Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?

I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but the answer to your question depends on your analysis of the problem.

If you're an ecomodernist, who believes we can stop and reverse the transgression of planetary boundaries (climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, ocean acidification, etc.) without any meaningful system changes, the sibling comment tips might help.

If you are, like me, unconvinced by the ecomodernist argument – and have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate"), know Jevons paradox and rebound effects, are up to speed with the empirical knowledge of decoupling rates of both energy and material flows compared to "safe" limits – then "working for climate" almost exclusively means working to bring about a big political change.

Unfortunately that limits quite a bit the income potential of the work, but for me that's what "working for climate" means.

Let me know if you want to be put in contact with a partner working at one of the key consultancies advising EU countries' governments (+EU itself and some other countries) to help them evaluate their impact on climate and strategies to reduce them.

> ...working to bring about a big political change

Can we start a quick brainstorming what promising organizations exist that support this goals and in turn joining/supporting them would be a viable option for individuals to have an actual impact towards political change?

I'll start with the usual suspect Greenpeace.

I'm a big fan of ClientEarth - they essentially take governments and organisations to court to try to force them to meet local and international environmental laws. It's one thing having the laws in place, but if they aren't enforced they aren't worth anything.

https://www.clientearth.org/

>"working for climate" almost exclusively means working to bring about a big political change.

This. System change not climate change.

What does meaningful system change mean to you? 1. Trillions of dollars of investment in the transition to solar? 2. Carbon tax (and other taxes on externalities?) 3. Abandoning combustion engines and switching to electric? 4. Moral persuasion to convince people to that humans are a cancer upon the earth?

1,2,3 have huge potential for climate and economic value. 4 is a straw man that obviously does nothing. But what do you propose exactly?

None of them are system changes.

Yes, 1 and 3 would be fantastic – although switching to electric without at the same time reducing SOVs is IMO very inadequate if you take int account all of the planetary boundaries, not just climate change. 2 is a policy that might stem from the system change, not the actual change. 4 is not based on facts: there are billions of people in the world who are living within planetary boundaries. Can't stress this enough: it's not "humans" that are the problem but the wealthy people that are taking more from nature than nature can regenerate.

A meaningful system change to me is where there is a deliberate and continued reduction in material flows and energy use in the rich countries until they are below planetary boundaries. That can be done if they deliberately start reducing overproduction. That in turn would happen if governments would abandon the goal of aggregate economic growth across all sectors, but instead increase the parts of the economy that produce well-being and scale down the parts that don't. Another system change would be if the rich countries would pay for the catastrophic damage they have inflicted on the countries worst affected by climate change, and then stop taking advantage of poor countries by ending unequal exchange.

Those would be system changes.

I'm not saying nothing except politics is needed – everything would be doubly hard if e.g. solar wouldn't have become so cheap.

But given what is easy in the current world (producing and selling stuff) and what is hard (creating political change), I wish that the most capable and smartest people in the world would work mostly on the hard parts.

"...if governments would abandon the goal of aggregate economic growth across all sectors..."

You've obviously thought about this topic quite deeply - have you heard any realistic proposals on how to achieven this? I have yet to hear any, and until I do I'll be devoting my energy to changes that have at least some chance of being enacted, like a carbon tax.

If I had to guess it’s ending consumerism and growth at all costs.

Probably heavy taxation of consumption and lowering the average standard of living across the globe. Too bad it's a pipe dream, people will never vote for it and an dictator that tries to impose it will be overthrown.

Not across the globe. Only in rich countries where the current standard of living is unsustainable.

I'd be shocked if even one country does it in a meaningful way. It's just so contrary to human nature.

I think the only thing that can save us short-term is technology. Inventing and implementing new gizmos is something we're actually good at. Long-term we're probably screwed anyway, because we'll eventually disturb the biological systems on the Earth too much (either via pollution, ocean acidification, killing biodiversity, soil depletion etc.), and they're way too immense and complex for us to fix. People forget that we're part of Earth's ecosystem, but if we disturb it too much we'll be reminded of it either via plagues (we got a taste of it already) and/or famines.

Well, it will happen, because the current standard is unsustainable, and that's the definition of the word.

The only thing is whether any of it will be in a somewhat controlled, damage limiting fashion, or will it be just one stupid catastrophe after another.

I feel new gizmos are generally just more fuel onto the fire of consumerism, and will just speed up the process, not slow it.

> What does meaningful system change mean to you?

I would also like to have something more concrete here, but I think the GP hinted at why there is no single elevator pitch-like answer to real-world problems like climate change:

>> [...] have a grasp on all of the different ways the environment is being destroyed (not just "climate")

Where is the electricity coming from to charge your electric vehicles? Electric vehicles have a lot of potential to reduce pollution and noise in cities, but as a solution to "fixing" inevitable climate they are a con.

