6 ms·

So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Bret Victor's essay on what a technologist can do about climate is a well-reasoned perspective targeted at

by joelg 10y ago

So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Bret Victor's essay on what a technologist can do about climate is a well-reasoned perspective targeted at people in the tech industry, and it's at least a start. What else? http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange

azeirah 10y ago
Even though I admire Bret victor's work very very much, I think we as technologists do not have much an influence over the issue by inventing. Instead, as I myself, and nearly everybody I know is barely aware of the issue at all, we need to make the general public aware of what is taking place through means of media. This has become a political problem, not a technology problem.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  Tools for making complex systems understandable to people unfamiliar/unpracticed in scientific thinking could be a powerful part of influencing this political problem (which I agree it is).
- henrikschroder 10y ago
  Everyone knows, noone gives a shit, because most people can't afford to care. It's only a small sliver of humanity - the college-educated upper-middle class of the west - that cares, and even most of them are just socially posturing and not actually caring. What works is the economic argument, the best environmental choice has to become the cheapest one, and that's something technology can do. When solar power is cheaper than coal, coal power plants will shut down very quickly and be replaced by solar power plants. When electric cars are cheaper than ICE cars, noone is going to buy the latter, and vehicle pollution will quickly disappear as well.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jwatte 10y ago
    And you can drive those electric cars for perhaps 10 years after that switch, until the global food supply finally kicks the bucket. On the current course, we are looking at global nuclear war level disruption; the only question is "when." Estimates are between 2035 and 2070. The problem is: once we stop, were have decades more build up that catches up. Really, actually reading the science, I'm starting to think the Fermi paradox is solved. When you say "cheaper," anything we do today is cheaper than massive human death.
    - taneq 10y ago
      At least a nuclear winter would reverse the effects of the carbon emissions...
oulu2006 10y ago
I'm very interested in what we can do individually to make this more of recognised issue by the common man. I'll take a look at this essay and if you think of anything else let me know.
qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago
For starters have fewer or no kids, and stop traveling frivolously by air. Aircraft emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is leveraged by a factor commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_%28travel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_%28travel%29 edit: also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
- white-flame 10y ago
  But are the per-person emissions in a passenger aircraft less than 1/2.7th compared to a car for the same distance traveled? Also, electric planes are theoretically coming.
  - refurb 10y ago
    I was going to say. Per passage per mile fuel efficiency exceeds 100 MPG. Even with the 2.7 adjustment it's better than most cars.
    - qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago
      This is an incomplete and thus inaccurate assessement. The efficiency is massively dependent on the distance being traveled. Shorter domestic flights are nowhere near as economical as longer ones. Longer flights amortize the hugely inefficient taxiing, takeoff, and climb to cruising altitude.
  - qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago
    It's pretty irrelevant to make the comparison against automobiles because you're assuming the travel will occur regardless of mode. Most air travel is arguably frivolous, and wouldn't occur if required to do so by automobile for a variety of reasons (time, inconvenience, et cetera). But if you must make the comparison, automobiles are obviously more efficient than aircraft per passenger for shorter distances. You wouldn't burn anywhere near the amount of fuel a jet uses taxiing to drive a comparable distance, to illustrate the extreme end of the spectrum favoring automobiles. Actually teasing out where exactly the inflexion point lies depends on the specific vehicles being compared, occupancy levels, and distance being traveled. These things have been studied and compared, Google it if you're actually interested in knowing when to drive instead of fly. It's far more prudent to simply cut down or eliminate air travel altogether, IMHO. There are other difficult to measure impacts from flying. For example, most people I encounter in the SF Bay area like to travel frivolously by air and broadcast to the world that they're doing so in their in-person conversations and social media posts. This amounts to advertising and promoting more frivolous air travel throughout their audiences, and wouldn't really be feasible if they hadn't taken the flight in the first place. There's a greater collateral damage with air travel, because it's so accessible and convenient, all it takes is a photo of a wing or some beautiful destination you flew to and anyone who sees the photo in your friend circle can likely afford to repeat the activity - there are effectively no barriers. Social networking has exacerbated this effect _tremendously_, it's somewhat horrifying.
Animats 10y ago
Don't locate too close to sea level or in an area prone to flash floods. Avoid areas where temperatures hit 100F now; it's going to get worse. Design electronics to function well at 140F ambient. Don't invest in Florida or New Orleans, or in areas ever flooded by the Mississippi River. Don't invest in cities scheduled for unliveable temperatures, such as Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas. Minnesota farmland, though, may have a comeback.
- joelg 10y ago
  Ironically, I grew up in Minnesota. My only hope is that I can retire from a career of ignoring climate change to a tropical, palm-treed Duluth.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Well, for six months out of the year...
