Ask HN: How to help prevent climate change with software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to help prevent climate change with software?

7 pointskirso3 comments

Looking at the areas of the impact for software products. Would love to see some examples or even ideas that you have in your head (if you are willing to share) for potential products that are tackling climate change where impact can be high.

Can be anything from carbon capture, to renewable energy to alternative food and agriculture. Just looking for inspiration and see what other fellow hackers are working on.

One thing specifically I am trying to understand is which areas or verticals that need the most improvement.

I was also recently inspired by RedwoodJS launch and their fund for tackling climate change (I am not associated or affiliated). They are giving out some base funding for tackling such problems: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2022/04/04/redwood-v1-and-funding.html

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Software is already having a big impact. Just think of all the tools that allowed us to work from home and not commute during the pandemic and how different the world would have been if we did not have them.

A area where software will have a huge impact is crypto mining. As a community we should be proactive in reducing the amount of energy wasted on crypto mining. If you think about it, only the rich have the ability to mine lots of crypto coins and these are people who could have used the same investment to do more positive things in their communities like donating computers to local schools or let the electric power they consume be used for more meaningful purposes instead of buying yet 10 more GPUs and plugging them into the grid. NVIDIA was on the right track with their firmware changes to slow down mining.

A website that closes the feedback loop between voters, the actions of their representatives and the progress made towards:

1. Matching food production & distribution to global demand.

2. Reforming labor, housing, healthcare, education etc. policy.

3. Proportion of energy generation made up of renewables.

4. Species diversity.

5. Tree coverage.

6. Quantity and sources of pollution generated.

7. Percentage of polluted land/water/air cleaned up.

8. etc. etc. etc.

The solution is ultimately political but technology can help us improve the ability of our political systems to respond constructively to crisis.

Helping the general population to know where/when/how to vote does a lot to block nasty surprises from political blocs with ultra-short-termist views.

Ideally you'd be aggregating and integrating other resources to form a complete picture rather than trying to tackle each on their own.

A map of carbon bombs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389645

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