Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

The easiest way to reduce CO2 is to plant a forest, so look for companies that do this.

Query like this "Ltd. climate change site:co.uk". Ireland, Netherlands or Sweden may also work. Others don't have an English-friendly working environment afaik

Good luck on that but if you really want to do something, join an organization, protest, etc. We need political power more than we need software right now.

Worked at a startup that unfortunately went under, trying to reuse heat generated in datacenters. (saves on electricity spend on airco and saves on having to generate heat elsewhere)

Luckily some competitors still exist: https://www.cloudandheat.com/ https://www.qarnot.com/fr/home-fr/

Go outside and plant a tree. Preferably in a tropical area where it is less likely to burn during the summer.

Trees are the cheapest most efficient way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. No other solution comes even remotely close.

You can drive a Prius, become a vegan, and buy solar panels but a person who plants a single acre of trees will have offset an entire lifetime of greenhouse gas production and then some.

you can help make compilers and hits and languages and their core libraries more efficient. the average program uses around 100x more electricity than it needs to. as a bonus i will be much less annoyed by software even if jevons paradox results in no co2 reduction

A parent - and raise your child(ren) to live in an ecologically sensitive manner that you wish the rest of the world to be. (Am being honest, not being snarky)

I'd say from long experience of being ignored when trying to do this and similar stuff, the best payoff is to push it upstairs to those in power, the politicians, who doubtless have many other things to do, but whose job it basically is. Your job is to tackle stuff on an individual level, yourself and your family perhaps, but theirs is to deal with things on a societal level where there is much greater effectiveness.

If there's a higher payoff available than that, I don't know where it is.

Absolutely vital tip from extremely painful experience; your physical and more vitally mental health come first. You must not forget that as if you burn yourself out you're no good for anything.

Pick the political party in your country most interested in stopping climate change and go work for them. And vote.

I keep getting YouTube ads from a company called Ecosia[1] who describe themselves as a search engine that plants trees.

I don’t know anything else about them other than I think they are based in Europe. Might be worth a look.

[1] https://www.ecosia.org/

Can we cut the constant climate change topics? For the last three or four weeks I haven't been able to swing a dead cat without hitting somebody going into histrionics about the end being nigh because humans or cow farts are destroying the planet.

How about stop using automobiles and walk to places?

The key phrase to be looking for in terms of employment is 'Environmental NGO'. As well as this, think about incentive engineering: ways you can make it easy for people to change their lifestyle.

Any programming job where you write code that runs at a higher power efficiency than whoever else would've programmed it if you hadn't taken the job

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ may inspire you.

Slightly adjacent to your question, but I've thought it would be nice to have a Google Maps-like app that optimizes for fuel use instead of drive time or distance.

Are you looking only for other jobs in software engineering, or are you willing to enter a different field to accomplish this?

Software has the possibility to change behavior but it's probably not the biggest lever available for this particular problem.

In terms of software engineering alone, your best bet may just be to find an organization you support and work hard while under their employ. Even if you're not _directly_ affecting emissions etc., you're supporting those who do. As a bonus, passion for a cause can be very motivational. (Though keep in mind you may be discouraged if the organization feels dysfunctional or ineffective. Be ready to switch jobs if need be.)

As for finding those organizations, that's a different question and may be better asked without reference to software engineering so as to receive the widest spectrum of orgs.

There are so many startups in that space. Smart grid management, drones to support wind turbines maintenance, robots that clean solar panels (yes, that is a thing https://www.ecoppia.com/), water leakage alerts using smart valves, all the alternative meat wannabes, vertical farming? (questionable...), the list goes on and on. There are VC funds investing solely in these things. Good luck!

The web is not very green or very accessible. Every bloated web page requires a lot of electrons to be moved around.

Recently the web has evolved with CSS Grid and this means that you no longer need to have web pages made of 'div soup' with every 'div' using half a dozen non-semantic class attributes.