  - jwatte 10y ago
    When 90% of the global population (including many North Americans) are starving to death, what will your "retirement" really be like?
  - jwatte 10y ago
    When 90% of the global population (including many North Americans) are starving to death, what will your "retirement" really be like?
c-smile 10y ago
> So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Write better, optimized code :) That consumes less CPU power (and so produces less heat while working). Oh, and that Pockemon thing ... you know, right? Heating problems at data centers ... and so on
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Read up on the Jevons paradox.
  - c-smile 10y ago
    That paradox has little relation to the quality of software. Let's say that Pockemon is written in the way that it takes 50% less CPU. So devices need less power taken from the grid. But it does not mean that number of its users will be doubled because of less consumption. Engineering responsibility, that's how this entity was named in my university.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Wirth's Law. Or conversely, it's possibly, just as an outside and highly improbable guess, that reducing the costs and power consumption of individual computing devices might: 1. Allow them to proliferate such that rather than IBM's famous 1950 market for five computers, there's a market for five billion. 2. Which are collectively backed by football-pitch sized datacenters around the world, running said Pokemon games and Pr0nTube servers. Just maybe. Could happen. You never know.
clumsysmurf 10y ago
Eat less meat.
- quakeguy 10y ago
  True, especially for beef products.
  - teslabox 10y ago
    Cattle can be used to restore grasslands [1]. [1] https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-saving-the-cows-and-grasslands-of-rural-zimbabwe-6201937282c4#.qiuyu09km https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-... Milk cows are the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside into human-consumable proteins.
aaron-lebo 10y ago
Very seriously look at what we are doing, who we are working for, which companies get our attention. How many new tech companies are doing things which feed into a consumerist culture which doesn't care about long-term impact because it's always BUY BUY BUY? It's all about making fuck you money, which really is fuck everyone else money. That's ugly and seeing as how it's one of the driving forces of the tech industry...well, some of us are guilty. We are all deeply embedded in a culture with massive issues and to fix that we have to reexamine our own actions which are contributing to it.
- marcusjt 10y ago
  Well said. It's hard to find ethical jobs. But that's not an excuse for working for evil companies instead. The world needs more ethical companies. Seek them out, join them, help them prosper. Please make the world a better place to live in, not worse, there's already too many people on that side of things, don't become one of them.
themgt 10y ago
This article is good at encapsulating the increasingly dire science and urgent need for immediate action. What can you do? Educate yourself, educate all your friends and anyone else you talk to, vote for politicians who take this seriously and urge dramatic immediate action, use any resources or connections you have to get this understood by the people who hold and wield power. The situation is rapidly slipping from bad to almost unimaginably dystopian.
pharrington 10y ago
Renewable and nuclear power are the only solutions of appropriate scale. Short of that, write computer programs that actually efficiently use CPU cycles.
mahyarm 10y ago
The entire internet industry and tools saves a lot of money and energy itself. Some of what people used to travel by car or airplane to do, now is done over far more energy and time efficient internet connections. Large amounts of paper has been replaced by far more environmentally friendly digital versions. The dream hasn't gone %100 yet, but it has replaced a big chunk already. Year by year it replaces more and more paper and in person travelling. You may think it isn't the case, but I have a story of a friend doing a psychology internship. The small office she works for has her schlep paper testing kits, patient charts and so on back and forth in between offices. And since they are shared they have often have to deliver them back and forth more than multiple copies would let them prevent. The main reason why its still paper is because her boss is in her 60s. But my friend has started to convince her boss to start digitizing. Now with hippa compliant google drive and pdf files replacing testing manuals and patient charts, they will save a ton of gas energy and time alone. It will be huge for them. And that is one simple example.
embwbam 10y ago
Reject consumerism, and use your extra resources for personal fulfillment, health, and fixing the world. It doesn't require everyone to cooperate, just us and those like us. Especially if we can capture the imagination of other similar people around us. Local examples of living well and doing good have more impact than we think. This requires a change in popular culture right? How does that happen? It's not with polarizing media campaigns. People are influenced by people around them that they admire. Live well, save the world, and be noisy about it. People will notice. https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/ https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com http://www.mrmoneymustache.com
n1000 10y ago
Here is what I try: Host stuff in data centers that are operated by 100% Renewables, use hardware efficiently (virtualisation, ARM boards for simple tasks), fly not more than every 2-5 years, eat meat only once a week, use public transport as much as possible (easier said in Europe I assume), take cold showers whenever I have the courage, make sure my bank does not invest my money in fossil fuel or military projects, ... Politicians and also scientists still avoid to say this aloud but without sufficiency there will be not enough change. The window of efficiency has passed.
mulcahey 10y ago
> So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Go put in 80 hour weeks at Tesla? Vote Democrat?