Electric vehicles use a lot less energy in total in the supply chain than gasoline cars (extracting and refining and transporting oil uses a lot of energy too, some of it electricity).

So electric vehicles reduces the energy required.

Longer term: Gasoline cars are not viable at all; electric cars are viable to the extent one can secure the energy for them. It is a way of getting any road transportation done in the future AT ALL; that is surely not a con?

I hope noone is arguing that moving to electric cars by itself is sufficient to stop climate change. That would be a con but also seems like a strawman.

The goal should be net zero, and electric cars are needed to have road transportation at all.

What is your opinion on the current post-truth politics backed by ubiquitous social media?

I am at a loss when figuring out how to even work towards meaningful change in an environment where that messages are viewed / liked / shared is the only important thing, and the relation of that message to physical reality is completely irrelevant.

And I have the feeling that in general, software is part of the problem, not the solution :-(

This was a variant of the question that I had when I left Stripe in 2019. After hearing someone say “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.”, I became fixated on the question of what can I, with my software skillset, do to have a meaningful impact on climate?. The answer (in hindsight), is a ton.

My particular approach was to start a company (Watershed[0]), but today there are lots of great options as a software engineer. There are already plenty of great examples in the thread of places to look for companies (MyClimateJourney community, climate job boards, etc). I think the most important thing is not to feel like you need to learn a ton before jumping into the fray. Most engineers that joined us had zero climate experience beforehand. All you need is to be curious, be an effective engineer and you can learn what you need on the job.

My email is in my profile if you want to chat!

[0] We’re hiring (https://watershed.com/jobs) and engineering is absolutely our rate limiter in helping companies decarbonize. We’ve built a climate platform that’s powering the climate programs of some of the world’s leading companies (Block, Shopify, Doordash as a few examples). Our goal is to be responsible for reducing the world’s yearly carbon emissions by 500 megatonnes of carbon by 2030 (1% of global emissions).

Would you like to post the URLs of the most important climate job boards, please?

Just out of curiosity - is the name ("Watershed") a reference to "A half-built garden" from R. Emrys?

I wrote this summary of what emissions sources matter if you want to move the needle, and how reputable sources argue for resolving them: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/big-picture-2020/

I used that as a basis to look for roles that - I imagined - actually would help make a dent. In the end, I took a job in the smart electric grid space, writing code to help the EU grid take on more cheap renewable generators at Tibber.

There’s a lot of software in many of these spaces! Decarbonising the grid, electrifying transport, building heat and industry, reducing agricultural emissions and so on.

Did that require any additional knowledge or training in electricity or physics?

Some roles at my current gig for sure does, but most do not. Tons of space for people with general experience in a very broad set of software skills - machine learning, general “backend dev”, apps devs, embedded devs.

There’s a lot of pairing people with general “here’s how you ship software” background and people with “here’s how the grid works” experience, doing skills transfer.

Part of the effort here ends up being training a whole cadre of people on how the grid works.

My email is in my profile if you want help trying to find gigs in US or EU in this space.

Thanks a lot! I won’t be looking for at least a year, but I will hit you up when I am.

If the plan is to "electrify everything" and reduce emissions by 50% by 2030, how can you not even mention nuclear power once?

Because the cost of construction AND timeline is not achievable before 2030 so the contribution of nuclear to the problem is post-2030. At best? you help to secure this form of power for 2040 and beyond. All nuclear under construction you are unable to shift its timeline. All nuclear in planning is subject to the regulatory delay of 10-15 years. The SMR push is not going to deliver power at scale by 2030, it will have at best a small handfull of megawatt units, when the demand is for terawatts.

If you invest in smart grid assist to balance wind, solar, battery, pumped hydro and can mitigate coal and gas load NOW then, as a new entrant, you have the choice to do that, or to invest in the longer term problem. If you want to invest in longterm Nuclear is no worse or better than any other choice. If you can reduce the cost of capital or increase productive efficiency now of the non-nuclear low carbon energy and grid, over the 10 year window you may have more effect.

There is nothing a new entrant engineer can do, to speed up nuclear. Its in regulatory and lawsuit hell. The engineer can help PV/Wind/Battery right now.

It's a choice, and goes to net present value, shape of the curve moving load, linear optimisation of choices...

Sometimes I wonder if people actually care about the climate at all, or if nuclear is just a political wedge issue used to distract from real solutions right now.

I think even people of good intent get stuck on blame-shifting and hindsight.

I opposed Torness (UK) in the 70s. I now would not protest an AGR, I think we need more nuclear not less. But, the time has passed where its economically viable in the necessary time window, for Australian power needs. LCOE, and time to construct has moved to wind, wave, solar and storage.

