8 ms·

What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)

42 points by manx 5y ago

x0054 5y ago
Stop using inefficient server side languages in the name of “developer efficiently”? That could cut some CO2. AWS doesn’t run on magic dust.
- heterodoxxed 5y ago
  The market doesn't reward those who optimize their code. Fastest-to-market and slow beats second-to-market and optimized every day of the week.
  - seb1204 5y ago
    There is an awareness of power consumption of data centres. Why not start marketing code to power consumption metrics? What about fastest-to-market and above average code base = marketing argument? Or even scientific paper? I think here is is also important to look at smaller companies and not only FAAG.
  - 8note 5y ago
    The market rewards destroying the environment, but that doesn't make it a good thing to do
    - heterodoxxed 5y ago
      Of course not, it's a terrible thing.
- js8 5y ago
  Also, avoid cryptocurrencies, build simpler web pages, prefer offline (desktop/mobile) to online (web/cloud) solutions, use documentation instead of googling, prefer centralized to distributed systems if possible. All these save energy.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
R&D for marine layer cloud brightening— perhaps using engines to loft salt water behind containerships could efficiently seed low clouds at a massive scale.
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse gases in 2019. Any version of a "green new deal" changes nothing globally until China and several other major polluting nations join the fight.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 emissions to those nations instead? If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes? Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user. Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
  - quicklime 5y ago
    Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed emissions back to household consumption: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environmental_Impact_Assessment_of_Household_Consumption https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the area, the more the impact." I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer. If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."
thysultan 5y ago
Buy seeds, and seal them with little sprinkles of wisdom like fortune cookies in places that would be accessible in the aftermath, the new inheritors of the earth will regard you as a prophet or god when they re-learn the ancient art of farming.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Unfortunately, outside some particular environmental conditions that are far from trivial to reproduce most places, seeds don't last indefinitely. The gemination rate tends to drop off fairly rapidly as a factor of years. They're designed to survive from late summer to spring, not years or the decades that would be needed for that sort of thing. Now, there's a ton you can do with seeds - work on optimizing various heirloom varieties of plants to your local climate (as opposed to the "one seed for all places, apply energy to the field until they behave!" approach that is widely used today), and trying to keep some genetic diversity in the seeds you use, but I don't think "random seed capsules" are likely to work over the likely timeframes involved.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  I think it's a bit fanciful to believe that post-apocalyptic people would have any interest in studying or learning from the past. Archeology is a very recent invention. Mostly, people just looted whatever old things they found for their immediate use or destroyed them because they didn't matter. The world will be awash in old crap by then too or if it isn't, the time capsules you leave will be just as gone as everything else.
Syonyk 5y ago
Buy a Raspberry Pi 4. Use it once a week as your main computer. I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by the never ending rush towards more and more computationally complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the power. It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications. I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking at you). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work. I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than-reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish - on a blogging platform. It's quite literally as far from mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side. Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that talk to a bunch of cloud servers"). But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you really need to be reconsidering your approach to the problem. ======== Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned about climate change, or do you just look like any other high income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the world? I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually solve problems, though it's quite profitable for those selling the "green" solutions. Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone.
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436237 - Dec 2020 (47 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043 - May 2020 (32 comments) What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20520183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20520183 - July 2019 (12 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106 - Feb 2019 (46 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675 - March 2018 (10 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 - Nov 2015 (289 comments)
- simsla 5y ago
  Dang, just wanted to say thank you for all you're doing for the HN discussion boards. Hope this doesn't break the rules for constructive responses. :-)
seb1204 5y ago
