How do I find jobs related to tackling global warming and climate change in Europe for an English speaker?
Open to ideas and thoughts.
1) Learn the things that are most likely to actually move the needle on climate change. There are a bunch of frameworks for thinking about this, but I think https://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/intro is pretty simple. Each wedge is a viable chunk of a huge path to mitigating climate change.
2) Search for companies that solve each of these problems individually. A company that sets out to solve "climate change" is unlikely to succeed in my view, but a company that sets out to make it easy to switch from coal plants to natural gas plants by bringing together the right financing and tech transfer might be easy.
3) Rank those places in terms of your likelihood in moving the needle for them. Nuclear power plant? Maybe they really could use an excellent software engineer, maybe they've already got a great set of people or it's not that important for their business. But maybe those same nuclear power plants desperately need an excellent quantitative person for their sales team, which is really what will move the needle for them.
I'd also suggest sourcing the companies through some of the VCs that have had success having world transforming success. Despite not loving Peter Thiel's political leanings, Founders Fund has funded Space X, The Climate Corporation and Oculus that each have/had a real shot at knocking out a wedge by themselves. Some places have a great track record for backing ambitious moon shots.
(Disclosure, I used to work for The Climate Corporation. I did go to work there because Peter Thiel talked about it in his Stanford Startups class though, so I think that counts as taking my own advice.)
If there's a higher payoff available than that, I don't know where it is.
Absolutely vital tip from extremely painful experience; your physical and more vitally mental health come first. You must not forget that as if you burn yourself out you're no good for anything.
I don't think anyone should feel bad about not coming up with the solutions to global problems. You not knowing any higher payoff doesn't make you a bad person. But every incredible transformation of the world started with a person, and many incredible people only became incredible through the work they tried to do.
Borlaug saved a Billion people from starvation. He started out as a basically normal man. Find something, fight for it, wrestle with the world and hope to hold on to something, mostly because we all lose in the end. If you lose early, enjoy a happy and normal life with your family, but you don't have to lose before you start.
The most effective way to reduce the effects of global warming is to implement a carbon tax. Use the power of the economic system we have to guide firms reduce their own carbon footprint. For example, in Canada, they implemented a revenue-neutral policy where carbon is taxed and the money made is refunded evenly per person. The only costs are the minimum administrative and the substitution/income effect (Slutsky equation).
As a person, it's difficult to know where to help. I would recommend to first promote the above and then look at the metric '$ per CO2 emission saved'. I believe it is the most important metric to reducing your carbon footprint.
Taking the bus instead of driving, moving to a smaller house, reducing meat consumption or updating to LED lighting in many cases has a negative $/CO2, meaning you save money and reduce CO2. With the money you saved, look at projects with positive but small $/CO2, this could be purchasing power from renewable sources, purchasing a more efficient heating and cooling system. This list is what I've seen in north america but changes greatly depending on region and what you are already doing.
Unfortunately it is a very complex challenge. I know I didn't answer your question. I would recommend starting with good information, the IPCC releases reports of the leading science of climate change and would recommend starting with the report for policy makers as a summary. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
Trees are the cheapest most efficient way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. No other solution comes even remotely close.
You can drive a Prius, become a vegan, and buy solar panels but a person who plants a single acre of trees will have offset an entire lifetime of greenhouse gas production and then some.
Nearest I've found is <https://greenismything.com/2015/06/23/howmanytrees/> which suggests ~2 acres per head for the US.
So to a zero approximation, I need to plant 1000 trees to offset my lifetime's carbon footprint. Without too much math, looking at my backyard, it's not possible to squeeze that into an acre (an order of magnitude off).
We started http://climateaction.tech/ to amplify and connect tech workers with just these types of questions, check out our guides there and join the Slack to connect with other folks wrestling with the same questions.
Luckily some competitors still exist: https://www.cloudandheat.com/ https://www.qarnot.com/fr/home-fr/
I wish people would go for the big guns, fully renewable energy, nuclear, electric transport, green concrete and steel - the major issues instead of wasting time and money recovering 10% of what some coal power plant supplied to their data centre.
