
What can a software developer do about climate change? - thenobsta
https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/09/10/software-developers-climage-change/
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esotericn
I made a post along these lines the other day regarding how best to put money
to work via charitable donations.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21024358)

A software developer in a fairly standard job in the Western world likely
earns double the minimum wage. Someone at an adtech company could well be an
order of magnitude higher.

5, 10 or (insert value here)% of that is an amount you won't even notice but
would make a spectacular difference if we all did it, and if you're somewhere
like SF or London your money will go a hell of a long way elsewhere in the
world.

I've committed to putting at least $500 a month towards a selection of
charities and plan to increase that over time. I don't need more toys.

The article here also mentions the idea of negotiating, or strongarming, your
way into a shorter working week in order that you have time to act
politically. I agree with that wholeheartedly - variety is the spice of life
in any case!

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_nhynes
If you're into machine learning you might consider projects like improving
crop yields from historical data and tracking deforestation using satellite
imagery. Microsoft has a whole "AI for Earth Initiative", too [0], if you're
looking for ideas.

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-for-
earth](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-for-earth)

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cmarschner
I would love to invest in a fund that invests in solar and wind plants. With
the investment goal to become carbon negative. What options are therefor
people like us (i.e. one with detailed reporting how money was spent, perhaps
options to invest more than just money, e.g. time and expertise etc.)?

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notmyfuture
For anyone looking to get involved but unsure how or where, try this too:
[http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/).
It's been posted before, but is a great starting point.

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notmyfuture
I’m all for the idea of incremental positive change. Yes, no individual
person, city or country can fix this, but if our response to that is to be
pessimistic, defeated and do nothing, then we all fail. Advocacy for cycling
is one positive thing, and there are so many more.

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jdmoreira
I know how absurd this may sound but I think it’s still rationally true.

We could remove all the bloat. There is a lot of bloat in modern systems that
just causes unnecessary heat and energy consumption. I’m sure it adds up once
we consider all the edge devices needing bigger lithium batteries and data
centers needing air conditioning.

I do exactly the same kind of computing today that I did in the early 90s. The
devices got way faster and way more energy efficient but my experience is
fundamentally the same. Boggles the mind.

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powerbroker
Try chipping in $100 to a local business so that it can offer free or
subsidized electricity to electric vehicles. If you can do that with 20
people, then you can likely get it done. Offer to repair a damaged EV charger,
if it is in a place where it can be effective. I've got a list of about 20
software projects that could possibly make a difference too. Let me add, that
my MacBook Pro has taken a licking from at least one cycling accident, and
held up like a champ.

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kevas
This idea has more holes than Swiss cheese, yet heck with it: remove layers of
abstraction from entire systems—hardware to software and everything in
between.

Each layer consumes additional resources which ultimately consumes energy.

In today’s environment, we try and abstract anything and everything away. From
the services we use to the software we create and if we were to take a look at
those dependencies, that graph would be stuff of nightmares.

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coder4life
I read the article, and there was nothing in it about what you eat and how
this _might_, a little bitty bit, also affect the climate/earth.

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NoZZz
Refuse to work on anything but C/C++ or Rust codebases.

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tracker1
Buy and eat from local, sustainable farms. Consider broader impact when
"upgrading". Donate used electronics to organizations that refurbish and reuse
them. Donate to organizations that plant trees with minimal overhead.

Step outside the surface level boxes that have people protesting over straws
and consider your larger usage. Stop buying products from countries that have
horrible track records for environmental waste and pollution. Inform those
politicians that represent you that you want a higher level of accountability.

To the aoc/green-new-deal supporters, drop the socialist and identity politics
and push legislation centered on specific issues that can be implemented
independently.

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blueadept111
Good grief, there's ONLY one thing: have less than two children! In a couple
of generations this would cut the word's population in half, assuming everyone
followed step.

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avmich
The whole point of improving environment is to make it better _for people_. If
there is no people, then any state of environment, naturally speaking, is
perfectly fine.

Having less children is, in effect, refusing to solve the problem.

~~~
blueadept111
The other way of solving the problem is to let people kill each other fighting
over dwindling resources as the planet dies and becomes sterile, because we're
not smart enough as a species to find and maintain a sustainable state of
equilibrium with our environment. This scenario is apparently the one we're
choosing, by default.

Human industrial/economic activity is what's killing the planet. The planet
cannot sustain the side effects of an economy of 7 billion people. It doesn't
matter what you think, it doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter if
you recycle, or drink out of paper straws, or vote for the green party, or
switch to hydrogen cars, or bury your head in the sand. If you want to solve
the problem, but don't want to have less children, then figure out another way
to reduce the population by billions of people. I can't wait to hear it.

~~~
avmich
> If you want to solve the problem, but don't want to have less children, then
> figure out another way to reduce the population by billions of people. I
> can't wait to hear it.

Maybe you don't need to reduce population at all - hence no need to find a
way? How about just using existing resources - which are plentiful - and also
new resources - which are available - to your needs without also getting those
resources uses harming you (society)?

> Human industrial/economic activity is what's killing the planet.

Important here is that it's not the existence of this activity which kills,
it's the way the activity is done. If so, we need to change the way. There are
seemingly enough suggestions about how specifically it could be done - energy
efficiency, better control for exhausts, pollutions, single-use items etc.

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thrower123
Probably the best thing would be to resist all urges to get involved with
bitcoin.