It is extremely rare for a web page to be 10% or higher in actual content, if you look at the actual document and don't even consider the images/scripts/stylesheets. Most of the web could be at the 33% mark if you strip the presentational markup away and just use HTML5 elements, styling them with CSS Grid. The benefits of writing this way are many, apart from being green, such a page is accessible because useful elements are used for the page, e.g. 'nav' instead of 'div', and easier to maintain, because the content is kept simple. There is also SEO benefit from having a quicker to download page that is a fraction of the size.

Now you may scoff at saving a few bytes from a few web pages but the savings add up, get one template right for a website that gets used by a few million people on a daily basis and you are suddenly saving gigabytes. People's phone batteries last longer, cell towers don't have to do as much work, server rooms can run cooler, it is a bigger win than people think.

Once upon a time we thought nothing of single use food containers or excess packaging, the humble 'div' with its framework class attributes double-wrapping every block of content on the page with a few 'span' elements thrown in for good measure is possibly more wasteful, at least you can reuse plastic bags, you can't reuse a 'div' that has been beamed across the airwaves from the far side of the globe.

There are laws coming along meaning that web pages have to be accessible. You can make them accessible in a lip service way or re-write them with maintainable, CSS-Grid styled HTML5 to deliver a first class accessible experience. In the EU there is a two year period for the public sector to get their act together on this.

Writing HTML without the div where you focus on document structure and use the right elements is very easy, as is using CSS Grid. But we are in an industry where the mindset is to work from a visual mockup and to then paint by numbers gormlessly using the dreadful div element that has no place in modern HTML and very much goes against the 'separation of concerns'.

The world needs someone to teach a new intake of web developers how to write actual HTML, leaving the build tools and hacks far behind, more of a focus on the written word rather than the overly complex tech.

We have had revolutions in web design, for instance 'responsive' was a thing. If we can have actual HTML instead of bloated presentational markup then there will be some old timers who won't get it, but this easier way should be well received. Right now though dev teams are very much geared up for over complicating projects and not even thinking to use just the HTML5 elements in a content first type of way. Hierarchies of teams are built around anachronistic 'agile' processes that are doomed to result in bloated div websites.

Unless there is nuclear war then we are not going back on the web, it is here to stay and be improved on. Be that improvement. Teach people how to write web pages the easy way, enable others to think differently and not be using tired Stack Overflow 'div' solutions that were okay a decade ago.

The maths of the CO2 saving is not easy to work out. But then it is. HTML is the language of the web and web pages are what we read. This page you are reading right now is HTML and not some JSON stringified thing. Coding the lean HTML5 way does get your HTML document size halved, plus the lights don't have to be on as long to write it in the first place.

You can do all of this stuff a lot easier than the stuff you have done thus far. I don't think your skill set is in 'pl...

I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions.

Very nascent, researching and blue-sky-ing, but I'm just putting it out there for anyone who might like to discuss this.

Get high as possible salary and donate as much as possible to https://www.rainforestcoalition.org or other nonprofit.

All politics is local. Imho the most promising stuff from tech startups is the e-scooter rental stuff. City councils are naturally conservative about big transit-oriented projects, but e-scooter rentals and public transit could work together to be a great system for making dents in climate change.

I would look to help a marketing team in an organization that promote reducing consumption, marketing is in my view the best shot we have to tackle environmental issues. Once living with a small house not heating too lunch and using public transport will be trendy, lots of people may change their way of life. Now where do you find them? I would start looking for activist artist.

There are, very broadly speaking, two strategies for tackling climate change:

1. Innovation (e.g. find new and better sources of energy) 2. Mitigation (e.g. reduce energy consumption)

For example the Tesla Solar Roof is an innovation strategy whereas planting trees is a mitigation strategy.

Although we really need a combination of both most companies tend to focus on a single approach, so I'd suggest thinking about which type of approach you'd like to work on.