Ask HN: I'm just a programmer worried about climate change, how can I help? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm just a programmer worried about climate change, how can I help?

114 pointsy3k94 comments

Hello everyone.

Since I was a teenager I've been worried about climate change, this led me to reduce my CO2 emissions, consumerism, and waste as much as possible; I do the best I can to not use my car, plastic bags, straws or bottles, re-use water and many other actions that I think can help.

However, every couple months I still read a new article stating that we are even closer than we thought to the point of no-return, even a few say we are already past it.

As a father I'm really worried about my children's future, and cannot avoid feeling overwhelmed by the fact that even if I do my best I just cannot fight against huge corporations that does not want to do the best they can to help climate change.

A couple days ago I read this http://carbon.ycombinator.com/ in HN's frontpage and got amazed about such creative and smart solutions, and cannot stop wondering what can I do to proactively help any of those, or any other idea, become true and help to repair the damage.

Sadly I'm just a Software Engineer and I feel that I cannot help as, for example, a Genetic Engineer to make those ideas become true. I'm not a genius, nor a millionaire philanthropist, neither a clever startup founder.

Is there anything I, a normal person, can do to actually help?

Thank you for reading me.

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Bret Victor thinks so, and outlines ways individual technologists can improve the situation, by helping others understand it and what needs to be built: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

This is an amazing resource, I didn't know about it.

Thank you for sharing it, I'm reading it already.

Thanks for this!

Thank you for this link. It should be on the first page of HN everyday.

Although it has become fashionable to decry making personal changes as "irrelevant" and "ineffective" with the lie that since everyone isn't doing it, there's not point in anyone doing it, making changes to how you and your family live is still very important.

Things you can do:

1. Find an energy provider who sells green energy - here in Germany, it's possible (and common) to buy 100% green energy, but I don't know what it's like where you are. Even if it costs more, get the green energy - it's a big change you can make that won't affect your lifestyle one bit.

2. Reduce the amount of red meat you eat. The environmental costs of this are well known. Give it up if you can, but if not, at least reduce it.

3. See if you can fly less. If you fly intercontinenally, then the CO2 from that will dwarf almost anything else you do. Again, this is something that's easy to say, but it's something that's very effective.

Those are the changes you can make in your personal life. There are plenty of other good suggestions here as to how to make systemic changes.

Was going to mention meat. If you take public transportation for your job and only drive occasionally (let's say to visit family, friends, and shop) it easily dwarfs any gas you use. Like 2-4x the pollution you cause via gas.

> it has become fashionable to decry making personal changes as "irrelevant" and "ineffective" with the lie that since everyone isn't doing it, there's not point in anyone doing it

I think it's very short-sighted for people to say that. While there may be no direct effects of certain personal changes, there are still indirect results.

Such change may make me more self-conscious about our environment. If I made a hundred irrelevant small changes, then perhaps it'll be more likely for me to even realize the need for a big change, when it comes.

Same way, other people who see my small changes might be more likely to even start thinking about our environmental impact.

I still have a problem with this. It's similar to voting. In my opinion, one vote / one person changing his habits is not going to do a meaningful difference.

I mean, maybe if you not only change your habits but become vocal about it - encouraging your friends to follow suit, you can make some difference. It needs to become fashionable to be green, and people need to be ostracized for emitting C02.

But this problem is very hard to solve. There is a problem in economics called Tragedy of the commons, and there was one famous woman economist Eleonor Ostrom that proved that people can overcome most of these problems that arise locally with cooperation without government. But for global warming, I think the only way to solve it is governments forcing citizens to change their behaviors.

David Mackay (Physicist and author of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html):

'Have no illusions. To achieve our goal of getting off fossil fuels, these reductions in demand and increases in supply must be big. Don’t be distracted by the myth that “every little helps.” If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What’s required are big changes in demand and in supply.'

He was amazing - probably one of the greatest British living scientists before his untimely death.

I read his book on Sustainable Energy in my Physics degree and later his book on Information Theory when studying Machine Learning. Truly impressive to have contributed to so many different fields.

But yeah - after reading his book I came to the conclusion that the greenest thing we can do is to support Nuclear Power.

> Is there anything I, a normal person, can do to actually help?

Absolutely. I work in cleantech, and you should, too! Solar and wind are economical, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up. That means tons and tons of problem solving, which means great engineering jobs!

