What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (2015)

Technology will play a role in affecting a perilous recovery, it won't in the way most technologists think. We don't have time to "invent a fix", we can't bank on having fusion power magically suck carbon from the oceans and skies at the last moment. Or a sunshade to prevent the tundra from erupting in methane.

Technologists can help organize (via online tools), educate and show (via charts, graphs, simulations). This is ultimately a social and political problem that requires the full force of governments. Individual efforts are largely symbolic. Not that we shouldn't do them, but convincing your legislators to enact real reforms is where we avoid life ending catastrophe. We can have a huge impact, we just have to find the areas where we can have a 1000:1 advantage vs a 1.5:1 advantage.

The section on "model-driven debate" (http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#media-debate) describes (and provides an example of) a mode of conversation that I have long wished was more common.

In particular it seems that the web should facilitate such model-driven debates, since these dynamic calculations can be embedded in the fabric of the conversation (the posts, articles, and documents that are being shared), where they would be more awkward to include in verbal/visual presentations/conversations.

I would love to see more of this, but alas it seems like an incredibly niche way of presenting ideas.

Thread from February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615

Brilliant article. Four years have passed.

"Everything about today’s power grid, from this centralized control to the aging machinery performing transmission and distribution, is not suitable for clean energy."

Had the U.S. started on this 10 years ago, like China did, we'd be well on-the-way to ready. The author again calls for WW2-scale effort. The clock is ticking.

Frustrating that the author parrots the wishful thinking "But once the grid cleans up, not only will electric cars be cleaner than gas cars, they may be more efficient than mass transit." while later admitting "Reducing the need for personal transportation via urban design. Among other reasons, this is important to counter the likely tendency of autonomous cars to increase urban sprawl, which has been strongly correlated with emissions."

The two are strongly linked. Mass transit is necessary because when you have a highly dense city (i.e. when you fight against urban sprawl) you need a higher throughput mode of transit than roads could ever provide. Good luck moving literally 9 million people per day as the Tokyo subway does with a system of automatic electric cars. In this lens of thinking, the solution we need is innovating more efficient mass transit.

The other approach is to increase density but in a distributed manner, a system of "small towns" if you will. Dense small towns are charming and, more importantly, can be walkable so that neither mass transit nor cars are needed for the average citizens' day-to-day. The issue with this approach is that modern civilization is currently demanding the opposite - despite internet technology, we are becoming more centralized in fewer megacities. Find a way to somehow make companies prefer remote work and we might reverse this trend.

Had not seen this though I am interested to anything Victor says, and climate change.

This looks like a lot of work went into it, and it seems to contain a lot of information. I wonder if there were an easy way to rank the innovations on various axes (most impactful for the environment, easiest, most profitable etc)

Answer: quit Grievance Studies, enrol in Engineering. :)