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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Ignore the crunchy comments saying don't eat meat, don't have kids, and don't drive. You have no impact as a consumer or influencer.

What you can do is:

* a) find someone working on climate change, and help write software for them part-time as a volunteer

* b) brainstorm an idea for a site/app, and build it yourself (and of course post it to HN)

* c) quit your job, join an organization focused on climate change, and do some work

* d) start researching more about climate change until you can make a better choice about a or b or c

If you can't commit a big chunk of time to it, then research good orgs focused on climate change, and donate money to them (or angel invest in them). That's the next best thing you can do.

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Not sure why not having kid is such controversial. I guess people just can't be not selfish, they will find any excuse. People will do anything that does not change their lifestyle, basically all of which are useless compared to what is going on in climate crisis.

Not having kid is the most effective thing anyone can do.

You can just adopt instead, raise them to be ethical. It should not be so controversial. You can be a parent without giving birth.

Also bringing a kid without their consent to this dying planet and then make them fix it (which due to their ancestor's screw ups and comfort) looks like a punishment by parents, pretty selfish. These kids already have jobs to perform before even born. I sure don't want my kids to suffer this disaster and without their consent.

Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking RCP8.5, the IPCC’s “worst case scenario”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fliCxyAwBWU&t=719s

> People will do anything that does not change their lifestyle

Clearly you don’t have children if you think having a child doesn’t change your lifestyle.

> Also bringing a kid without their consent to this dying planet and then make them fix it…looks like a punishment by parents, pretty selfish

Here’s a tip, don’t use this line on a first date.

It's not about dating. It's truth that you didn't want to hear. Because accepting truth is difficult, so fight it, deny it instead.

Regarding lifestyle, I chose wrong word, not my first language. It's what and how you want your life that you don't want to compromise for climate crisis.

I don't think not having a kid is, itself, controversial. I think that telling others who want children not to have them is the controversial bit.

On the one hand, it is a very effective way to reduce your carbon footprint if you can do it. On the other hand, for many people it conflicts with one of the most basic human desires, which is life-defining for lots of the population.

As an analogy, if you asked people to be celibate you could guarantee that no new babies would come along even if birth-control-methods failed; a huge net positive! Despite that, sex is a basic human experience that many see as integral to their vision of a life, and it'd be controversial to seemingly impose that restriction on others.

tl;dr: no controversy in you doing you, sometimes controversy in you asking others to similarly do you

"Ignore the crunchy comments saying don't eat meat, don't have kids, and don't drive. You have no impact as a consumer or influencer."

Yet each of these actions can be quantified in terms of CO2 no emitted or resources preserved. There is an impact, and that impact becomes apparent given sufficient scale and time.

One's choice not to have kids could very well provide exponential savings when compared to one's personal lifetime emissions/consumption when looking over generations.

I did just c) - I'm joining https://normative.io as an engineer at the beginning of next year for this particular reason. The company helps other companies decrease carbon emissions by generating sustainability reports.

I'm _very_ excited to be a tiny part in helping humanity solve one of our biggest problems.

If you’re into AI, there is Climate Change AI which is a “global initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning.”

- https://www.climatechange.ai/