climate change

I trust the evidence of my own experience, the science and delegates from 196 nations of Earth that human-induced climate change is a real, urgent, and accelerating crisis that demands concerted, systemic action on the part of humanity. In a perverse reading of William Gibson’s quote that “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” the most vulnerable among us have already been suffering the consequences (see also: The climate disaster is here), and the relative wealth and privilege which insulates people like me from those consequences won’t do so forever.

We’ve known about human-induced climate change for more than a century

A 1912 newspaper article clearly explains the mechanism by which burning fossil fuels warms the earth:

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.

Even ExxonMobil was a public pioneer climate change research in the 1970s before a strategic shift in the ‘90s toward climate change denial in which they adopted the strategy (and same PR firms) as big tobacco to mislead the public about the causes and magnitude of climate change.

What Humanity Needs to Do

We’re beyond the point at which we can avert disaster by merely reducing future emissions. Now, we also need to revert past emissions by pulling CO₂ out of the air. Here’s a deep but accessible primer on carbon capture (thanks to my friend Tony for the link).

What I Can Do

It’s important to recognize that 100 corporations are responsible for 71% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So on the one hand, we shouldn’t be misled by campaigns to e.g. use paper straws that make it sound like consumers making different choices are going to fix the climate crisis. It’s a systemic problem that requires systemic change at the level of governments and multinational corporations, whom we must hold accountable. On the other hand, while taking individual action alone won’t save us, if it helps you feel empowered and staves off cynical despair like it does for me, then by all means do all you can.

1. Vote for and donate to candidates who acknowledge the urgency of taking action on climate change. The League of Conservation Voters maintains an online scorecard for members of the United States House and Senate.
2. Divest from polluters (stock, retirement accounts, etc.) For stocks, start with the list of 100 linked above. For mutual funds, check out FossilFreeFunds.org to search for funds with a sustainability mandate and good climate scores. You don’t even necessarily need to switch providers: my employer 401(k) provider, Vanguard, offers fossil-free funds.
3. Go carbon-neutral by auditing your carbon emissions and purchasing offsets for your household. If you live in Indiana, I had a great experience doing this through the nonprofit Carbon Neutral Indiana.
4. Choose 100% renewable energy from your electricity provider. If you live near me and use AES Indiana (formerly Indianapolis Power and Light) log in and choose “GreenPower”—it only cost me a few extra dollars a month.
5. If you’re a developer like me, vote with your compute hours by choosing a sustainable cloud. According to Wired’s research, Google Cloud Platform is best, while AWS, the most popular, racks up the greatest environmental cost.
6. More, obviously. If you’re taking action in some way that I’m not, please let me know. I have a lot of learning and growing to do here.

Then there’s all the little stuff like biking, planting trees and edible gardens, donating to sustainability initiatives, and eating less meat (especially beef), all of which I have to acknowledge require significant privilege to even have the option of doing. If like me you have that privilege to do so, then please use it, but it’s unfair to guilt anyone who lacks the means or even just the energy to take such action. It’s a perverse fact of our economy that we have been mortgaging our future to subsidize unsustainable inequality in the present, turning sustainability into a luxury. This is where climate justice and prioritizing the most vulnerable comes into play.

What Technologists Can Do

Liz Fong-Jones wrote a great piece in LeadDev about how tech contributes greenhouse gas emissions and what we can do about it. For example:

• If you can, choose not to work for fossil-fuel extraction companies and projects, and avoid cryptocurrency (which, in addition to being rife with fraud, contributes 1% of all human greenhouse gas emissions and growing)
• [Learn to] write more efficient code. This would be a great idea even if we weren’t facing a climate crisis. But computing power has gotten so cheap that it’s often easier to throw more servers at a problem than understand why your code isn’t performing well. But the low sticker price of compute resources hides a high climate cost: 3.8% of all non-cryptocurrency emissions.
• For compute-heavy workloads, consider more-efficient ARM-based processors developed for mobile. I love how Fong-Jones saved 120T of annual carbon emissions by switching a data-crunching workload from x86 to ARM cores. That’s the equivalent of 80 people switching to a vegetarian diet, and a great example of how we can all look to the leverage points around us to have an outsized impact on climate.

Emissions by Industry

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