He can do what everyone can do. Live a more conscious life, consume less, buy high quality consumer products that last longer, re-use reduce recycle, talk about it, advocate better choices. Consume greenery/renewable energy, take public transportation, engaged in politics.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > re-use reduce recycle I believe the ideal order is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot." Refuse: Just say no to stuff. You don't have to worry about dealing with the waste from things that you don't take in the first place. This can be taken to not-helpful extremes, but in general, this is the best option. It's always depressing to see just how much trash (of the "actual trash" variety) one of our very rare take-out meals produces. If we all (4 of us) have something from a drivethrough, the amount of trash generated by that one meal is very close to a week's worth of kitchen trash for us with other meals. The paper is often too greasy to recycle, waxed paper cups are good for firestarters but little else, etc. Reduce: All other things being equal, "less crap to dispose of" beats "more." I'll point to standard blister packaging as the sort of thing one ought avoid, if at all possible. Not only is it a very real health hazard during the opening process, it's almost entirely impossible to do anything with it after the fact. This is where bringing your own bags to the grocery store fit in, or for things like loose vegetables and such... just don't use a bag! You get some weird looks in the checkout lane when you dump half a dozen onions on the conveyer, but I remove the outer skins anyway when I work on them, and I don't have a plastic bag to deal with as a result. Reuse: Anyone with small children (and lacking weird quirks about "You're playing with a box!") is probably an expert at this. I cannot tell you how many times a box something came in has turned into a good play toy for a week or two. Random kitchen boxes can be taped up and turned into blocks, corrugated cardboard is just awesome for everything, waste paper from address labels or such is useful for drawing, etc. Lots of options here. I've considered getting a setup to smash glass up and embed it in concrete I pour for various things, though I'm not sure this really gains me an awful lot in terms of mass. Recycle: This is the standard first response, and depressingly often, "Recycle" actually translates to, "Oh, yeah, totally buy this thing, it can be recycled!" It's just an excuse to consume more. If you want to be quite upset by this, look at the state of plastic recycling in developed nations. It tends to consist heavily of "We loaded it into a shipping container, sent it to a third world country, and counted it as recycled, we don't care what they actually do with it." "What they actually do with it," often enough, is open burning, or just letting it wander down the river into the ocean. If you're concerned about the environment (as opposed to purely carbon emissions and GHGs), plastics should be a huge, huge problem. Unfortunately, literally everything comes in them. Rot: Compost. If it's organic, or nearly so, compost it. Hot piles work best.
carapace 5y ago
Use less energy. Here's Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 ) We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.
GoodJokes 5y ago
adapt to it. Don’t enable others to exacerbate it.
anonporridge 5y ago
The best thing everyone can do is have fewer children. This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.
- leucineleprec0n 5y ago
  Just the opposite. Arguably anyone reading these comments - yes, you — ought to have a greater number of children. A world of fecund engineers, executives, mathmeticians and what have you is a world vastly more equipped to deal with climate change than the counterfactual without them.
  - warlog 5y ago
    How's that working for humans so far?
    - leucineleprec0n 5y ago
      Why don't you come back to me when fertility rates rise.
  - valbaca 5y ago
    Careers aren't genetic
    - leucineleprec0n 5y ago
      Right, that's a cute way of being obtuse. The antecedents to successful careers are, to a degree. The generally-applicable cognitive skillset is the point.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Well, if you're getting into things nobody wants to talk about, how about have fewer non-contributing or low-value children? I suspect that most of the people in the world are deadweight who pollute just to exist while a minority actually make things happen. It's hard to know exactly who will be who but we can use some heuristics. Any thoughts on my enhancement of your idea or are you afraid of talking about uncomfortable elephants in rooms?
tito 5y ago
Hackers can join (or start) an air mining company working on how to pull carbon from the air economically: https://airminers.org/ https://airminers.org/
soroushjp 5y ago
If you're looking for ways to contribute positively to the fight against climate change, check out relevant job boards like https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs (no affiliation). I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote software engineers as well. * 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-recommendations/ https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-...
d_silin 5y ago
Understand that you can't solve society-wide issues with technology alone.
swader999 5y ago
Don't worry about it. Sea level is rising 1-3 mm a year, temp has only increased .04 C per year the last thirty. We can easily adapt.
- aaaxyz 5y ago
  I'm glad the climate is simple enough that we can approximate it as a simple linear system
  - swader999 5y ago
    I'm just saying that what we've seen so far isn't out of normal oscillation over years and decades. And you are right, climate is too complex. Yet we put a lot of faith and policy into the models that can't even be back tested without falling hard.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robomartin 5y ago
