
Show HN: Collective.Energy – Crowdsource climate solutions as a community - ericvanular
https://collective.energy
======
ericvanular
Hi HN!

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the global climate crisis. I made this as a
response to the problem, ”I don’t know what I can do to help”.

[https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy) is a community for
crowdsourcing climate solutions & actions. The platform empowers individuals
by providing inspiration, feedback, and an audience. Turn climate ideas into
plans into reality - all in one place.

Feel free to make an account and post. It's far from perfect but let me know
what you think. I'd love helpful feedback.

Thanks, Eric (Collective.Energy maker)

~~~
albi_lander
Great initiative! You should have a look at
[https://www.tmrow.com](https://www.tmrow.com), they are building tools which
allow anyone to understand the climate impact of their decisions. The
"pragmatic guide" they wrote about climate change
([https://www.tmrow.com/climatechange](https://www.tmrow.com/climatechange))
is one of the best I've read on the topic, as it is very well documented and
provide actionable insights.

~~~
ericvanular
This is awesome. The focus on climate pragmatism is exactly what we'd like to
channel. I'll post about it on Collective.Energy - if you're involved with
tmrow, get in touch!

~~~
martincollignon
I'm involved! Feel free to reach out at martin@tmrow.com

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DennisP
Looks cool. A related project is MIT's ClimateColab:

[https://www.climatecolab.org/](https://www.climatecolab.org/)

They run annual contests for climate solutions. For several years they had a
conference at MIT for all the winning proposals, with VCs attending. In the
first couple years the winners presented their ideas to small groups at
Congress and the U.N.

But neither of those entities was interested in the ideas anyone presented.
Now they've scaled down to a few tightly focused contests sponsored by people
who actually want to implement something.

~~~
ericvanular
I think Climate Colab is great. They are coming at it from a slightly
different angle, which isn’t necessarily any better or worse. It is very
contest oriented, with highly structured judging processes. Our objective is
to include as many people in the discussion as possible, opening up the
dialogue beyond a judged format (which can feel exclusive and prevent some
people who might otherwise contribute their voice). Their approach has more of
an academic focus (which is natural being a product of MIT). To me Colab feels
more like Kaggle than HN/Reddit. Awesome work though!

------
pjc50
An example thing to do that you might be able to replicate in your city:
[https://www.edinburghsolar.coop/](https://www.edinburghsolar.coop/)

Co-op and mutual solutions have interesting potential, although this one does
rather rely on government subsidies.

~~~
ericvanular
Amazing idea! Please post about this on Collective.Energy, I think you could
inspire similar projects all over

------
tristor
The solution seems pretty simple based on current technology:

* Nuclear for base load generation

* Wind/Solar for peak times during the day

* Pumped hydroelectric storage to help offset excess capacity

* Maintain existing hydroelectric dams

It's pretty much that simple, but the politic blocks against using nuclear are
massively damaging to our ability to put in place any real solutions.

~~~
briandear
Why is this being downvoted?

~~~
joshypants
Because nuclear takes too long to spin up - we don't have time.

~~~
kortilla
Well then we just keep burning gas/coal for base load. Congrats on wrecking
the planet.

~~~
joshypants
We have 10 years to cut 50% of emissions. We literally can't build enough
nuclear plants in that time, it's very slow. It's also really expensive. We
have to use other renewables.

~~~
powerbroker
We should a) build renewable; and b) build nuclear reactors with the idea that
you will insert rods, to decrease power output when the winds are blowing
strong, and restore power when the winds have dampened. Outcome, lowered
nuclear waste from the plant, fewer expensive battery storage (or pumped
hydro).

~~~
ericvanular
Hey powerbroker, would love to have your opinions over at
[https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy)

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mettamage
I don't care what you made was good, I upvoted you one intention alone. More
techies should work on this, myself included. It may be interesting to hear my
and other people their objections as to why they're not working on it.

I'm already dreading asking the question to myself, but a part of me really
believes this should be done.

~~~
ericvanular
Thank you! I was facing that dilemma myself for quite some time. The intention
here is that you don't need to start huge - writing just one valuable comment
on Collective.Energy can have a downstream impact that motivates/inspires
others and creates positive effects. The ability to do good from your couch is
really empowering I think. It makes it easy to get involved. Have you added
your voice yet? There could be others that want to hear what you have to say

~~~
mettamage
Oh boy, I don't feel qualified to give an opinion about this. But I'll do the
best I can.

~~~
ericvanular
You can take part in ongoing discussions with no judgement or qualification
required. If you can help even one person, it will be worth it!

------
throwaway5752
Has anyone looked into mutual corps or coops that allow individual (accredited
or not) investors to crowdsource solar or wind production facilities? Does it
not work out financially or logistically?

edit: Never mind, it would make a lot more sense for me to post that on this
collective.energy. I will do that instead.

~~~
abraae
I've wondered if we could crowdsource synthetic fuel production to compete
with fossil fuels.

It would be very attractive to drive the oil companies out of business with a
frontal assault.

Of course it would depend on having enough consumers prepared to pay more for
their fuel.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I hate to be the rain on parade guy, but... you are talking about chemical
engineering that will involve working with gases like hydrogen, carbon
monoxide and methane at a large scale. You're simply not going to be allowed
to even purchase the raw materials you need in the quantities you need unless
you are running a proper chemical company, complete with all the
certifications and HSE work. The investment cost is huge, and requires a lot
of specialized engineering plus the purchase of a suitable industrial estate
that is large and has a wide safety zone against all surrounding neighbours.

If you're serious about this, I'd recommend reading Max Gergel's book "Excuse
me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide", and then imagine
what you would need to go through in order to start an operation 10x to 100x
bigger than Gergel's in todays regulatory regime.