It's better than nothing but very close to nothing. It's a pervasive way of thinking in green engineering, every bit helps but what we need is BIG help: https://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml
> How do I find jobs related to tackling global warming and climate change in Europe for an English speaker?
While not directly answering the question, here are some ideas for purchasing, donating, creating new positions, and hiring people that care:
Write more efficient code. Write more efficient compilers. Optimize interpretation and compilation so that the code written by people with domain knowledge who aren't that great at programming who are trying to solve other important problems is more efficient.
Push for PPAs (Power Purchase Agreements) that offset energy use. Push for directly sourcing clean energy.
Use services that at least have 100% PPAs for the energy they use: services that run on clean energy sources.
Choose green datacenters.
- [ ] Add the capability for cloud resource schedulers like Kubernetes and Terraform to prefer or require clean energy datacenters.
Choose to work with companies that voluntarily choose to do sustainability reporting.
Work to help develop (and popularize) blockchain solutions that are more energy efficient and that have equal or better security assurances as less efficient chains.
Advocate for clean energy. Donate to NGOs working for our environment and for clean energy.
Invest in clean energy. There are a number of clean energy ETFs, for example. Better energy storage is a good investment.
Push for certified green buildings and datacenters.
- [ ] We should create some sort of a badge and structured data (JSONLD, RDFa, Microdata) for site headers and/or footers that lets consumers know that we're working toward '200% green' so that we can vote with our money.
Do not vote for people who are rolling back regulations that protect our environment. Pay an organization that pays lobbyists to work the system: that's the game.
Help explain why it's both environment-rational and cost-rational to align with national and international environmental sustainability and clean energy objectives.
Argue that we should make external costs internal in order that markets will optimize for what we actually want.
There are a number of existing solutions that solve for energy inefficiency due to unreclaimed waste heat.
"Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854
"Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18139654
As for finding those organizations, that's a different question and may be better asked without reference to software engineering so as to receive the widest spectrum of orgs.
The coolest company I saw on he list was this: https://www.coolearth.org/
A lot of the HN comments talk about planting trees. What's more effective, I imagine, is preventing deforestation in the first place.
There are also a number of environment and social impact accelerators that may be useful for finding companies or pursuing one's own ideas, we started though the EU Climate-KIC program, for example. Increasingly as well there are a number of larger corporates engaging with social impact as a driver (sometimes this can appear a little like green-washing but there are some genuine motivations behind it).
At the moment it does seem more of a growing industry, the people and the companies are there if you can keep that determination to find them. And the more developers showing and looking for a clear sense of that environmental motivation will itself push through a wider change as there is plenty of great and fulfilling work that can be done.
I believe understanding the footprint of anything should be a commodity, and easily accessible to anyone. That's why we're currently building an app that automatically computes your carbon footprint, and gives you the means to change for the better. I previously built electricitymap.org, and we're now hiring if you're interested: https://www.tmrow.com/jobs Feel free to reach out directly if you want to chat (or join our Slack at slack.tmrow.com). This is the most pressing issue of our time and we simply don't have enough people working or caring about it.
A bit of reading: - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ - https://www.tmrow.com/climatechange
Olivier
I don’t know anything else about them other than I think they are based in Europe. Might be worth a look.
Those tree planting drone companies probably require software engineering.
I'm not sure if that's just an asterisk indicating that the short-run effect may be a wash, or if it's clear enough to rule out some environments/tree species in favor of other choices.
Based on his assessment, there are lots of job possibilities in electric vehicles, electric heating and cooling, and LED / industrial processes.
Very nascent, researching and blue-sky-ing, but I'm just putting it out there for anyone who might like to discuss this.
have slack, too.
jason.[lastname-from-username] at gmail
1. Innovation (e.g. find new and better sources of energy) 2. Mitigation (e.g. reduce energy consumption)
For example the Tesla Solar Roof is an innovation strategy whereas planting trees is a mitigation strategy.
