9 ms·

Bill Gates gets it. We need to step on the gas and deploy boatloads of wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, pumped hydro, long-distance transmission, energy efficie

by jabl 7y ago

Bill Gates gets it. We need to step on the gas and deploy boatloads of wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, pumped hydro, long-distance transmission, energy efficiency measures, CCS, demand response, and whatnot. Yes, it will cost a lot. But leaving our children with an increasingly hostile planet isn't a tenable option either (and one which will be even more expensive as well).

lazyjones 7y ago
> We need to step on the gas Nice metaphor...
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  Maybe “get the lead out” would be better?
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  Really nice, because a ramp up in mass production of these things causes a lot of emissions that will take 50+ years to recover from.
- Fuzzwah 7y ago
  In current Formula 1 parlance; we need to increase our torque demand.
rooam-dev 7y ago
How could be people convinced about importance of this if it doesn't or won't impact them enough? Yes, "think about our children" is good, but in the end people are still selfish and will think that it's not their problem.
- mojomark 7y ago
  > How could be people convinced about importance of this if it doesn't or won't impact them enough? As engineers, I feel it's our responsibility to make environmentally friendly solutions that are simply more economically viable than the unclean/unsustainable alternative. I'm working on the oceanic shipping industry myself.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  One thing that might help is that longevity research is going on well. Hopefully in 10-20 years it will produce enough results for the general public to start believing that saving the Earth is not just about their children.
- sgift 7y ago
  That's one of the most important jobs of a politician. Make the hard decisions and convince people that they are needed, even if they don't see it right now. Politicians who don't do that don't do their job. And yes, that means we are in the West (and probably elsewhere) in a veritable political crisis. Not because we have some nutjobs run around "it's all a myth! we don't need to do anything!" but because politicians don't work anymore against it and instead take the lazy path to votes and just agree with it, even if the long-term consequences will be disastrous for humanity.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  These initiatives will create a lot of jobs: engineers, administrators, electricians, construction workers. Many of those in areas that were hit hard by manufacturing moving away.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  I meet much more people that use “other people won’t care” as an excuse for not doing anything themselves than I meet people who actually don’t care. If we just started doing our parts and didn’t worry so much about other people doing theirs we wouldn’t in this mess.
  - m_mueller 7y ago
    or in other words, the tragedy of commons.
    - Ma8ee 7y ago
      No, it's the tragedy of blaming the tragedy of the commons.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Yes, saw recently on HN (and often IRL) "no point recycling when industry ...", and "we'll never best 10% domestic recycling, why bother". In UK councils quote 50% recycling rates. And that's with most supermarkets still producing food in unrecyclable packaging.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      At the risk of injecting extra negativity into the thread: what about the recent revelations that a lot of (if not most) recycling is really shipping the trash to poorer nations to be dumped there?
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        >"councils quote" Yeah ... I've not investigated that yet. But I have seen some of our local recycling facilities and they seem to be operating rather than secretly filling shipping containers. It does trouble me visiting my town's rubbish dump, there is so much usable stuff in the skips, so much waste. Presumably China now refusing other country's trash is shedding new light on these issues. I think we have to fix our entire economic systems in order to solve this, and I don't think that's going to work readily because people will always exploit others for financial/political gain at the expense of the environment. We're going to have to seriously curtail individual freedoms that allow people to make excessive use of resources. We can't do that under our current market-based systems. Take a simple example, fleece fabric is great, cheap, used widely but is a massive source of microplastic pollution - we're going to have to make it expensive, and stop people from throwing it away, and use the income to do proper filtration and recycling. We're going to need to start treating fraud wrt environmental issues as akin to manslaughter - actually put businessmen in jail who are responsible (knowingly, or unknowingly through negligence) for things like shipping recycling abroad and not confirming it is recycled, or lying about car MPGs, or failing to filter effluent, or allowing runoff to poison water sources, .... We probably need something akin to a global one-child policy as well. We can't go on increasing population and just expect resources to stretch. Things are going to break much harder with population rates left as they are. I better stop ... /rant
mrpopo 7y ago