Some people can't get over this, and are stuck on energy density and scale.

People realize we failed out of lazyness and ignorance and are despaired, so its just so tempting to start believing again in this free&easy energy dream.. I think the issue more is that the real renewables, despite being the only real free and now also already proven path in parts of the world, had and still have too much counter propaganda.. the rest is just humans

The “90% clean grid” back casting model I mention very much includes nuclear! My little sentence there from 2020 is wrong, it should say “90% clean using wind, solar, batteries, hydro and the existing nuclear fleet”.

Hi there,

I had the same thoughts, which led me to build Electricity Maps (https://app.electricitymaps.com) a few years back, mainly to understand the current state of how electricity grids cause CO2 emissions. Luckily (and with a lot of hard work) it turned into a successful company. I also worked on some other climate tech products which weren’t as fortunate. I’ve written about past experiences here: https://oliviercorradi.com/blog/lessons-learned-climate-tech...

Hopefully this can help you a bit on your journey.

We’re also hiring (although jobs are based in Copenhagen). Furthermore, a lot of our work is open source (https://github.com/electricitymap/electricitymap-contrib) - feel free to take a peek!

In any case, do not hesitate to get in touch if you think I can help

I am in a similar position like OP and find it quite hard not only to find offerings, but also to understand if the projects have some real impact or are just propaganda green-washing activities or even plain climate budget hijacking by dinosaur companies.

Look, even in this thread people are seriously (?) recommending working on Bitcoin for climate change - in a similar but mostly not so obvious way you can find "green jobs" that in fact are not green jobs at all.

Even "green minister" nowadays is no guarantee for doing the right thing.

E.g. look at Germany: the poor green Mr. Habeck who is now Minister of Economy must make decisions that are completely opposite of the green political program (because of Putin).

This is a good demonstration why you really need to double check "green" job offers and companies.

It would be great to have a validation service of climate job offers done by people with reputation. If you are living in the inner circles of the climate movement please talk about this idea, thanks!

I'm aware this is somewhat besides the point. But still ..

The way I see it, carefully choosing a job doesn't matter much (compared to other things you can do) for helping avoid the ecosphere catastrophe as an individual.

Most jobs are the end result of consumers (and also institutions like the state or other companies) demanding whatever products and services they deem necessary. Companies then implement processes to produce these things and then issue job offers accordingly and employ personnel.

If some job vacancy provides enough salary, it will very likely be filled. By you or someone else. By choosing to not do a certain job, you don't influence the demand side for it (which comes from consumers' demand) and if the demand is high, in principle the salary will generally just increase until someone else is willing to do the job.

If you want to gently yet effectively change and shape the whole supply chain and reduce emissions, you can choose to be very conscious of your individual demands that you feed into the worldwide production system.

If you simply buy less unnecessary stuff (right now the best thing you can do) or buy used stuff or buy sustainable stuff ... and if billions of people do the same, we will have a totally different landscape of companies within 20 years.

Living daily life as sustainably as possible, is - in our current western environment - a real challenge. Some people find meaning in trying to accomplish that.

IMO there's nothing wrong with working in a job that's not per se sustainable (say oil rig) and at the same time living your daily life in such a way that shapes your little individual slice of the world wide demand for production so that it's sustainable.

You can even invert and distort the example in my last paragraph to the extreme and ask yourself which (A or B) will more likely lead to a better outcome for the ecosphere.

A) You work as a consultant for a company that advises other companies how to save energy in their processes. You make good money and use your ample holiday of 50 days a year travelling the world by flying here and there with your family.

B) You work on an oil rig and recently bought a small house in the outskirts of a small town. You're mostly vegetarian and in your holidays you're either working on renovating the house to be selfsufficient (top insulation, solar panels, electrolyzer, H2-tank, fuel-cell, rain water tank, ...) or you're doing bike trips with a tent.

In the past decade, a warming anomaly caused a plague that killed off 99% of the Sunflower Sea Stars, a top predator of sea urchins. The runaway sea urchin population resulted in the rapid and sustained loss of >100,000 square km of Kelp forests off the coast of California. Kelp does an amazing job of sequestering carbon to the deep sea. For instance, estimates show that the lost Kelp forests provide close to $1.5B per year in carbon sequestration services (at $5/ton). I’m trying to help my friend raise money for her organization that is trying to bring the kelp forests back through the repopulation of the giant sea stars. Any ideas?

https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/

Personally, I want to develop a viable vision around “AI for ecological wellbeing.”

After most recently working in ads, I switched to working in climate - feels infinitely more meaningful on a daily basis.

