Ask HN: What can I do to actively fight climate change?

Stop eating meat and make it easy for people to find out why and how.

don't procreate. stop eating meat. vote.

Depends on the timeline. Long term unsexy answer is don’t have kids. Compounding matters.

Probably coding a website to make it easy to lobby for nuclear reactors in the US.

Ironically enough, even though Chinese is the biggest contributor of greenhouse gases right now, they're likely going to be the least in a few decades, considering how much engineering they're putting into nuclear reactor research and experimentation.

1. Vote for representatives who believe in climate change or run for office yourself.

2. Have less kids or no kids.

3. Drive an EV or don't own a car at all (if possible).

4. Avoid air travel.

5. Eat less meat or no meat.

6. Work for companies who are growing rapidly in the EV, renewable energy/energy storage, carbon sequestration, and lab grown ag space. Push out fossil fuel usage for electricity and transportation.

(in that order)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

You'll probably make the biggest impact by working at a hedge fund and use your excess disposable income to lobby for change

Stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy. No ocean cruises. Limit flying.

Look up "effective altruism" and find some recommended charities to donate to.

Ignore the crunchy comments saying don't eat meat, don't have kids, and don't drive. You have no impact as a consumer or influencer.

What you can do is:

* a) find someone working on climate change, and help write software for them part-time as a volunteer

* b) brainstorm an idea for a site/app, and build it yourself (and of course post it to HN)

* c) quit your job, join an organization focused on climate change, and do some work

* d) start researching more about climate change until you can make a better choice about a or b or c

If you can't commit a big chunk of time to it, then research good orgs focused on climate change, and donate money to them (or angel invest in them). That's the next best thing you can do.

Create The Matrix(1999). As a SWE it is your best bet. Everything from eating to travel can all be done from within cyberspace.

Edit: This guy eats meat without any greenhouse emissions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO-LFVHpA4s

Activists are long on ideas but short on technical know-how. Someone like you, willing to volunteer your skills even part-time, would be a God send.

I would suggest focusing on work that motivates and scales, just as people do in the for-profit sector. Activism that puts political and economic pressure on the large corporations who are the worst polluters provide the biggest bang for the buck. As just one example, there is a movement to divest from fossil fuel companies. Better software might help activists reach more people and mobilize them to pressure the boards of the universities they work for, etc.

Another issue we currently have in the country is that corporate interests collect huge amounts of data to sway elections, while activists without those same deep pockets are outmatched and outgunned. So any software that helps support voter turnout, voter equity, etc., would also indirectly help address climate change and other injustices.

Go nuckelar, and carbon extraction

Stop eating meat.

To those who suggest "don't have kids": if everyone who cares about saving the planet followed your advice, what would the voting population look like a couple decades from now? I say instead, have children and raise them to be the kind of ethical, courageous, well-educated leaders our future so desperately needs.

Tito can’t be on HN 24/7, I suppose.

Join Airminers! Carbon capture is really the only solution at this point. https://airminers.org/

Climate change can't be fought on a personal level. That's just propaganda to shift responsibility onto the individual consumer and there are plenty of bleeding hearts out there that eat it up and conjure up guilt for something out of their control on a macro level

Working at Tesla, or another car company working on EVs, is one of the most direct ways to immediately have a big positive impact.

But working for "the next Tesla" would be the most potential positive impact, given that Tesla has already achieved its goal of forcing the car industry towards EVs.

You could make a list of the most harmful industries and work at a company trying to force them into change, like Tesla is doing with the auto industry.

Donate highly effective charities https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/13/21132013/climat...

I don't think my skills are super applicable to working on climate change directly, so instead I work for big tech and donate to charities from this list. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climat...

If you're not totally set on doing direct work for climate change, you could consider a similar strategy. In my case, I think it's probably more impactful than I could be if I tried to pivot into a climate-related career.

The comments here seem to think that children raised by what appears to be an intelligent, service-minded individual will not be a net asset in addressing the problems the future holds. I disagree.