By a "technologist" I assume this means someone with a reasonable level of study of science. If that's the case, you need to start pushing hard to become a voice for reason. What's going on with climate change is truly disgusting. It's a political football that, at least in the US, both political extremes use to gather an audience. Deniers are demented. And zealots are just as crazy. "The fight against climate change" is a commonly used phrase. And, yes, this is crazy. Please, "technologists", engage your brain and do some math. Please explain how it is that we can "fight" planetary scale effects that require 50K to 100K years for a meaningful change by doing any of the things we are being told to do. First you have to understand the baseline. What is the baseline? How long would it take for a 100 ppm reduction in CO2 if humanity did not exist? All of our technology and all of us gone. Poof. How long? We know this with great accuracy. The answer is a range between 50K and 100K years. 50K and 100K years. How do we know this with such certainty? Ice core atmospheric samples going back 800K years. This is a highly accurate and reliable dataset of what the planet was doing when we were not mucking with it. Where do you find such data? Here: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html All you have to do is apply very basic analysis to determine the slopes of the up/down cycles to reach a very simple conclusion: We cannot do a thing about climate change. Why? Because if we left the planet entirely it would take 100K years for CO2 concentration to come down by 100 ppm. What do you think is going to happen if we do anything LESS than leave the planet? The answer is very simple: Nothing. Well, not nothing. Atmospheric CO2 will not drop. It might stabilize at some higher level at some point in the future. Drop? No way in hell. Use less energy you say? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? Leaving the planet puts us on a slope of -100 ppm in 100K years. Using less energy? It won't even bend the curve. Drive electric cars? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Stop using oil and its derivative products? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Besides, this is impossible. I am not trying to be a defeatist here. When the data tells you everyone is missing the true conclusion by a light year, all you can do is your best to make people think. If you think you can "fight" climate change, stop, study the data I provided a link to, do some math (YOU HAVE TO DO SOME MATH TO UNDERSTAND THIS) and then realize we are mercilessly lying to ourselves. As for climate change deniers: The above doesn't mean you are right. In fact, you are horribly wrong. Once again, look at the data. Climate change is very real. And yes, we made it worse. So, what can you do as a "technologist"? Understand the truth and force a shift in the conversation towards what we have to do in order to deal with the reality of the matter rather than some fantasy being used for political and financial gain. I have been asking people from varied disciplines to refute my conclusion (scientifically, not with "feelings", blind political alignment or religion) --because I WANT to be wrong. In the decade or so since reaching this conclusion nobody has offered any argument against the baseline of the ice core sample data and the conclusion it represents. The best paper I found so far that hints at a "we can't do a thing about it" conclusion is this one: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... If you are a "technologist" this is definitely worth reading.
seltzered_ 5y ago
1. One thing to do is to reframe from not just climate change to thinking in terms of planetary boundaries. The stockholm resilience center goes into this: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... . There's even a netflix documentary out now called 'Breaking Boundaries' hosted by David Attenborough and all. I stress this because too many people think just in terms of climate and not also recognize biodiversity collapse, biogeochemical flows, etc. There may be opportunities in thinking about regions more from this standpoint too, a la Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. 2. Realize there are social practices to help deal with some of these problems, not necessarily just technological fixes. Things like possibly working at a neighborhood scale to have more local circular flows, cohousing, etc. 3. Have some concern that a route of having a 'climate' plan may accidentally end up with more ghg emissions or miss the mark on environmental/social issues. Some things I've been thinking about lately have been the results of south korea's climate plan ( https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 ) and an argument that the green new deal is a moral hazard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc ) 4. Think about niche construction, and what caused anthropogenic climate change - getting into the economic & social factors. 5. Consider that it's possible to do ecosystem restoration, as evangelized by groups like https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org , https://ecosystemguild.org https://ecosystemguild.org , etc. There's also things under the umbrella of 'assisted migration' as climactic shifts happen. 6. Some of the more basic things like water might be of more interest than energy depending on where you are. There's all sorts of things to be talked about in terms of 'decentralizing water'. Again, goes in hand with understanding ecosystems. While super inspirational, I've actually found myself rethinking what worrydream wrote in this piece. It's too focused on just climate - feeling a bit too inspired by Saul Griffith (who with the otherlab team's creating amazing things like http://energyliteracy.com http://energyliteracy.com ). Some like Joe Brewer have already touched on all this with 'The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth' - https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-regenerating-earth/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-... (bias: I know the author, google the book), works from the Post-Carbon Institute, etc.
rhacker 5y ago
Keep mining bitcoin and donate the profits to research reducing the electricity cost of proof of work. /sarc
leucineleprec0n 5y ago
Stop using X86 chips. I kid, but encouraging more efficient server architecture is surely meaningfully beneficial and will only prove moreso in the near future. Also: don't buy coins.
antonzabirko 5y ago
Nothing, you cannot do anything to compete with the gargantuan mount of emissions corporate makes.
warlog 5y ago
Please stop using per capita. The system will persist or collapse based on absolute amounts of CO2, pollution, etc. Per capita is not helpful except to deflect blame. It's a political tool rather than a useful tool.

