Gen Z members flock to climate careers | Hacker News Reader

Gen Z members flock to climate careers

theguardian.com

108 pointsmakerofspoons120 comments

Cynically, I expect a continued growth in climate bureaucracy, where various office jobs get set up in the name of tackling climate change, but for the most part are just doing the usual stuff you'd do in a bureaucracy.

It would be nice (despite the irony of suggesting a bureaucratic task) to see some analysis or thoughts about what jobs have the biggest real impact.

For example, I wonder how many people are looking at becoming farmers or builders or other sustainable trades, vs who wants to do software development or data science.

Hot take: The most important jobs are building and installing renewables (drives out coal, natural gas, and diesel/oil fuels), electrifying transportation (drives out petroleum), lab grown proteins and protein replacements (drives out emissions from factory farming emissions), and air source carbon extraction (paying back the credit card of CO2 we spent industrializing as a species).

You can add battery research to your list.

I always wonder if it's worth it for me (30yo) to learn a new trade, like the physics to advance battery research, when I now know a ton about computers and could rather be a dev or sysadmin for a company doing battery research. Probably I need to make that decision soon if I want to make it ever.

I think battery research is more chemistry than physics, but of course there's overlap.

See, that's my current level of expertise in the field!

other hot take: soil restoration, reforesting and ocean deacidification. We need to reduce carbon emission, but also restore natural carbon sequestration processes in a way that supports ecology.

Have to start sucking the CO2 we've already overloaded the atmosphere and oceans with if those efforts are to provide meaningful value. Otherwise, you're dressing wounds on a the victim who is bleeding out from an artery.

nature itself sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere, primarily through soil, plants and the ocean. The ocean is a CO2 buffer (ie, just stores CO2 rather than consuming it) but soil and plants actively consume CO2.

I do agree that we also need some kind of technological carbon sequestration. I'm skeptical of the "pump it underground" approach and think that things like CO2-negative building materials and processes would be a way to couple CO2 extraction and economic incentive.

Lots to unpack here. First, consider the delta in PPM between present day and pre-industrialization [1]. Next, consider that the ocean has acted as a carbon sink [2] (you mention this), but to great detriment to its chemical composition (more CO2 = increased acidity). We should absolutely not rely on it further as a carbon sink if we expect to use the ocean for aquaculture and to sustain life. Finally, soil, plants, and trees are in no way able to absorb CO2 at the rate necessary to mitigate climate change. This leaves air source extraction as a critical need. I'm partial to Climeworks [3], but any technology that can sequester CO2 underground in a stable form will do.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...

[3] https://climeworks.com/

I specifically wrote that we need further work on ocean deacification, because of all those things you've mentioned.

It's not an either/or proposition: we need to do all of these things:

- restore the ecosystem's ability to consume CO2

- decrease our production of CO2

- develop technology to artificially sequester and consume CO2

Alongside other, non-CO2 related things like restoring biodiversity and ecosystems (where possible, mass extinction is still a thing), reducing our chemical output and destruction of nature etc.

How about nuclear energy? Germany's decision to do without a few years back was overreaction to Fukushima. Renewables plus batteries great, nuclear is a good base and fallback.

Will never be cost competitive. Enough sunlight ("fusion at a distance") hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. Batteries, solar, and wind will get cheaper while nuclear still can't be built cost effectively (if even at all, considering cost overruns and construction disfunction). HVDC transmission can be laid on ocean floors and buried underground to avoid natural disasters and NIMBY, you can push ~1-1.5GW over a pair of 5" HVDC conductors.

Grid operators will balance variable supply with variable demand, and storage will grow as battery costs come down as manufacturing for battery cells scales up to meet EV demands.

you really think it'll be cheaper to lay power cables under the atlantic ocean than build some nuclear plants to power the American continent during the night?

No, I think it'll be cheaper to use HVDC transmission and interconnects to network the largest electrical systems in the US [1] so that you can shift power across the continent. No need to run cables to Asia, Africa, or Europe. We already import clean hydro from Canada to parts of the US (specifically between Ontario and New York state). Also, as I mentioned, I expect the cost of battery storage to come down, to where it combined with renewables at ~1 cent/kwh is still cheaper than fossil fuels even assuming long duration discharge (8-10 hours).