If you think about it, the switch to renewables means we need to deal with situations where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, yet still keep the lights on. That means you have to build in a ton of storage and load control, which means good communication and analysis, which means software! Something like half of the impact of the energy transition will be done through software optimizing the deployment and operation of clean energy assets.

Anyway, please check out my previous comments on recommendations when looking for climate impact work. Overall, the biggest impact per unit time spent is working as a regulator[1]. Next is working at a cleantech company[2].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/8l5yhw/whats_the_be...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127154

> Absolutely. I work in cleantech, and you should, too! Solar and wind are economical, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up. That means tons and tons of problem solving, which means great engineering jobs!

Economical right. But can it replace nuclear power plants ? Because we need a LOT of power (datacenter, electric cars ?).

Does it have to replace them entirely in order to be worthwhile?

This is more like what I meant.

I follow most, if not every, advise about lifestyle, but I also belive that is not enough.

My current work consist in helping a company get more money, and while there's nothing wrong with that I would certainly preffer to work on something that along making profit helps fight climate change.

Will read both links given, thank you.

Great! Mind if I ask you to email me your resume? My email is in my HN profile.

Get involved in grassroots politics, e.g. https://350.org/

Personal action (such as reducing your own CO2 emissions) is good but not enough. Collective action to put pressure on governments to regulate CO2 emissions is what's needed.

We already have the tech to reduce emissions to safe levels. What we lack is the political will to use it.

TechForCampaigns.com is also great.

If you're a typical tech employee/well-to-do person - travel less. Air travel is likely the single largest component of your carbon footprint, and with high quality communication tools and good management, travel for work is not as important. (Plus I think if folks introspected they'd admit fun is a significant motivation for their work trips.)

I already do that, I travel only once every 2 years or so. I'd be able to do it way more frequently, but preffer not to.

Truth. And commuting. +1 for remote work.

Here's one factor to consider, which might be controversial to some...

You can use your skills to earn as much money as you can, so you can purchase clean energy/goods, and invest in clean-tech assets.

The reason carbon emissions are still such a problem is that carbon-emitting fuels are still generally the cheapest.

Clean-tech purchases like domestic solar panels and electric cars are still quite costly, because they're still in the immature stages of development and market growth.

The way to drive down the prices of these kinds of items is to increase demand, which you can help to do by purchasing them.

The more people do this, the cheaper they'll become, and then the more affordable they'll be for less wealthy people.

This is controversial as people tend to equate commerce with environmental harm. There is some truth in this, but it's only a partial truth: environmental harm comes from commerce that is powered by dirty fuels (or that has other harmful externalities).

By increasing our commercial activity that has little or no negative environmental impact, then re-investing the gains in goods that have a further positive environmental impact, we can each make a solid contribution to undoing the damage.

Very well written, additional ideas:

* don't buy new phone every year - if it's not cheapest model then nowadays there is almost no difference between 1-2y old phones and most of them can easily last 3,4 or 5 years.

* repair devices instead of throwing away and buying new ones,I you must buy repairable high quality devices

* this might be hard but: consume less, create more - nowadays almost _every_ service is expecting that you'll consume and it's not limited to physical goods - twitter, twitch, facebook, netflix, pinterest, youtube - all of them wants your attention ,you just need to scroll down, refresh, watch watch, read constantly, consume.

* teach your relatives, friends to consume less - this will be insanely hard and you'll be judged as freak so better don't do it ;-)

I could buy a thousand new phones every year and it wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.

Climate change is a problem with such a massive scale that any individual action taken to combat it isn’t going to matter.

If everyone did it, it'd make a noticeable impact. That impact isn't enough to fix things, but thinking "oh well I won't do anything because they're not doing anything" is not the kind of thinking that will get us to a solution. Act to your capacity and trust that everyone else will do the same. Either you will be right and things improve quite a bit, or you will be wrong and things improve very little. In both cases at least you've stopped making it worse.

Coming up with a convincing argument for individuals to adopt locally subsignificant choices—a new, credible golden rule—might be something for an entrepreneuring philosopher.

It’s the same problem as getting people to vote...

I think this is more the case when the messaging is that people must lower their standard of living. The desire of people to maximise their level of comfort and convenience is difficult/impossible to counter.