The main issue now is how little time we have left. We're already past the tipping point, and there's about a 30-50 year horizon before it's too late to do anything at all.

This means that the following are going to take too long:

- "Doing your part", i.e. the regular "don't eat meat", "consume environmentally friendly things", and all those things that will only work over a horizon of 100+ years.

- Accumulating a ton of wealth and then using it to lobby. This would have worked 50 years ago but we need people to use this kind of big money NOW.

- Helping activists set up their websites and other tech things. We're past the point where activism alone will save us.

Our world has just started runaway heating, and Arctic methane is now being released, which is 100x worse than carbon. The ONLY thing that can save us at this point is a hail Mary shot of sequestration of greenhouse gases and at the same time, active cooling of the planet. Build this kind of tech, or join others building it. There are a few companies coming out that do this kind of thing. We need breathing room above all else, because even with tech 50 years is very little time.

Edit: Aaaand now the downvotes. I don't know why I even bother contributing here.

I enjoyed this episode of "Ologies" talking to an artist, Andy Hall [0] working on what he calls the "The Drawdown Design Project" - creating inspirational posters and raising money to go towards the rainforest coalition.

Basically he had the same question, talks about the themes in the posters, empower - engage - cultivate - electrify. When asked what the average person can do, his answer was basically 'donate money to elect democrats' and honestly I agree. You can spend thousands of dollars or thousands of hours of volunteering, but its the politicians that are deciding how to spend trillions. Outside of that, I can recommend the book "Climate - a new story" by Charles Eisenstein, it argues against focusing on a single metric of CO2 ppm (and includes an aside on the war-analogy we default to when we decide to fight something ;). Basically it suggests we focus more on creating a healthy biosphere, explains the connections between weather, chemistry, and life. It's got me convinced that planting trees is the right approach, but not just to sequester carbon, but to increase the amount and variety of life on earth.

[0] https://www.alieward.com/ologies/drawdowndesignproject

Biggest problem about climate change is political correctness. We're too afraid to talk about the real problems and solutions because of "votes". Instead, we focus on small wins without any real impacts because it's "safe" and make people happy, like recycling.

Real problem and solutions:

  - energy -> Need hydro or nuclear. Everything else is just marketing bullshit. Windmills aren't reliable, you still need a way to store the energy and have a backup. If you factor in the cost of that backup and other solutions, you soon realize that hydro (or nuclear if hydro isn't possible) is way more cost efficient.

  - transportation -> Living in a suburb should have a penalty cost. Just compare the environmental impact between an apartment in a city and a mansion in a suburb with 5 cars. One is killing the planet much faster, there should be a penalty for it. I'm not saying forbid living in a suburb, I'm saying there should be an additional cost to living in a suburb because of the environmental impact.

  - greenhouse gases -> penalty cost in proportion to the damage caused (for instance, buying meat from livestock should be WAY more expensive.)

I'm not a climate change expert, but I do know that people react to incentive. And right now, there's no penalty to killing the planet so we can't blame people for making the decisions they're making. And policy makers can't set real policies because of fear (rightfully so) of not being elected.

It seems like we'll need to wait until the Earth is almost doomed before implementing these policies, but then it might be too late. Maybe another way is to have a "bad guy climate change" that all political party would need to take into account as part of their mandate, so the votes would be about who can best solve these issues rather than whether they should be tackled.

As long as you need a market-rate salary, go work for a company that is carbon-negative if you can (e.g. carbon capture or clean energy). One that is vocally pro-enviroment and carbon-neutral would also be an accomplishment.

If you need less money, work for a nonprofit focused on environmental issues or research. Working for a politician's campaign might be a good way to apply tech, marketing, or management skills.

Don't volunteer. The vast majority of the value is for the volunteer, not for the nonprofit.

When you're a (very) part-time volunteer, you'll never get deep enough into their problems that your contributions will outweigh the cost to manage/train you.

It's better to advance your own career and donate money to full-time people who are able to devote all of their work time to the issue.

(Source: ran a nonprofit for a few years that sourced skilled volunteers for other orgs)