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.
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.
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).
* https://www.usajobs.gov/job/631234500
* https://www.usajobs.gov/job/665458700
* https://www.usajobs.gov/job/668184500
Bonus, if you are into finance; you could help keep the fed on track with this one:
* https://www.usajobs.gov/job/652648400
More here: https://www.usajobs.gov/Search/Results?j=2210&j=1550&j=1560&...
Climate is political. The technology exists, but needs subsidies to hit the manufacturing volume that would make them price competitive. Government is the main driver of this. The main driver of the US government is special interest groups.
So if you want to maximize your impact, work for a special interest group with a focus on climate, energy and environment. There are 2 main categories you can work in, “the business,” and “the program”.
The business is the operational and fundraising arm of the org. It takes the mission, bottles it up and sells it to people who want a bit of hopium. There are normal tech roles here like IT, Web, apps, and customer databases. Pay is low, but you are contributing by keeping the lights on and the paychecks flowing to the people changing the world.
The program is whatever specific mission vertical the org works on. This will involve a lot of lobbyists, policy wonks and lawyers. Because, again, it makes no sense to spend your own orgs money when you can get a 100-1 lever by convincing the govt to do it for you. That climate bill is 370 billion and orgs that have an annual revenue of 10 million wrote the policy. There can be tech jobs around constituent management databases like VAN. Could see some technical jobs packaging up scientific data into easy to demo visuals for the lawmaker staff to consume. Rarely there could be some PHD spots for original research.
I worked in the field for about 10 years. If you want to know anything, just ask.
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.
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.
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.
PS Right on! Im thinking about the exact same career pivot myself. Very inspiring to see this :)
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.
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.
https://www.sunflowerstarlab.org/
Personally, I want to develop a viable vision around “AI for ecological wellbeing.”
Currently I work at Climatiq making carbon estimation API's (we're hiring!), but previously I worked with wind turbines for several years, which are massive beasts and generate crazy amount of data, requiring large teams of software developers to efficiently manage. Perhaps solar management is similar.
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
- https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2165937/software-development...
- https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2159478/renewable-research-s...
- https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2079935/sr-applied-scientist...
Very fulfilling for me so far - strongly recommended.
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.
What's lacking, not to get too Ouroborean about it, seems to be energy. A number of my former classmates have gone into entrepreneurial ventures since graduation, since that seems much more what the industry is lacking.
To give one example relevant to your background - if you're skilled in finance, a fund of some kind that invests dividends from fossil fuel companies into emerging alternative sources would probably do a lot. That is really the global challenge, to invest the dividends from the fossil fuel era into a post-fossil era with as little reduction in human living standards as possible. Fossil fuels have an energy that renewables lack, never mind the hype. It's bringing that energy over with as few losses as possible that I see as the challenge.
Here's another one that's focused on carbon and methane:
I know several of their board members and leadership and they are also very skilled.
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).
"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...
Previously, I was programming industrial machines in the manufacturing industry.
I found the company because I own a few shares of one of our partners. I saw a press release announcing the partnership and thought it sounded awesome, so I emailed and said "Here's my skillset. I'm excited by what you're doing. If you'd like to work together, let me know."
It is fully remote.
Yes, it makes an impact. Reservoir use our data to make informed decisions on moving water between or reservoirs and putting water restrictions in place.
We are a very small team. I report to the CTO, am given a lot of autonomy/freedom, and touch every part of our process from circuit board to customer-facing dashboard, so by extension I feel that I'm making a positive impact.
I started as a full-time employee, now I work remotely as a freelancer/contractor.
I am pretty glad for the switch. The type of work I do (data engineering, tech leadership) is quite similar to the airline business; but in the clean-tech side.
For finding a job, maybe remote job listing sites might help [1], or then clean-tech related job sites.
[1] https://twitter.com/insharamin/status/1554160501550358528
So far we have built an airbnb-like platform (https://www.greengo.voyage) with a host selection component, but we have big plans to differentiate thanks to a recent 1.6M funding round. People who want to embark on this mission don't hesitate to contact me at felix@greengo.voyage :-)
I’m still on good terms with founders and helping them recruit a hands on CTO in Australian time zones if someone with the right skills is interested, wants to chat. Can be reached at the same username on twitter.
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.
However, if you are constrained such that you need to stay primarily in the software domain, I would recommend a lateral into something like a controls or optimization oriented roll. There are plenty of commercial and industrial buildings whose HVAC could operate more efficiently. There are plenty of ISOs and utilities who employ planners and forecasters (and this could be high leverage, as if we solve present day tasks like building lots of clean generation and storage, we will quickly find that transmission and distribution are the new constraints). You will see a lot of companies that are solving issues around measuring, dashboarding, and reporting, but I do not think this is high value work and I think the space is too crowded already, so I would very much recommend you find something where you are directly optimizing the deployment or operation of real physical assets.