42 points by manx 5y ago

Stop using inefficient server side languages in the name of “developer efficiently”? That could cut some CO2. AWS doesn’t run on magic dust.

heterodoxxed 5y ago
The market doesn't reward those who optimize their code. Fastest-to-market and slow beats second-to-market and optimized every day of the week.
- seb1204 5y ago
  There is an awareness of power consumption of data centres. Why not start marketing code to power consumption metrics? What about fastest-to-market and above average code base = marketing argument? Or even scientific paper? I think here is is also important to look at smaller companies and not only FAAG.
- 8note 5y ago
  The market rewards destroying the environment, but that doesn't make it a good thing to do
  - heterodoxxed 5y ago
    Of course not, it's a terrible thing.
js8 5y ago
Also, avoid cryptocurrencies, build simpler web pages, prefer offline (desktop/mobile) to online (web/cloud) solutions, use documentation instead of googling, prefer centralized to distributed systems if possible. All these save energy.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

R&D for marine layer cloud brightening— perhaps using engines to loft salt water behind containerships could efficiently seed low clouds at a massive scale.

howmayiannoyyou 5y ago

Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse gases in 2019. Any version of a "green new deal" changes nothing globally until China and several other major polluting nations join the fight.

Syonyk 5y ago
How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 emissions to those nations instead? If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking purposes? Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in China to serve demand in a totally different country with a different end user. Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to another country (with far worse environmental standards) doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game.
- quicklime 5y ago
  Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed emissions back to household consumption: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environmental_Impact_Assessment_of_Household_Consumption https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme...
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the area, the more the impact." I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about how important stopping climate change is, as long as someone else does it. That the most anyone could be expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2/4 years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but don't actually care that much" sort of answer. If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge houses."

thysultan 5y ago

Buy seeds, and seal them with little sprinkles of wisdom like fortune cookies in places that would be accessible in the aftermath, the new inheritors of the earth will regard you as a prophet or god when they re-learn the ancient art of farming.

