{"id":293,"date":"2015-11-28T13:39:37","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T21:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinschimmelfing.com\/blog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2015-11-28T21:35:10","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T05:35:10","slug":"three-things-to-fight-climate-change-you-can-do-that-brett-victor-missed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/colinschimmelfing.com\/blog\/three-things-to-fight-climate-change-you-can-do-that-brett-victor-missed\/","title":{"rendered":"Three ways to fight climate change that Bret Victor missed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bret Victor just put out a great post<\/a> about various projects one could work on as a technologist to help with the climate crisis. Many of these are great suggestions for an individual’s ~5 year project, but it might be hard to see how a normal engineer working in the industry could start working on climate change problems.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m here to show that you can help fight climate change even if starting a clean tech company or working on a new programming language is out of reach.<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Up<\/a>
Up and to the right, faster and faster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The three actions seem small, but given our industry\u2019s future trajectory (up and to the right, of course), these can have a huge compound effect into the future:<\/h4>\n
    \n
  1. Choose carbon-efficient server hosting, from the start<\/li>\n
  2. Change tech culture around climate change from passive to active<\/li>\n
  3. Work for a company tackling an aspect of the climate challenge<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We often see climate change as something for other industries to handle – after all, those other industries are moving crops or making steel or feeding cows and we are “just moving bits”. How bad can moving bits be for the environment? Aren’t we already doing well?<\/p>\n

    It’s true that the tech industry is less carbon-intensive than other industries. However, we are only as \u201cgreen\u201d as the power our servers draw. While some companies have spent massive efforts on clean energy (kudos, Google!<\/a>), no one expects or should reasonably expect companies to work outside their core competency.<\/p>\n

    Luckily for the environment, the more accurately carbon is priced, the better the tech industry does as a whole<\/strong> (see item #2<\/a>), and so the entire tech industry should<\/em> be united in working for a solution to climate change.<\/p>\n

    1) Use carbon-efficient server hosting<\/h3>\n

    Again, we don\u2019t need to smelt aluminum, move wheat, or drive a tractor to do our jobs. But if cloud computing were a country, it would rank 6th in the world for energy usage<\/a>. This gives us an outsized impact on the energy sector, about the same size as Germany!<\/p>\n

    \"cloud<\/a><\/p>\n

    If tech demands clean energy, utilities will have to start providing the clean option, and economies of scale and political barriers start to tip in favor of non-carbon energy sources.<\/p>\n

    If you’re in one of the green bubbles in the image below, skip to the next section, you\u2019re doing great. However most of us when starting a business just opt for AWS, and while they have some efforts to improve their carbon footprint, there\u2019s little transparency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \"2015<\/a>
    2015 datacenter energy use report card<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    If you do use AWS, set your default to us-west-2\/Oregon<\/code> or another carbon-neutral datacenter. At least for the US, us-west-2<\/code> has consistently been the cheapest datacenter so this also helps your business. Of course you may need to use some east-coast centers for web latency, but it makes complete sense that data processing should be done with cheap, water-powered, renewable energy.<\/p>\n

    When you have 100% carbon-neutral servers, your salespeople will happily use this as a selling point, another positive impact to your business. Go ask them how useful that point would be – just send a single email<\/em>…<\/p>\n

    Some things you personally can do:<\/h4>\n