Ask HN: Companies/non profits working against climate change

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538575

by randomgoose • 6 years ago

3 7 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am looking for contributing towards fighting climate change and want to look for opportunities (both for profit/non profit) in the space. I am a techie with backend and ML experience. The longer term goal with this is to understand the space and drive companies to adopting practices that help combat climate change.

Where should I look? Which companies/non profits are doing good work here?

PaulHoule2• 6 years ago

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

randomgoose2• 6 years ago

That's a very different model I was not even aware of. Do you have any others' in mind as well?

PaulHoule2• 6 years ago

I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron:

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

This is illegal under the U.N. law of the Sea but thanks to Don Rumsfeld the U.S. is not a party to that law so if you only use ports in the U.S., Chile and a handful of other countries, nobody will stop you.

I wound up talking to some experts in the field and was told with no uncertainty not to try it, although I think the scientific arguments weren't entirely convincing.

---

The gist of it is this. If you want to make people pay money to solve the global warming problems you run straight into

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

if you build some system for shuffling money (e.g. "Carbon Credits") around you now have a new problem that people are going to steal it:

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

If you can create a fully economically competitive energy source or carbon removal system people will use it and our great-grandchildren will remember that we solved this problem.

If we screw around with other things, the "way out" is that the 8 billion population ends up under 2 billion. CO2 emissions will not be a problem then, but our great-grandchildren will assign a death count that is roughly Hitler plus Stalin squared to our current political order.

I don't know what political/economic system they'll end up with but the Roman experience would lead us to think that they'll reject everything our civilization believes in.

a_square_peg• 6 years ago

In a similar situation, I'm hoping to help this somewhat by making global weather data more easier to access and thereby helping to understand and communicate better on issues related to climate change. Example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEI6d7K1E5M

If you have ML background and would like to play with the data, feel free to sign up at https://oikolab.com and let me know. Happy to remove usage limits while you explore weather data.

randomgoose2• 6 years ago

I will take a look at this. Will reach out once I have had a chance to look

digheal• 6 years ago

https://www.supplyshift.net/

Ask HN: Companies/non profits working against climate change

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