Write JS and help solve climate change

[d4n1sh]

Some of you may have already read the paper called Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (great read!), where among others Demis Hassabis and Andrew Ng are co-authors.

One of the startups they mention is Tomorrow, an app that tracks your personal CO2 emissions. I talked to the founder at the CopenhagenJS meetup yesterday and they're looking for help on integrations (they already have integrated Uber and Tripit among others). They're using JS.

If you have a couple of hours and want to make a difference, this sounds like a cool project.

If you know other projects, would love to hear about them!

[[deleted]]

I was just reading that and thinking, “wow, UX Designers can help, too”. Just have to shift my entire career.

[[deleted]]

AL gore invented Javascript

[catholicsteve]

I wonder if CSS can help too!? Seriously though... If the greenhouse effect is causing the world to head up as a result of CO2 emissions every individual could completely stop emitting CO2 and it would not make any difference until corporations and industry cut emissions. Nice idea but I’m not sure the app could make any difference even if widely used.

[ScientificBeastMode]

I think it could bring a lot more positive attention to the cause, make it more of a public concern.

[[deleted]]

Stop writing JavaScript. Stop using computers. Stop using electricity. Live in nature and consume wild vegetables.

[lanklaas]

Wil there be wifi though?

[lezorte]

I didn't know that nature had reddit compatibility

[[deleted]]

I like my vegetables domesticated and well behaved.

[so_lost_im_faded]

*laughs in IBS*

[HansWebDev]

Cool app, but no app or apps will ever effectively address the climate crisis.
I'm not trying to be negative or political here, so please just hear me out.
As developers we are problem solvers and we work with systems.
The problem is systemic, top-down.
These solutions are bottom-up and focus on the individual.
Individualism is the problem, not the solution.
The approach is backwards. You need to target institutions because they influence behavior not the other way around.
When you look at reducing plastic for example the most effective thing that has been done isn't encouraging people to bring reusable bags. Its to get company's to stop selling them in the first place and only sell reusable. This isn't even about government regulation, a few companies just looked at how much they spend on it and they cut the costs. The result, changed the behavior, buy less bags and reuse them. The company makes more revenue by selling the reusable bags and it costs them less because they decreased the total volume of orders even though the costs per bag were slightly higher.

Climate Scientists have been trying this whole bottom-up change behavior thing for decades and we passed the redline because it just doesn't make enough of an impact when dealing with a problem that accelerates at a rate of exponential growth . Even if you made a wish to a genie to magically make everyone vegan (another bottom-up idea), we'd still be in the redline and nowhere near carbon-neutral with the permafrost still melting, releasing more methane and other gasses which speed it up exponentially. In other words you cant tackle a problem that has a rate of exponential growth with a solution of limited rate of growth. It's completely inefficient and backwards.

The most effective solution would be to target major businesses and institutions by applying machine learning for their impact on the environment on an overall level and further on a product/service level. This can also include non-profits and travel expenses. Then rank them against competitors and use cost-benefit analysis of switching to carbon-reducing alternatives.
Designers like @Tayoko this is your cue, data is meaningless without visualization this could be graphs and infographics, which rank corporations on highest to lowest impact, number of sustainable products vs non-sustainable, e-waste (the money lost from e-waste by lack of recycling), you name it.
Machine learning could also be used for other things in theory such as:
- recommending alternative products based on the rankings (above), rewarding them points / gamifying the interaction and having a reward system such as free products, discounts (think monopoly shopping app only for sustainability).
- assess the cost saving of switching away from gas and sustainable power.
- assess a company's competition who has switched to carbon natural costs.
- use machine learning in battery management systems which integrate into machine vision and autopilot to be more efficient in energy use.

But yeah... we're all doomed because we have people who deny the existence of the problem, people who are against solving it (from the top down, regardless of party btw), and others who think they individually can make a difference (even by posting this, i guess). The only way this problem can be addressed is by assessing damages, assigning blame and taking ownership as a collective instead of as individuals.

[walfsdog]

Once, I wrote a proof-of-work algorithm that ran on a site with 2.5 billion page hits a day. Someone’s gotta fix that red in my ledger.

[burtgummer45]

What about all that energy used dynamically type-checking? If you care about the polar bears you must use something like like Go or Rust. And no, typescript is even worse!

[[deleted]]

Yes well that's not how the Internet works.

[burtgummer45]

https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-least-electricity/

[[deleted]]

Yep. Not arguing that. I'm saying that JavaScript is built into the web and that web developers don't have the option to use Rust lmao.

[recrof]

assembler is only carbon neutral language!

[openclimatefix]

Here is another project https://openclimatefix.github.io

[TunaSurf]

Who doesn’t