Comment by ecotable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecotable | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, audit your emissions and make some changes for the easy wins. You can make large savings without committing to 0 children, 0 meat, 0 petrol cars.

Next, act horizontally: help other reduce their emissions.

Repeat. Stay ahead of the curve to avoid hypocrisy.

As a technologist, you have lots of options to help horizontally.

Technology will play a role in mitigating climate change, and it's not ready yet.

* Profile your machines for energy usage. Try to maximise power saved. File bugs and write patches. As an example, GNOME does not support suspend-then-hibernate, and nor does secure boot.

* Build an open database of vampire devices. How can consumers decide which devices to avoid? Are there cheap workarounds?

* Help make the transition to clean sources by improving software for controlling and graphing inverters.

* Build tools to allow people to measure and reduce their consumption.

* Build a HTML5 version of https://www.withouthotair.com/ . Put it on GitHub and allow people to contribute country-specific figures.

* Work on cycling routing apps.

* Build a site to crowdsource requests for electric vehicle charging stations.

* Tell others about what you do.

Err towards action over picking the perfect project.

If you don't have the capacity sustain a project, contribute to an existing one instead.

Take energy saving technology that is usable by 0.5% of users, and make it usable by 5% of users.

Build these tools into your life routines, so you use them as a user.

If one moves towards net zero emissions as my country is doing it doesn't matter how much energy you consume.

This wierd self flagellation is not necessary. Nor will it have any appreciable impact on global climate

> If one moves towards net zero emissions as my country is doing it doesn't matter how much energy you consume.

No citations or justification?

Looks like you're from the UK.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_re... is a talk by the UK's (ex) chief science advisor on climate change discussing that demand for energy will have to drop a lot, based on the energy sources that the UK can use.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/15/food-str... was a recent UK gov report suggesting dropping meat consumption, or self flagellation as you might call it.

Climate change is being solved, but requires effort across various disciplines.

Energy security is not negotiable. It is perfectly defensible to state that and that energy consumption is unlikely to decrease. Nuclear power is much more sustainable, but alas people spent 40 years attacking that industry so we are way behind in it

> was a recent UK gov report suggesting dropping meat consumption, or self flagellation as you might call it.

yes i saw that, and it is a disgrace. Governments taxing food is not acceptable

> No citations or justification?

For what? a basic logical statement? That if power is largely renewable and even if not other sources are used to smooth peak capacity and stop the grid crashing, then the carbon footprint of said energy is not relevant.

I love this approach and think you're totally right:

> Err towards action over picking the perfect project.

Lots of really cool ideas here. Thanks for posting all of them - I really appreciate it :)

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