Syonyk 5y ago
Unfortunately, outside some particular environmental conditions that are far from trivial to reproduce most places, seeds don't last indefinitely. The gemination rate tends to drop off fairly rapidly as a factor of years. They're designed to survive from late summer to spring, not years or the decades that would be needed for that sort of thing. Now, there's a ton you can do with seeds - work on optimizing various heirloom varieties of plants to your local climate (as opposed to the "one seed for all places, apply energy to the field until they behave!" approach that is widely used today), and trying to keep some genetic diversity in the seeds you use, but I don't think "random seed capsules" are likely to work over the likely timeframes involved.
exporectomy 5y ago
I think it's a bit fanciful to believe that post-apocalyptic people would have any interest in studying or learning from the past. Archeology is a very recent invention. Mostly, people just looted whatever old things they found for their immediate use or destroyed them because they didn't matter. The world will be awash in old crap by then too or if it isn't, the time capsules you leave will be just as gone as everything else.

Syonyk 5y ago

Buy a Raspberry Pi 4. Use it once a week as your main computer. I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by the never ending rush towards more and more computationally complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the power. It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications. I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking at you). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work. I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than-reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish - on a blogging platform. It's quite literally as far from mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side. Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that talk to a bunch of cloud servers"). But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you really need to be reconsidering your approach to the problem. ======== Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned about climate change, or do you just look like any other high income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the world? I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually solve problems, though it's quite profitable for those selling the "green" solutions. Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone.

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436237 - Dec 2020 (47 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043 - May 2020 (32 comments) What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20520183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20520183 - July 2019 (12 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106 - Feb 2019 (46 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675 - March 2018 (10 comments) What can a technologist do about climate change? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 - Nov 2015 (289 comments)

simsla 5y ago
Dang, just wanted to say thank you for all you're doing for the HN discussion boards. Hope this doesn't break the rules for constructive responses. :-)

seb1204 5y ago

He can do what everyone can do. Live a more conscious life, consume less, buy high quality consumer products that last longer, re-use reduce recycle, talk about it, advocate better choices. Consume greenery/renewable energy, take public transportation, engaged in politics.

Syonyk 5y ago
> re-use reduce recycle I believe the ideal order is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot." Refuse: Just say no to stuff. You don't have to worry about dealing with the waste from things that you don't take in the first place. This can be taken to not-helpful extremes, but in general, this is the best option. It's always depressing to see just how much trash (of the "actual trash" variety) one of our very rare take-out meals produces. If we all (4 of us) have something from a drivethrough, the amount of trash generated by that one meal is very close to a week's worth of kitchen trash for us with other meals. The paper is often too greasy to recycle, waxed paper cups are good for firestarters but little else, etc. Reduce: All other things being equal, "less crap to dispose of" beats "more." I'll point to standard blister packaging as the sort of thing one ought avoid, if at all possible. Not only is it a very real health hazard during the opening process, it's almost entirely impossible to do anything with it after the fact. This is where bringing your own bags to the grocery store fit in, or for things like loose vegetables and such... just don't use a bag! You get some weird looks in the checkout lane when you dump half a dozen onions on the conveyer, but I remove the outer skins anyway when I work on them, and I don't have a plastic bag to deal with as a result. Reuse: Anyone with small children (and lacking weird quirks about "You're playing with a box!") is probably an expert at this. I cannot tell you how many times a box something came in has turned into a good play toy for a week or two. Random kitchen boxes can be taped up and turned into blocks, corrugated cardboard is just awesome for everything, waste paper from address labels or such is useful for drawing, etc. Lots of options here. I've considered getting a setup to smash glass up and embed it in concrete I pour for various things, though I'm not sure this really gains me an awful lot in terms of mass. Recycle: This is the standard first response, and depressingly often, "Recycle" actually translates to, "Oh, yeah, totally buy this thing, it can be recycled!" It's just an excuse to consume more. If you want to be quite upset by this, look at the state of plastic recycling in developed nations. It tends to consist heavily of "We loaded it into a shipping container, sent it to a third world country, and counted it as recycled, we don't care what they actually do with it." "What they actually do with it," often enough, is open burning, or just letting it wander down the river into the ocean. If you're concerned about the environment (as opposed to purely carbon emissions and GHGs), plastics should be a huge, huge problem. Unfortunately, literally everything comes in them. Rot: Compost. If it's organic, or nearly so, compost it. Hot piles work best.

carapace 5y ago

Use less energy. Here's Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 ) We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.