We're working on carbon accounting and industrial decarbonization here at Gravity (https://gravityclimate.com). Your background could make for a strong fit.

Email in profile.

Hi Ted,

Not OP but would like to get in touch as well.

Check your personal email.

We are working in europe on pushing the renewable energy transition to bring „infinite power to all of us“. There are fully remote software jobs, if you are located near CET. https://neoom.com/en/career

I had a look at your job postings being located in the DACH region myself but I must admit I’m surprised you find anybody willing to work for the salaries listed.

I get that you’re not competing with FAANG salaries and kudos for mentioning them upfront but sub 50k gross would not even convince newly grads, let alone senior engineers where I live. We pay almost twice this and are having serious trouble hiring remote or local.

Im sure this is mentioned in this thread but just to be sure make sure you check this out.

https://techjobsforgood.com/

Only thing I ever applied to on there was a python job at a carbon capture startup in New Zealand. I got a call back. Didnt end up working out but 100% is a pretty good call back rate so far. Looking forward to getting back on there in a couple months.

Also if you haven't heard of / checked out Recurse Center it might be a good place to make your career transition. It's kind of why they exist.

https://recurse.com/

PS Right on! Im thinking about the exact same career pivot myself. Very inspiring to see this :)

I am getting `Access denied Error code 1020` while trying to access https://techjobsforgood.com/ from AS55836 in India.

I highly recommend checking out 80,000 hours which has very helpful problem profile guides, quizzes on how to find out what is most meaningful to you, career guides, and a job board. It's been exceedingly helpful for me as I made career decisions (and major life decisions).

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/climate-change/#top

[Project drawdown](https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) lists a large number of ranked solutions to fight climate change. A good way to find sectors you might easily become passionate about but hadn't considered. The [80,000 hours](https://80000hours.org/) website also has a job board and provides a lot of excellent resources. All the best in your journey :)

I joined a company that isn't focused on solving climate change, but we are working to make freight shipping via train more feasible in the US, which could potentially offset shipping emissions by a non-trivial amount.

I personally care a lot about climate change, so this work is quite a bit more satisfying than optimizing ad spend or A/B testing UI to improve "impression" metrics or similar.

There are places to find work where your time and energy help mitigate climate change (or other big problems), without the work directly focusing on that problem.

Climate economist here. Game-changing impacts from knowledge provision are like academic impacts, very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, you seem to have the right background, and I endorse another comment on insurance. Providing the right information should make it difficult to invest/borrow/insure carbon intensive activities. I would focus on finding how to provide this information. Happy to chat, I might have more ideas that could be valuable to you, not sure. Email in profile.

Thanks a lot for asking this. I have been thinking about a similar jump but never found much resources to do so (mostly checking the job boards of every related company I find in my news feed; not very optimal :). Now I have way more to peruse. I just hope I can find more Europe centric sites (so far much has been USA leaning).

Working in Bitcoin. This seems to me like the single most impactful thing one can do for the future of humanity, including climate and energy use.

Imagine if you didn't need to buy a new iPhone every other year, because they will be better built. Imagine if buildings would be of the same quality as they once were, when the world was on a gold standard.

Under a money system that constantly devalues the currency, everything that is built is of worse quality than the previous versions of the same for the simple reason that the producer has to somehow account for the money being lost due to inflation without constantly raising the prices, and the only way to do that is to "devalue" the products themselves - use worse materials, make them easier obsolete, so consumers buy them more often.

Surprised no one has said the following; study AI and try make a meaningful contribution to the field. It may sound trite, but the most likely way we solve the climate crisis is by solving AGI first, hoping it doesn't cause a doomsday scenario itself, and subsequently hoping 'it' will coordinate an effort to reverse the damage we have done.

As an AI researcher, I feel like this is misguided advice. The field is overrun with people, and it's almost impossible to make a meaningful dent anymore. Even if you have a group of experienced researchers and large compute reserves, most people are content with chasing SOTAs, because the green-field low-hanging fruit of yesteryear is over (and has been over for a while). Sure, you can learn some AI and then look for climate-applications[0], but then again, why not enter that field as a software engineer in the first place. Learning AI and is just an unnecessary detour if you want to end up in climate change.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05433

So you make a brilliant AGI, it points out the obvious -- we should stop consumerism and lower rich countries' standard of living before physics forces us to. How then does it get any political power to achieve that? It won't be taken more seriously than any individual human.

Seems quite likely to me that the AGI hucksters won't deliver the goods before we're able to make the planet inhospitable for ourselves. Risky bet, in any case.

