> "The rest of this is more like retooling for World War II, except with everyone playing on the same team."<p>No, it isn't. They key problem is that it is absolutely not the case that everyone is on the same team. Beyond the usual international division and bickering, there are people profiting from high-CO2 industries who oppose change and promote denialism, people who aren't interested in solving the problem because they believe the consequences will land on other people, as well as a huge hinterland of conspiracists, denialists, and fake news vendors who just muddy the waters for whatever reason.<p>Covid-19 has highlighted all of these very sharply. There are countries which have decided to do what's necessary to fight the virus on one hand, and protestors making it very clear that they will not accept someone else's risk of death for a restriction on their liberties.
Technology? Take a step back for the big picture.<p>GDP growth cannot be decoupled from greenhouse gas emission growth.
Even tech services require building and running an infrastructure to back them up.
The contribution of the sector to greenhouse gas emissions is non-trivial and increasing.<p>Continuing on a growth path inevitably leads us to total failure.<p>Unless we can manage degrowth for an extended period of time, we're done.<p>This is of course heresy and cannot even be discussed.<p>I know what you're thinking and no, there is simply not enough time left to implement a technical solution and/or decouple growth&energy, sorry.<p>Meanwhile - pr babble and CV19 pause aside - we as a species are ramping up fossil fuel extraction and getting ready to exploit the thawing arctic.
I don't have to single out a nation or an energy company, because it's all of them. See investor letters and fossil market outlook communications.<p>We all must do everything we can to buy more time - but at this point in time technology can only be a plaster on gangrene.<p>Force policy change and force economists to come up with a new economic model.
And force yourself to accept a cut in your standard of living.<p>Do you see it ever happening?
Join the community at <a href="https://collective.energy" rel="nofollow">https://collective.energy</a> or find a job at <a href="https://enviro.work" rel="nofollow">https://enviro.work</a> working to help the environment! (disclaimer: I'm the founder)
I am recycling plastic into 3d printing filament with my home brewed machine:<p><a href="https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...</a><p>Anyone who needs help building one for their community can reach out to me.<p>Plastic usually degrades when recycled, it loses its properties like strength. But 3d printing is a good area where recycled plastic can be used as lots of people use it for printing a show piece with artistic value, not for high stenght tasks.
As a chaser to this article, the technologist Saul Griffith at Otherlab has been consulting with presidential candidates and has a pretty strong case for optimism, provided we take massive coordinated action right now:<p>"Decarbonizing with massive electrification will bring about a new American abundance.": <a href="https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8ddd569de16" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and-gnd-b8d...</a><p>"How do we decarbonize? We don’t need a miracle. Everything we need to solve climate change is already here.": <a href="https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2fa84e887" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2f...</a> Solar and wind have already won the market.<p>And his upcoming book, "In Climate Emergency Break Glass" has the first 3 chapters available for download free: <a href="https://www.breakglassbook.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.breakglassbook.com/</a>
I was having a conversation with a friend before lock down and she was saying that her and her partner have consciously decided to avoid flying. I pointed out that, while certainly agree it's a good thing to do, by not flying at the individual level you are only reducing the cost of flying at the margin. Where as regulatory and technical changes could change the impact across the whole industry.
Easy. Focus on the electrical power needed to run your computation. CPU seconds are a good proxy for this. Webdevs can make enormous contributions here by cutting the megabytes of JavaScript they include in the simplest web pages that are only a few K of useful content. The data centre industry emits more CO2 than aviation so backend devs have a role to play too.
Interesting page, but quite extensive and not particularly easy to read.<p>For developers who are interested in recommendations by scientists how they can personally make an effective contribution, here are two interesting publications:<p><a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541" rel="nofollow">https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541</a> (the most effective individual actions)<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_efficiency_across_programming_languages_how_do_energy_time_and_memory_relate" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320436353_Energy_ef...</a> (energy efficiency across programming languages)
> How do we get public perception and public discussion of energy and climate centered around evidence-grounded models, instead of tips, soundbites, factoids, and emotional rhetoric?<p>> Furthermore, the point of embedding a model is that the reader can explore scenarios within the context of the document. This requires tools for authoring “dynamic documents” — documents whose contents change as the reader explores the model.<p>I've long-appreciated Victor's perspective in this article. But the general public understands very little about how models work and what they promise. I've seen little evidence that making them explorable in the New York Times has done much to move the public (and thus lawmakers) in the United States to move on gun violence or climate change.<p>Technologists can build better tools for storytellers and whistle-blowers. This mostly involves facilitating the disclosure, formatting (cleaning), and analysis of data.
I can also suggest joining the community/Slack channels at:
<a href="https://climateaction.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://climateaction.tech/</a>
Build a gigantic floating barge in the middle of the pacific that uses obscenely large nuclear reactors to power direct carbon capture / fuel production and then sell the fuel to become the next petro power.