Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Howdy! I work fighting climate change, and I guess it's that time again for a what-can-you-do-about-it post :)

So what can you do about it?

You can get a job fighting climate change! Solar, wind, batteries, and EVs are now competitive against fossil-based incumbents, so now the biggest issue is scaling them up. That means tons and tons of problem solving, which means great software and engineering jobs and startup opportunities!

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 and electrify as much as you can (transportation, heating, etc.). All that new infrastructure needs to have 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.

I've posted about this many times[1], so please check out my previous comments on links for finding climate impact work. It's mostly about (A) browsing sector-specific conferences and looking at the expo and speakers' companies for ones that interest you, and (B) showing up to energy meetups just to meet people working in the space. If you're in the bay area, I run a calendar of all the clean energy-related events (https://bayareaenergyevents.com), so I encourage you to just start showing up :)

My favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

Why not turn the fatalism and anxiety you feel into a paycheck?

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

I have a question on climate change: what's the most accurate prediction for the climate in 2050 at the current rate things are going?

As in, are there predictions in temperature that have been made based on current models that we will hit by 2050 that we can measure in 2050 to see if the models are correct? Have such predictions been made before for, say, 2020 or 2030?

I don't dispute climate change, but my belief in it rests on authorities telling me it's true. It's not based on anything I myself could look at. I'd love to hear some predictions made now or in the past that we could observe whether they're true in the future.

The IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) is the generally considered the best source on climate change science. They have a nice graph of how things can go based on various amounts of sequestered carbon being injected into the carbon cycle.

Graph: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/SPM.05-01-1....

Report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

It basically shows that if you assume we keep pulling carbon out of the ground (e.g. extracting and burning fossil fuels) we'll end up at +4.5C increase. That kind of change is likely an human extinction-level event (e.g. https://xkcd.com/1379/). The Paris agreements call for a max of +2C, which means we can only pull up about 25% of proven fossil reserves.

So we're going to have to leave 75% of proven fossil reserves in the ground. There's actually a term for this called the "Carbon Bubble", and it's expected to decimate the oil majors and sovereign oil and gas since most of their proven reserves on their balance sheets are going to end up being stranded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble

> have to leave 75% of proven fossil reserves in the ground.

To nitpick, I think you mean burn them. Oil into plastics has minimal emissions.

Correct, but plastics and other non-burned uses only accounts for <10% of oil and gas. So you'd have to 10x the number of petrochemical products to make up for the decrease in burned product. Plastics are a pretty mature industry, so 10x is well outside the range of what's possible.

> Why not turn the fatalism and anxiety you feel into a paycheck?

I don't want to sound mean, but the only anxiety I am beginning to feel lately is that more and more people are turning to fighting a gas that all of us exhale, some of them fanatically and violently, and they seem to ultimately agree that we must wind down the economy to beat it. I don't want to lose everything that gave us wealth, progress, medical breakthroughs and freedom for the sole reason that some people are afraid of a warmer climate.

So, what do I do about it?

Nothing? If you don't believe in climate change or believe we should be fighting it, then please get out of the way.

The energy transition is a bigger economic opportunity that the Internet (Bloomberg estimates it at something like $10+ trillion). So you doing nothing is more money for me. Thanks I guess?

> The energy transition is a bigger economic opportunity that the Internet (Bloomberg estimates it at something like $10+ trillion). So you doing nothing is more money for me. Thanks I guess?

So where exactly do you think this money is coming from? It'll come out of your pocket (and mine) due to laws that force us to invest in new technology.

Well, for my company, the money is coming from homeowners and business owners buying clean energy products (solar, batteries, EVs, etc.). They are choosing to buy these new technologies because they want to.

I noticed you didn't really address my core assumption that you don't believe in climate change. So you don't think it's a problem, right? Can you talk a little more about from where you derive that conclusion? It's so rare nowadays to hear someone straight up deny climate change is a problem when there's so much scientific and economic analysis saying the opposite.

> They are choosing to buy these new technologies because they want to.

So do I, I have no issues with that. I bought a Tesla Model S 2 years ago because I don't like noise and pollution and it's a cool car. This has nothing to do with buying "to save the planet" or mandated CO2 reductions and EV quotas though, which is what is coming soon and I oppose.

> I noticed you didn't really address my core assumption that you don't believe in climate change.

Why do you make such assumptions? To discredit and offend someone you are discussing with?

> It's so rare nowadays to hear someone straight up deny climate change

It can't be so rare if you accuse people of doing this all the time.

Hmmm, HN is limiting our thread depth, so can you please email me at my email in my profile? I'd like to continue the conversation and learn more about your point of view.

Well i sure as hell hope so. I would love the money being taken from us actually fund something i care about and that will benefit everyone, instead of wasting it on stupid crap.

The internet showed what value is produced by ramping up communications orders of magnitude in bandwidth beyond what was previously possible. At this point our bottleneck for value is energy, not communication

Solar energy doesn't have to worry about entropy: energy from the sun is beating down on us whether we tap it or not. The money will come from the fact that energy produces value. Renewables have been progressing over the past decades to compete with existing carbon infrastructure. To suggest renewables are only hoisted up by policy is to disregard that the oil industry is heavily subsidized & the states currently has a president who will claim "clean beautiful coal"

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/green-energy-revolution-...

