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I'm a conservationist who frequently visits Hacker News. I find it fascinating. I'm also very interested in the extent to which environmental and climate storie

by F3L 10y ago

I'm a conservationist who frequently visits Hacker News. I find it fascinating. I'm also very interested in the extent to which environmental and climate stories feature on here - my guess is that these issues are a real concern for this community. I only wish there was a Y Combinator for massively scalable environmental solutions. As it happens there is virtually no money for early stage environmental businesses or approaches (only growth capital). The money that is available is administered very unimagineatively by bureaucrats. I raise this only because I would be interested in the ideas of this community in getting around this problem - where frequently the benefits of value cannot be reaped by a VC.

bjelkeman-again 10y ago
I left the field of IT/startups to work with this specific issue. Not on the financing side, but on the solutions side. I have experienced just what you describe. There are ways around it, but the finances available are just not the same. It would be good with a group of people to work on the bigger underlying issue here.
ctack 10y ago
I'm not sure about a bureaucratic approach, bureaucracy seems to be limited by a need to conserve the status quo. The more popular approach is a company like Tesla which seems to be on the verge achieving - or at least sparking - a huge victory over fossil fuels while realising investor returns. The challenge is to identify a cleaner and cheaper way to do something and then disrupting the hell out of the existing field. The guys attempting to grow meat in labs are set to disrupt things when their meat becomes cheaper than slash and burn burgers(it likely already is as the true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for meat). Once they're done with meat maybe it is possible to culture high quality wood in a lab. They'd save the amazon rainforest and make themselves and their investors a ton of money. But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede. It has another potential role to play though: safeguarding the playing field. For each Tesla trying to make the world a better place, there's an Uber, fucking society over for profit. The role of bureaucracy should be to allow the former and prevent the latter.
  - arjie 10y ago
    I don't know if you can say that Uber has made the world a worse place. That requires at least a total ordering on Uber's biggest actions and probably quantification of the consequences. If the advent of Uber has resulted in a billion drink deaths not happening but one person making $2 less per hour, it's clear. The other way around is clear too. But as it is right now, you can't assert that as is. You have to bring something more convincing to the table.
  - ctack 10y ago
    True, that statement does suffer from overreach. I was stuck in thinking of big government and entrenched players using economic tools to stifle positive disruptors. Of course there is a role for good as well.
  - specialist 10y ago
    Yup. Functioning market economy requires a fair and impartial judicial system. Among other things. Freedom Markets™ is a religion, not economics.
- matt4077 10y ago
  > The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede. That's an incredibly myopic view of reality, and of the history of scientific progress. Bureaucrats eradicated polio and smallpox, invented the internet, space travel, GPS – and actually almost anything important you could think of (if you include public universities and publicly-funded research). They have the power to massively support new technology until it is self-sustaining. There wouldn't be any renewable energy production today without the help of bureaucrats organising massive subsidies that allowed these industries to scale up to competitiveness. With regards to power-consumption, regulation has played a massive role in decreasing energy needs: from fuel efficiency standards to seemingly stupid stuff like standby modes, which used to consume dozens of watts continuously because that was a few cents cheaper to manufacture, and consumers just didn't care. Tesla is a fantastic company. But their best allies are just those bureaucrats and politicians: many countries support electric cars with tax breaks, sane countries have long ago started taxing the externalities of oil consumption, and there are thousands of initiatives on the smallest local level to allow electric cars to compete. Cities create reserved parking with charging infrastructure, or open bus- and taxi-lanes to electric vehicles. Universities have massively invested in the basic research that made not just those cars possible, but also the generation of it's power from non-fossile fuels. Not to mention that (at least in sane countries), public transport and bike infrastructure have probably prevented CO_2 emissions at a rate that's still 3 or 4 orders of magnitude ahead of Tesla.
matt4077 10y ago
