Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?
I have been getting very conscious of climate change and human impact on the earth and would like to more actively contribute. I am quite a good senior programmer working in finance. Im having enough of devoting my life to things that seems so meaningless in comparaison with the real problems of humanity. Yet i see little I can do. Any one of you made the switch? Where did you find the job. Was it remote? Is it really making an impact?
287 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadA lot of the reason we know anything about climate is to do with government - NOAA, NASA Earth Science, EPA.
-Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Very fulfilling for me so far - strongly recommended.
I have no affiliation, other than previously working with the founders at Stripe (they are some of the most impressive people I've met in my life).
We're working on carbon accounting and industrial decarbonization here at Gravity (https://gravityclimate.com). Your background could make for a strong fit.
Email in profile.
Not OP but would like to get in touch as well.
Check your personal email.
I used that as a basis to look for roles that - I imagined - actually would help make a dent. In the end, I took a job in the smart electric grid space, writing code to help the EU grid take on more cheap renewable generators at Tibber.
There’s a lot of software in many of these spaces! Decarbonising the grid, electrifying transport, building heat and industry, reducing agricultural emissions and so on.
There’s a lot of pairing people with general “here’s how you ship software” background and people with “here’s how the grid works” experience, doing skills transfer.
Part of the effort here ends up being training a whole cadre of people on how the grid works.
My email is in my profile if you want help trying to find gigs in US or EU in this space.
If you invest in smart grid assist to balance wind, solar, battery, pumped hydro and can mitigate coal and gas load NOW then, as a new entrant, you have the choice to do that, or to invest in the longer term problem. If you want to invest in longterm Nuclear is no worse or better than any other choice. If you can reduce the cost of capital or increase productive efficiency now of the non-nuclear low carbon energy and grid, over the 10 year window you may have more effect.
There is nothing a new entrant engineer can do, to speed up nuclear. Its in regulatory and lawsuit hell. The engineer can help PV/Wind/Battery right now.
It's a choice, and goes to net present value, shape of the curve moving load, linear optimisation of choices...
I opposed Torness (UK) in the 70s. I now would not protest an AGR, I think we need more nuclear not less. But, the time has passed where its economically viable in the necessary time window, for Australian power needs. LCOE, and time to construct has moved to wind, wave, solar and storage.
Some people can't get over this, and are stuck on energy density and scale.
Molten salt reactors, for instance, offer a massive potential reduction in size and complexity (they eliminate a lot of the risks of water-cooled designs, so shouldn't need the same kind of massive containment structure to contain e.g. large volumes of highly radioactive steam in the event of a failure).
If next-gen fission research got even 10% of the resources that are currently spent on fusion, I think we would see a lot of progress towards improving the economics.
If you look at the payback times on Battery, smarter networks, pumped hydro, windmill improvements, solar improvements, even now they are at their margins for 80/20 its probably shorter path to more beneficient outcome, but at a lower energy density.
The improvement in battery storage, and solar cell efficiency/cost is a good example. Over the same 5/10/15 year lifetime the drop has been continuous and at times above linear. We're now beyond the 2x improvement space, but the value of a 0.05% improvement in manufacturing for the volumes being made now, is really significant.
Nuclear, it would be very hard to project better than linear improvement in LCOE
I stress, I think we should do it. Its like the Manhatten project: Leslie Groves was asked to pick between thermal diffusion and gaseous centrifuge, and said "do both" -He was right: it turned out doing both improved feedstock quality going into the calutrons AND speed it up overall. Sometimes, its not pick A or B, its pick doing A and B and C
People are generally good. If you want them to do something that is both bad and expensive, like continue subsidizing fossil fuels, then you need to convince them that they are doing something good, or at the very least the other side are doing something bad.
Nuclear neatly fills this hole of being sonething that is better than fossil fuels and yet lets you demonize people trying to fix the fossil fuel problem as innumerate, unsophisticated, dreamers etc.
To what degree the people who fall for this scam are culpable is hard to establish. They are also victims of the most expensive propaganda campaign in history.
Ironically, they also believe that people supporting renewables are just propaganda victims. They're generally less charitable about it though, feeling that anyone who is confused by corporate propaganda is the problem, rather than the harmful corporate propaganda itself.
It's easy to manipulate people who demand perfection because the alternative to perfection is low-energy lazy cynicism. I don't know how prevalent this manipulation is, though.
(And yes, I see the irony in my comment.)
