IT jobs fighting against climate catastrophe?
I'm very passionate to fight the climate catastrophe. Unfortunately my current e-commerce job has nothing to do with it. The best I can do outside my personal behavior is to donate money to some organizations. Are there any IT jobs at companies that are more aligned with my passion? Any idea on how to find them? Most of the companies I found don't seem to need Software Engineers / SysAdmins. I'm living in Germany and would happily do full-remote work.
This question pops up quite regularly on HN. I am always giving the same answer. We, HN crowd, presented with a problem tend to reach for a technical solution. Unfortunately, climate change is not an engineering problem, it's a political problem. IT will not solve it. The best we, as engineers, can do is the same as for anyone else - step out of our comport zone and join a climate movement. Extinction Rebellion is my favorite. You can choose your own poison.
I spent a few years working for a small environmental advocacy group in small-town USA. One thing you could do is branch out your skills and learn GIS, then offer that to small groups who are doing environmental advocacy.
These groups are crazy desperate for more people who know how to use GIS software, because there are needs for good mapping in almost every single aspect of the work they do. The issue is that anyone who is good enough at GIS to be useful can get a job elsewhere making 2-3x more money. Maybe they don't get to go help release a rehabbed sea turtle back into the ocean during their lunch break at that other job, but cash is king I guess. At my org we had an ex-high school history teacher working part time learning to use ArcGIS from youtube so we could present results of a bicycle infrastructure plan to local city councilpeople. For another project we paid a shit ton of money (like, more money than was responsible to spend for an org. of our size) for an architectural firm to basically come in with their intern who knows GIS and create maps with overlays of how much money the city would save with new stormwater infrastructure in key places.
Most software engineers I've met in the climate science field are either scientific programmers or data scientists. If this is the type of job you like to do I think there are regular position openings in scientific institutions. My knowledge outside academia is limited
One of the very lowest-hanging fruit for reducing emissions at the moment is bitcoin. It is burning 0.1% of the entire world's energy for doing barely anything at all.
Do all you can to make sure bitcoin is destroyed.
> An exciting and ambitious job in a young company with horizontal hierarchies and flexible working hours awaits you. Here you will find a motivating environment where your ideas are welcome. In our dynamic team, you will be able to expand your practical knowledge and promote your personal development. You will get an insight into the growing renewable energy market and you will also be able to demonstrate your skills in the company's foosball table.
To add to the advice that it's a political problem - you should think of ways of using your tech skills to provide leverage to campaigners. Build a proof of concept and approach NGOs and campaign organisations to see if they would sponsor you. There may also be PR firms with ethical agendas (if that's not a contradiction).
Some ideas off the top of my head - visualisation tools (mapping large offenders and their carbon footprints, tools for unearthing dirty money flows). Ways of reaching potential converts more effectively. Ways of linking people to green energy sources and products.
The 'greed camp' have been using tech very effectively to convince people nothing bad is happening. Use their own tactics against them.
There is this company which was posted to the HN Who’s Hiring thread recently: https://youtu.be/LDJ_QdUaap4
Anything ag tech is going to be high impact in the next two decades.
I've aligned my side projects to be climate focused.
I spend a lot of time and money building a website to encourage people to pack less when they travel. My impact may be minimal, but I feel like I'm helping.
Buildings take up a major proportion of the carbon and energy budget. Consider contributing to EnergyPlus[0]:
> EnergyPlus is a whole building energy simulation program that engineers, architects, and researchers use to model both energy consumption and water use in buildings.
There are a ton of open issues...
[0] https://github.com/NREL/EnergyPlus
You should aim to grow out your e-commerce career. Companies like Amazon make the greatest difference to climate change as improved logistics benefits the entire supply chain. Mom and pop shops are great for romanticism and NYT hit pieces about the terrors of gentrification and white flight but their logistics are incredibly inefficient compared to efficiencies of scale offered by e-commerce. "Micro" low hanging fruit efforts like data visualization which these comment threads tend to favor make little difference. Grassroots won't solve climate change, you need changes in technologies that allow the emerging economies to no-strings-attached capture the value and benefits of economic growth without the side effects of pollution (that means convincing or forcing institutions like the World Bank/IMF to replace their onerous neoliberal funding requirements with only one: green technologies), you need systematic changes in federal policy, and you need restructuring of company operations to be more efficient. As a software engineer, the most effective thing that you can do is the latter.
I work for a sustainability startup in Berlin that is focussed on helping businesses analyze their carbon footprint to become neutral through reduction and offsetting.
We are looking for frontend (react), backend (python mostly), and data engineers.
If you're interested let me know how best to contact you!
VR - With good enough virtual reality everything in the world would just become a poor substitute. A high quality VR enabled world would see the end to most transport and production of commercial goods.
I've just learned that we will soon be hiring a couple more software engineers, though we are in the UK:
https://www.indra.co.uk/
Nothing will change without strong incentive on the part of the elites. Unfortunately, it would be already deep in the catastrophe, when even them on their yachts will feel it.
I found my job at CarbonCure on the whoishiring thread. Sometimes we post here, but you can keep an eye on the careers page.
Fix some bugs - github.com/PecanProject
Probably rule out activist EU stuff.