Worked in that space for a while and found it through a Recruiter on LinkedIn. Generally I think the average salary is a bit lower but now there are a lot of Climate techs which to my understanding work like Fintechs. There is everything from solar tech to CO2 budgeting systems. Surely it has an impact although of course the companies are still businesses so not everything they do is for a greater good

It depends on what you want to impact. If you want to be in an area where somehow you'd get notoriety for contributing to mitigating clinate change disaster, you probably have a naive view of climate science research. However, if you basically just want to contribute in some small way by shifting what you're working on, and probably taking a 70% pay cut, then I'd recommend looking at academic labs. Lots of Uni research labs have lots of data being produced that needs to be hosted and made publicly accessible. This is essentially what I did for some time and it was very rewarding. In my case I worked on maintaining an open data portal based on CKAN, which hosted water water quality data as well as other data produced as a product of biology research.

Check out https://www.infogrid.io/careers , a company focused on improving building health and energy use through smart sensors. The company HQ is in London but moving to the US soon. Most technical roles are remote and still hiring.

Check out Climate Base (https://climatebase.org). It is a climate action oriented job board that spans a range of sub industries.

Try to find a tech job at an organization working on:

1. Passive solar design

2. Construction financing, especially intended to foster mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods

3. Funding or building smaller scale housing in walkable neighborhoods and infill development.

4. Cycling infrastructure so it's possible to start walking back out car-centric American lifestyle.

5. Buy local movements.

6. Anything similar to the above that promotes decentralization, local markets supported by online tech solutions, walkable development etc.

Do you want to have a real impact?

Donate to https://www.climateemergencyfund.org/

They are the only ones who are trying to make a real difference, which can happen only through a political change.

Maybe not so obvious, but a hard and interesting CS problem with a big impact on climate is compiler design. If you can make a 0.1% performance improvement in Gcc or LLVM, you will save a huge amount of power and CO2. Compiler designers are the true unsung heroes of software.

If you’re interested in staying in finance there are many blends of finance and climate serving all parts of the stack like https://www.joinatmos.com (mobile banking that funds clean energy, where I work), https://carboncollective.co & https://www.raisegreen.com (clean investing), etc

Very fulfilling for me so far - strongly recommended.

Actually, I have been asking this question to myself, in addition to my other comment in this thread responding to the question. I have 10y experience in top publications in climate research, worked at top institutions, with top people, and I know the scientific landscape very well across the physics and human dimensions -- including strengths and pitfalls. I am being interviewed for tenured positions in academia these days. However, I really would like to help efforts out of academia, even without a workload from an (unpaid) advisory role, that would make a difference for me at the end of the day! BUT, I do not know how to transfer my knowledge, where to start, or to whom I could talk. This thread is beautiful because it shows many valuable sources to continue my still inconclusive search, please if you have any advice, I would be most grateful!

Check out https://watershed.com/jobs

I have no affiliation, other than previously working with the founders at Stripe (they are some of the most impressive people I've met in my life).

Check out workonclimate.slack.com - I found a job there. It is a quite active community of people thinking and feeling as you do. You'll find climate-related jobs aggregators and opportunities to engage with companies/individuals seeking talent of all sorts.

Not a joke, I swear.

Work in property insurance/reinsurance. I spent the last 16 years in that world and contemplated climate change nearly the entire time. Insurance not seen as all that sexy, but I think it's one area where climate matters in a very practical way.

Happy to discuss with you if interested.

Sorry to ask this in your thread, but are there jobs particularly in the nuclear sector for a general software engineer? I don’t have a related degree though.

Another good resource and community is https://www.mcjcollective.com

They have a slack community (access by membership), as well as a Substack and podcast.

Lastly, I found a new recruiting firm (which, I know, bear with me) called Climate People (https://www.climatepeople.com) focuses exclusively on placing people at climate change focused companies.

This is a great piece on finding a job with purpose: https://medium.com/@hhlim/chasing-a-job-with-purpose-85357ee...

"2 years ago, I made the career pivot I’d thought about for years, from my Silicon Valley enterprise software job, to finally working on solving climate change full-time. Since then, my friends and their friends would often ask how they, too, can make purpose-driven impact work their day job. In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, these requests now come up weekly. It’s a crazy 2020: with a pandemic, fast-approaching climate disaster, and continuing systemic racism towards Black people front and center, it seems that for many, it feels harder every day to continue life as normal, and go back to just “a job”. "

Podcast version here: https://nori.com/podcasts/reversing-climate-change/S2E32-Cha...

There are a large number of problems in climate and clean energy that need creative finance solutions. Look up Generate Capital for one example.

I work on digitizing electricity rates to enable smarter financing of clean energy projects, distributed energy resources in particular. So much of this work is about creating pathways for money to get where it needs to go. You can definitely find a way to use your existing skills in the service of climate rescue.