I think those unimaginative bureaucrats are your best bet right now. The sort of technology that could solve climate change is probably in the "hard science" category, and startups probably the worst structure to tackle those. What this crowd could contribute is more along the "thousand papercuts"-strategy: shaving off a few watt-hours here and there, and not inventing any more cryptocurrencies that turn coal into ashes and hashes. Governments and universities have been quite successful inventing the big stuff, and they're also best situated to fight climate change via the other, equally important, avenues: getting agreement on worldwide collective action, incentivising the private sector , and transforming economic structures, habits, cities etc. For example, Germany almost single-handedly financed the 90% reduction in the cost of wind power generation with subsidies. One initiative from VC-land that might be of interest to you is Y combinator's research effort into the future of cities. That may seem only tangentially related, but a well-designed city could probably eliminate the need for private car ownership and radically reduce the energy need for heating. Add in reduced use of materials for construction (apartments instead of single-family houses), smart concepts to share equipment among neighbours (washing machine, tools etc) and a few lifestyle choices we already see people in cities making, I wouldn't be surprised if energy usage could be reduces by 2/3 without loss in quality of life.
- specialist 10y ago
  I long thought the killer app for conservation was going to be GIS. And now maybe drones. It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers. --- Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time. It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up. I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.
  - knz 10y ago
    IIRC GIS exists in its current form because of the benefit in using it for land management. It's definitely a powerful tool to show climate change etc but unfortunately I think we are past that phase. Most people have made up their mind on the issue - typically along partisan lines. All the maps on the world can't change political belief if people are saturated with media about how it's all a hoax etc. Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.
specialist 10y ago
Compelled to reply, even though I don't know how it relates (directly). TL;DR: IMHO, Conservation is an accounting problem, adding externalities to the ledger, making local tax payers aware they're getting screwed. I volunteered for a wetlands conservation group, about 10 years during the 90s. Wetlands, riparian areas, bogs, marshes, etc are habitat for birds, fish, their predators. They slow down the water during storms. They clean the water. Etc, Etc. We might have slowed down some development, in one county that had somewhat better governance than its neighbors. But habitat destruction continues. Ditto flooding. And the fisheries we were trying to protect were later proposed for endangered species status (all but gone). One signature achievement was creating birding trails, partially funded by state tourism bureau, to better rake in those sweet eco-tourism dollars. (~$140m/yr during the late 90s.) People will be surprised that Bush Sr signed the first federal wetlands protection legislation. Lots of optimism during the Clinton years. Then Bush The Lesser happened. And after a decade, we just kinda ran out of steam. Today, I honestly don't know who's working this issue locally. --- I have one more point to add. It's notable that the "environmental movement" was born in Southern California, where the residents could see the destruction and consequences occur in real-time vs spread-out over generations.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  Your last point is a good one. People started paying attention to the environment in Japan after four major incidents of people getting fked up by industrial pollution. I guess people will only start caring when we literally run out of fish or Alaska melts.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I'm strongly inclined to agree with the accounting-problem element of this, though correcting how economics views costs, value, and price (three distinct elements) would help tremendously as well. The drawing down of natural capital is simply not accounted for, despite the fact that early models of value (Smith, Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall) were consistent, if not outright encouraging of this. If oil companies (or the holders of lands from which it was withdrawn) had to account for the 100 million years plus of formation time in their accounting, the economics (or rather, finances) would change markedly.
sametmax 10y ago
Environment problems are not technological problems, their are driven by society. The way we consume, how we reproduce, the responsibilities we are willing to take, how we design our days, what define success, what are our purpose, our values and how we communicate, share, and educate. Technology is only the thing we use to compensate our failure in the other areas. But it's a never ending race. If we don't solve the root of the problem, technology will also bring more power to act badly, which we will need to compensate with better tech, etc.

by F3L 10y ago

bjelkeman-again 10y ago

I left the field of IT/startups to work with this specific issue. Not on the financing side, but on the solutions side. I have experienced just what you describe. There are ways around it, but the finances available are just not the same. It would be good with a group of people to work on the bigger underlying issue here.