GoodJokes 5y ago

adapt to it. Don’t enable others to exacerbate it.

anonporridge 5y ago

The best thing everyone can do is have fewer children. This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.

leucineleprec0n 5y ago
Just the opposite. Arguably anyone reading these comments - yes, you — ought to have a greater number of children. A world of fecund engineers, executives, mathmeticians and what have you is a world vastly more equipped to deal with climate change than the counterfactual without them.
- warlog 5y ago
  How's that working for humans so far?
  - leucineleprec0n 5y ago
    Why don't you come back to me when fertility rates rise.
- valbaca 5y ago
  Careers aren't genetic
  - leucineleprec0n 5y ago
    Right, that's a cute way of being obtuse. The antecedents to successful careers are, to a degree. The generally-applicable cognitive skillset is the point.
exporectomy 5y ago
Well, if you're getting into things nobody wants to talk about, how about have fewer non-contributing or low-value children? I suspect that most of the people in the world are deadweight who pollute just to exist while a minority actually make things happen. It's hard to know exactly who will be who but we can use some heuristics. Any thoughts on my enhancement of your idea or are you afraid of talking about uncomfortable elephants in rooms?

tito 5y ago

Hackers can join (or start) an air mining company working on how to pull carbon from the air economically: https://airminers.org/ https://airminers.org/

soroushjp 5y ago

If you're looking for ways to contribute positively to the fight against climate change, check out relevant job boards like https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs (no affiliation). I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote software engineers as well. * 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-recommendations/ https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-...

d_silin 5y ago

Understand that you can't solve society-wide issues with technology alone.

swader999 5y ago

Don't worry about it. Sea level is rising 1-3 mm a year, temp has only increased .04 C per year the last thirty. We can easily adapt.

aaaxyz 5y ago
I'm glad the climate is simple enough that we can approximate it as a simple linear system
- swader999 5y ago
  I'm just saying that what we've seen so far isn't out of normal oscillation over years and decades. And you are right, climate is too complex. Yet we put a lot of faith and policy into the models that can't even be back tested without falling hard.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 5y ago

By a "technologist" I assume this means someone with a reasonable level of study of science. If that's the case, you need to start pushing hard to become a voice for reason. What's going on with climate change is truly disgusting. It's a political football that, at least in the US, both political extremes use to gather an audience. Deniers are demented. And zealots are just as crazy. "The fight against climate change" is a commonly used phrase. And, yes, this is crazy. Please, "technologists", engage your brain and do some math. Please explain how it is that we can "fight" planetary scale effects that require 50K to 100K years for a meaningful change by doing any of the things we are being told to do. First you have to understand the baseline. What is the baseline? How long would it take for a 100 ppm reduction in CO2 if humanity did not exist? All of our technology and all of us gone. Poof. How long? We know this with great accuracy. The answer is a range between 50K and 100K years. 50K and 100K years. How do we know this with such certainty? Ice core atmospheric samples going back 800K years. This is a highly accurate and reliable dataset of what the planet was doing when we were not mucking with it. Where do you find such data? Here: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html All you have to do is apply very basic analysis to determine the slopes of the up/down cycles to reach a very simple conclusion: We cannot do a thing about climate change. Why? Because if we left the planet entirely it would take 100K years for CO2 concentration to come down by 100 ppm. What do you think is going to happen if we do anything LESS than leave the planet? The answer is very simple: Nothing. Well, not nothing. Atmospheric CO2 will not drop. It might stabilize at some higher level at some point in the future. Drop? No way in hell. Use less energy you say? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? Leaving the planet puts us on a slope of -100 ppm in 100K years. Using less energy? It won't even bend the curve. Drive electric cars? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Stop using oil and its derivative products? How is that BETTER than leaving the planet? It isn't. It won't do a thing. Besides, this is impossible. I am not trying to be a defeatist here. When the data tells you everyone is missing the true conclusion by a light year, all you can do is your best to make people think. If you think you can "fight" climate change, stop, study the data I provided a link to, do some math (YOU HAVE TO DO SOME MATH TO UNDERSTAND THIS) and then realize we are mercilessly lying to ourselves. As for climate change deniers: The above doesn't mean you are right. In fact, you are horribly wrong. Once again, look at the data. Climate change is very real. And yes, we made it worse. So, what can you do as a "technologist"? Understand the truth and force a shift in the conversation towards what we have to do in order to deal with the reality of the matter rather than some fantasy being used for political and financial gain. I have been asking people from varied disciplines to refute my conclusion (scientifically, not with "feelings", blind political alignment or religion) --because I WANT to be wrong. In the decade or so since reaching this conclusion nobody has offered any argument against the baseline of the ice core sample data and the conclusion it represents. The best paper I found so far that hints at a "we can't do a thing about it" conclusion is this one: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... If you are a "technologist" this is definitely worth reading.

