[HN Gopher] What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) ___________________________________________________________________ What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015) Author : manx Score : 31 points Date : 2021-06-13 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (worrydream.com) (TXT) w3m dump (worrydream.com) | seb1204 wrote: | He can do what everyone can do. Live a more conscious life, | consume less, buy high quality consumer products that last | longer, re-use reduce recycle, talk about it, advocate better | choices. Consume greenery/renewable energy, take public | transportation, engaged in politics. | Syonyk wrote: | > _re-use reduce recycle_ | | I believe the ideal order is "Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, | rot." | | Refuse: Just say no to stuff. You don't have to worry about | dealing with the waste from things that you don't take in the | first place. This can be taken to not-helpful extremes, but in | general, this is the best option. It's always depressing to see | just how much trash (of the "actual trash" variety) one of our | very rare take-out meals produces. If we all (4 of us) have | something from a drivethrough, the amount of trash generated by | that one meal is very close to a week's worth of kitchen trash | for us with other meals. The paper is often too greasy to | recycle, waxed paper cups are good for firestarters but little | else, etc. | | Reduce: All other things being equal, "less crap to dispose of" | beats "more." I'll point to standard blister packaging as the | sort of thing one ought avoid, if at all possible. Not only is | it a very real health hazard during the opening process, it's | almost entirely impossible to do anything with it after the | fact. This is where bringing your own bags to the grocery store | fit in, or for things like loose vegetables and such... just | don't use a bag! You get some weird looks in the checkout lane | when you dump half a dozen onions on the conveyer, but I remove | the outer skins anyway when I work on them, and I don't have a | plastic bag to deal with as a result. | | Reuse: Anyone with small children (and lacking weird quirks | about "You're playing with a box!") is probably an expert at | this. I cannot tell you how many times a box something came in | has turned into a good play toy for a week or two. Random | kitchen boxes can be taped up and turned into blocks, | corrugated cardboard is just awesome for everything, waste | paper from address labels or such is useful for drawing, etc. | Lots of options here. I've considered getting a setup to smash | glass up and embed it in concrete I pour for various things, | though I'm not sure this really gains me an awful lot in terms | of mass. | | Recycle: This is the standard first response, and depressingly | often, "Recycle" actually translates to, "Oh, yeah, totally buy | this thing, it can be recycled!" It's just an excuse to consume | more. If you want to be quite upset by this, look at the state | of plastic recycling in developed nations. It tends to consist | heavily of "We loaded it into a shipping container, sent it to | a third world country, and counted it as recycled, we don't | care what they actually do with it." "What they actually do | with it," often enough, is open burning, or just letting it | wander down the river into the ocean. If you're concerned about | the environment (as opposed to purely carbon emissions and | GHGs), plastics should be a huge, huge problem. Unfortunately, | _literally everything_ comes in them. | | Rot: Compost. If it's organic, or nearly so, compost it. Hot | piles work best. | thysultan wrote: | Buy seeds, and seal them with little sprinkles of wisdom like | fortune cookies in places that would be accessible in the | aftermath, the new inheritors of the earth will regard you as a | prophet or god when they re-learn the ancient art of farming. | Syonyk wrote: | Unfortunately, outside some particular environmental conditions | that are far from trivial to reproduce most places, seeds don't | last indefinitely. The gemination rate tends to drop off fairly | rapidly as a factor of years. | | They're designed to survive from late summer to spring, not | years or the decades that would be needed for that sort of | thing. | | Now, there's a ton you can do with seeds - work on optimizing | various heirloom varieties of plants to your local climate (as | opposed to the "one seed for all places, apply energy to the | field until they behave!" approach that is widely used today), | and trying to keep some genetic diversity in the seeds you use, | but I don't think "random seed capsules" are likely to work | over the likely timeframes involved. | anonporridge wrote: | The best thing everyone can do is have fewer children. | | This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. | carapace wrote: | Use less energy. | | Here's Vaclav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 | giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate - what we | can learn from historic energy transitions". | https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk | | The conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use | would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 ) | | We can do this and most of the technology needed is already | invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a | species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to | endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get | us most of the way there. | tito wrote: | Hackers can join (or start) an air mining company working on how | to pull carbon from the air economically: https://airminers.org/ | soroushjp wrote: | If you're looking for ways to contribute positively to the fight | against climate change, check out relevant job boards like | https://jobs.climatebase.org/jobs (no affiliation). | | I also lead engineering over at Vow (vowfood.com), where we're | hoping to transition the world to cell-cultured meat as a way to | dramatically cut back on global emissions, since a quarter of all | GHG emissions are food related.