I can call Tesla today and have a Megapack installed in a few months. Same for solar and wind utility scale installs. If I break ground on a nuclear reactor today, it will be at least a decade before you see the first kilowatt generated. Georgia's Vogtle units 3 and 4 nuclear generators are six years behind schedule and costs have ballooned to almost $10 billion [2]. $10B buys a lot of renewables and batteries.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/NE...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...

Sorry, when I said "the American continent" I meant, like, the entire continent, where a billion people live and night time is all at the same time (so no solar). You're saying the solution is just batteries? Why did you mention power cables on the ocean floor?

> Why did you mention power cables on the ocean floor?

"you really think it'll be cheaper to lay power cables under the atlantic ocean" -- TremendousJudge

Those are definately the most important technologies, but how are those going to get done without lawyers, and other boring not-saving-the-world-directly jobs, jobs that could generally be called "bureaucracy" if you wanted to make them seem bad for some reason.

As long as these young people vote out the climate change deniers, and society get serious about not rewarding people who generate externalities there will be jobs aplenty, that will be taken by people who just want the money. If they don't then it won't matter what they do.

You're right, and I was remiss in not including this, and yet it is most important:

Support political candidates and run for office in order to put those who understand the science behind and believe in climate change and who will commit to policy to contribute towards solutions (and tilt the scales away from fossil fuels). Otherwise everyone working towards the cause is swimming upstream.

> As long as these young people vote out the climate change deniers

The gigantic problem is that we can’t. Old people have by far the most voting power.

And in the US those seem to be pretty securely glued to their TVs running Fox News (I know my american relatives were).

There's definately some skullduggery when it comes to restricing democracy, but it's still the most straightforward and achievable avenue, and it sits upstream of everything else.

Imagine that one of the many nuclear zealots on HN invents a nuclear plant that is cheaper than fossil fuels, but only if you include the cost of carbon externalities? They wouldn't be able to build a business on that without societal support.

SPOILER: existing nuclear plants are already cheaper than fossil fuels with reasonable carbon fees [1]. Why haven't they been rolled out more? Because carbon fees have been fought by fossil fuel interests who spend a lot of money convincing young people that it was all the treehuggers fault.

1. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_14674/carbon-pricing-power-...

Hot take: The most important job is soldiers going to polluting countries and beating the shit out of them until they fall in line. As long as compliance is optional it wont matter how green you personally are.

...air and point source carbon extraction and sequestration. A friend is dating a fellow who has just accepted a job at Shell Oil in carbon storage

https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/carbon-capture-a...

https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/7/13/shell-sees-a-profita...

Carbon capture is just marketing for oil companies; it doesn't make sense energetically. And just looking at the numbers provided in their marketing page, it's clear that it's absolutely useless. In 2018 Shell extracted more than 4 million barrels of oil a day [0] -- with 430kg of CO2 per barrel [1], that's 1.591 billion (with a B, a thousand million) kg of CO2 extracted from the ground per day.

Meanwhile, on that page that you are quoting, all of those projects are on the ballpark of a million tons (a billion kg) per year. With luck, all of those projects put together (by the most ""climate responsible"" oil company nonetheless), each year would cover 15 days of Shell's carbon extraction. And that's without taking into account the fact that these projects have emissions of their own, which are definitely not taken into account for these totals.

Carbon sequestration is an interesting effort for sure, but the only use it has is give oil companies excuses for their existence.

[0] http://priceofoil.org/2019/05/20/shell-emissions-still-going... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...

I mostly agree with this assessment although I think it's still good for such efforts to continue. I wouldn't say carbon sequestration ventures only use is marketing (it's definitely the largest use and definitely the primary disingenuous monetary driver though).

There are groups that assume fossil fuels will still continue in some capacity regardless for some time, so if technology can be developed (without generating vast amounts of emissions in the process) to reduce undesired side effects of fossil fuels continued use, it's worth exploring. It may also become useful on the global stage where certain states don't seem to care at all about developing clean energy (e.g. China). If you do develop an effective cheap way to sequester carbon emissions for fossil fuels, you have a much better chance at persuading China to use and adopt it than telling them to shutdown all their coal fire power plants.

While I agree with the fact that China has a lot of coal power plants, afaik they are the ones investing the most into new nuclear tech. And also it's not like their emissions happen on a vacuum; first the world outsources all of their factories to China, and then they complain that they pollute a lot, as though the demand for consumer goods was China's fault.