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.
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.
I found that Energy is one of the most important things. If you have abundance of energy you can do a lot of things. E.g. convert existing materials to new. The only thing is that you need to produce that energy in a sustainable way.
At that point I decided to join a start-up called Sympower (now ~100 people). Sympower helps balance the electricity grid by using already existing resources. Balancing the grid is very important to be able to accommodate additional renewable resources into our grid.
At the moment I am satisfied with my decision. I feel like the company is making an impact and the company is also keeping sustainability in mind in its daily operations. The job is also remote.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out fred.puistaja@sympower.net
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
The primary challenge for me was finding a company which was mission-driven, had interesting engineering problems, and had a strong engineering culture. At the time, that combination felt very rare.
Ultimately, software necessarily sits a few steps removed from the tactical changes in climate (energy transition, policy, etc.). That said, I do feel like I'm making a tangible impact on moving the US toward solar and away from carbon-intensive energy.
P.S. I lead the engineering team at Wunder Capital [1]. I'd be happy to chat with anyone interested in moving into climate and/or our open engineering roles.
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.
That said, I'm working in the climate insurance start-up Descartes Underwriting, trying to compute risks for many natural perils: cyclones, wildfires, hail, droughts...
We're not on the mitigation side, but on the adaptation side. The financial service we provide helps companies survive and recover after catastrophes : I feel like my work has a positive impact! And although frightening, it's really interesting to first-hand witness the perturbations of climate.
https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/descartesunderwritin...
1. https://github.com/os-climate/OS-Climate-Community-Hub#readm... 2. https://opensustain.tech/blog/openness_as_a_key_indicator_fo...
The only problem - I didn't yet made a prototype to validate this idea, because I have to work overtime just to support myself and family. I'm slowly making progress on this and I will be able to finish that prototype until end of year.
On the other hand, having a team of mission-driven true believers actually makes for some difficult and potentially toxic team dynamics.
This elicited a strong reaction from folks on HN, but then again any novel idea does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32266086
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.
I used to write software for insurance companies, now I convert London Taxis to be all-electric: https://clipper.cab
We raised some pre-seed friends & family money and were supported by innovateUK in a critical part of the project.
The "new" electric London taxis are hybrid only! The exhaust isn't visible, so many people think they are electric which I think is terrible.
Our solution recycles existing vehicles and is truly all-electric.
That's just one of the challenges, of course, but it's one that might be relevant to your finance experience, since a lot of this work has to be done in energy markets.
I've been on the lookout for Developer Relations jobs in the space though, and so far haven't found a single position. I know it's a hard cookie but I'd be grateful if someone has ideas.
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.
Cheers, Peter McHale
Climate tech VC newsletter is an awesome source of the state of tech climate work, and provides links to additional resources.
I find it very motivating personally. It also means you'll be working with decent people who care about their work.
Don't expect to be paid top dollar though!
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).
If you want to work for a weather monitoring satellite company, there is Spire[1] (also RocketLab,SpaceX who is hiring)
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.
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.
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!
Climatetech is a scheme to sound good to investors.
We had a good chance of doing something meaningful 60 to 70 years ago, but now we're really just re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic as the ship goes down. I've spent the past four years working for a climate change mitigation company, and the more people I met in the 'industry' the more depressed I got.
Almost all of the work being done in the environmental space is 'make work' stuff. People shuffling research papers around, attending conventions and expos, networking with their peers to build a route to their next role. It goes on and on in a huge circle of ineffective (albeit sometimes sincere) activity. The problem is all stakeholders demand a return on investment, preferably a large one. Forget about the return being a liveable future for our grandchildren, they want cash in x years or no investment. Hilarious and so stupidly tragic.
Yes we need massive systemic political change, but we all know deep down that's not going to happen in time. The pandemic showed us what we could do if we really wanted to, and what happened? Here we are now with emissions rising even faster, and people blathering about 'net zero', which everyone knows is just smoke and mirrors. And now Ukraine is 'forcing' countries to return to dirty fuels to stay warm this winter.
We're kind of done.
But seriously, I heartily applaud anyone here and beyond if they feel the need to do something to help, no matter how modest. I still try and remain upbeat and optimistic as I search for a new role to help out. But it's increasingly clear that my biggest concern for the future will be how can I try and maintain a secure food source for the family as things start to tip over.
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.
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.