[1][2] If you're a Software or | Mechatronics Engineer who wants to learn more, shoot me a | message. We're hiring in Sydney and for experienced remote | software engineers as well. | | * 1: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 * 2: | https://gfi.org/resource/cultivated-meat-lca-and-tea-policy-... | d_silin wrote: | Understand that you can't solve society-wide issues with | technology alone. | Syonyk wrote: | Buy a Raspberry Pi 4. Use it once a week as your main computer. | | I'm serious. So much waste (power, e-waste, etc) is generated by | the never ending rush towards more and more computationally | complex computing that, for the most part, does what we did 5, | 10, 20 years ago but on a fraction the compute and a fraction the | power. | | It drives me up the wall just how bloated most modern code is. A | "chat application" is now, often enough, an Electron app with a | couple hundred megabyte download size, a memory footprint in the | high hundreds of MB, and a CPU burn of "Well, it hasn't pegged | out the CPU yet so typing is still fast enough... oh, wait, there | it goes lagging." For passing around text messages that are no | different from what we used to do on AIM back in the 90s, or, for | that matter, still do on IRC today on native applications. | | I've noticed a definite trend with web stuff in the past 5 years, | which is that it works great if you're on a high end workstation | with a 4k monitor or two and gobs of RAM - the sort of thing | companies tend to provide to web developers (Google, I'm looking | at _you_ ). Try to use the same stuff on lower power, older | hardware, and... well, it simply doesn't work. | | I'm still pretty bitter about the fact that Google's "New" | Blogger interface is, quite literally, unusable on older hardware | once you have a decent number of photos in the post. I've no idea | why the speed of typing text is dependent on the number of images | in the post, but it is, and you can even bring a modern high end | machine to a crawl if you put enough images in (some larger-than- | reasonable number, but it shouldn't matter in the first place). A | couple people with high end workstations utterly ruined a | perfectly functional interface and made it impossible to write | text-and-photos blog posts on older hardware that used to work | just fine, for the sake of some responsive, mobile-first rubbish | - on a _blogging_ platform. It 's quite literally as far from | mobile-first as one can get, for the editor side. | | Even the power efficient looking stuff we do often has a large | power budget on the backend (see "most phone applications that | talk to a bunch of cloud servers"). | | But if you can't run a basic task on a Pi 4, you _really_ need to | be reconsidering your approach to the problem. | | ======== | | Beyond that particular thorn of mine, if you're in the tech | industry and concerned about climate change... does it show? | Could someone else looking at your life tell you're concerned | about climate change, or do you just look like any other high | income consumer, buying shiny luxury toys and jetting around the | world? | | I'll suggest that "consuming our way out of problems largely | caused by overconsumption" isn't a strategy to actually _solve_ | problems, though it 's quite profitable for those selling the | "green" solutions. | | Edit: And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out that | Starlink access terminals, at least the one I have, consume a | reliable 2+kWh/day, so about 750kWh/yr. Per Dishy. That's pretty | well absurd for an internet connection terminal alone. | x0054 wrote: | Stop using inefficient server side languages in the name of | "developer efficiently"? That could cut some CO2. AWS doesn't run | on magic dust. | heterodoxxed wrote: | The market doesn't reward those who optimize their code. | | Fastest-to-market and slow beats second-to-market and optimized | every day of the week. | seb1204 wrote: | There is an awareness of power consumption of data centres. | Why not start marketing code to power consumption metrics? | What about fastest-to-market and above average code base = | marketing argument? Or even scientific paper? | | I think here is is also important to look at smaller | companies and not only FAAG. | dang wrote: | Some past threads: | | _Ask HN: What can a technologist do about climate change?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436237 - Dec 2020 (47 | comments) | | _What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153043 - May 2020 (32 | comments) | | _What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? (2015)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20520183 - July 2019 (12 | comments) | | _What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19259106 - Feb 2019 (46 | comments) | | _What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16505675 - March 2018 (10 | comments) | | _What can a technologist do about climate change?