Ask HN: I'm just a programmer worried about climate change, how can I help?
Since I was a teenager I've been worried about climate change, this led me to reduce my CO2 emissions, consumerism, and waste as much as possible; I do the best I can to not use my car, plastic bags, straws or bottles, re-use water and many other actions that I think can help.
However, every couple months I still read a new article stating that we are even closer than we thought to the point of no-return, even a few say we are already past it.
As a father I'm really worried about my children's future, and cannot avoid feeling overwhelmed by the fact that even if I do my best I just cannot fight against huge corporations that does not want to do the best they can to help climate change.
A couple days ago I read this http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ in HN's frontpage and got amazed about such creative and smart solutions, and cannot stop wondering what can I do to proactively help any of those, or any other idea, become true and help to repair the damage.
Sadly I'm just a Software Engineer and I feel that I cannot help as, for example, a Genetic Engineer to make those ideas become true. I'm not a genius, nor a millionaire philanthropist, neither a clever startup founder.
Is there anything I, a normal person, can do to actually help?
Thank you for reading me.
104 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadThank you for the suggestion.
Thank you for sharing it, I'm reading it already.
Thanks.
cryptocurrencies are sucking down electricity at a rate larger than many nations, and all for literally doing NOTHING useful...
(majorly non eco activity...)
I got interested a lot about BTC at the beginning, but then after reading reports about electricity consumption decided to not be part of that.
I think the downside doesn't come from the blockchain technology as-is, but the mining part of cryptocurrency.
Personal action (such as reducing your own CO2 emissions) is good but not enough. Collective action to put pressure on governments to regulate CO2 emissions is what's needed.
We already have the tech to reduce emissions to safe levels. What we lack is the political will to use it.
Take the opportunities and make the necessary changes to your own life as they present themselves - which you appear to be doing already, ie. leading by example.
Something I found effective, which is obvious in hindsight and I only found out by accident, is quantifying the financial benefits - because this resonates with people. I purchased solar panels a few years back, and mentioning my power bills in comparison to those without solar panels does draw attention.
I just wanted to be able to quantify it to myself, and ended up documenting on a website so I could point interested parties to it: http://electricity.atcf.com.au/economics/ (hasn't been updated in a couple of years...)
This is a single example, and quantifying it took planning and effort that doesn't translate to other things like not using plastic bags or straws. Overall, leading by example is the first step, and then making that example publicly available is a second step that's likely easily accessible to an HN'r.
I think if you're able to quanitfy your savings from minimising car usage, THAT would provide interesting financials that would attract attention.
Write an instructional and experiential blog, mention it to your friends and family, let the influence expand at its own pace, maybe linking to it in related HN comments ;)
1. Basic principles: Do a bit of philosophy. Figure out some things that would be more sustainable, more accessable, more energy efficient. Software has a sizable impact on many processes, though public discussion tends to discount it. Consider how to align your career against those goals. Test your goals for coherence: You want to get them all aligned together so that you're constantly propelled in a good direction.
2. Plan a specific design: You might not be able to make the system you envision, but you can probably find some kind of leverage on the problem, whether it's collecting information, creating a prototype, contributing to an existing project, or marketing a better solution.
3. Create a feedback loop: Your first attempt is not likely to solve climate change. So your purpose in trying something is not to immediately solve it, but to find feedback that will guide you or others towards that goal. For example, if you think you have a technical solution that will reduce energy usage, you need to find a benchmark that you can use to measure and improve that solution. Ideally you develop a feedback mechanism like a workout log, where you can easily see your progression in training volume and intensity.
Historically, many breakthroughs result from this kind of effort distributed across many people, attacking different angles of a problem. A lot of the individual aspects like "recycle your waste" are effective when there's broad enforcement measures that make it the optimal or only option - it was less than a hundred years ago that taking your trash to the backyard incinerator was a common practice in all industrialized cities, and less than two hundred that dumping it out the window and onto the street was acceptable. We have plenty of things to improve still!
A major cause of deforestation is to grow corn / soybeans to feed to livestock. The forests, natural carbon sinks, are lost, and the livestock increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere. It takes 9 times the amount of land to make beef vs. growing plants. It uses a lot more freshwater to grow the food, and much more to give to the animals.
We're already doing that. Not gonna lie, we love meat, but understand it isn't the best choice for the planet, so far we've reduced our meat consumption about 50%.
If you have children, it is also an excellent opportunity to teach them that meat doesn't come from the store, and to help them gain some respect for all the work that goes into getting food on the table.