ctack 10y ago

I'm not sure about a bureaucratic approach, bureaucracy seems to be limited by a need to conserve the status quo. The more popular approach is a company like Tesla which seems to be on the verge achieving - or at least sparking - a huge victory over fossil fuels while realising investor returns. The challenge is to identify a cleaner and cheaper way to do something and then disrupting the hell out of the existing field. The guys attempting to grow meat in labs are set to disrupt things when their meat becomes cheaper than slash and burn burgers(it likely already is as the true cost of rainforest loss is externalised - rainforest loss to soya fields that is 70% fed to cattle amounts to the same thing: rainforest loss for meat). Once they're done with meat maybe it is possible to culture high quality wood in a lab. They'd save the amazon rainforest and make themselves and their investors a ton of money. But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> But the patten is there, already laid out. The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede. It has another potential role to play though: safeguarding the playing field. For each Tesla trying to make the world a better place, there's an Uber, fucking society over for profit. The role of bureaucracy should be to allow the former and prevent the latter.
- arjie 10y ago
  I don't know if you can say that Uber has made the world a worse place. That requires at least a total ordering on Uber's biggest actions and probably quantification of the consequences. If the advent of Uber has resulted in a billion drink deaths not happening but one person making $2 less per hour, it's clear. The other way around is clear too. But as it is right now, you can't assert that as is. You have to bring something more convincing to the table.
- ctack 10y ago
  True, that statement does suffer from overreach. I was stuck in thinking of big government and entrenched players using economic tools to stifle positive disruptors. Of course there is a role for good as well.
- specialist 10y ago
  Yup. Functioning market economy requires a fair and impartial judicial system. Among other things. Freedom Markets™ is a religion, not economics.
matt4077 10y ago
> The only role bureaucracy might play will be to get out of the way. To not impede. That's an incredibly myopic view of reality, and of the history of scientific progress. Bureaucrats eradicated polio and smallpox, invented the internet, space travel, GPS – and actually almost anything important you could think of (if you include public universities and publicly-funded research). They have the power to massively support new technology until it is self-sustaining. There wouldn't be any renewable energy production today without the help of bureaucrats organising massive subsidies that allowed these industries to scale up to competitiveness. With regards to power-consumption, regulation has played a massive role in decreasing energy needs: from fuel efficiency standards to seemingly stupid stuff like standby modes, which used to consume dozens of watts continuously because that was a few cents cheaper to manufacture, and consumers just didn't care. Tesla is a fantastic company. But their best allies are just those bureaucrats and politicians: many countries support electric cars with tax breaks, sane countries have long ago started taxing the externalities of oil consumption, and there are thousands of initiatives on the smallest local level to allow electric cars to compete. Cities create reserved parking with charging infrastructure, or open bus- and taxi-lanes to electric vehicles. Universities have massively invested in the basic research that made not just those cars possible, but also the generation of it's power from non-fossile fuels. Not to mention that (at least in sane countries), public transport and bike infrastructure have probably prevented CO_2 emissions at a rate that's still 3 or 4 orders of magnitude ahead of Tesla.

matt4077 10y ago

I think those unimaginative bureaucrats are your best bet right now. The sort of technology that could solve climate change is probably in the "hard science" category, and startups probably the worst structure to tackle those. What this crowd could contribute is more along the "thousand papercuts"-strategy: shaving off a few watt-hours here and there, and not inventing any more cryptocurrencies that turn coal into ashes and hashes. Governments and universities have been quite successful inventing the big stuff, and they're also best situated to fight climate change via the other, equally important, avenues: getting agreement on worldwide collective action, incentivising the private sector , and transforming economic structures, habits, cities etc. For example, Germany almost single-handedly financed the 90% reduction in the cost of wind power generation with subsidies. One initiative from VC-land that might be of interest to you is Y combinator's research effort into the future of cities. That may seem only tangentially related, but a well-designed city could probably eliminate the need for private car ownership and radically reduce the energy need for heating. Add in reduced use of materials for construction (apartments instead of single-family houses), smart concepts to share equipment among neighbours (washing machine, tools etc) and a few lifestyle choices we already see people in cities making, I wouldn't be surprised if energy usage could be reduces by 2/3 without loss in quality of life.