But if the messaging is that people can increase their standard of living but do so in a way that has neutral or positive environmental effects, that will be far more persuasive.

This has been the key to Tesla's initial success, and is also the key to roof-mounted domestic solar panels in many cases: they position environmentally-beneficial purchases/investments as luxury and/or fashion items.

This may not be a popular opinion here, but I feel like engineers disease is actually contributing to the problem. [0] Every time I see a new carbon sequestration startup I die a little at the arrogance of the engineers that they think they can beat nature at that game. Let alone in the time span of ~30 years that we need it to happen. If those brilliant engineers had spent time working with domain experts (i.e. "talking to your users") I feel like some of the effort might be better spent elsewhere. This family of plants is incredibly efficient at sequestering carbon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae. At a minimum, why not have a startup that exploits something like this and use nature's ability to heal itself instead of trying to reinvent the wheel? The mere perspective that we need to "save the environment" is a fallacy. We live in the environment, and we need to care for it, it's not something to be blocked and cordoned off.

My point is, yes you can help, but it might not be by writing software or engineering a product. A lot of brilliant people have been aware of this problem and working hard to combat it, it is arrogant to think we can disrupt something we don't fully understand, instead of doing something solo, try to join up with others already fighting the good fight. You want to help try reading and learn from experts in the field. Then with your programming background you might see something in a different light. Talk to people and ask questions from your perspective!

For anyone who is interested in combating climate change I highly suggest these three books, they have been perspective changing for me:

1. Permaculture By Bill Mollison (or this free online course https://open.oregonstate.edu/courses/permaculture/) 2. The Hard Rain By Timothy Egan (Think SFO is relatively green? Think again the 'clean' power projects have been wreaking havoc on the ecosystem in the PNW) 3. Rethinking the War on Invasives By Tao Orion

In addition to that as others have indicated, reduce meat consumption. Don't think it matters? Read about the dust bowl, and those areas of the country covered in sage brush? Yeah a-lot of that is from overgrazing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10812975

Reduce your meat consumption or go vegetarian or vegan.

A major cause of deforestation is to grow corn / soybeans to feed to livestock. The forests, natural carbon sinks, are lost, and the livestock increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere. It takes 9 times the amount of land to make beef vs. growing plants. It uses a lot more freshwater to grow the food, and much more to give to the animals.

Thank you for your advice.

We're already doing that. Not gonna lie, we love meat, but understand it isn't the best choice for the planet, so far we've reduced our meat consumption about 50%.

We love meat too. What I do is trying to not go to McDonalds or fast food so often where meat are mostly sh*t, but rather go to a local farmer and buy fresh meat. Maybe twice a week.

Local meat and McDonalds factory farm meat still require the same amount of cow. Buying the same amount of meat from a different source incurs the same environmental costs.

Chickens and rabbits are excellent sources of meat and if you have room for it then you can easily produce meat with a very low carbon foot print.

If you have children, it is also an excellent opportunity to teach them that meat doesn't come from the store, and to help them gain some respect for all the work that goes into getting food on the table.

What about environmentally conscious farming? I mean pastured, free-range, etc.

Also, what would you say is the difference between massive industrial plantations intended to feed livestock vs those intended to feed humans with a less than ideal diet?

There's literally not enough land on the planet for everyone to eat free range beef.

As for the plantations: if we all cut out livestock from our diets, there'd be 9x less of them.

And what does "ideal" mean?

From your first sentence, I understand that feeding everyone in the planet is a priority. You also assert that, if we move to a plant-based diet, we would need 9x less plantations^. Do you believe those plantations will be abandoned? Or, rather, that they will be used to feed humans and thus lead to an overabundance of food and a 9x population growth?

I believe that "ideal" is nowhere near a diet requiring supplementation and leading to metabolic and cardiovascular disease.

^: I see this "fact" touted around quite a lot. Could I get a source? Here you can actually see a figure of 67% of global crop yield by weight used to feed humans: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/0340...

9x less plantations:

0.58 cows per hectare - http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/62085

274 kg meat on a cow - https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/junk/cow.html

10470 kJ of food energy per kilo of beef - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef

1000 days to rear a cow - https://www.withouthotair.com/c13/page_77.shtml

Therefore 0.58 * 274 * 10470 / 1000 = 607 kJ of cow, per day, per hectare.

