[HN Gopher] What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)
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What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)
Author : manx
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-06-13 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| 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.
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