It took me a very long time (years) to come to terms with the idea that as a techie I can't do anything to help climate. Tech projects is just an excuse to stay in my comfort zone. A very uncomfortable realization.
Do you not think about living by your values as a matter of integrity?
I don't not steal to stop others from stealing. I don't steal because I don't want to hurt others. If everyone in the world stole, I still wouldn't. If the whole world pollutes, I'm still going to avoid polluting as much as I can.
I would like to add this article by Bret Victor: "What can a technologist do about climate change? (A personal view)" http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
This piece by Brett Victor gave me the push to focus more on what work I do rather than just focusing on personal wealth + career. I ended up being employee #1 at solar forecasting company that is targeting the intermittency problem of renewables.
If you’re in a privileged enough situation, I’d highly recommend renewable energy sector, lots of problems where applying technical skill can be extremely impactful.
> Likewise support Green New Deal politicians in the US and elsewhere.
If we are really trying to avert climate change, how is spending trillions on labor unions and guaranteed jobs going to help?
If this was the plot of the movie Armageddon, and there was an asteroid hurtling towards earth, would your planned respond spend pages talking about unions, wealth inequality, indigenous people, and guaranteed healthcare, jobs, and housing? If climate change is really imminent and existential threat that requires “war time mobilization” then how can we afford to water down our response with these tangential things?
Under the Green New Deal you’d spend trillions more a year on healthcare, housing, etc. For that money you could buy up the major oil companies like Exxon (market cap $300 billion) and keep the oil in the ground. You could make the US carbon neutral using existing or near-term CO2 recapture technology. You could bankroll India and China to keep their fossil fuels in the ground and build out fully renewable capacity. You could invest in renewables technology, nuclear, carbon capture at the same time. If you sincerely believed that climate change was an existential crisis, why would you divert 90%+ of the force of the “war time mobilization” on social programs?
In my view, the Green new deal has done incalculable damage to the environmental movement. It is a transparent and cynical attempt to piggy-back traditional left wing politics onto the environmental movement, undermining its credibility and seriousness.
The logic behind the GND is simple: if we don’t do something about this, we’re going to be screwed. People don’t want to do anything about it because they’re afraid it will cost jobs. So make a plan that guarantees them jobs if they do something about it.
It’s a political solution to a technical problem. You may not like the politics, but it’s pretty damn logical.
> The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.
The question is whether there is a logic to it beyond the pretext that motivated it originally. And I don’t think there is. Protecting jobs from displacement as a result of climate change mitigation efforts makes sense. That could be accomplished for a fraction of the price of offering guaranteed housing, jobs, healthcare, higher education, etc.
We are talking about spending trillions a year on social welfare to get maybe $100 billion (at most?) on climate change mitigation. Is that “pretty damn logical?”?)
I think it’s one solution on the table, and not even one that has the full support of a single party. The others so far seem to be pretty close to a no-op. Be nice to see some other folks try to modulate it and offer a better proposal.