In comparison, wheat yields 3120 kg per hectare per year - https://www.statista.com/statistics/237705/global-wheat-prod...

1368 kJ per kg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat

Therefore 3120 * 1368 / 356 = 11989 kJ of wheat, per day, per hectare.

So, by my calculations, you need 19.75x more land to grow a kJ of beef than a kJ of wheat.

There’s enough land on the planet for everyone to eat free range beef. Just not in large quantities or very often.

That said, free range solves some of the problems with factory farming but it is not the solution to climate change caused by meat production and consumption.

Either way, even if for health reasons you’re not going to become entirely vegetarian, it is possible for most to reduce their meat consumption. A quarter to half a pound of meat daily (or worse, at every meal) is a weird American expectation that’s totally unnecessary.

I've been wanting to become a vegetarian for some time to reduce my carbon footprint. But it is so hard. Do you or any other vegetarians have some tips for lazy hackers like me? Thing is, it is really easy to eat two burgers for lunch (costs 2€ at McD) and it is quite healthy. I have not found any vegetarian options that are similarly convenient, cheap and arguably healthy.

I am Vegetarian. It is all about the local food tradition and balancing. We must follow local food tradition to survive and healthy. I am belong to India where there are people have different food habits region and religon wise. Best of vegeterian food habits are followed by Jain fellows (https://www.jainworld.com/education/level1/lesson07.htm)

May you volunteer a couple of hours afterwork in your week to some environmental charity at local or regional level? As a STEM professional very able with computers, your skills might help a lot without touching hard-nosed activism or politics.

Interesting idea!

This so much. Something like setting up mailchimp for a nonprofit, setting up a crm system to track volunteer data, how to read google analytics for their webpage, or even as simple as getting email signatures setup for the office workers. I've spent a lot of time proving basic IT support and basic "this is how you effiently use a email" types of deals.

devise an alternative to "proof of work" blockchain ledgers.

cryptocurrencies are sucking down electricity at a rate larger than many nations, and all for literally doing NOTHING useful...

(majorly non eco activity...)

This is exactly why I stopped following the crypto news.

I got interested a lot about BTC at the beginning, but then after reading reports about electricity consumption decided to not be part of that.

I think the downside doesn't come from the blockchain technology as-is, but the mining part of cryptocurrency.

Agree ! If only more people could thing like you.

Secure proof-of-stake is a huge topic in blockchain research! It won’t have the same characteristics as PoW—worse in some ways, better in others—but it’s not like nobody’s thinking about it.

Don't despair that you're not part of the vanguard.

Take the opportunities and make the necessary changes to your own life as they present themselves - which you appear to be doing already, ie. leading by example.

Something I found effective, which is obvious in hindsight and I only found out by accident, is quantifying the financial benefits - because this resonates with people. I purchased solar panels a few years back, and mentioning my power bills in comparison to those without solar panels does draw attention.

I just wanted to be able to quantify it to myself, and ended up documenting on a website so I could point interested parties to it: http://electricity.atcf.com.au/economics/ (hasn't been updated in a couple of years...)

This is a single example, and quantifying it took planning and effort that doesn't translate to other things like not using plastic bags or straws. Overall, leading by example is the first step, and then making that example publicly available is a second step that's likely easily accessible to an HN'r.

I think if you're able to quanitfy your savings from minimising car usage, THAT would provide interesting financials that would attract attention.

Write an instructional and experiential blog, mention it to your friends and family, let the influence expand at its own pace, maybe linking to it in related HN comments ;)

Here is a link to another thread on HM regarding the same problem : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276987

I definitely think that we can't do anything as developers (maybe optimizing process to consume less, but that's not obvious). And here is why :

- we used computers/servers/hard disks/etc that are made of rare-earth metals (which required a lot of energy to be extracted and are a environmental disaster (first link in google : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-ra...). - big datacenters, in which our compagnies are involved into, require a fabulous amount of energy to work (cooling système, electricity, etc), proably more that average cities.