For a practical example, the government of the UK likes to claim that they are on track to be "zero emissions"[0] -- great effort on their part. However, here all the imported manufactured products that definitely are not "zero emissions" aren't counted. All these emissions were exported to China, and then they have the gall to complain that China's emissions are too high.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-is-now-halfway-to-me...

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2021/7/30/the-struggle...

Carbon sequestration is probably going to be important, but if it in any way enables more fossil fuels to be burnt, then it's probably a net negative. We need it to take stuff back out of the atmosphere, not extract and then store yet more fossil Carbon.

> and point source carbon extraction and sequestration.

CCS at the extraction point is just propaganda to keep extracting more CO2. This is not a solution it's just an excuse to keep pumping CO2 out of the ground and into the air. The end result of CCS is just more emissions. Both because they don't capture every CO2 released during extraction and because they can't address the usage of the extracted material that will release more CO2.

We know what the solution is: renewables + storage and/or nuclear.

The solution is not to get more CO2 out of the ground.

Indeed. A lot of companies are talking about environmentalism and sustainability, but a lot of that is just people figuring out how to market what they already do.

I'm also cynical because a bunch of "top minds" in my graduating high school class have gone on to work at think-tanks and other climate policy NGO's. As far as I can tell, they haven't made much tangible progress beyond mere punditry. The few kids that went off to become electricians have probably done more to reduce carbon emissions by installing home solar panels than any of the climate advocates.

Policy is important though. For instance, designing an HOA policy or local law allowing for solar panels for instance is way more important than the actual installation, drawing from my personal experience.

I don't deny that policy is important, especially on a local level, but these folks are off in Northern Virginia / D.C. doing lord-knows-what. I also can't help but think they are preaching about things we already know need to be done. Almost like how the Susan G. Komen foundation spends so much more on breast cancer awareness than actual research.

I'd say humans, we're still in the assessment phase, slowly coming right out of denial. Data science would be very useful. A recent economist article shows how polluters skirt EPA rules for instance.

Is there any career overlap between software engineering / data science and fighting climate change? Was hoping the article would touch on it.

Given that literally everything is software, probably yes.

There's an interesting viewpoint that comes through in these comments that seems to imply that the policy and regulatory side of climate isn't "doing", and that engineering or science roles would be more beneficial to make tangible progress. I'd like to challenge that view -- it's my belief that at this point climate is really no longer mainly an engineering or science problem. If we allocated our money and effort correctly, we could tackle a huge part of the problem NOW, with current technology. And this lack of will is ultimately a policy and regulatory problem at heart.

This isn't to say there aren't many engineering challenges or potential engineering solutions. But for the most part I see those as only being necessary if the desire to fix things stays at its (very low) current level.

I'd agree, it's always been a "collective action" problem, we could all have adopted a carbon tax years ago and the problem would have solved itself. But, if one country or one political party defects, then they can profit themselves at the expense of everyone.

I'm also a big fan of the effective "regulatory funny business" that have been regularly maligned, like seperating the carbon and electricity components of electricity production, and offsetting carbon for flights with easy wins of replacing kerosene with solar in developing countries.

It's the simplest and easiest solution, and it's not primarily technical, just about creating a market. But it's been viciously attacked for so long it's all gets done quietly when reactionary voters aren't paying attention, even though it's worked really well wherever it's been used.

Policy and regulation are indeed extremely important, at least as much as engineering. Implementing a carbon tax would probably be the single most effective thing we can do.

However, I do not agree that climate change is no longer an engineering/science issue: Even if we were to magically stop emitting any GHG tomorrow, we would still be in for a pretty rough time (albeit much better than our current trajectory). And realistically, even with the best imaginable policies in place everywhere around the world we will still need to emit GHGs for decades no matter what. Developing carbon removal technologies is absolutely essential to solve this problem.

My college had a pretty large environmental engineering and sustainability programs. It may have even been one of the first to have sustainability as a major.

Many of the people found out that if you go the "save the planet route", you usually end up doing some boring regulatory job. Lots of energy auditors and EHS managers. These are important jobs, but I don't think they are very fulfilling, and they certainly aren't doing anything great for the climate.

Your last sentence seems contradictory, can you elaborate?

They are important in the they maintain safe workplaces and enforce say... wastewater treatment standards.