It is indeed magical thinking. "$200,000 worth of Tesla batteries, which collectively weigh over 20,000 pounds, are needed to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil. A barrel of oil, meanwhile, weighs 300 pounds and can be stored in a $20 tank. Those are the realities of today’s lithium batteries. Even a 200% improvement in underlying battery economics and technology won’t close such a gap."

Meanwhile the battery industry currently uses 42 percent of global cobalt production, a critical metal for Lithium-ion cells. 70% comes from the Congo where kids do their bit against 'climate change'.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat...

Cobalt is not a critical metal for all lithium-ion cells, only for maximum energy density lithium-ion cells. If you're willing to sacrifice energy density you can use lithium iron phosphate instead, which is also safer and more durable. BYD Auto, the Chinese company behind the great success of electric buses in China (preventing more CO2 emissions than electric cars) uses lithium iron phosphate.

We exhale it because it's bad for us, and it's not the only thing in the fight against climate change.

The point isn't to wind down the economy to beat it, it's to find alternate ways of keeping the economy going while beating it. Green energy solutions are not winding down the economy, if anything it is supplementing it.

>We exhale it because it's bad for us

Off-topic in the context of climate change, but that's an oversimplification at best. Not enough CO2 in the body will kill you just as readily as too much.

> I don't want to lose everything that gave us wealth, progress, medical breakthroughs and freedom for the sole reason that some people are afraid of a warmer climate

There were some/articles studies that were putting part of the “blame” for the recent Syrian Civil War on climate change (as far as I remember increased aridity caused by climate change had forced many rural Syrians onto the cities where they couldn’t all find jobs, hence the conflict) and as such I’m pretty sure that future climate change-induced wars will take care of our “wealth, progress and medical breakthroughs” unless we manage to somehow slow the rate of change.

Germany's worst week in 2018 in terms of wind and sunshine had 27.6% of it's electricity produced without emitting greenhouse gases. Compare that to 45% of the total energy in the entire year being generated with zero carbon sources. 27.6% is 60% of the annualized renewable share. In other words even in the 5 worst weeks a year our economy only has to shrink down by 40% if seasonal storage beyond a week is impossible.

You are assuming that the economy can smoothly scale down with energy restriction. In reality, everything is highly optimized, with "just in time" supply chains with little safety margin. Once energy demand greatly exceeds supply, the whole system collapses.

And most transport and heating does not use electricity, so the problem is actually worse than 27.6% of normal supply.

“Only” 40%? That’s basically peak to trough Greece!

I think this comment is being unfairly downvoted. I believe a lot of so-called environmentalists are actually opposed to civilization, and would prefer if humanity reverted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. This is more "natural", and humans are generally happier living like that, so it's not a totally ridiculous idea. The main drawback is that it would require the deaths of billions, but by their revealed preferences, it seems a lot of environmentalists are actually okay with this. Why else would they oppose the only proven solution that could bring CO2 emissions to zero in time to limit the damage to something survivable?: nuclear power.

I think climate change is the biggest current threat to humanity, and almost nobody is taking it as seriously as they should. Even the ongoing protests in London are a massive under-reaction. But how many of those environmentalists actually support a solution that isn't "wind down the economy?" Germany began a complete shutdown their nuclear power plants in response to a reactor containment failure in Japan that killed nobody directly, and even with the worst case assumptions, statistically caused few hundred excess cancer deaths at most. This is 0% of the deaths that will be caused when one of the alternative "wind down the economy" or "uncontrolled temperature rise" plans triggers World War 3.

It's wrong to assume that those of us fighting climate change are anti-nuclear. The only reason I didn't include nuclear in my parent comment is because it isn't currently competitive with either clean or dirty energy sources.

Solar and wind plus storage is way cheaper than nuclear (and that gap is widening over time, not shrinking), so there's not much reason to include it in a pitch for getting a job fighting climate change unless the audience is primarily PhD physicists and researchers.

> I think climate change is the biggest current threat to humanity, and almost nobody is taking it as seriously as they should.

Here I disagree. We're trying to colonise Mars, but at the same time believe a somewhat warmer climate is an existential threat to humanity. How is that logical?

Climate change will not destroy humanity, civilisation, or even the planet. We will adapt easily. Look to the 20th century for examples of actual threats to humanity...

> This is 0% of the deaths that will be caused when one of the alternative "wind down the economy" or "uncontrolled temperature rise" plans triggers World War 3

Exactly, only that these aren't the only possible triggers for a WW3.

> We're trying to colonise Mars, but at the same time believe a somewhat warmer climate is an existential threat to humanity.

That’s an interesting non sequitur. How does the potential for colonization of Mars say anything about how big of a threat climate change is?

> That’s an interesting non sequitur.

I'll have to write it in a more straightforward manner, since it's apparently a non sequitur if you don't understand it: if we are optimistic about living on a planet as hostile as Mars, how can we be pessimistic about surviving a temperature increase of a few degrees on Earth?