However, what you (and we) could do as citizen could be : - buy from local/bio producers - do not buy shitty products coming directly from china that will last 1 week and then will be broken for no reason. - think twice before buying new product (not only electronic ones). do I need this new smartphone (which, by the way, his cost is half a salary or a all salary for most of the people ?) can I repear it ? - do not buy big companies' products (coke,nutella,etc). They are destroying environement (mexican vilages have less and less water because of coca-cola, nutala are heavily using palm oil...) Those are only 2 examples.

Easy to write, not to do ...

> Sadly I'm just a Software Engineer and I feel that I cannot help as, for example, a Genetic Engineer to make those ideas become true. I'm not a genius, nor a millionaire philanthropist, neither a clever startup founder.

Most of us are in the same case. I'm actually reading Gunter Pauli's books regarding the "Blue Economy". -> https://www.theblueeconomy.org/ There are plenty of "simple" ideas that might be "easy" to implements in our life as side-projects.

Yes, you can do something.

1. Basic principles: Do a bit of philosophy. Figure out some things that would be more sustainable, more accessable, more energy efficient. Software has a sizable impact on many processes, though public discussion tends to discount it. Consider how to align your career against those goals. Test your goals for coherence: You want to get them all aligned together so that you're constantly propelled in a good direction.

2. Plan a specific design: You might not be able to make the system you envision, but you can probably find some kind of leverage on the problem, whether it's collecting information, creating a prototype, contributing to an existing project, or marketing a better solution.

3. Create a feedback loop: Your first attempt is not likely to solve climate change. So your purpose in trying something is not to immediately solve it, but to find feedback that will guide you or others towards that goal. For example, if you think you have a technical solution that will reduce energy usage, you need to find a benchmark that you can use to measure and improve that solution. Ideally you develop a feedback mechanism like a workout log, where you can easily see your progression in training volume and intensity.

Historically, many breakthroughs result from this kind of effort distributed across many people, attacking different angles of a problem. A lot of the individual aspects like "recycle your waste" are effective when there's broad enforcement measures that make it the optimal or only option - it was less than a hundred years ago that taking your trash to the backyard incinerator was a common practice in all industrialized cities, and less than two hundred that dumping it out the window and onto the street was acceptable. We have plenty of things to improve still!

Write fast, efficient low level code and don't put developer experience above users. The carbon cost of modern bloat is immense.

Come join the Carbon Doomsday project, we need backend help!

http://carbondoomsday.com

https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby

Looks pretty good! Will join.

You could try protesting in China? Especially about their power plants.

https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-...

One example I can imagine you can help with: if your city doesn't have it, you could put its train timetables in an app. There's one for Sydney, it's called TripView. A train timetable available in a convenient manner will help people rely on trains more and reduce CO2 emissions.

If you develop an API for it and everyone can use the data all over the place freely and easily, that could help.

This sounds pretty nice, sadly the city were I live has no trains, cars only.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Google maps does a reasonable job of finding a public transport route. Should work anywhere right?

Going vegan is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on the environment:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

The next step would probably be engaging other people in veganism and in spreading the word about it.

Not having children will have a bigger impact.

A plant based diet is moderately low down this list (again from the Guardian, they could try to be a bit more consistent).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...

Why not both? The OP asked what they could do. It's an option.

That ship has sailed. OP says, “As a father...”

What country do you live in? I work at a climate research institute and have connections all over. I could perhaps put you in contact with a local research team.

Sadly, I'd say that a lot of current research tools are pretty shoddy when it comes to implementation. Not that they give incorrect results, more-so that there is no way to really interop systems with any ease. No standards, only a small culture of open source etc etc. Having a software engineer on speed dial to consult with when designing and implementing new frontier research tools would be of immense help in my opinion.

any good contact in India or Asia Pacific?

Hi, sorry for being late.

At the moment I live in México / USA.

I would love to provide feedback to help standarize and design protocols.

The only thing that you can do that will matter is convincing other people to do something.

A collective problem requires collective action. Anything you do alone will not make a difference.

Sometimes the best convincing is done by giving people a good personal example, not merely by talking.

Yes. I'm reminded of a friend who agreed that going vegetarian was a great idea. So he vowed to start a club to convince others to go vegetarian, but wouldn't himself.

In the mean time, vegetarian friends of mine who are just generally good people seem to have convinced a lot of people around them, without doing almost any talking at all.

Tongue-in-cheek get a job in ad-tech. You'll get paid lots of money helping to sell products that are at least 4 steps away from any real economic activity, which means they are also very distant from creating anything that requires a carbon footprint. As a bonus you might be able to work from home. No driving means lower carbon footprint.