So in that sense they are important. However, given the trends in climate change, these jobs don't do much to change the trajectory of climate change.

I guess saying they aren't fulfilling is more a personal judgement, but I thought it was boring work.

> these jobs don't do much to change the trajectory of climate change.

Yes, the trends are depressing, but jobs like energy auditing are very important going forward as housing is an even larger source of greenhouse gas emissions than cars [1].

There is no way we can make significant progress toward decarbonization without a workforce trained to understand and measure efficiency and GHG emissions - even if "progress" means just avoiding the worst possible climate change trajectory.

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/5-charts-show-how-y...

Anecdotally, when talking with my advisor toward the end of college, I was essentially given the choice between choosing a career that's really meaningful (working on data mining for climate projects was the example) and pays less, or a career that pays more but doesn't mean as much. I chose the latter for now, but I still think about it often. Maybe I'll regret it in time.

Your choice doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s perfectly fine working for a few years in high paying jobs to build a cushion and then work on something that you find meaningful. Now the hard part is deciding when your cushion is big enough as it is very easy to always want more.

Saving the world and making a living are not guaranteed to align well. So I'd argue that it makes sense to first work to become financially independent, then spending that freedom in pursuit of making a difference, without being influenced by which path has paying jobs at any given time.

Yes lets all do that. Graduate with a degree in finance. Work for a big investment firm, make a few million. Then go help poor people with 'saving' more money 'to make a difference'

What is meaningful? You can live life the way you find meaningful, you can even spend the extra money you now make on something meaningful. I think it is a false dichotomy to begin with.

Btw way, aren't you in a better position to change the climate for the better when you are in, say, a car company? From the inside? I wouldn't listen to this BS. It's a road to a skewed market full of unhappy people, imho.

A career is "data mining" you can apply it to anything. It doesn't have to be exclusively about climate projects.

they didn’t pick data mining

If it's any consolation, I did the same. Skipped on the academic career partly because I hate the pretentiousness of academia with a passion (while loving science), partly for a desire to get hands-on with industry and "the real world" quicker.

I think either path is fine and we can still develop to do meaningful things. Working for a paycheck to increase some random companies profit feels less and less enticing though.

In general, people in my bubble seem to gravitate towards more free time than increased salary. 32h weeks are not that rare anymore and for many jobs 37hrs is the normal full time nowadays.

Working 5 days a week will die out, as most office jobs will have people wasting time anyways just to match the clock.

FWIW there's a lot of variability in academic pretentiousness based on the lab and university.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Who knows how you’d feel about your choice if you were struggling financially in a more meaningful career?

I can relate to this. Keep your eye open for new opportunities and eventually you may find something that both pays well and contributes to solving the climate problem.

The good news is that more people are finding ways of doing meaningful work while also turning a profit. An obvious example is working at a place like Tesla, but there are an increasing number of lower-profile for-profit companies that need tech + data talent to execute.

Good for them, although like most passion careers market forces are guaranteed to turn it into something quite undesirable for anyone wishing to make a steady living. Why treat your staff well when more are always knocking at the door?

The fact is the willingness to do the work isn't the problem, the issue is always whether there is sufficient capital on the table.

Most investors would cite a lack of opportunities, though. More young people doing more things means more investment opportunities.

Considering billionaires are going to space for fun, I think there's enough capital.

In the past they build a continental railroad, cities, industry and inventions for fun, those were at least useful. I’m not sure what we get out of billionaire space flights really, maybe some safety and viability data.

I’m not sure I’ve seen Zuckerberg, Bezos, Branson, et al expressing interest into the next transistor.

Maybe our generation’s robber barons aren’t as interesting as ones of the past?

Or maybe it's just a lot easier to tell what "the next transistor" is with half a century of hindsight.

You're basically saying "kids these days" except about billionaires.

Well yeah of course, the issue I'd take is it's on the "cock rocket" table rather than the "fix climate change" table.

I read because I was curious what "climate career" means. From the article they mention:

Urban farmer

Environmental consultant

Environmental scientist

Environmental lawyer

Environmental activist

Or joining the proposed "Climate Corps", a federal jobs program for young people to help fight the climate crisis [doing what though?]

pretty soon we'll have Environmental software developer

i optimize my code cycles to environmental standards. Best CO2/LOC ratio in 5 years

You joke, but code optimization is a career. If you can make something run much more efficiently, there's money to be made. I can't remember the name of the consultancy that did this though.

if it were so profitable maybe some things wouldnt be so bloated

Yeah the job is not exactly widespread. I guess because most of that stuff is just "ship it and not our problem" (the user is used to buying new hardware every 5 years to do the same tasks anyway).