This will cost a lot, and this is not even the hardest step. We use energy for electricity, but also transportation, heating, fertilizer production/agriculture, cattle produces GHG, A/C recycling, and what not. The USA will need to reduce meat consumption, improve public transportation (electric cars if produced at scale will introduce lots of other environmental issues), relocalize industries. They are late to the transition in every domain.
- badpun 7y ago
  It sounds almost like the disruption necessary to stop global warming is greater than the disruption that would be caused by the global warming.
  - marliechiller 7y ago
    not sure youre being sarcastic or not... of course the disruption due global warming will be vastly greater than the disruption caused by trying to prevent it, that much is a given
    - js8 7y ago
      Even if the actual disruption was the same magnitude - if you have control over the disruption, it is much more pleasant one than the one you don't have any control over.
      - Mirioron 7y ago
        Is it though? Because if humans have control over it, then you can be sure that humans will fight over it. How would the US tell Russia to pollute less?
        js8 7y ago
        > How would the US tell Russia to pollute less? Easy. This has actually been done many times during Cold War. You do it yourself, and so well, that their citizens will demand it too. There were many social advances in the West that were imported (usually in a crippled way, but still) to the communist countries (I was born in one). Things like 5-day work week, education improvements, recycling, ecological laws, nuclear proliferation treaties... usually it's very small things, but they do make difference.
gyaniv 7y ago
I think the fact that it isn't cheap shouldn't be that much of an issue (although I know it currently is) because the price we (not even our children) will pay because of climate change would be much higher (in pure economic costs, before we start talking about more moral and environmental costs like animal extinction). But I think the problem is that people care about today a lot more then they care about tomorrow, or next year (and definitely more then their potential future descendants).
- simonh 7y ago
  > I think the fact that it isn't cheap shouldn't be that much of an issue... EDIT: Apologies for the combative tone below, what I'm trying to say is, it's not as simple as monetary cost. I'm afraid that's looks like first world thinking. For countries still developing lives are literally at stake right now. Rolling back environmental impact means lower economic growth, poorer infrastructure and therefore people dying in poverty. It's not all bad news on this front. Modi committed India to opening a swath of new coal power stations before coming into office, but has since changed tack with the collapse in the cost of solar energy[1]. Still, this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all. [1]https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521 https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e...
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    > this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Can you elaborate more on this last point? Do you mean to imply that one approach to the problem is to build no new electricity capacity? How will we displaced fossil fuel use for transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mineral processing if not with new electricity generation? Or did you mean to imply the world would be better off if India’s poorest continued to suffer in the dark and cold?
    - simonh 7y ago
baybal2 7y ago
I'm surprised to not to see inertial storage there And by no means is the "duck curve" or storage an impediment for adoption. I will not go as far as identifying it as a "core" issue here.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I wouldn't take offense, it's rare for our personal pet technologies to make it into high level documents. These are just Gates' opinion of the best ones after all. But I would put my money on reflow batteries in the long run if they weren't so far behind, simply the decoupling of storage capacity from power density feels like an engineering perfect storm to me. I was lucky enough that my pet technology made it in =) Why do you think inertial storage might be superior? I've talked to a fair number of people working on it and it sounds totally doable but I'm unclear that it actually costs less per joule stored or why it would. Granted a flywheel costs less per unit mass and compressed air is cheap, but on a capacity and fabrication basis? Maybe. I don't think I'd call it a shoo-in though and wouldn't invest in it myself.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    > Granted a flywheel costs less per unit mass and compressed air is cheap, but on a capacity and fabrication basis? Maybe. I don't think I'd call it a shoo-in though and wouldn't invest in it myself. Its power and energy density is next to nothing in the industry. Fabrication, cost on the market? Even most basic flywheels like one used as industrial UPSes can be used right away for grid storage, and be more or less competitive with their high round-trip efficiency. This just shows that how low a commercial opportunity for energy storage as such is. You need truly monstrous daily variations in energy price to make people put money it it.
    - baybal2 7y ago
      By the way, I'm talking about regular steel flywheel, not carbon fibre ones
jillesvangurp 7y ago