~~~
cjbenedikt
I beg to differ. Based on IPs from Columbia Uni, NYC, we are a startup working
on technology to produce green hydrogen from sea water and renewable energy.
We received a NYSERDA validation grant and are on our way to pilot in the Port
of Rotterdam in 2020. We are currently looking into the possibility to
crowdfund some of our work.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Cool stuff! Is it different from electrolysis?

The way I see it, you're somewhat in a different ballgame since you're not
buying explosive/toxic gases from anyone else. You're producing an explosive
gas from seawater. Still, I imagine you need some pretty big safety zones if
you're operating at scale, no?

~~~
ericvanular
Hey semi-extrinsic, cjbenedikt posted more about this on the platform. If
you'd like, you can engage them there and drive the conversation forward!

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linguaz
This looks like really interesting & useful. Couple questions:

What copyright is assigned to the posts from contributors? Creative Commons?

Could there be a way to allow users to accumulate a local copy of the
discussion threads? This is something I appreciate about mailing lists and
Usenet -- being widely distributed & redundant minimizes the chance of
important content getting lost to the sands of time. Also allows for reading
offline in situations where internet access might not always be available.

I see there are RSS feeds for individual discussions, but on a quick look
through a few of those it wasn't clear to me how well this would capture
threaded conversations, if it would require continually adding additional
feeds for newly spawning discussions, etc. Maybe db dumps could be utilized
similar to how Kiwix creates an offline Wikipedia?

Anyhow, great idea, I hope to be able to contribute.

~~~
ericvanular
linguaz these are fantastic questions. It would be super helpful if you could
post them in the Meta category on the site so that they can be opened up to
the community for discussion. I'd like to obtain community input on these
types of decisions. You're thinking about this at an advanced level in any
case which I appreciate.

------
syllable_studio
I love this project and have started to participate on the platform, thanks
@ericvanular!

If anyone lives in New York and would like a real-life community extension of
this idea, you're welcome to join us in getting this meetup group off the
ground.

[https://www.meetup.com/New-York-Climate-Change-Meetup-
Group/](https://www.meetup.com/New-York-Climate-Change-Meetup-Group/)

~~~
ericvanular
Thank you! In fact, there's a thread going on Collective.Energy to detail
local meetups for everyone's reference. You can find it at
[https://collective.energy/topic/23/add-your-local-meetup-
gro...](https://collective.energy/topic/23/add-your-local-meetup-groups-
here/7)

------
sails
Great, I like the idea.

Something that you may find useful that I came across recently is
Climateaction.tech [0], which may have some overlap that you could take
advantage of.

[0] [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

~~~
ericvanular
Absolutely! The more people that are working together on climate solutions the
better as far as we're concerned.

It looks like that initiative is working together through a Google doc for
now? Perhaps they might be interested in also leveraging a forum-type
environment to foster ongoing discussion in addition to their document! Love
what they're doing though. If you're involved with that, get in touch!

------
gaze
It strikes me that we know much of what to do, we just aren't doing it. We
also know what we shouldn't be doing, but we refuse to stop doing it.

~~~
ericvanular
Hi gaze, founder of Collective.Energy here. We would love to have your voice
as part of our community if you're open to it!

~~~
gaze
Your forum seems overwhelmingly focused on individual action. I would be
interested if your focus shifted to organizing collective action. Organized
boycotts, for instance.

------
probablypower
Nice project. Can't fault your intentions.

The name seems odd to me however, as I read it from the perspective of
electrical energy. Most countries already have extensive electrical
infrastructure (i.e. collective energy) so the name evoked in me the horrible
idea of taking communities off grid to run on their own micro-grid.

This is fine in a few edge cases, but is generally suboptimal from a socio-
economic perspective.

~~~
ericvanular
Thanks for your feedback. I wanted to evoke the idea of harnessing the energy
that we collectively have towards solving the climate crisis.

Also it seems like you have great knowledge about electrical infrastructure.
Maybe you could contribute that knowledge on the platform. We've discussed
ideas like local micro-grids and many would love to learn more about why you
think they are a bad idea. We'd be happy to have you bolstering our ranks!

------
wabazai
This looks very cool - I can dig it.

------
perfunctory
Why can't I register without giving my email address?

~~~
ericvanular
Please feel free to put in a placeholder email if you're not comfortable with
it. It helps me to recover lost passwords and prevent spam

------
perfunctory
Do you plan any moderation to combat climate deniers?

~~~
ericvanular
We have baked-in anti spam moderation to the community. In regards to climate
deniers coming on and brigading the community, I felt that it would be better
to let moderators & the community treat those on a case by case basis with
counter arguments and voting as necessary

What do you think? I'm open to suggestion but I feel like suppressing free
speech goes against the ideals of the community

~~~
vcdimension
Absolutely agree with that, but the problem might be people not having the
time to follow up on long discussions, and source information to disprove
climate denier arguments. In fact my experience is that many climate activists
are not that familiar with the science & economics themselves:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qaJKM77j00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qaJKM77j00)
(she should have quoted Martin Weitzman's work on the fat tails of the climate
sensitivity distribution).

I would suggest having a repository of clear arguments and counter arguments
with links to reputable scientific sources, that we can refer any climate
deniers to. For example:
[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/will-c...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/will-
climate-change-bring-benefits-from-reduced-cold-related-mortality-insights-
from-the-latest-epidemiological-research/)

~~~
ericvanular
I'm hearing you loud and clear. That's a great idea to keep the conversation
focused. If you're willing, we would love to have you put forward this idea on
the platform itself!

