Ask HN: Can software engineering help combat climate change?

It's lipstick on a pig, it's a way of feeling important while making no difference. The way you combat climate change is by reducing carbon dioxide output and increasing biomass creation and therefore uptake and sinking. You can't write code that does that.

Adding complexity to everything is what software developers do best, only the most skilled ones manage to reduce complexity, and adding complexity to this situation isn't going to help anyone. Don't stick your fingers in the pie, this one's not for you unless you want to build some different skills.

I used to work for a tech company that used big data to convince large swaths of people to become energy efficient. One of the company metrics was how much energy was saved, accounting for our footprint as well; it was fun and gratifying when we crossed the saved more than 1TWh threshold, which also reduced the need for fossil fuel peaker plants. So these companies do exist, but the tech isn't sexy nor complex/hard/challenging ~ way more of a business and social component to these systems, and tech is only a small tool here.

Said company was acquired by Oracle and still running and doing well!

* https://www.oracle.com/industries/utilities/products/opower-...

* https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/14/how-opower-sold-to-oracle-ha...

You might ask Saul Griffith (https://twitter.com/GriffithSaul/) for more details. He really has his finger on the pulse of the engineering needed and is one of the main people that got the US IRA climate bill to pass.

I will try to come up with a few examples anyway, in no particular order:

1. You could write software which improves the efficacy of an organization who is working on climate related problems.

2. Low level optimizations in algorithms could conceivably result in reduced processing resources expended when executed billions or trillions of times (though realistically all that will happen is more stuff will be processed)

3. Stepping away from software engineering specifically and looking toward electrical engineering, you could make sizeable contributions to reducing emissions by working on “green” computing architectures. This one is sort of like 2 in that very small improvements in TDP on CPUs add up substantially. I had a professor who worked on this sort of thing.

Climate change is neither of those things. You might be able to find a niche aspect of it that is, in which case go for it! Otherwise check coo it the job board at 80000hours.org for jobs that fall under 1 & 2 above: https://jobs.80000hours.org/?refinementList%5Btags_role_type...

Through the coordination of hundreds software engineers over the course of roughly 7 years, they made fundamental changes to the consensus protocol, such that it now falls somewhere at the very end of that list.

Now of course, software engineers also caused the problem in the first place, so make of that what you will

It never ceases to amaze that hardly anyone seems to even want to talk about the daily commute as one of the main reasons for climate change.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you're using an EV, a combustion engine, or even public transport to get to office every day. Not having to commute at all is what can make a difference, though.

One of the biggest challenges to reaching climate change is to globally educate in a transparent manner, identify the highest per capita contibutor and consumption demographics, promote suggestions for change, identify BS carbon credit trading schemes, identify effective C02 capture and reduction strategies, etc.

If I want to get a neice the best available SimEarth (for reals) what are the current options?

However, Climate Draft [1] spends a lot of effort to find high potential startups with technical hiring challenges.

[1] https://www.climatedraft.org/

Things like bitcoin with their proof of work algorithms, are borderline immoral. Just burning through and awful lot of energy for no good reason.

This does not mean nihilism or acceptance of the status quo, it just means that we cannot produce our way out of this mess.

I am typing this after staying up all night in a suburban area by an arterial road -- the world is beautifully quiet at 3:00AM. The magic didn't last long, because a mere hour later I started hearing whispers of a waking world. It's now 4:30AM and there's a steadily increasing whoosh of tires and a growing cacophony of revving engines. All these people are rapidly going somewhere, but why? Is it really necessary?

The answer is not more EVs or more bike lanes or whatever, but rather less of everything aka degrowth.

Stop Doing Things and encourage others to adopt this mindset as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth

However, thinking in terms of what IDE settings, configs, etc. and the act of software engineering with regards to Climate Change is too minuscule an impact that it may not have the desired effect.

For instance, in 2018, I help build a functioning aeroponics farm right in the middle of the city and supplied produce to some local eateries to test/experiment on our hypothesis. The entire operation ran on a single Raspberry Pi and the nutrient feed timing and feeding was automated. That is software engineering helping as a tool.

Yes, we can use Software Engineering as one of the key means to our end goal and do have big role to play which can have an outsized return in fighting climate change.

Make more efficient and faster software.