Indeed, it's not cost but investment. There's a return on investment and it's not just getting rid of carbon. IMHO the easiest way to get the world moving to mostly wind + solar is continuing to lower the cost (unsubsidized). Lower cost of energy enables new use cases. People seem to be talking about replacing existing energy suppliers with clean ones. Instead we need to be talking about what it will take to generate 10-100X the amount of energy in a few decades and what that would enable. Cheap clean energy enables a lot of things that are currently too expensive/polluting to consider. Countries that manage this will be able to grow more rapidly economically. China looks like it is well positioned for that. I'm not against nuclear but it will have to come down in price and upfront investment cost for that to have meaningful impact short term. As long as people still dream about maybe being cost competitive with coal/gas one day, the ambitions are simply not high enough. It needs to be vastly cheaper than that. 2-3x would keep it competitive with solar and wind for some decades. IMHO any price comparisons against current prices are in any case effectively obsolete since those are likely trending down for solar and wind for some time to come. If prices drop by another few double digit percentages, a lot of home owners will do the math and put some solar on their roof. Carbon capture schemes only make sense when the combined cost of that and keeping the carbon producing stuff they offset functioning is lower. However, even without carbon capturing a lot of these solutions are already problematic in terms of cost and making them more expensive will only speed up their demise. With coal, that has already happened. Natural gas will last a bit longer. However, when wind and solar bids start undercutting these solutions consistently the same will happen there. There's a real chance that remaining gas plants switch to clean sources of gas (i.e. generated using solar/wind/nuclear) when that gets cheap enough.
holri 7y ago
If we insist on a system with exponential growth the natural outcome will be self destruction, no matter what technology drives this growth.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Why would we settle for the "natural" outcome? Jeff Bezos' dream for Blue Origin is that population and civilization growth can continue in Space, where there's plenty of space and resources.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    I just have a hard time with that. So we make our own planet, a space in the universe we are literally evolved to use, unlivable at some point. The solution is that we'll magically figure out how to make space, an already hostile environment, livable? Honestly, space settlement makes for nice headlines for the new ruling class to pat themselves on the back with, but for the rest of us, the natural outcome of unlimited growth is population crash.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > The solution is that we'll magically figure out how to make space, an already hostile environment, livable? Well, potentially yes, because it would offer us to relieve the pressure on Earth - and the spin-offs from the process of creating space infrastructure and space habitats would be mightily useful for fixing the damage we've already done to Earth. We didn't break Earth out of spite; before technological civilization, life on Earth was shit. We're breaking the planet out of desire to make our lives better, and we might fix Earth out of the same desire - but only if we get the chance to do it in time.
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      Not magically, intelligently. Earth exists in Space and is livable, therefore it is possible. I mean, what else do you want? You don't want the mass death of population crash, nobody has the power to order billions of people to stop wanting things and live in poverty, no one person or group can change government policy of all nations, and we can't keep polluting and increasing energy use at current rates. There's no way back to an ideal perfect before-time. The only way is forward, and the only way forward without mass death is more technology. I hope someone can work out a way to put the polluting energy intensive things away from where we live.
lelima 7y ago
There are around 1 Billion people right now without electricity[1]. For them is already a hostile planet. I wonder if their governments care more about the environment or provide more people with electricity. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-without-electricity-access-falls-below-one-billion https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-wit...
britch 7y ago
I just want to point out that "our children" here is literally us and our actual children. It's not some far future hypothetical human population. If you're under 30, you will probably live to see large swaths of the plant that were previously inhabitable become unlivably hot due to human created carbon emissions. Factor in increased natural disasters, and the effects of a warmer climate on our ability to produce food, this is an incredibly serious problem that will affect you and people you know and love.[0] Now is the time to act and get involved. Look into groups like the CCL[1] or local Green New Deal organizers. Call your congress-person, get involved at the state and local level. Make this a priority. [0] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-... [1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
- jsingleton 7y ago
  Another option for getting involved is: https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ "Technology professionals from many companies — such as Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Lyft and many more — are coming together under the banner of ClimateAction.tech to find ways to accelerate solutions to climate change." There are lots of interesting projects and support in the slack workspace.

