HN Explorer

Ask HN: What can I do professionally to combat climate change?

13 points by jlevers ↗ HN
I've seen a lot of recommendations for what I can do in my personal life to help with climate change, but I've also seen that lot of smart people think that my lifestyle contributions are a drop in the bucket. It seems to me (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that I could have a much larger impact by focusing my software development skills/career on combating climate change.

That being said, I'm looking for resources to help me decide what direction to take professionally in order to work on projects that a) have a larger impact on climate change than personal lifestyle changes, and b) are interesting problems technically.

Some of the good resources I've found include Bret Victor's "What can a technologist do about climate change?" [1], and Steve Easterbrook's "Climate Change: A Grand Software Challenge" paper [2], both of which are great resources. I'm interested to hear if any HN'ers know of other great resources in this domain, or specific companies/organizations with which I could work on this extremely important problem.

[1] http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ [2] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/papers/2010/Easterbrook-FSE2010-wkshp.pdf

5 comments

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tmaly
I would say make training videos or do comparisons of products like reusable drinking bottles etc.

Educating people on what they can do is probably the single most effective way to leverage. YouTube and other video platforms are becoming the dominate way to consume content. So figure how to educate on those platforms.

antocv
Lets make such a resource together, a forum or list of things to do, and invent/work on?
tylerpachal
A resource for finding jobs for "green" companies would be great. At least here in Canada, my searches that intersect "software" with "green"/"renewable"/"wind"/etc yield next to nothing.
jryan49
Convincing everyone its a real problem and we must deal with it now is the first step. We need to tackle this problem as a society, not as individuals.