Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?

news.ycombinator.com

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: Ask HN: IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?

#31

This question pops up quite regularly on HN. I am always giving the same answer. We, HN crowd, presented with a problem tend to reach for a technical solution. Unfortunately, climate change is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem. IT will not solve it. The best we, as engineers, can do is the same as for anyone else - step out of our comport zone and join a climate movement. Extinction Rebellion is my…

I would argue the opposite, that its mainly a technical problem that has been coopted by a political movement.

The technical problem should be (roughly), how can we continue to enjoy our lives and the standard of living we have achieved, and continue to bring more of the world to that level, in a way that is sustainable long term. There are lots of promising routes to making this happen, and we have already seen lots of progress towards reducing environmental impact.

But there are people that want to move backwards, to reduce our standard of living, to reduce our freedom to make our own choices, and to enforce some kind of forced mediocrity that will help ration our natural resources. I reject this (and weaker versions of it) and believe there is more to be gained by focusing on progress than on telling people what to do.

Re: Ask HN: IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?

#35
post #5

This question pops up quite regularly on HN. I am always giving the same answer. We, HN crowd, presented with a problem tend to reach for a technical solution. Unfortunately, climate change is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem. IT will not solve it. The best we, as engineers, can do is the same as for anyone else - step out of our comport zone and join a climate movement. Extinction Rebellion is my…

> is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem That's a political choice, and it doesn't have to be that way. You think it's a hard political problem because we'd have to make very hard choices (reducing quality of life) with the currently deployed technical solutions. We could push along the R&D levels tech that's already researched, just not deployed (renewables and storage for their intermittent product…

Having palatable tech solutions would mean not making unpalatable political choices.

The only answer is to tackle the issue from both a technological point of view and a political one. Waiting for someone to find a tech solution, and then failing to find one, will make things so much worse.

Re: Ask HN: IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?

#37

You need to checkout https://climateaction.tech . They've an active German presence and you could find myriad opportunities there.

This should be the top rated answer!

"We are a community of practice of tech workers that provides support and guidance for systemic change in our organisations and industries, to face the climate crisis."

Re: Ask HN: IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?

#38
post #20

This question pops up quite regularly on HN. I am always giving the same answer. We, HN crowd, presented with a problem tend to reach for a technical solution. Unfortunately, climate change is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem. IT will not solve it. The best we, as engineers, can do is the same as for anyone else - step out of our comport zone and join a climate movement. Extinction Rebellion is my…

We already have the solution: nuclear power. The rest is the political problem of the anti-science attitude of one party in the US being spread to the rest of the world.

What is the latest development on nuclear power? I tried to read about these recently, but maybe can you point me in the right direction?
Post reply on HN