Also a lot of people mentioned climatebase.org. They’re great! Lots of good jobs across a lot of roles.

The job found me, from posting here, actually. Yep it's remote. Still early days, but if we do it right, it will have a real impact on local communities, like kids & adults sensitive to poor air quality. I think it'll also show kids that change is possible & happening now, which I think will inspire them (imagine being 12 and getting on an electric schoolbus for the first time!). And it's moving the needle forward on electrification of trucking nation-wide. Much more meaningful than my last gig.

If you're interested, shoot me a line at peter dot willis at nexteraenergy dot com, we have lots of open roles. But either way, I do recommend going after something you find meaningfully improves the lives of people or the environment. Even if it takes a while to find one that fits, I don't think you'll regret it.

For small startups: check out Elemental Excelerator (I work for a great company funded through that)

For large startups: climate unicorns https://climatetechvc.substack.com/p/-climate-unicorns-take-...

Big tech: Google X Tapestry, Tesla, or any large solar company like Sunrun

I work for a company that does predictive maintenance on wind turbines. E.g. “we think you need to look at this now rather than leave it 6 months because there’s a high risk that the fault progresses, and the turbine will be offline for 9 months”

You might make more impact finding the highest paying finance job and then donating most of your income to climate causes.

You were downvoted but this is a legit point - people like the ones in this article on “effective altruism” made this decision: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/09/23/effective...

If you can find an org that can convert dollars to lives saved (by climate advocacy eg climate central or direct action eg terraformation) and commit to donating a certain percentage of your paycheck to them it may make your job feel more meaningful. Doesn’t work for me but works for sum.

Effective altruism suffers from a number of issues, the biggest being the inability of current frameworks to quantify the effects of externalities via systems modeling. In short: if your job contributes to the climate issue (and finance certainly does), you probably won't counteract that effect by donating even the entirety of your disposable income.

It might if you're really good at making money and really bad at climate stuff, but your donation enabled people who are actually impactful to work on it. At an extreme, a finance person's salary could pay for a dozen good teachers who could go on to inspire hundreds to work more directly in climate, vs that finance person trying to become an educator themselves (if education isn't their skill or desire).

But yes, we don't have a good system for quantifying those differences in individual effectiveness per career path across society.

This suggestion only makes sense if you don't consider your job as part of the contributions to climate change. You will find that the things you help to finance in your job will cause more carbon emissions than you can counteract with your salary.

YAAAS If we can accelerate income equality we can reduce consumption. We need the 99% (better yet the 99.9%) to be as poor as possible. Income is related to consumption, and consumption is related to emissions and pollution.

Making a lot of money doesn't "accelerate income inequality" necessarily; there isn't a fixed amount of money in the world and it's not possible to hoard it.

> Income is related to consumption, and consumption is related to emissions and pollution.

This doesn't make any sense. The suggestion is to make more money and donate ~all of it instead of consuming it. You can't look at a plan to make more income and infer that the higher income means more consumption _when the entire point of the plan explicitly avoids consuming the excess income_.

The best way to solve climate change with a skill set like yours is to make ESG ratings more open, transparent and scientific. Here two resources to get started in this domain. OS-Climate can definitely use your skills:

1. https://github.com/os-climate/OS-Climate-Community-Hub#readm... 2. https://opensustain.tech/blog/openness_as_a_key_indicator_fo...

I took a break from tech and got a Masters of Environmental Science and Management if you are interested in that path. It helps you really have additionality rather than being a hired tech person in the climate space. Also the Work on Climate group is good!

I've been consulting with Ambrook (https://ambrook.com/) who are working on this problem. Great team and worth checking out if you're looking at the space.

There are small-to-midsize firms working to get climate-related remote sensing data into the hands of farmers and others. Here's one whose chief scientist is really exceptional:

https://www.hydrosat.com

Here's another one that's focused on carbon and methane:

https://carbonmapper.org/

I know several of their board members and leadership and they are also very skilled.

I've worked on and off for climate for about a decade, starting from student sustainability jobs to now solar manufacturing (as a front end dev supporting our web services).

Is my job making a difference? Well, more than if I did nothing at all. Enough? No. Honestly, I think it's all too little, too late. But what can one man do? Even Elon Musk can't singlehandedly prevent climate change (though I do thank him for trying).

At the very least, it's better than working in fossil fuels or speculative crypto. Shrug.

As a senior programmer, you can decide whether you just want to be another invisible cog in a relatively benevolent machine, which really won't change anything but might you feel better about your life choices, or whether you want to gamble everything and try to actually make a difference by coming up with something really novel and scalable, maybe some sort of market mechanism for carbon that doesn't involve government oversight.