by joelg 10y ago

azeirah 10y ago

Even though I admire Bret victor's work very very much, I think we as technologists do not have much an influence over the issue by inventing. Instead, as I myself, and nearly everybody I know is barely aware of the issue at all, we need to make the general public aware of what is taking place through means of media. This has become a political problem, not a technology problem.

germinalphrase 10y ago
Tools for making complex systems understandable to people unfamiliar/unpracticed in scientific thinking could be a powerful part of influencing this political problem (which I agree it is).
henrikschroder 10y ago
Everyone knows, noone gives a shit, because most people can't afford to care. It's only a small sliver of humanity - the college-educated upper-middle class of the west - that cares, and even most of them are just socially posturing and not actually caring. What works is the economic argument, the best environmental choice has to become the cheapest one, and that's something technology can do. When solar power is cheaper than coal, coal power plants will shut down very quickly and be replaced by solar power plants. When electric cars are cheaper than ICE cars, noone is going to buy the latter, and vehicle pollution will quickly disappear as well.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jwatte 10y ago
  And you can drive those electric cars for perhaps 10 years after that switch, until the global food supply finally kicks the bucket. On the current course, we are looking at global nuclear war level disruption; the only question is "when." Estimates are between 2035 and 2070. The problem is: once we stop, were have decades more build up that catches up. Really, actually reading the science, I'm starting to think the Fermi paradox is solved. When you say "cheaper," anything we do today is cheaper than massive human death.
  - taneq 10y ago
    At least a nuclear winter would reverse the effects of the carbon emissions...

oulu2006 10y ago

I'm very interested in what we can do individually to make this more of recognised issue by the common man. I'll take a look at this essay and if you think of anything else let me know.

qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago

For starters have fewer or no kids, and stop traveling frivolously by air. Aircraft emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is leveraged by a factor commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_%28travel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_%28travel%29 edit: also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY

white-flame 10y ago
But are the per-person emissions in a passenger aircraft less than 1/2.7th compared to a car for the same distance traveled? Also, electric planes are theoretically coming.
- refurb 10y ago
  I was going to say. Per passage per mile fuel efficiency exceeds 100 MPG. Even with the 2.7 adjustment it's better than most cars.
  - qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago
    This is an incomplete and thus inaccurate assessement. The efficiency is massively dependent on the distance being traveled. Shorter domestic flights are nowhere near as economical as longer ones. Longer flights amortize the hugely inefficient taxiing, takeoff, and climb to cruising altitude.
- qpwoeirutyzzzz 10y ago
  It's pretty irrelevant to make the comparison against automobiles because you're assuming the travel will occur regardless of mode. Most air travel is arguably frivolous, and wouldn't occur if required to do so by automobile for a variety of reasons (time, inconvenience, et cetera). But if you must make the comparison, automobiles are obviously more efficient than aircraft per passenger for shorter distances. You wouldn't burn anywhere near the amount of fuel a jet uses taxiing to drive a comparable distance, to illustrate the extreme end of the spectrum favoring automobiles. Actually teasing out where exactly the inflexion point lies depends on the specific vehicles being compared, occupancy levels, and distance being traveled. These things have been studied and compared, Google it if you're actually interested in knowing when to drive instead of fly. It's far more prudent to simply cut down or eliminate air travel altogether, IMHO. There are other difficult to measure impacts from flying. For example, most people I encounter in the SF Bay area like to travel frivolously by air and broadcast to the world that they're doing so in their in-person conversations and social media posts. This amounts to advertising and promoting more frivolous air travel throughout their audiences, and wouldn't really be feasible if they hadn't taken the flight in the first place. There's a greater collateral damage with air travel, because it's so accessible and convenient, all it takes is a photo of a wing or some beautiful destination you flew to and anyone who sees the photo in your friend circle can likely afford to repeat the activity - there are effectively no barriers. Social networking has exacerbated this effect _tremendously_, it's somewhat horrifying.

Animats 10y ago

Don't locate too close to sea level or in an area prone to flash floods. Avoid areas where temperatures hit 100F now; it's going to get worse. Design electronics to function well at 140F ambient. Don't invest in Florida or New Orleans, or in areas ever flooded by the Mississippi River. Don't invest in cities scheduled for unliveable temperatures, such as Doha, Abu Dhabi and Bandar Abbas. Minnesota farmland, though, may have a comeback.

joelg 10y ago
Ironically, I grew up in Minnesota. My only hope is that I can retire from a career of ignoring climate change to a tropical, palm-treed Duluth.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Well, for six months out of the year...
- jwatte 10y ago
  When 90% of the global population (including many North Americans) are starving to death, what will your "retirement" really be like?
- jwatte 10y ago
  When 90% of the global population (including many North Americans) are starving to death, what will your "retirement" really be like?