Also, what would you say is the difference between massive industrial plantations intended to feed livestock vs those intended to feed humans with a less than ideal diet?
As for the plantations: if we all cut out livestock from our diets, there'd be 9x less of them.
And what does "ideal" mean?
I believe that "ideal" is nowhere near a diet requiring supplementation and leading to metabolic and cardiovascular disease.
^: I see this "fact" touted around quite a lot. Could I get a source? Here you can actually see a figure of 67% of global crop yield by weight used to feed humans: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/0340...
0.58 cows per hectare - http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/62085
274 kg meat on a cow - https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/junk/cow.html
10470 kJ of food energy per kilo of beef - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef
1000 days to rear a cow - https://www.withouthotair.com/c13/page_77.shtml
Therefore 0.58 * 274 * 10470 / 1000 = 607 kJ of cow, per day, per hectare.
In comparison, wheat yields 3120 kg per hectare per year - https://www.statista.com/statistics/237705/global-wheat-prod...
1368 kJ per kg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
Therefore 3120 * 1368 / 356 = 11989 kJ of wheat, per day, per hectare.
So, by my calculations, you need 19.75x more land to grow a kJ of beef than a kJ of wheat.
That said, free range solves some of the problems with factory farming but it is not the solution to climate change caused by meat production and consumption.
Either way, even if for health reasons you’re not going to become entirely vegetarian, it is possible for most to reduce their meat consumption. A quarter to half a pound of meat daily (or worse, at every meal) is a weird American expectation that’s totally unnecessary.
Absolutely. I work in cleantech, and you should, too! Solar and wind are economical, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up. That means tons and tons of problem solving, which means great engineering jobs!
If you think about it, the switch to renewables means we need to deal with situations where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, yet still keep the lights on. That means you have to build in a ton of storage and load control, which means good communication and analysis, which means software! Something like half of the impact of the energy transition will be done through software optimizing the deployment and operation of clean energy assets.
Anyway, please check out my previous comments on recommendations when looking for climate impact work. Overall, the biggest impact per unit time spent is working as a regulator[1]. Next is working at a cleantech company[2].
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/8l5yhw/whats_the_be...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127154
Economical right. But can it replace nuclear power plants ? Because we need a LOT of power (datacenter, electric cars ?).
I follow most, if not every, advise about lifestyle, but I also belive that is not enough.
My current work consist in helping a company get more money, and while there's nothing wrong with that I would certainly preffer to work on something that along making profit helps fight climate change.
Will read both links given, thank you.
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?department=1
I definitely think that we can't do anything as developers (maybe optimizing process to consume less, but that's not obvious). And here is why :
- we used computers/servers/hard disks/etc that are made of rare-earth metals (which required a lot of energy to be extracted and are a environmental disaster (first link in google : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...). - big datacenters, in which our compagnies are involved into, require a fabulous amount of energy to work (cooling système, electricity, etc), proably more that average cities.
However, what you (and we) could do as citizen could be : - buy from local/bio producers - do not buy shitty products coming directly from china that will last 1 week and then will be broken for no reason. - think twice before buying new product (not only electronic ones). do I need this new smartphone (which, by the way, his cost is half a salary or a all salary for most of the people ?) can I repear it ? - do not buy big companies' products (coke,nutella,etc). They are destroying environement (mexican vilages have less and less water because of coca-cola, nutala are heavily using palm oil...) Those are only 2 examples.
Easy to write, not to do ...
> Sadly I'm just a Software Engineer and I feel that I cannot help as, for example, a Genetic Engineer to make those ideas become true. I'm not a genius, nor a millionaire philanthropist, neither a clever startup founder.
Most of us are in the same case. I'm actually reading Gunter Pauli's books regarding the "Blue Economy". -> https://www.theblueeconomy.org/ There are plenty of "simple" ideas that might be "easy" to implements in our life as side-projects.
Sadly, I'd say that a lot of current research tools are pretty shoddy when it comes to implementation. Not that they give incorrect results, more-so that there is no way to really interop systems with any ease. No standards, only a small culture of open source etc etc. Having a software engineer on speed dial to consult with when designing and implementing new frontier research tools would be of immense help in my opinion.
At the moment I live in México / USA.
I would love to provide feedback to help standarize and design protocols.
source: a climatologist friend.
But it's something that I will research for sure.
I also wanted to say that changing individual behavior isn't going to fix it by much. The fuel I don't burn, others will burn it instead.
The only way to fix this is 1) technology to make C02 emissions less profitable than green tech and 2) policy.
As a technologist, I try to focus on 1).