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Ask HN: Can software engineering help combat climate change?

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Re: Ask HN: Can software engineering help combat climate change?

#21
post #16

No. It's lipstick on a pig, it's a way of feeling important while making no difference. The way you combat climate change is by reducing carbon dioxide output and increasing biomass creation and therefore uptake and sinking. You can't write code that does that. Adding complexity to everything is what software developers do best, only the most skilled ones manage to reduce complexity, and adding complexity to this sit…

Well you could be efficient with your code so it doesn't waste CPU cycles, since CPU cycles == Energy, and if your algorithms use less energy, in all likelihood you'll emit less CO2. Specially if they're widely deployed.

Well we gave developers that job and they failed miserably. We have orders of magnitude more compute and orders of magnitude more bandwidth and things are getting slower. If developers were going to solve that problem they would've done it already.

Re: Ask HN: Can software engineering help combat climate change?

#22

No. It's lipstick on a pig, it's a way of feeling important while making no difference. The way you combat climate change is by reducing carbon dioxide output and increasing biomass creation and therefore uptake and sinking. You can't write code that does that. Adding complexity to everything is what software developers do best, only the most skilled ones manage to reduce complexity, and adding complexity to this sit…

There's plenty of greenwashing in tech, but I don't think it's hopeless. On an ops call this morning I heard about a team switching to a server type that saves ~40% on power, and their fleet is ~50k instances. Opportunities exist if you have the skills and this is an issue you care about.

But the net effect is usually not less is it? Management will find a new way to spend that money or the team will realize they can now run 40% more instances on the same budget.

Re: Ask HN: Can software engineering help combat climate change?

#23
The problem with climate change is the amount you are likely to do will be very small. Go find areas you can contribute to that are both 1) tractable (ie you can actually do something about them) and 2) neglected (so your impact will be much bigger than non-neglected things)

Climate change is neither of those things. You might be able to find a niche aspect of it that is, in which case go for it! Otherwise check coo it the job board at 80000hours.org for jobs that fall under 1 & 2 above: https://jobs.80000hours.org/?refinementList%5Btags_role_type...

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