My undergrad was in environmental science and I spent the last decade working in renewables and climate adjacent nonprofits. To be frank with you, I think humanity is doomed if we keep using the existing "solutions" that are merely bandaids.

We don't have a solution in sight. At all. Not even over the horizon. There is no way our current trajectory is sufficient, and it's actually getting worse. So if you actually want to make a difference, eh, I would encourage you to think drastically outside the box and not just slide into an existing industry like I lazily did. Because I can guarantee that won't be enough, however well-intentioned. Sadly.

I will also note that NREL, the National Renewable Energy Lab, often needs dev support and hire for it. They don't pay well but they do a lot of really good research work, if that's of interest.

I keep wishing we had a Manhattan Project of climate, but that looks less and less likely as the years go by.

I've been working in climate tech for about 7 years now, at https://sense.com. Very fulfilling. We're hiring in lots of roles. Feel free to get in touch. (Email in profile.)

You could reach out to phaidra.ai . They are involved in using ML to optimize energy consumptions at industrial plants and data centers.

https://www.ctvc.co/

Climate tech VC newsletter is an awesome source of the state of tech climate work, and provides links to additional resources.

climatebase.org (edited from .com) - we actively post there along with other amazing climate companies.

Requests an email address before you can see any actual info, but after you've given preferences for areas of interest. Seems... really anti-patterny?

You can dodge that; go to the "Explore by sectors" a bit further down, pick any. Now you can search without having to hand over an email address. But yeah, the first time I hit that "search here.. but only after you provide an email", I bounced.

A lot of good programmers in the games Industry never switch out, but their skills can be used at satellite/rocket companies.

If you want to work for a weather monitoring satellite company, there is Spire[1] (also RocketLab,SpaceX who is hiring)

[1] https://spire.com/

[2] https://www.rocketlabusa.com/careers/positions/

You won't find climate change work at SpaceX.

well indirectly, since a robust satellite infrastructure allows for daily imagery updates. Governments use this to more easily hold corporations accountable for their environmental day-to-day actions across the earth.

Illegal deforestation? If a fleet of satellites is providing daily updates across the amazon, it is far more easily caught, rather than having it show up 2 weeks later after they have already cut out a chunk and left

Indirectly, even baker down my street is involved - government agents need to eat, and he provides them with bread.

SpaceX's involvement in those missions ends when the payload separates from the second stage. You'd be very disappointed if you went there hoping to feel like you were making a meaningful impact on climate.

I recommend looking into the carbon emissions per-launch (or per-satellite if you prefer that accounting).

It's bleak. Launching things into space is unsustainable and should be minimized.

ah perhaps, but doesnt seem that bad when compared to all the plane flights familys are taking for leisure, google hit https://www.inverse.com/innovation/are-rockets-environmental...

> Current rocket launches have a negligible effect on total carbon emissions — Everyday Astronaut found they accounted for 0.0000059 percent of global carbon emissions in 2018, while the airline industry produced 2.4 percent the same year.

> But the long-term effect is less clear, especially as companies like SpaceX move from hosting 26 launches in a year to 1,000 launches per rocket in a year.

> “I think we can guess that rockets won't be a huge impact on the environment, and they probably won't stand out as a sole source of new problems,” Darin Toohey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, tells Inverse. “But they will add to the growing list of activities that have negative impacts on the environment.”

One thing being better than a second, worse thing does not automatically make the first thing good.

I mean, if they get to mars they'll have to terraform it. And if they figure it out there then they can just do it here right? I thought that was all part of his master plan. Doesn't explain the flamethrowers but I'm sure they play a role too.

I made the transition from fintech to working at the intersection of web3 and climate. There’s an emerging movement around “Regenerative Finance” and it’s quite exciting. There’s very real potential for impact here. A good starting spot to get the pulse on these trends is the “My Climate Journey” podcast.

I have been interested on sustainability before 2000 (got education for sustainability certificate yada yada) and years later I became a dev. I looked for years for a remote work on sustainability but it was difficult. The pandemic opened the gate to remote work and Biden policies the momentum for investments. I'm currently working for Bractlet (we're hiring, you can find us in the current whoishiring thread) and before them I was working for CarbonCure (I think they are also hiring). Both great companies.

Real impact? I don't know as I'm obviously biased as my salary depends on that. Reducing concrete footprint (the most used construction material and with gigantic carbon footprint) sounds a good bet. Reducing building energy consumption is also a good bet. Other things that are interesting is working in lab meat (not sure it's a place for devs yet).

I'm happy with the switch and I don't see myself doing anything else with my working time until we solve this as species.

Where do you find them. YC has a climate startups (), LowerCarbonCapital has a jobs board, and you can always ctrl-f "climate" in the whoishiring thread. Tip, search for green VCs and check their portfolio one by one.