I hope that attitude changes. Buying new hardware every 5 years should not be the norm.

I nominate this guy then https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

This site is beautiful from the in- and outside.

Can't come soon enough. Randall's Python environment is really screwed. Node.js is a lost cause.

https://xkcd.com/1987/

You can have a "climate career" doing pretty much any job you would like.

You can be an IT, a dev, a mechanical engineer, an accountant in a startup working on carbon removal [1], you can be a chemist researching new ways of producing cement with less CO2 impact [2], a farmer specializing in multistrata agroforestry [3], a technician installing solar panels etc.

[1]: https://carbonengineering.com/careers/

[2]: https://drawdown.org/solutions/alternative-cement

[3]: https://drawdown.org/solutions/multistrata-agroforestry

That's a neat, pretty small scale set of jobs there.

The article has some data, but IMHO it's a bit too sparse to support the title's hypothesis. It says "33% of survey respondents say they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report weekly sustainability practices." referring to a survey[0], but this survey doesn't appear to specify what exactly these practices are. From looking at the questions, I'm lead to believe that even merely using a recycling bin qualifies.

It then goes on to say that the director of the Environmental Studies program at USC has seen "an uptick in student enrollment within her department, particularly over the last five to 10 years". It'd be interesting to see what enrollment looks like in other departments for comparison since an uptick due to, say, population growth is a non-story (and it's also worth noting that USC is just one university, and in California - a very liberal-leaning state, to boot)

The one piece of data that seems encouraging is the part about median salaries (they're reportedly above average), but at best that merely supports the idea that environment jobs are no longer gambles as they had a reputation of being in the past. This is good, but it's a pretty big stretch to go from that to "students are flocking to environment jobs".

[0] https://green.usc.edu/files/2020/03/2028_Survey_Results_3192...

> California is facing a drought so devastating, some publications call it “biblical”.

California is in a great place to address most (all?) of the ills plaguing it through sustainable infrastructure investments, such as mass solar (we are at what only 14% as a state?!), solar storage, desalination, etc.

Fire situation can be helped with controlled burns and better overall management.

Hunh, given those numbers against costs-nothing feel-good questions, I actually came to the opposite conclusion, i.e. GenZ cares about other stuff way more like ya know jobs, housing, cost of living, etc. Instead of 25% giving lackluster priority to these broad climate goals I expected 75+%.

Am I "not getting it" ? Sorry...

It's typical selection bias.

News outlet needed a story about climate, so they decided to interview students until they got the sound bites they needed.

Obviously that doesn't accurately represent the wider sentiment. From my experience/view, Gen Z is extremely materialistic, so climate work (real work, not virtue signaling) is pretty far down their list of priorities.

Let’s hope you’re wrong and that this article isn’t trying to put the cart before the horse.

We need the next generation who are climate-aware-from-birth to go hard into it with both feet and don’t look back. Better for everyone if they do.

If climate change really was brought about by the industrial revolution, then the only solution is to go pre-industrial, and of course you would have to do something about the excess population that you need industry in order to be able to take care of.

And if climate change is as serious as we're told, why do the people who warn us the most always buy the hundred million dollars beach side properties? Don't they know that'll all be underwater in a couple years?

I'm at a point where I've accepted if it's real, we're all screwed anyways. So I just kind of don't care anymore. I see no point stressing myself out about it every day. Either I'll get killed by the climate change, killed by the only possible method to stop it, or not get killed... 2:1? There are certainly worse odds in life.

I know about companies like electric car manufactures, do folks know of other (non-activist) companies that are helping to solve climate change?

Providing an example of just one or two companies for each categories but there are obviously much more.

* Carbon Capture technologies [1]

* Any of the companies working on any of the renewable source of energy: solar, wind, geothermal etc. [2]

* Energy providers (and other smaller companies) working on smart and/or micro grids: being able to forecast renewable production and intelligently balance it across the grid to avoid starting up backup coal/gas plants. [3]

* Plant-based meat substitute companies [4]

* Monitoring through satellite imagery [5]

* Low CO2 cement production (don't know this industry enough to link)

* Smart thermostat, insulation and other means to reduce energy consumption for heating [6]

* etc. etc.