c-smile 10y ago

> So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Write better, optimized code :) That consumes less CPU power (and so produces less heat while working). Oh, and that Pockemon thing ... you know, right? Heating problems at data centers ... and so on

dredmorbius 10y ago
Read up on the Jevons paradox.
- c-smile 10y ago
  That paradox has little relation to the quality of software. Let's say that Pockemon is written in the way that it takes 50% less CPU. So devices need less power taken from the grid. But it does not mean that number of its users will be doubled because of less consumption. Engineering responsibility, that's how this entity was named in my university.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Wirth's Law. Or conversely, it's possibly, just as an outside and highly improbable guess, that reducing the costs and power consumption of individual computing devices might: 1. Allow them to proliferate such that rather than IBM's famous 1950 market for five computers, there's a market for five billion. 2. Which are collectively backed by football-pitch sized datacenters around the world, running said Pokemon games and Pr0nTube servers. Just maybe. Could happen. You never know.

clumsysmurf 10y ago

Eat less meat.

quakeguy 10y ago
True, especially for beef products.
- teslabox 10y ago
  Cattle can be used to restore grasslands [1]. [1] https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-saving-the-cows-and-grasslands-of-rural-zimbabwe-6201937282c4#.qiuyu09km https://psmag.com/conservation-in-the-age-of-climate-change-... Milk cows are the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside into human-consumable proteins.

aaron-lebo 10y ago

Very seriously look at what we are doing, who we are working for, which companies get our attention. How many new tech companies are doing things which feed into a consumerist culture which doesn't care about long-term impact because it's always BUY BUY BUY? It's all about making fuck you money, which really is fuck everyone else money. That's ugly and seeing as how it's one of the driving forces of the tech industry...well, some of us are guilty. We are all deeply embedded in a culture with massive issues and to fix that we have to reexamine our own actions which are contributing to it.

marcusjt 10y ago
Well said. It's hard to find ethical jobs. But that's not an excuse for working for evil companies instead. The world needs more ethical companies. Seek them out, join them, help them prosper. Please make the world a better place to live in, not worse, there's already too many people on that side of things, don't become one of them.

themgt 10y ago

This article is good at encapsulating the increasingly dire science and urgent need for immediate action. What can you do? Educate yourself, educate all your friends and anyone else you talk to, vote for politicians who take this seriously and urge dramatic immediate action, use any resources or connections you have to get this understood by the people who hold and wield power. The situation is rapidly slipping from bad to almost unimaginably dystopian.

pharrington 10y ago

Renewable and nuclear power are the only solutions of appropriate scale. Short of that, write computer programs that actually efficiently use CPU cycles.

mahyarm 10y ago

The entire internet industry and tools saves a lot of money and energy itself. Some of what people used to travel by car or airplane to do, now is done over far more energy and time efficient internet connections. Large amounts of paper has been replaced by far more environmentally friendly digital versions. The dream hasn't gone %100 yet, but it has replaced a big chunk already. Year by year it replaces more and more paper and in person travelling. You may think it isn't the case, but I have a story of a friend doing a psychology internship. The small office she works for has her schlep paper testing kits, patient charts and so on back and forth in between offices. And since they are shared they have often have to deliver them back and forth more than multiple copies would let them prevent. The main reason why its still paper is because her boss is in her 60s. But my friend has started to convince her boss to start digitizing. Now with hippa compliant google drive and pdf files replacing testing manuals and patient charts, they will save a ton of gas energy and time alone. It will be huge for them. And that is one simple example.

embwbam 10y ago

Reject consumerism, and use your extra resources for personal fulfillment, health, and fixing the world. It doesn't require everyone to cooperate, just us and those like us. Especially if we can capture the imagination of other similar people around us. Local examples of living well and doing good have more impact than we think. This requires a change in popular culture right? How does that happen? It's not with polarizing media campaigns. People are influenced by people around them that they admire. Live well, save the world, and be noisy about it. People will notice. https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/ https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com http://www.mrmoneymustache.com

n1000 10y ago

Here is what I try: Host stuff in data centers that are operated by 100% Renewables, use hardware efficiently (virtualisation, ARM boards for simple tasks), fly not more than every 2-5 years, eat meat only once a week, use public transport as much as possible (easier said in Europe I assume), take cold showers whenever I have the courage, make sure my bank does not invest my money in fossil fuel or military projects, ... Politicians and also scientists still avoid to say this aloud but without sufficiency there will be not enough change. The window of efficiency has passed.

mulcahey 10y ago

> So what can we - the average HN crowd - actually do? Go put in 80 hour weeks at Tesla? Vote Democrat?