Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CptFribble | Hacker News Reader

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"Middle-class-ness" in this context shouldn't be the primary goal, because it's only a proxy for "have enough time and space to care." I assure you, poor people care about the environment, but we've structured our society to prevent the working poor from having enough free time and energy to advocate for things like the environment. Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts.

Instead of just being like "lets burn more carbon to generate wealth first," we should skip the middle steps and go directly to giving people of all classes, especially the working poor that make up the majority of the human race, a voice and access to voting rights. Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.

Respectfully, saying that you have to be rich enough to have time to care is missing the forest for the trees.

One of the informal definitions of "middle class" that I've heard is "people who have enough wealth and power that they don't have to constantly think about survival, but not enough to have to worry about being a target in the political game of thrones".

The original middle class meant people who can afford to participate in public life, but aren't aristocracy. Ben Franklin is the archetype.

> Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.

What are you basing your belief on? Are you saying that people who have never had the time or means to get any sort of education or ponder over such subjects will still understand why society should care about the environment (and many other things, like technology advancement, health, research, military etc)?

I don't believe that's the case and I just can't see how you might have arrived at such conclusion (which to me amounts to: you don't need any sort of education to arrive at these conclusions).

In practice, I see a lot of people in developing countries who live in a democracy and hence, already have a voice just by being able to vote, tend to vote for candidates who have populist agendas which almost never include green energy (when that will cost the population) and forrest preservation (instead of jobs and more agricultural/logging output) or anything not directly related to their immediate wellbeing (sometimes, against even that).

Why do you claim that poor people have no education?

The OP said "I assure you, poor people care about the environment", but whether you believe that or not, the point was this: "Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts."

Poor people clearly care about affordable housing. They have to care. You don't need a fancy education for that. But the ability to express that caring in a way that affects politicians and the political system takes a lot more time, effort, and especially money.

Who finances political campaigns, the tenants or the landlords? That pretty much explains the end results. How much money do environmental groups have available to spend vs. industry groups? Our politics is pay-to-play.

> Why do you claim that poor people have no education?

Poor countries almost universally have a much lower rate of education than richer countries. That's not just a coincidence, of course... when you have an educated population, you tend to get out of poverty pretty quickly unless you have something very stronly keeping you back (fundamentalist religion for example). See Singapore and South Korea which are highly advanced societies today, but not long ago were pretty poor.

I am talking about poor, really poor, people. The kind of people who cannot afford caring about education at all. All they have time for is chase food. You may not believe it, but people like that are the majority in much of the developing world.

Well, the United States is one of the largest polluters in the world, if not the largest, so a large part of the solution to the problem has to come from within. And the United States has over the decades been a major barrier to reaching global environmental treaties.

The richer countries are polluting a lot more than the poorer countries. The latter aren't really the biggest problem (yet). So at least in my mind, I was framing this in terms of social classes within richer countries such as the US.

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