A very good place to start to get exposure to many different solutions is Drawdown: https://drawdown.org/solutions

----------

[1] https://carbonengineering.com/

[2] https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels https://www.edf-renouvelables.com/en/

[3] https://openclimatefix.org/projects https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/fairs-events/fairs...

[4] https://www.beyondmeat.com/ https://impossiblefoods.com/

[5] https://ecometrica.com/

[6] https://www.ecobee.com

Very helpful list. Thank you!

We live in a (maybe THE) golden age of cheap energy. We're pretty wasteful as a society (especially in America) and it's hard to see causality in your day to day life. People, including me, rely on things like cars for every day things. Grocery store 2 miles away? Well of course I'm taking my car. So that means the car has to be built (emissions), thankfully we are remote so we're sharing one standard range Model 3, we have to use electricity to power the car (fossil fuels), and I'm moving 2000 - 3000 pounds of material 4 miles round trip when if I had the ability to I could ride a bike or just walk those 2 miles and maybe save the car for the day that it rains.

So let's say I want some broccoli.

  Broccoli is grown in California which is far away from Ohio
  Broccoli has to be shipped by some giant truck to a warehouse
  Warehouse ships the broccoli to my local grocery store
  I go and ask Tesla to build me an electric car (something something pretending I'm making a difference)
  I get the car, and now every time I want broccoli I start it up and drive 4 miles round trip to get broccoli
  Eventually I get tired of the car and I'll get a new one and that's more emissions, resources used, etc.

This is an insane use of energy. And not to mention all of the times that people will go through this chain multiple times/day/week. "Oh forgot the butter, let me drive to the grocery store". And then we spend all of this money building and expanding highways and roads.

It's like, what if we just built medium density mixed-use neighborhoods, and I could ride my bike (or walk) down the road to a farmer's market style store? How much money would we save by all American families only needing one car, and not having to build and expand highways until we paved the whole planet?

Electric cars for example are just reaffirmations of the way we live right now. Bandaids. It's like you're doing the wrong thing and trying to find ways to improve doing the wrong thing instead of doing the right thing. It drives me crazy.

But in your day to day life very few people chain these things together (or some variation of them, this isn't meant to be exact). It's just "gas prices are XYZ, I need my car to do things, why are gas prices high?".

and this is just one (albeit, frankly I think the greatest) environmental challenge in America alone (I guess the anglosphere in general to some extent).

Anyway, enough rambling from my soapbox.

Yeah, totally feel your pain. I like my car but hate being dependent on it. Definitely looking into walkability/walk score next time I move.

Incidentally I have been looking for a google maps style "walkability" color coded map.

All fair, but the USA is so large it basically HAS to be a car based society. Have room, so we use it.

I think smaller mixed use neighborhoods would be great, but there’s literally no way to get there because it seems people don’t want to live on top of each other in biking distance unless they have to.

No scenario are you not shipping broccoli all over the world. Redesigning society seems to only prevent the last mile wastes.

Interesting point that EVs reinforce this.

Thanks - the only thing I'd say is that as I'm currently living in the 'burbs (close to my spouse's work so she didn't have a commute when we were in-office) I don't feel like I'm more on top of people than I did living in a mixed-use neighborhood that I could bike over to the coffee shop, wine store, or grocery store.

In Columbus we have this place called German Village [1]. I'd like to see all of America built more like this (not exactly necessarily, but more like it).

[1]https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g50226-d110220...

>USA is so large it basically HAS to be a car based society.

No it does not. Infrastructure that accommodates cars is extremely expensive. We subsidize car lifestyles to an extreme degree, at great financial and environmental cost. If you assure that rural locations will have near-equal (or superior) access to broadband and medical facilities, use funds from the entire state to subsidize expensive roads and bus drivers for those rural and suburban places, focus all services on highways rather than in productive places, shielding consumers from all those costs, it should not surprise anyone that people will normally respond to financial incentives rather than choosing more pleasant and sustainable lifestyles.

>Interesting point that EVs reinforce this. Absolutely. EVs as a solution are green-washing, and self driving cars as a solution are pretending that there is no component of transportation problems that revolves around physical space.