by jabl 7y ago

lazyjones 7y ago

> We need to step on the gas Nice metaphor...

travisjungroth 7y ago
Maybe “get the lead out” would be better?
_pmf_ 7y ago
Really nice, because a ramp up in mass production of these things causes a lot of emissions that will take 50+ years to recover from.
Fuzzwah 7y ago
In current Formula 1 parlance; we need to increase our torque demand.

rooam-dev 7y ago

How could be people convinced about importance of this if it doesn't or won't impact them enough? Yes, "think about our children" is good, but in the end people are still selfish and will think that it's not their problem.

mojomark 7y ago
> How could be people convinced about importance of this if it doesn't or won't impact them enough? As engineers, I feel it's our responsibility to make environmentally friendly solutions that are simply more economically viable than the unclean/unsustainable alternative. I'm working on the oceanic shipping industry myself.
xiphias2 7y ago
One thing that might help is that longevity research is going on well. Hopefully in 10-20 years it will produce enough results for the general public to start believing that saving the Earth is not just about their children.
sgift 7y ago
That's one of the most important jobs of a politician. Make the hard decisions and convince people that they are needed, even if they don't see it right now. Politicians who don't do that don't do their job. And yes, that means we are in the West (and probably elsewhere) in a veritable political crisis. Not because we have some nutjobs run around "it's all a myth! we don't need to do anything!" but because politicians don't work anymore against it and instead take the lazy path to votes and just agree with it, even if the long-term consequences will be disastrous for humanity.
rubinelli 7y ago
These initiatives will create a lot of jobs: engineers, administrators, electricians, construction workers. Many of those in areas that were hit hard by manufacturing moving away.
Ma8ee 7y ago
I meet much more people that use “other people won’t care” as an excuse for not doing anything themselves than I meet people who actually don’t care. If we just started doing our parts and didn’t worry so much about other people doing theirs we wouldn’t in this mess.
- m_mueller 7y ago
  or in other words, the tragedy of commons.
  - Ma8ee 7y ago
    No, it's the tragedy of blaming the tragedy of the commons.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Yes, saw recently on HN (and often IRL) "no point recycling when industry ...", and "we'll never best 10% domestic recycling, why bother". In UK councils quote 50% recycling rates. And that's with most supermarkets still producing food in unrecyclable packaging.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    At the risk of injecting extra negativity into the thread: what about the recent revelations that a lot of (if not most) recycling is really shipping the trash to poorer nations to be dumped there?
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      >"councils quote" Yeah ... I've not investigated that yet. But I have seen some of our local recycling facilities and they seem to be operating rather than secretly filling shipping containers. It does trouble me visiting my town's rubbish dump, there is so much usable stuff in the skips, so much waste. Presumably China now refusing other country's trash is shedding new light on these issues. I think we have to fix our entire economic systems in order to solve this, and I don't think that's going to work readily because people will always exploit others for financial/political gain at the expense of the environment. We're going to have to seriously curtail individual freedoms that allow people to make excessive use of resources. We can't do that under our current market-based systems. Take a simple example, fleece fabric is great, cheap, used widely but is a massive source of microplastic pollution - we're going to have to make it expensive, and stop people from throwing it away, and use the income to do proper filtration and recycling. We're going to need to start treating fraud wrt environmental issues as akin to manslaughter - actually put businessmen in jail who are responsible (knowingly, or unknowingly through negligence) for things like shipping recycling abroad and not confirming it is recycled, or lying about car MPGs, or failing to filter effluent, or allowing runoff to poison water sources, .... We probably need something akin to a global one-child policy as well. We can't go on increasing population and just expect resources to stretch. Things are going to break much harder with population rates left as they are. I better stop ... /rant

mrpopo 7y ago

This will cost a lot, and this is not even the hardest step. We use energy for electricity, but also transportation, heating, fertilizer production/agriculture, cattle produces GHG, A/C recycling, and what not. The USA will need to reduce meat consumption, improve public transportation (electric cars if produced at scale will introduce lots of other environmental issues), relocalize industries. They are late to the transition in every domain.

