Don't write your billion-user apps in Python, use a more efficient language like Rust or Go. Don't make 10MB webpages where 100kb would also suffice.
But I think useful change can only be made using political means. Write your representatives and tell them how you feel. Vote for politicians who want to change things.
I like technical solutions because they're undemocratic - they can step around conflicting short-term agendas and force change by exploiting market / people's preferences. In the day and age when climate is at best a very distant concern for most people, political solutions seem like a hard work for little and uncertain effect.
I wish I could be proven wrong on that though. Are there any low-hanging, high-impact fruits one could focus on? Maybe one should refocus on local politics? It seems much less messy and corrupt than national-scale politics.
(Also, voting is really a low-hanging fruit, so the best response here would probably be "why not both?".)
My worries about engaging directly in politics - becoming a politician - is that I see it as a very inefficient process, in which you'll have to give away most of your morality (and possibly interest in the original problem) before you get in a position to effect big changes.
Animal agriculture is comparable to all transit, while heating/cooling/electricity is heavily at the top.
If I were profiling I'd optimize the highest bottleneck first.
Edit: I was thinking about lights, I don't know far away sensors maybe? Not helpful if the lights are always being used (lots of cars).
Liquid salt thorium reactor haha
- proximity detector is another potential point of failure; including it raises both installation and maintenance costs
- when you're walking at night, you'd like to see further than the distance between two lampposts; this would require the proximity sensor to trigger several lamp posts arond you (totally doable, I guess, but again extra installation and maintenance costs for having the lamps wired together in the right way)
- in the past, streetlights were using sodium-vapor lamps, which have a significant warmup time
- now lamps are switching to LEDs so warmup time is not a concern, but I wonder how constantly turning them on/off impacts their longevity
Wearing my optimist hat, I think city planners are comparing costs of the issues above with potential savings. But pessimist in me tells me that it's mostly because electricity is cheap and incentives to optimize streetlights aren't strong.
It is pretty crazy how we just expect electricity to work, one day when everything is destroyed and we're back to the stone ages how long would it take to get back to where we are now I wonder haha. An offline version of wikipedia on how to turn ore into a generator. Oh well I guess we'll figure it out hopefully.
A long time. Technology level isn't just about know-how. You'd also need a global supply chain ensuring access to all the raw materials, subcomponents, sub-subcomponemts, etc. You need a civilized society and the rule of law so that people can specialize and still put food on the table.
> An offline version of wikipedia on how to turn ore into a generator.
That's the easy part. Some people are already working on it.