What fossil fuels are doing to our oceans

Agreed. This is not a problem that is tractable on an individual level. Sure, if everyone became a vegetarian and cycled to work and only partook of goods and services that were part of a circular economy, then the world would be a place. But that's not going to happen, because in many places, food choices (and food culture) is terrible; cities are designed in cycling/pedestrian-hostile ways; the circular economy just can't supply all the goods and services you need to keep your family in good shape.

So that's not gonna work. I mean, do it if it makes you feel good -- personally I don't own a car, am a vegetarian, etc. -- but don't kid yourself that that's how the world gets saved. It isn't. The problems need to be fixed on an institutional/structural level.

Here's how I'm personally doing that:

- Worked on a new urban transport technology (http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/) that is significantly more attractive than the car in many respects, is all-electric, requires 70% less net energy, and uses 95% less land.

- Although I failed at getting the above technology implemented at urban scales, I discovered a more fundamental problem that needed to be cracked: cities have difficulty innovating (and integrating) because all the various planning/engineering/policymaking disciplines are heavily siloed. So I started a software company (https://www.podaris.com/) that has now created a collaboration platform for transport planners, urban planners, architects, policymakers etc. If it helps us to create better cities, it may actually help to save the world.

If I could clone myself and work on other things, they would be:

- Bio-engineered vat-grown meat and yeast-derived dairy. I have no intrinsic problem with small-scale, local, traditional meat production, but the mainstream industry, based on feedlots and Brazilian Soya, needs to die.

- Sea farming: seaweed and oysters. Sustainable, and also highly freaking yummy.

- Vertical / urban farming tech. (Still not 100% sold on this, but where it makes sense, it should be done!)

- Create software tools for tracking, comprehending, and shaping designs and resource flows in the circular economy.

- Get involved in public policy: reform campaign-finance laws that allow entrenched industries to capture and distort the regulatory landscape; implement a carbon tax; abolish farm subsidies.

- Electric aviation. Somewhere in the next 10 years this will be crossing into the realm of viability. Would be exciting to get in on the ground floor.

- Electric storage systems. A decarbonised electrical systm needs better way of buffering electricity, whether that's in batteries, potential energy, air pressure, or whatever. Much innovation needed here.

- Electric shipping. Hey, why isn't this a thing already?

- Sustainable building materials. Concrete is one of my favourite materials, but it has one hell of a carbon footprint. Figure out better ways to make concrete, or innovate with other materials entirely. (I suspect that bamboo still has a hell of a lot of untapped potential, and could even be a viable carbon sink.)

- Better automation in the production and installation of solar and wind. The more that robots do the work, the faster it can get done. (Elon Musk is very much on this track, with his whole "factories that make factories" thing). You should be extremely pessimistic every time you hear people extol how many jobs will be created by the Green Economy: the flipside of the jobs-creation scenario is that it'll take a very long time and an unsustainable fuckload of money. Want it to be done quickly and economically sustainably? It'll have to be done with robots. Go build 'em.

- Do research on / campaign for a Universal Basic Income. Wait, what does this have to do with ocean acidification? Simple: 1. We're not getting out of this mess without software/robots eating the world. The decarbonisation process is going to destroy millions of jobs in old, polluting industry -- and won't replace them with an equivalent number of new jobs. Heck, even my urban planning collaboration software is going to eventually displace a lot of middlemen. So the entire wage-labor economy, with one's salary being the cornerstone of the social contract, is going the way of the Dodo. 2. When people are economically insecure, they have a difficult giving a damn about any of the above. They just want their coal-mining jobs (or whatever) back. And thus we end up with the politics of our age. 3. This problem is worse in emerging economies, BTW. 4. So until more people can achieve economic security, all of the above will be a very uphill battle. But the world has more than enough money to solve this problem, so let's bloody well solve it so we can get on to the harder problems.

There's your list, for a start. It'll be tough work, but somebody's gotta do it. Might as well be you.

in a 1:1 substitution case. but locally, sustainably (yeah, maybe not the right word ... organically?) produced meat is more expensive, which should lead people to eat less meat, but if they eat meat to consume meat produced locally with a smaller environmental footprint (if that's the case, I'm not an expert in that field).

maybe that's just wishful thinking though.

As the problem is really a compound of millions of people and not any one indivdiual, the answer is then really nothing - bar more unrealistic options such as becoming a dictator and banning fossil fuel, or become a genie and invent an engine running on water.

The more realistic approach is to change ones own behavior where possible - get an electric car, demand your electricity company switch to clean tech, switch to getting electric from non-fossil fueled power, fly less miles, use a bike, and so on - and try to convince others to do so too. If noone does anything, it's pretty certain nothing will change either.

I don't think many people on HN have the skills to make other people stop eating animals, so I focused on computers.

Improving local infrastructure to improve walkability and prioritize cycling over cars helps, but in the near term we need to stop producing GHGs completely. So unless you have a found a cheap way to get fusion power to market in the next fifteen years or so, or have grid scale power storage up your sleeves, a large scale, expensive shift of our whole economy seems necessary. I don't see how you can do that without politics.