badpun 7y ago
It sounds almost like the disruption necessary to stop global warming is greater than the disruption that would be caused by the global warming.
- marliechiller 7y ago
  not sure youre being sarcastic or not... of course the disruption due global warming will be vastly greater than the disruption caused by trying to prevent it, that much is a given
  - js8 7y ago
    Even if the actual disruption was the same magnitude - if you have control over the disruption, it is much more pleasant one than the one you don't have any control over.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      Is it though? Because if humans have control over it, then you can be sure that humans will fight over it. How would the US tell Russia to pollute less?
      - js8 7y ago
        > How would the US tell Russia to pollute less? Easy. This has actually been done many times during Cold War. You do it yourself, and so well, that their citizens will demand it too. There were many social advances in the West that were imported (usually in a crippled way, but still) to the communist countries (I was born in one). Things like 5-day work week, education improvements, recycling, ecological laws, nuclear proliferation treaties... usually it's very small things, but they do make difference.

gyaniv 7y ago

I think the fact that it isn't cheap shouldn't be that much of an issue (although I know it currently is) because the price we (not even our children) will pay because of climate change would be much higher (in pure economic costs, before we start talking about more moral and environmental costs like animal extinction). But I think the problem is that people care about today a lot more then they care about tomorrow, or next year (and definitely more then their potential future descendants).

simonh 7y ago
> I think the fact that it isn't cheap shouldn't be that much of an issue... EDIT: Apologies for the combative tone below, what I'm trying to say is, it's not as simple as monetary cost. I'm afraid that's looks like first world thinking. For countries still developing lives are literally at stake right now. Rolling back environmental impact means lower economic growth, poorer infrastructure and therefore people dying in poverty. It's not all bad news on this front. Modi committed India to opening a swath of new coal power stations before coming into office, but has since changed tack with the collapse in the cost of solar energy[1]. Still, this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all. [1]https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521 https://www.ft.com/content/b8d24c94-fde7-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e...
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  > this will be new solar capacity and while it's better than more coal it's still environmentally worse than no new energy generation at all. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Can you elaborate more on this last point? Do you mean to imply that one approach to the problem is to build no new electricity capacity? How will we displaced fossil fuel use for transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mineral processing if not with new electricity generation? Or did you mean to imply the world would be better off if India’s poorest continued to suffer in the dark and cold?
  - simonh 7y ago

baybal2 7y ago

I'm surprised to not to see inertial storage there And by no means is the "duck curve" or storage an impediment for adoption. I will not go as far as identifying it as a "core" issue here.

neltnerb 7y ago
I wouldn't take offense, it's rare for our personal pet technologies to make it into high level documents. These are just Gates' opinion of the best ones after all. But I would put my money on reflow batteries in the long run if they weren't so far behind, simply the decoupling of storage capacity from power density feels like an engineering perfect storm to me. I was lucky enough that my pet technology made it in =) Why do you think inertial storage might be superior? I've talked to a fair number of people working on it and it sounds totally doable but I'm unclear that it actually costs less per joule stored or why it would. Granted a flywheel costs less per unit mass and compressed air is cheap, but on a capacity and fabrication basis? Maybe. I don't think I'd call it a shoo-in though and wouldn't invest in it myself.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > Granted a flywheel costs less per unit mass and compressed air is cheap, but on a capacity and fabrication basis? Maybe. I don't think I'd call it a shoo-in though and wouldn't invest in it myself. Its power and energy density is next to nothing in the industry. Fabrication, cost on the market? Even most basic flywheels like one used as industrial UPSes can be used right away for grid storage, and be more or less competitive with their high round-trip efficiency. This just shows that how low a commercial opportunity for energy storage as such is. You need truly monstrous daily variations in energy price to make people put money it it.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    By the way, I'm talking about regular steel flywheel, not carbon fibre ones