Although we really need a combination of both most companies tend to focus on a single approach, so I'd suggest thinking about which type of approach you'd like to work on.
I have pondered about a more sustainable career for a long time. But the opportunities did not match my talents, hope it works out for you.
Look for agtech or renewable energy companies who need software engineers. You're helping tackle climate change by being a part of the solution.
Software has the possibility to change behavior but it's probably not the biggest lever available for this particular problem.
Recently the web has evolved with CSS Grid and this means that you no longer need to have web pages made of 'div soup' with every 'div' using half a dozen non-semantic class attributes.
It is extremely rare for a web page to be 10% or higher in actual content, if you look at the actual document and don't even consider the images/scripts/stylesheets. Most of the web could be at the 33% mark if you strip the presentational markup away and just use HTML5 elements, styling them with CSS Grid. The benefits of writing this way are many, apart from being green, such a page is accessible because useful elements are used for the page, e.g. 'nav' instead of 'div', and easier to maintain, because the content is kept simple. There is also SEO benefit from having a quicker to download page that is a fraction of the size.
Now you may scoff at saving a few bytes from a few web pages but the savings add up, get one template right for a website that gets used by a few million people on a daily basis and you are suddenly saving gigabytes. People's phone batteries last longer, cell towers don't have to do as much work, server rooms can run cooler, it is a bigger win than people think.
Once upon a time we thought nothing of single use food containers or excess packaging, the humble 'div' with its framework class attributes double-wrapping every block of content on the page with a few 'span' elements thrown in for good measure is possibly more wasteful, at least you can reuse plastic bags, you can't reuse a 'div' that has been beamed across the airwaves from the far side of the globe.
There are laws coming along meaning that web pages have to be accessible. You can make them accessible in a lip service way or re-write them with maintainable, CSS-Grid styled HTML5 to deliver a first class accessible experience. In the EU there is a two year period for the public sector to get their act together on this.
Writing HTML without the div where you focus on document structure and use the right elements is very easy, as is using CSS Grid. But we are in an industry where the mindset is to work from a visual mockup and to then paint by numbers gormlessly using the dreadful div element that has no place in modern HTML and very much goes against the 'separation of concerns'.
The world needs someone to teach a new intake of web developers how to write actual HTML, leaving the build tools and hacks far behind, more of a focus on the written word rather than the overly complex tech.
We have had revolutions in web design, for instance 'responsive' was a thing. If we can have actual HTML instead of bloated presentational markup then there will be some old timers who won't get it, but this easier way should be well received. Right now though dev teams are very much geared up for over complicating projects and not even thinking to use just the HTML5 elements in a content first type of way. Hierarchies of teams are built around anachronistic 'agile' processes that are doomed to result in bloated div websites.
Unless there is nuclear war then we are not going back on the web, it is here to stay and be improved on. Be that improvement. Teach people how to write web pages the easy way, enable others to think differently and not be using tired Stack Overflow 'div' solutions that were okay a decade ago.
The maths of the CO2 saving is not easy to work out. But then it is. HTML is the language of the web and web pages are what we read. This page you are reading right now is HTML and not some JSON stringified thing. Coding the lean HTML5 way does get your HTML document size halved, plus the lights don't have to be on as long to write it in the first place.
You can do all of this stuff a lot easier than the stuff you have done thus far. I don't think your skill set is in 'planting trees'. Nobody is looking for 'green HTML developers' but there is this legislative requirement for accessible HTML. Start selling yourself to them.
But half the world spends half their time on their phone. Halve the bytes and bandwidth needed for that and make things accessible - what is not to like? I bet that changing the way we do web pages to remove old fashioned bloat saves more penguins than your suggestion.
My suggestion was written specifically for the questioner based on their skillset. Not a one size fits all solution for everyone.
Please do the maths for me after refactoring a web page of your choosing so you have an idea of the gains. Don't be a blocker, present some sums.
As for cows, the biggest source of methane emission in livestock comes from belching rather than farts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...