seltzered_ 5y ago

1. One thing to do is to reframe from not just climate change to thinking in terms of planetary boundaries. The stockholm resilience center goes into this: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... . There's even a netflix documentary out now called 'Breaking Boundaries' hosted by David Attenborough and all. I stress this because too many people think just in terms of climate and not also recognize biodiversity collapse, biogeochemical flows, etc. There may be opportunities in thinking about regions more from this standpoint too, a la Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics. 2. Realize there are social practices to help deal with some of these problems, not necessarily just technological fixes. Things like possibly working at a neighborhood scale to have more local circular flows, cohousing, etc. 3. Have some concern that a route of having a 'climate' plan may accidentally end up with more ghg emissions or miss the mark on environmental/social issues. Some things I've been thinking about lately have been the results of south korea's climate plan ( https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 https://youtu.be/x0ckvo2Z5BU?t=4 ) and an argument that the green new deal is a moral hazard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSae5F__yQc ) 4. Think about niche construction, and what caused anthropogenic climate change - getting into the economic & social factors. 5. Consider that it's possible to do ecosystem restoration, as evangelized by groups like https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org https://ecosystemrestorationcamps.org , https://ecosystemguild.org https://ecosystemguild.org , etc. There's also things under the umbrella of 'assisted migration' as climactic shifts happen. 6. Some of the more basic things like water might be of more interest than energy depending on where you are. There's all sorts of things to be talked about in terms of 'decentralizing water'. Again, goes in hand with understanding ecosystems. While super inspirational, I've actually found myself rethinking what worrydream wrote in this piece. It's too focused on just climate - feeling a bit too inspired by Saul Griffith (who with the otherlab team's creating amazing things like http://energyliteracy.com http://energyliteracy.com ). Some like Joe Brewer have already touched on all this with 'The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth' - https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-regenerating-earth/ https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-design-pathway-for-... (bias: I know the author, google the book), works from the Post-Carbon Institute, etc.

rhacker 5y ago

Keep mining bitcoin and donate the profits to research reducing the electricity cost of proof of work. /sarc

leucineleprec0n 5y ago

Stop using X86 chips. I kid, but encouraging more efficient server architecture is surely meaningfully beneficial and will only prove moreso in the near future. Also: don't buy coins.

antonzabirko 5y ago

Nothing, you cannot do anything to compete with the gargantuan mount of emissions corporate makes.

warlog 5y ago

Please stop using per capita. The system will persist or collapse based on absolute amounts of CO2, pollution, etc. Per capita is not helpful except to deflect blame. It's a political tool rather than a useful tool.