jillesvangurp 7y ago

Indeed, it's not cost but investment. There's a return on investment and it's not just getting rid of carbon. IMHO the easiest way to get the world moving to mostly wind + solar is continuing to lower the cost (unsubsidized). Lower cost of energy enables new use cases. People seem to be talking about replacing existing energy suppliers with clean ones. Instead we need to be talking about what it will take to generate 10-100X the amount of energy in a few decades and what that would enable. Cheap clean energy enables a lot of things that are currently too expensive/polluting to consider. Countries that manage this will be able to grow more rapidly economically. China looks like it is well positioned for that. I'm not against nuclear but it will have to come down in price and upfront investment cost for that to have meaningful impact short term. As long as people still dream about maybe being cost competitive with coal/gas one day, the ambitions are simply not high enough. It needs to be vastly cheaper than that. 2-3x would keep it competitive with solar and wind for some decades. IMHO any price comparisons against current prices are in any case effectively obsolete since those are likely trending down for solar and wind for some time to come. If prices drop by another few double digit percentages, a lot of home owners will do the math and put some solar on their roof. Carbon capture schemes only make sense when the combined cost of that and keeping the carbon producing stuff they offset functioning is lower. However, even without carbon capturing a lot of these solutions are already problematic in terms of cost and making them more expensive will only speed up their demise. With coal, that has already happened. Natural gas will last a bit longer. However, when wind and solar bids start undercutting these solutions consistently the same will happen there. There's a real chance that remaining gas plants switch to clean sources of gas (i.e. generated using solar/wind/nuclear) when that gets cheap enough.

holri 7y ago

If we insist on a system with exponential growth the natural outcome will be self destruction, no matter what technology drives this growth.

jodrellblank 7y ago
Why would we settle for the "natural" outcome? Jeff Bezos' dream for Blue Origin is that population and civilization growth can continue in Space, where there's plenty of space and resources.
- Loughla 7y ago
  I just have a hard time with that. So we make our own planet, a space in the universe we are literally evolved to use, unlivable at some point. The solution is that we'll magically figure out how to make space, an already hostile environment, livable? Honestly, space settlement makes for nice headlines for the new ruling class to pat themselves on the back with, but for the rest of us, the natural outcome of unlimited growth is population crash.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The solution is that we'll magically figure out how to make space, an already hostile environment, livable? Well, potentially yes, because it would offer us to relieve the pressure on Earth - and the spin-offs from the process of creating space infrastructure and space habitats would be mightily useful for fixing the damage we've already done to Earth. We didn't break Earth out of spite; before technological civilization, life on Earth was shit. We're breaking the planet out of desire to make our lives better, and we might fix Earth out of the same desire - but only if we get the chance to do it in time.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Not magically, intelligently. Earth exists in Space and is livable, therefore it is possible. I mean, what else do you want? You don't want the mass death of population crash, nobody has the power to order billions of people to stop wanting things and live in poverty, no one person or group can change government policy of all nations, and we can't keep polluting and increasing energy use at current rates. There's no way back to an ideal perfect before-time. The only way is forward, and the only way forward without mass death is more technology. I hope someone can work out a way to put the polluting energy intensive things away from where we live.

lelima 7y ago

There are around 1 Billion people right now without electricity[1]. For them is already a hostile planet. I wonder if their governments care more about the environment or provide more people with electricity. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-without-electricity-access-falls-below-one-billion https://ourworldindata.org/number-of-people-in-the-world-wit...

britch 7y ago

I just want to point out that "our children" here is literally us and our actual children. It's not some far future hypothetical human population. If you're under 30, you will probably live to see large swaths of the plant that were previously inhabitable become unlivably hot due to human created carbon emissions. Factor in increased natural disasters, and the effects of a warmer climate on our ability to produce food, this is an incredibly serious problem that will affect you and people you know and love.[0] Now is the time to act and get involved. Look into groups like the CCL[1] or local Green New Deal organizers. Call your congress-person, get involved at the state and local level. Make this a priority. [0] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-... [1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

jsingleton 7y ago
Another option for getting involved is: https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ "Technology professionals from many companies — such as Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Etsy, Github, SoundCloud, Lyft and many more — are coming together under the banner of ClimateAction.tech to find ways to accelerate solutions to climate change." There are lots of interesting projects and support in the slack workspace.