Probably not responsive to the likely orientation of the OP, but a legit option.

A lot of the reason we know anything about climate is to do with government - NOAA, NASA Earth Science, EPA.

This organisation runs a slack community where climate jobs are discussed and new postings for lots of companies get shared there:

https://workonclimate.org/

That said, while I feel similarly to you OP, I am also highly skeptical of the tech industry as an avenue for bringing about the necessary change. We don't need new tech, the problem is almost entirely one of societal organisation and changing the economic incentives. One particularly egregious example of a tech failure is the case of the carbon offset company that actually succeeded in starting wildfires and destroying a lot of forest instead, and there are plenty more you can find.

I think, while it might not feel meaningful in the same way, your effort is better spent financially supporting and contributing to climate activism that can change the perspective and politics in your community.

I've meandered down that path a bit.

I chatted with the Wren folks: https://www.wren.co/

I did an internship with Natural Capitalism Solutions: https://natcapsolutions.org/

I also co-founded a local food startup: https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/

I have also gotten some permaculture certificates.

Be prepared to take a lower salary. This was the biggest stumbling block for me.

An alternative I'm sure you've thought of is to donate some of your finance salary to climate non-profits or buy things that are climate conscious (including from a startup doing this).

More hysteria based on models. We saw with covid how unreliable and destructive this new form of crystal ball reading. Falsifiable and thus pseudo science.

Here’s the problem you are going to run into: The vast majority of the climate change/save the planet movement is uninformed cult-think driven by a delusion fed by politicians who learned to earn votes with this from the unthinking masses.

The opposite side, the deniers, are just as delusional but for a different set of reasons.

In the end, you have two sides battling over bullshit and people on both ends of the scale making money and angling for power.

If you really want to help, take the time to truly understand and push for the truth to become the only conversation.

What is the truth?

We can’t do a thing about any of it. Period.

The delusion (well, one of them) is to actually believe we can change a planetary-scale problem one thousand times faster than nature has managed over millions of years. This is ridiculous. It’s lunacy. We are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to save it.

The data is out there. Not opinions. Not my words. High quality scientific data. Start by studying the 800K year ice core atmospheric data we have and understand how the planet has dealt with this for millions of years. That’s the start of the journey who should make anyone honest enough to look for the truth become horrified at the nonsense we are pummeled with every day.

Man, isn't this the argument from two decades ago? That climate change is happening but isn't human caused? Why do you still believe this? Just because nature is big and we are small? It's such an odd mentality to have. Do you not believe in ozone holes either, or DDT, or pollution, or extinction? We're just powerless apes walking around a wet ball, making no impact at all, leaving no trace? I don't understand how you can look at the data and go "nah it just can't be us, because that's ridiculous". Every species has an impact on their habitat. It comes down to degree. And it's not like we're going to singlehandedly turn the planet into a flaming ball of lava. But a few degrees here and there? Why wouldn't we be able to?

Thank you. I feel pretty lonely having this view myself. Hearing it from someone else at least makes me feel more confident that it's everyone else who is slightly nuts and not me.

What do you think of Ben Davidson's material on sun-earth interactions, space weather and long-term cycles?

Any sources you would recommend?

Yeah, it’s really quite eye-opening to witness so many people on here having been convinced by obvious propaganda. Climate obsession is the height of human arrogance: to think that we are solely responsible for destroying “the planet”, and solely responsible for rescuing it from certain demise.

Yet more evidence that there are yawning chasms of meaning in our lives today, and the unscrupulous are more than willing to exploit them.

Do you believe that the human production of carbon and its release into the atmosphere is not affecting the planetary climate?

Nobody thinks we're solely responsible. We're just one major input out of many, and the only one we can really control. If you wanna just ask the sun to please operate on medium power for a few years, that'd help too. It didn't listen when I asked.

Rocky Mountain Institute in the USA has a long track record of delivering solid engineering analysis and direct involvement here and there; also defense work, if you care about that. Check with them about their current projects

There are countless climate tech jobs — as long as you are willing to take a large haircut.

"What kinda hippie am I? I'm a business hippie."

-Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

I'm currently working for a german startup as a freelancer to create a web app that helps companies to monitor, report and compensate their carbon footprint.

I got the job because I'm specialised on green web development and was found on LinkedIn/Xing by the CEO. I completly work remote from my small home town, sitting in an old castle - one of the oldest buildings of the city.

So far the first customers get an onboarding towards using the software. The data layout is quite flexible so every kind of data, company structure, etc can be integrated.

Do you want to disclose which startup it is? I'm German and in the same situation as OP, so this might be interesting.