when an earthquake happens.)

One of the problems I see with the current worldview is that many of these interventions are now so far away in time, and ongoing monitoring is so specialized, that most people simply forgot that they exist and ensure our current prosperity. But in fact we're simply profiting from the lessons of centuries of disasters and of careful engineering.

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