That is a very superficial comparison between two problems that are fundamentally different, especially with regards to what’s at stake.

Going to Mars has no deadline, and barely any stakes. If it proves practically unachievable, it’s a failed dream, or maybe just an indefinitely delayed dream; no big deal. Earth is already inhabited by millions of species, and if it becomes even one percent less hospitable, that’s an existential crisis.

> Earth is already inhabited by millions of species, and if it becomes even one percent less hospitable, that’s an existential crisis.

No, it's not. This is just the typical scaremongering and dramatisation I'm getting so tired of. Every populated region on Earth becomes much more than one percent less hospitable every winter and there is no crisis, especially not an existential one. We can cope very well with minor changes in weather and climate and we will. Stop obsessing about climate doom scenarios, it's silly.

> Every populated region on Earth becomes much more than one percent less hospitable every winter

No, winter is part of the baseline. Life has evolved to to survive during winter, and societies have been built to handle it. We do not have ecosystem collapses or widespread climate refugees every winter. Permanent and unprecedented changes cause completely different problems than a few months of winter.

You're setting up an imaginary strawman. I grew up in the 80s in one of the most environmentalist households you could imagine. My mother was a local politician for the German Green Party, everything was ecological and fair trade in our household, from the food to everything else. She was fighting for windmills, against cars, etc. Our bread was baked by an ecological farmer with a long beard, for some time we fetched the milk directly from a local farmer, and so on. We participated in marches for peace and the protection of the environment, my mother helped voluntarily in the local fair trade shop ("3rd World Shop").

So I've had plenty of experiences with environmentalists over my life and heard many crazy stories, e.g. one of her friends really thought that honey is harmless for children but sugar essentially poison.

Despite all this, even the most radical and craziest person I've ever heard of does not fit the description of an environmentalist that you attribute to this subculture as a whole. There are radicals like VHEMT but these are in a ridiculously small minority. The vast majority of all environmentalist believe that it is perfectly possible for a large number of humans on earth to life in harmony together with nature while sustaining high standards of living. It's all about reasonable consumption and studying ecological lifetime calculations of products.

Where I grew up, Swabia in Germany, is a pretty good example of reasonable & realistic environmental politics. I used to make fun of many of her claims, proudly eating my bacon sandwich and visiting by plane, but it turns out in retrospective that she and her friends were right about most of the issues that most of the things my mother has been fighting for are now in the party programs of all major parties.

What is the relationship between burning fossil fuels and medical breakthrough, wealth and progress?

So you don't care about it because you don't care about the people as well as species that are already impacted by climate change? Just because you're afraid of having to change your lifestyle? What you should do about it is maybe stop freaking out first about your lifestyle, progress doesn't require screwing climate....

Do you want to do something about it?

Then a good way to proceed would probably to study why we are all freaking out. The basics for why too much CO2 is a problem are actually quite simple and might be accessible to you experimentally if you so choose.

(What the exact consequences are is more complicated and we have uncertainties on the results, so that might be harder.)

edit: (While some of the models are actually open-source and you can download them, running and understanding them in a useful manner is a full-time job.)

I feel like at this point it is a political and capitalism problem. We could start impacting global temperature within a week if we actually wanted to fix the issue[1], but a number of industries whose business models basically guarantee they will contribute to climate change won't permit that. Those same companies then lobby congress, etc.

If we had the scenario where we told world governments and corporations that the tipping point of no return is in one month, and if we don't do anything the planet is dead in 50 years, what could we do? If we said (just making these up): 1) limit flights to weekdays; 2) limit cruise ships [2]; 3) companies must allow remote work to reduce commutes. (I'm sure someone can and will come up with better examples). Can you imagine the blowback from airlines, etc? I imagine they will find some way to justify not participating, even though it literally means the death of the planet.

We have the technology and the know-how, it just isn't stronger than the pathological greed of corporations.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/05/911_contra... [2] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/15/18096925/cruise-env...

Do you know of any jobs in software related to this, or where one could start searching for such?

Sure!

Most distributed battery storage (Stem, Advanced Microgrid, etc.) and building energy management companies (Carbon Lighthouse, Siemens, etc.) have software divisions that focus on data analysis tools for their customers (think energy dashboards and reports). Also, most grid operators (CAISO, etc.), utilities (PG&E, etc.), and utility vendors (AutoGrid, etc.) have software and data analysis divisions that focus on figuring out how we can keep the grid running while ramping up renewables. Finally, regulators (Dept of Energy, public utility commissions, city managers, etc.) are in desperate need of software and data science talent to help them understand all this new energy advancements that are going on (often at policy hearings utilities are saying one technical thing, distributed energy companies are saying another technical thing, and the panel of regulators have no idea what the technical implications of all this back-and-forth is).

Hope that helps! In addition to the (A) and (B) suggestions in my parent comment, you can try searching typical software job boards (Indeed, etc.) for your language of choice + keywords (clean energy, solar, renewables, smart grid, climate change, etc.). For example, "python solar" in San Francisco returns a bunch of results on indeed.com.

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