This doesn't make any sense. The suggestion is to make more money and donate ~all of it instead of consuming it. You can't look at a plan to make more income and infer that the higher income means more consumption _when the entire point of the plan explicitly avoids consuming the excess income_.
If you can find an org that can convert dollars to lives saved (by climate advocacy eg climate central or direct action eg terraformation) and commit to donating a certain percentage of your paycheck to them it may make your job feel more meaningful. Doesn’t work for me but works for sum.
But yes, we don't have a good system for quantifying those differences in individual effectiveness per career path across society.
And there are force multipliers. Education is one of them. Science/R&D is another.
Think of it another way. You can pay 3x more fancy vegan food that might be like 150% better for the climate, or use that money to plant trees directly and save more carbon overall.
Efficiency and magnitude matters. It's all CO2E in the end, but not every dollar spent gets you the same amount.
Participating in finance is itself a force multiplier for others to do the same, and with such an energy-hungry practice as finance, that is going to cause worse outcomes. We can't just buy our way out of the problem, because on the whole, the economic activity you generate enables others to help cause worse outcomes (even per-capita, it's a lot of people).
I chatted with the Wren folks: https://www.wren.co/
I did an internship with Natural Capitalism Solutions: https://natcapsolutions.org/
I also co-founded a local food startup: https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/
I have also gotten some permaculture certificates.
Be prepared to take a lower salary. This was the biggest stumbling block for me.
An alternative I'm sure you've thought of is to donate some of your finance salary to climate non-profits or buy things that are climate conscious (including from a startup doing this).
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/#top
https://workonclimate.org/
That said, while I feel similarly to you OP, I am also highly skeptical of the tech industry as an avenue for bringing about the necessary change. We don't need new tech, the problem is almost entirely one of societal organisation and changing the economic incentives. One particularly egregious example of a tech failure is the case of the carbon offset company that actually succeeded in starting wildfires and destroying a lot of forest instead, and there are plenty more you can find.
I think, while it might not feel meaningful in the same way, your effort is better spent financially supporting and contributing to climate activism that can change the perspective and politics in your community.
I personally care a lot about climate change, so this work is quite a bit more satisfying than optimizing ad spend or A/B testing UI to improve "impression" metrics or similar.
There are places to find work where your time and energy help mitigate climate change (or other big problems), without the work directly focusing on that problem.
https://www.hydrosat.com
Here's another one that's focused on carbon and methane:
https://carbonmapper.org/
I know several of their board members and leadership and they are also very skilled.
Climate tech VC newsletter is an awesome source of the state of tech climate work, and provides links to additional resources.
Real impact? I don't know as I'm obviously biased as my salary depends on that. Reducing concrete footprint (the most used construction material and with gigantic carbon footprint) sounds a good bet. Reducing building energy consumption is also a good bet. Other things that are interesting is working in lab meat (not sure it's a place for devs yet).
I'm happy with the switch and I don't see myself doing anything else with my working time until we solve this as species.
Where do you find them. YC has a climate startups (), LowerCarbonCapital has a jobs board, and you can always ctrl-f "climate" in the whoishiring thread. Tip, search for green VCs and check their portfolio one by one.
If you want to work for a weather monitoring satellite company, there is Spire[1] (also RocketLab,SpaceX who is hiring)
[1] https://spire.com/
[2] https://www.rocketlabusa.com/careers/positions/
Illegal deforestation? If a fleet of satellites is providing daily updates across the amazon, it is far more easily caught, rather than having it show up 2 weeks later after they have already cut out a chunk and left
It's bleak. Launching things into space is unsustainable and should be minimized.
> Current rocket launches have a negligible effect on total carbon emissions — Everyday Astronaut found they accounted for 0.0000059 percent of global carbon emissions in 2018, while the airline industry produced 2.4 percent the same year.
> But the long-term effect is less clear, especially as companies like SpaceX move from hosting 26 launches in a year to 1,000 launches per rocket in a year.
> “I think we can guess that rockets won't be a huge impact on the environment, and they probably won't stand out as a sole source of new problems,” Darin Toohey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, tells Inverse. “But they will add to the growing list of activities that have negative impacts on the environment.”
Work in property insurance/reinsurance. I spent the last 16 years in that world and contemplated climate change nearly the entire time. Insurance not seen as all that sexy, but I think it's one area where climate matters in a very practical way.
Happy to discuss with you if interested.