> what if we just built medium density mixed-use neighborhoods, and I could ride my bike (or walk) down the road to a farmer's market style store?

I think you might like Europe

Every time I visit! Though not without its own flaws. We live where we live because of family. Otherwise I'd really love to live/retire in Scotland. Also it kind of sucks but seems like it's hard to immigrate to places like this.

Why not nuclear engineering jobs too?

From the effort we put in now, almost seems like a dead end career unless you are in the military. It’s been regulated into impracticality.

There's Terrapower, which seems like a pretty interesting place to work and a lot of worthwhile technologies. I'd probably go work there myself if I were open to the location.

Talking from my experience, despite its undeniable advantages to fight climate change, the general hostility of the public opinion towards fission (or nuclear in general) refrained me from pursuing this path...

Construction is the challenge with nuclear. It's likely that due to the extreme challenge of construction, we will see a huge contraction in the amount of nuclear.

We literally can't build it fast enough anymore to replace reactors that are reaching their end of life.

Choosing a nuclear engineer career path today is likely to be extremely challenging, and will have little impact. Better to try something that scales, like wind/solar/storage, or do something high-risk that is completely out of the known path, in order to try to blaze something novel. (We still need cement and steel decarbonization tech, for example.)

Because it's not about actually fixing the climate. It's about signaling superior holiness. See Turchin's work on elite overproduction.

As a software engineer, I am seriously considering going back to college and studying nuclear physics.

I believe an abundance of emission-free energy is about the only thing that can move the global economy to where it needs to be. Fossil fuels need to be out-competed with very cheap electricity. Once you achieve that, capitalism will ensure that all fossil fuel burning devices will gradually disappear. Other methods that try to fight capitalism (e.g. CO2 taxes) are ultimately losing battles, because the global political goodwill will never be there.

Solar is great, and cheap, until it's not. You need to cover vast areas of land in solar panels to power the whole country (incl. cars, freight, industry, ...), which is impractical and extremely costly, and still only works part of the day/year. It's an important part of the solution, but not the solution.

Nuclear is about the only thing that can provide continuous abundance at a reasonable cost, though we need new technologies.

Having climate change experts is great but flocking to careers around climate change is not the solution. We need people in power who want to change. Fact of the matter is that there are still far too many climate denying anti-scientist career politicians, most of whom are boomers, in office. It's these people we need to drive out. We need the right people to kick out the career politicians that have done nothing to fight climate change. Both Democrats and Republicans. Both Labour and Conservatives.

It is insane that the democrats, the so-called "centre-left", have yet to take any action around climate change. It's either "manchin this manchin that" or "republicans this republicans that". While here in the UK we have the likes of Boris who can increase taxes on the rich to pay for the pandemic, and instead puts it on the working class and the poor, while Labour can only stand by and complain that they're not in power (before any Labour supporter says, they'll probably make just as little progress if they were in power).

We need the young to take these offices. We need climate change champions as our Prime Ministers and as our Presidents. Not as yet another scientist that will practically be ignored by politicians.

> They’re also practicing what they preach: 33% of survey respondents say they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report weekly sustainability practices.

I wonder what those activities/practices might be.

Not having a car might be strong one. You can get away with it it many places.

A close 2nd may be avoiding/foregoing meat. To be honest, for me, the meat they include at restaurants (esp. takeout given the pandemic) is sub-standard anyway.

I'm Gen X and I looked for a job in sustainability/env for years (I got one). I'm really happy the newer generations have this offer available.

Can I ask what that job is you found? Mainly the general company goal and what your job/function in it is.

Is there any career overlap between software engineering and fighting climate change? New to the field and not sure where to start.

Maybe this is a bit of a pessimistic view, but they are bound to become disillusioned. Nobody will move as fast as they want them to. Even if they are experts in energy policy, energy market design or engineering (i.e. not "using the lens of literature and philosophy [...]" to use a quote from the article), their contribution to limiting global warming will be insignificant. If they have deeply anti-capitalist stances, they might find a job in a degrowth think tank and make even less of a difference. And most importantly, climate change poses much less of a financial risk to the economy than they think, so companies won't become environmentally conscious unless politics introduces those environmental externalities into their balances.

I'd consider myself a part of this group and I also want to find meaning in my work - but I try to manage my expectations.

