51–60 of 77 posts
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.
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…
A few mins searching and I've not been able to find any figures that justify that, do you have any to hand? An acre sounds a bit small. Nearest I've found is " rel="nofollow">https://greenismything.com/2015/06/23/howmanytrees/> which suggests ~2 acres per head for the US.
So to a zero approximation, I need to plant 1000 trees to offset my lifetime's carbon footprint. Without too much math, looking at my backyard, it's not possible to squeeze that into an acre (an order of magnitude off).
> How do I find jobs related to tackling global warming and climate change in Europe for an English speaker?
While not directly answering the question, here are some ideas for purchasing, donating, creating new positions, and hiring people that care:
Write more efficient code. Write more efficient compilers. Optimize interpretation and compilation so that the code written by people with domain knowledge who aren't that great at programming who are trying to solve other important problems is more efficient.
Push for PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) that offset energy use. Push for directly sourcing clean energy.
Use services that at least have 100% PPAs for the energy they use: services that run on clean energy sources.
Choose green datacenters.
- [ ] Add the capability for cloud resource schedulers like Kubernetes and Terraform to prefer or require clean energy datacenters.
Choose to work with companies that voluntarily choose to do sustainability reporting.
Work to help develop (and popularize) blockchain solutions that are more energy efficient and that have equal or better security assurances as less efficient chains.
Advocate for clean energy. Donate to NGOs working for our environment and for clean energy.
Invest in clean energy. There are a number of clean energy ETFs, for example. Better energy storage is a good investment.
Push for certified green buildings and datacenters.
- [ ] We should create some sort of a badge and structured data (JSONLD, RDFa, Microdata) for site headers and/or footers that lets consumers know that we're working toward '200% green' so that we can vote with our money.
Do not vote for people who are rolling back regulations that protect our environment. Pay an organization that pays lobbyists to work the system: that's the game.
Help explain why it's both environment-rational and cost-rational to align with national and international environmental sustainability and clean energy objectives.
Argue that we should make external costs internal in order that markets will optimize for what we actually want.
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/
I wish people would go for the big guns, fully renewable energy, nuclear, electric transport, green concrete and steel - the major issues instead of wasting time and money recovering 10% of what some coal power plant supplied to their data centre.
It's better than nothing but very close to nothing. It's a pervasive way of thinking in green engineering, every bit helps but what we need is BIG help: https://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml
The coolest company I saw on he list was this: https://www.coolearth.org/
A lot of the HN comments talk about planting trees. What's more effective, I imagine, is preventing deforestation in the first place.
1) Learn the things that are most likely to actually move the needle on climate change. There are a bunch of frameworks for thinking about this, but I think https://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/intro is pretty simple. Each wedge is a viable chunk of a huge path to mitigating climate change.
2) Search for companies that solve each of these problems individually. A company that sets out to solve "climate change" is unlikely to succeed in my view, but a company that sets out to make it easy to switch from coal plants to natural gas plants by bringing together the right financing and tech transfer might be easy.
3) Rank those places in terms of your likelihood in moving the needle for them. Nuclear power plant? Maybe they really could use an excellent software engineer, maybe they've already got a great set of people or it's not that important for their business. But maybe those same nuclear power plants desperately need an excellent quantitative person for their sales team, which is really what will move the needle for them.
I'd also suggest sourcing the companies through some of the VCs that have had success having world transforming success. Despite not loving Peter Thiel's political leanings, Founders Fund has funded Space X, The Climate Corporation and Oculus that each have/had a real shot at knocking out a wedge by themselves. Some places have a great track record for backing ambitious moon shots.
(Disclosure, I used to work for The Climate Corporation. I did go to work there because Peter Thiel talked about it in his Stanford Startups class though, so I think that counts as taking my own advice.)
I have pondered about a more sustainable career for a long time. But the opportunities did not match my talents, hope it works out for you.
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.…
I don't think anyone should feel bad about not coming up with the solutions to global problems. You not knowing any higher payoff doesn't make you a bad person. But every incredible transformation of the world started with a person, and many incredible people only became incredible through the work they tried to do.
Borlaug saved a Billion people from starvation. He started out as a basically normal man. Find something, fight for it, wrestle with the world and hope to hold on to something, mostly because we all lose in the end. If you lose early, enjoy a happy and normal life with your family, but you don't have to lose before you start.
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…
I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but HTML5 and lighter web pages are not a solution to climate change. There's no way in the world that math works out.
But half the world spends half their time on their phone. Halve the bytes and bandwidth needed for that and make things accessible - what is not to like? I bet that changing the way we do web pages to remove old fashioned bloat saves more penguins than your suggestion.
My suggestion was written specifically for the questioner based on their skillset. Not a one size fits all solution for everyone.
Please do the maths for me after refactoring a web page of your choosing so you have an idea of the gains. Don't be a blocker, present some sums.