Ask HN: What interesting jobs for software engineers exist in climate tech?

On and off, I find myself wondering if the problems I work on as an engineer are important enough in the grand scheme of things. It's easy to conclude that climate change is one of the biggest problems we face today and for years to come.

Which leads me to wonder whether software engineering skills equip us to be part of the solution. Is there a demand out there?

I've been running searches for "climate tech jobs" occasionally, but what I find is sobering and doesn't make me very feel useful. Broadly speaking:

- There's a lot of startups or even more established companies providing SaaS solutions to do footprint monitoring, etc. Sadly, very often this business model seems to be paired with "greenwashing" type certifications. Cursory investigation often reveals plausible critique of the standards and due diligence involved. Some of this may be useful work, but I find it very hard to tell the good from the bad.

- I've looked into a few of the companies working on engineering solutions to climate change, e.g. Direct Air Capture and similar. The proble is that even when the technology works, right now it looks like fossil fuel burners are heavily leaning on them to get out of emission reductions. Additionally, these companies mostly post chemical and mechanical engineering jobs. Software is not core to these products.

- The most obviously-good stuff I've found is e.g. web apps that help inform the public and decision-makers with good interfaces and smart visualizations. For example the NDC viewer and others. But it feels like you have to be "at the right place at the right time" to get involved with one of these.

Overall the feeling I get is that mitigation and adaptation projects world-wide aren't sufficiently funded to lead the tech industry to optimize its portfolio to answer any demands. And even where it happens it's more a slow evolution of existing products or product portfolios rather than greenfield solutions. It seems hard to find an engineering job where you get to truly focus on this problem space - all the action with impact seems to be in the policy space instead.

What am I missing? Are any of you working software engineers in climate tech and have some suggestions for where you see capacity gaps right now?