I honestly can't tell if the Guardian is trolling with lines like this:

“My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments,” they say.

Like, why would you put that quote in an article otherwise?

Possibly they're just idealistic dreamers, but since they regularly feature right-wing controversialists that rile up their usual fanbase, it feels likely that the algorithm tells them that this drives "engagement", possibly without them understanding why, but even before the algorithm was an possible excuse, they've been regularly printing inflammatory drivel to drive sales.

The article is describing a cult, so the language is going to be quite abstract and obtuse.

literature, maybe not - but philosophy does provide options that aren't just navel-gazing. The philosophical attitude that modernist society takes towards nature is that of material resources to be extracted for economic benefit; obviously this mindset is a big part of how we got to this point. Instead there are philosophical ideas like deep ecology or complex systems theory that point to a different approach.

So I'm probably a good example of the Guardian's target demographic, and I highly value the study of philosophy and literature and other humanities. I fully believe that going to zero carbon is the next big global challenge.

I still would pause if I was writing an article about students trying to save the world from climate change and used that line, unless I was trying to undermine them.

Maybe I'm just out of touch, or maybe too in touch with the older generation who have been turned into deniers. But having e.g. read academic papers that argue that Africa shouldn't introduce carbon fees, because it would be bad for Africa, from someone employed by a fossil fuel company, my suspicions are raised that this is intentionally inflammatory.

I think the particular word choice is causing some people to mentally think "you're not part of my tribe, that sounds ridiculous," but that's not a fair assessment of what was said.

How many people on HN have been deeply inspired to build a better future because of SF? I certainly have. And that's exactly what that phrase is talking about.

Literature is a very powerful tool for orienting human goals and finding inspiration to perform feats and labor that we might not otherwise do.

One such work that does exactly this (for me) is Kim Stanley Robinson's recent book Ministry For The Future. A lot of people found it kind of dry, but I appreciated the thoughts about tech and science. It's a fantastic encapsulation if all sorts of the best knowledge on the subject in 2020.

This feels like an ideologically motivated article. Something along the lines of "boomers bad". They don't actually provide any evidence to support the assertion in the headline that "Gen Z members flock to climate careers".

Edit: “My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments” Seriously?

It's the Guardian, kind of the left wing version of the Daily Mail (yes, I am mostly a Guardian reader).

You'll get flack on here for saying this (speaking from experience), but this is accurate. Bad faith (and naive) opinion pieces abound.

I say this as a Guardian reader, it's really made a very conscious effort to become the liberal Daily Mail in an effort to stave off bankruptcy.

The Guardian is way more extreme than the Daily Mail. A better analog would be Breitbart.

How pretentious.

Title when I commented was something about nothing else being important except climate change

They are flocking even harder to blockchain. Almost as if people are rational actors motivated by the forcing factor of “pay your bills or die”, there is funding for climate jobs now more than ever before.

Wonder if the companies responsible for the exaggeration of impending doom will make some position for them.

Also wonder if the companies will ever change because zoomers care so much.

It's not about saving the planet, its a way for more control over us. Usher in the bait and switch of a new era. Millennial had the war on terror. Zoomers, the war on climate change.

The people in this article appear more like a cult than a science-based environment.

-Rachel Larrivee, 23, a sustainability consultant based in Boston

-Mimi Ausland, 25, the founder of Free the Ocean

-Matt Ellis-Ramirez, 22, a Chicago-based volunteer for the youth-led environmental activist organization the Sunrise Movement

-Brooke Hoese, a 24-year-old undergraduate in Texas pursuing a career in restoration ecology

What is a cult? In what way are these cult-like?

Maybe that they work together towards a goal of common good. I suppose some people cannot understand why somebody would care for others, or care about the future.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, am I supposed to be familiar with these organizations? Also, what's culty about "restoration ecology"?

I’m curious to know why. Out of those people you listed, I don’t see a single thing pointing to a cult, or not consistent with science.

I re-read the article critically, and I don’t see any signs of a cult here. Maybe these people are putting their beliefs ahead of empirical research (hard to tell from just this article †), but from what I can tell it’s just people who feel passionately about the environment.

† The Sunrise movement generally opposes nuclear energy, carbon capture and geo-engineering. But I think there are scientific and policy arguments for and against these strategies that can be rooted in public policy, engineering and even scientific constrains.

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