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 - Nov 2015 (289 | comments) | dr_dshiv wrote: | R&D for marine layer cloud brightening-- perhaps using engines to | loft salt water behind containerships could efficiently seed low | clouds at a massive scale. | GoodJokes wrote: | adapt to it. Don't enable others to exacerbate it. | howmayiannoyyou wrote: | Nothing. China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire | developed world combined, a new report has claimed. The research | by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world's greenhouse | gases in 2019. Any version of a "green new deal" changes nothing | globally until China and several other major polluting nations | join the fight. | Syonyk wrote: | How would those gasses be attributed if you took the end users | of the products produced in China, and assigned the CO2 | emissions to those nations instead? | | If I buy a FizzWhizz Mk 3, which is produced in China (on coal | power), shipped (via container ship) to the United States, and | then trucked to me, where I use it for 5 years... is it really | fair to count those emissions as "Chinese" for tracking | purposes? | | Yes, I agree they are emitted in China, but they're emitted in | China to serve demand in a totally different country with a | different end user. | | Cleaning up your emissions by exporting the manufacturing to | another country (with far worse environmental standards) | doesn't seem like anything beyond a shell game. | lhorie wrote: | Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could | have an impact if enough people stopped spending | discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of course, | is nobody thinks they're part of the problem. | Syonyk wrote: | I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the | problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than | the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so | they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the | dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as | possible. | | I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the | residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken | things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were | either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the | amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - | I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a | good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if | you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." | "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be | up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for | repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops | and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling | anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, | is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else | know at the time). | | It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry | for reasons I don't understand. | | I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro | region for a while, and I was quite literally the only | person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing | cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and | refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made | rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that | in an office of several thousand people, I was literally | the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering | iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed | power connection. | belorn wrote: | The assumption used when you move the pollution to the end | user is that environmental regulations does not exist. An | product produced through coal power with little regard to the | environment is assumed to be cause the same emission if | produced where the end user is. | | In order to calculate the actually virtual emission value of | the consumer, one would first have to convert the FizzWhizz | Mk 3 to the emission values as if a real factory in your | location produced it. | | If we assume that people will always export the manufacturing | to the country with the worst environmental standards, having | any environmental standards above the worst is pointless and | have no impact on the environment. It also give little | incentives for countries with a lot of high export to reduce | emissions. | | One could try to adjust this with tariffs that reflect the | environmental costs the manufacturing country, but right now | that is not a very popular concept. | quicklime wrote: | Agree. Some people have modeled this, and attributed | emissions back to household consumption: | | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289373031_Environme. | .. | Syonyk wrote: | Thanks - that looks like an interesting read, but the | abstract reads roughly as I'd assumed: "The wealthier the | area, the more the impact." | | I remain generally annoyed at people who go on and on about | how important stopping climate change is, _as long as | someone else does it._ That the most anyone could be | expected to do is vote some way or another, every 2 /4 | years... that's a "I want to be seen caring about it but | don't actually care that much" sort of answer. | | If you're earning tech money and car about climate change, | there are a lot of things you can do. They just involve | "not spending all your money on luxury toys and huge | houses." | fighterpilot wrote: | The only fair way is to attribute some to the purchaser and | some to the seller. Both parties have benefited from the | transaction and neither party has paid the associated | social cost. | rocknor wrote: | So? Consumption CO2 per capita is what really matters. | | https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi... | b3n wrote: | Why is that what really matters? Having fewer children makes | a big difference which is invisible by this metric. | | What _really_ matters is the negative impact on the | environment. If we half emissions per capita but 10x the | population size mother nature isn 't congratulating us. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-13 23:00 UTC)