Yeah you're still helping data centers consume electricity but it's a lot cleaner than working in coal.

We're a blockchain startup and while we're not directly solving global warming, we are pioneering the bleeding edge technology for building in economic incentives for applications like lowering carbon emissions, water waste, or fossil fuel usage. We believe that through the clever use of blockchains, we might create the incentives for a greener planet.

If you're a go, rust, or JavaScript developer, we're hiring--

tendermint.com/careers

What about the environmental impact of blockchain itself? https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/02/19/the-5-bi...

Thank you for the offer.

Sadly I do believe that the power consumption of blockchain / crypto technologies is, at this step, pretty bad compared to what they can solve.

I justed wanted to say hi because I'm totally in the same boat. Since I was 12 I've been watching this and my fears have been confirmed.

I also wanted to say that changing individual behavior isn't going to fix it by much. The fuel I don't burn, others will burn it instead.

The only way to fix this is 1) technology to make C02 emissions less profitable than green tech and 2) policy.

As a technologist, I try to focus on 1).

Surprisingly no one mentioned about 3 R(Reduce, Reuse and recycle) which is quite popular in India (don't know about other countries).

https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange//kids/solutions/actions/w...

Here's an earlier HN post on carbon removal technologies, some of which seem quite cost effective and promising: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18285606 Perhaps you can volunteer your time or other resources towards some of these initiatives.

Volunteer or donate to the Veterans' Greenhouse non-profit. They're applying recent advancements in computer science to agriculture specifically to reduce carbon output and water consumption by industrial agriculture. https://veteransgreenhouse.org

Power companies have a great demand for software. By working with green companies you are helping the world get cleaner. By working with coal or gas-fired Power plants to manage, control and reduce their emissions, you are also helping the world. I have worked for the past 13 years doing that.

That sounds ideal.

Any suggestion about where to start looking at? Sadly in my current location neither goverment nor companies have too much interest on going green.

You can search for SCADA companies as well as others working with analytics for wind power. For the second you will find more in Europe. Some names, to mention a few, are: Greenbyte, CNTRAL (not a typo), Inductive Automation, PCVue, Elipse Software, scadaHUB, Osisoft and Canary. Where are you and what do you do?

Climate research relies heavily on simulations. You could probably work in a climate research institute to improve the modeling software. This kind of coding of also interesting from a technical point of view: very big computation, lot of data, parallelism.

source: a climatologist friend.

I would love to do that. I'm probably not experienced enough to find a work on it though.

But it's something that I will research for sure.

Have you considered Tesla?

https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?department=1

Would love to work there, I don't think I've either the expertise or the contacts to get a job there.

Use highly optimized code, logical operators , small alias for variables and it will save electricity, as every byte is processed by computing. saving electricity = saving climate

Since nobody else said it: Write efficient code using efficient software running on efficient hardware in efficient data centers.

It can really add up.

Already trying to do that.

However, I want to be more proactive against the climate change, got tired of just do my best to improve my emissions, I want to actually help to fix what we have done.

Sounds like the work at a startup team could get together with the carbon.yc team and help route software engineers into jobs.

Choose not to have (biological) children.

Already got one, not planning any more.

Host with AWS. They are 50% powered by renewables and have a long-term goal of 100%. They’ve also helped build solar and wind farms generating 250+ gigawatts of renewable energy.

Doesn't Google do something similar? I don't know the exact figures, but I know they made a push for renewables a little while back.

100% renewable: https://cloud.google.com/environment/

I didn't know about their 50% renewables, but I do host everything (and the company I work for as well) in AWS.

Thanks.

You already had kids. There’s nothing you can do now that can undo the impact of that on the environment.

You can always stop eating meat, move to a smaller home, get rid of your cars, etc. But only do it if you want. There’s really not much of a point.

Stop worrying about nothing. All the noise around ecology is only used to legitimize new taxes.

Even the concept of vegetarianism is a sham. If everyone starts consuming vegetable food, yields will have to be ensured by standardizing crops and using pesticides.

Pollution does not come from everyone, but from the big industrial groups.

You will never have ecology by advocating a society based on economic growth.

It is a rude and dishonest lure.

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