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Request for Startups: Climate Tech

ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#271

Post by a_square_peg »

baremetal wrote: post #213
a_square_peg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly - take a look ( https://oikolab.com ) and let me know your use case. There is a free tier but we've also given free access to a quite a few number of researchers, non-profits and university students for their projects when they reached out to us.

I own and operate a high intensity organic farm. My use case is to attempt to predict how much water I can expect for the growing season and other growing conditions like date of last frost. I'm trying to apply my software engineering skills to my farm. I am also researching automation strategies. Your offering is most intriguing.

Sounds good - can you sign up for the free tier and send me an email to support@oikolab.com? This comes to me so I'll know which account belongs to you and we can take it from there.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#272

Post by KurvaKing »

a_square_peg wrote: post #271
baremetal wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own and operate a high intensity organic farm. My use case is to attempt to predict how much water I can expect for the growing season and other growing conditions like date of last frost. I'm trying to apply my software engineering skills to my farm. I am also researching automation strategies. Your offering is most intriguing.

Sounds good - can you sign up for the free tier and send me an email to support@oikolab.com? This comes to me so I'll know which account belongs to you and we can take it from there.

No post body was provided.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#273

Post by CalRobert »

nadavr wrote: post #236
CalRobert wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal is to make it painfully easy to live in communities where you can walk, bike, or take public transport to all of your daily needs, which is a completely low tech problem with a huge social science component. The first step, I think, is making it obvious when purchasing a home whether you will be able to do this yourself. Want to collaborate? I have a pilot project going for Ireland and am unsure where to take…

what is "painfully easy"?

You know, that's a good point. I suppose I mean "painfully obvious". Like, so easy/obvious to figure out where to live that it's the easiest choice, not something you have to spend ages trying to tease out from existing tools.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#274

Post by admax88qqq »

bmitc wrote: post #257
agonmon wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever want to stop wallowing in misanthropic nihilism, I recommend reading books like "More From Less" - Mcafee which shows that capitalism does in fact reduce/moderate consumption. Next look at "Speed and Scale" - Doerr, or "How to Solve a Climate Disaster" - Gates for a giant list of human innovations that will in fact decrease/reverse climate change.

Aside from the needless labeling, thank you for the references. I will take a look. However, count me initially skeptical of some of the claims. I simply have not seen any data that would corroborate what seems to be the thesis of More From Less . Even if "more from less" is true, doing so at scale is still more. But I will read more. I do note the following quote from a review of More From Less : > In a positive not…

Population growth is slowing.

Current projects suggest it will peak/plateau around 10 billion.

In many developed capitalist economies carbon footprint per person is decreasing.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

Theoretically, if we can drive the carbon footprint per captia down far enough such that the carbon footprint of 10 billion people is lower than the rate of carbon removal (natural and artifical), then we're fine.

Definitely a hard problem, but so is restructuring society into a non-capitalist, non-consumption based system.

So I think the "coherent plan" is to accelerate this decrease in carbon per captia. It's trending the right way but too slowly. But perhaps with the power of the market's exponential growth, if we incentivize it the right way, it will accelerate this in a way to avoid total collapse.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#275

Post by mym1990 »

jedberg wrote: post #179
mym1990 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with pretty much all of this but if any governing body(whether it be the manufacturer or government) cared about screens and how detrimental they are to safety and driving, you wouldn't see every other person gawking at their phone while driving 70mph.

There's a reason using your phone while driving is illegal in most of the liberal states.

Jaywalking is also illegal in a lot of places, doesn't mean its enforced.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#276

Post by panda888888 »

Climate tech doesn't have to be crazy futuristic ML models or whatever in order to be useful.

For instance, I love the Purple Air air quality sensors, which crowdsource data and use a simple existing technology. (See https://map.purpleair.com/). This example may not be "revolutionary" enough for YCombinator, but I'm a fan.

Personally, I'd like to see a company that focuses on solar hot water heating. Water heating is usually about 1/3 of a home's energy usage. In several countries, especially in the middle east and in Africa, standalone solar hot water systems are the most common way water is heated. But in the US, solar hot water is nearly non-existent. I'm not talking whole-house solar panels, but rather a small system that you can buy for $~4-5k. There's an opportunity lurking there somewhere.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#277

Post by pcl »

kokanee wrote: post #128
pcl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing liquids (or solids) from at STP is far simpler than storing it in gaseous form. If we can cheaply extract CO2 or methane from the atmosphere and make liquid from it, we could sequester it in all sorts of trivial ways.

Sure, but that's not what Twelve is doing or what the "I should start an oil company" comment suggested. They're talking about extracting CO2 to make fuel, and then burning it again in the same petroleum-based economy.

Yeah sure. And that ties into all our existing infrastructure, which seems fair.

If we can extract and burn and extract and burn and keep going with that loop (without dinosaur input), then all that extract-burn cycle is zero-carbon.

We can then separately decide to pump some of that cycle’s output into easy liquid storage, thus going carbon-negative.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#278

Post by bmitc »

hocuspocus wrote: post #269
bmitc wrote: post #87

I'm not convinced that the solutions to climate change are tech related. If anything, climate change is tech driven. Addressing climate change doesn't really require startups and venture capitalist pump and dump schemes. It requires social and behavioral changes, mainly centered around consumption. Basically everything on this list would increase consumption, manufacturing, construction, road building, etc. There are…

> If anything, climate change is tech driven. It's sad to see such comments systematically downvoted on HN. I understand most people on here (including me) are paid to believe otherwise but you should really look at the history of tech and energy for the past 200 years or so, and also listen to competent people (i.e. not Musk nor PG) about the energy and geological resources challenges we're facing. Even if you don't…

Thanks for the backup. Haha. But such is life in a technocratic society and on a technocratic forum.

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#279

Post by hn3644 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #103
a_square_peg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, is accessing & working with large datasets a problem in your areas of work? I run a weather/climate site that makes some of this less painful, taking datasets such as GFS or ERA5/ERA5-Land much faster to access. We have some enterprise clients who really value the time-saving aspect of this but I also feel like everyone has their own data-processing set up and problems are different for everyone.

There are a couple issues I see with basic access and working with large datasets. Ease of access for typical users is also a valid issue. First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data.…

Have you come across Kart? https://kartproject.org/

Re: Request for Startups: Climate Tech

#280

Post by Grustaf »

bmitc wrote: post #267
Grustaf wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can move a heavy object using less energy than others move a much lighter object, then it would seem that you are quite efficient. Unless we're talking about constant speed in a vacuum.

Yes, but where does the less energy argument or data come from?

From the comment I responded to
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