specialist 10y ago
I long thought the killer app for conservation was going to be GIS. And now maybe drones. It is wicked hard to convey the destruction, loss. Especially to policy makers. --- Methinks the best thing all governments could do is operate with an open ledger. All receipts, contracts, expenditures, procurements, permits, everything publicly posted in real-time. It's hard to govern not knowing what the hell is happening. Even policy makers are kept in the dark. And they definitely don't have the staff to keep up. I've done numerous FOIAs (public records requests). It's onerous and almost completely ineffectual. And by the time you get the data you've asked for, the window of opportunity has passed.
- knz 10y ago
  IIRC GIS exists in its current form because of the benefit in using it for land management. It's definitely a powerful tool to show climate change etc but unfortunately I think we are past that phase. Most people have made up their mind on the issue - typically along partisan lines. All the maps on the world can't change political belief if people are saturated with media about how it's all a hoax etc. Great point re data. The tools for dissemination of data are getting better and there is a growing open data movement within government. My own experience has been that greater education is needed for policy makers - they often fear releasing data in case it will be used against them or don't understand the potential benefits of releasing data. In the GIS world there has also been resistance due to policy makers wanting to recover the cost of data acquisition.

specialist 10y ago

Compelled to reply, even though I don't know how it relates (directly). TL;DR: IMHO, Conservation is an accounting problem, adding externalities to the ledger, making local tax payers aware they're getting screwed. I volunteered for a wetlands conservation group, about 10 years during the 90s. Wetlands, riparian areas, bogs, marshes, etc are habitat for birds, fish, their predators. They slow down the water during storms. They clean the water. Etc, Etc. We might have slowed down some development, in one county that had somewhat better governance than its neighbors. But habitat destruction continues. Ditto flooding. And the fisheries we were trying to protect were later proposed for endangered species status (all but gone). One signature achievement was creating birding trails, partially funded by state tourism bureau, to better rake in those sweet eco-tourism dollars. (~$140m/yr during the late 90s.) People will be surprised that Bush Sr signed the first federal wetlands protection legislation. Lots of optimism during the Clinton years. Then Bush The Lesser happened. And after a decade, we just kinda ran out of steam. Today, I honestly don't know who's working this issue locally. --- I have one more point to add. It's notable that the "environmental movement" was born in Southern California, where the residents could see the destruction and consequences occur in real-time vs spread-out over generations.

rangibaby 10y ago
Your last point is a good one. People started paying attention to the environment in Japan after four major incidents of people getting fked up by industrial pollution. I guess people will only start caring when we literally run out of fish or Alaska melts.
dredmorbius 10y ago
I'm strongly inclined to agree with the accounting-problem element of this, though correcting how economics views costs, value, and price (three distinct elements) would help tremendously as well. The drawing down of natural capital is simply not accounted for, despite the fact that early models of value (Smith, Boehm-Bawerk, Marshall) were consistent, if not outright encouraging of this. If oil companies (or the holders of lands from which it was withdrawn) had to account for the 100 million years plus of formation time in their accounting, the economics (or rather, finances) would change markedly.

sametmax 10y ago

Environment problems are not technological problems, their are driven by society. The way we consume, how we reproduce, the responsibilities we are willing to take, how we design our days, what define success, what are our purpose, our values and how we communicate, share, and educate. Technology is only the thing we use to compensate our failure in the other areas. But it's a never ending race. If we don't solve the root of the problem, technology will also bring more power to act badly, which we will need to compensate with better tech, etc.