Ask HN: Who Here Is Working to Fix the Environment?
I&#x27;m not but i recognize it to be a problem, sadly it seems those with money seem to want to throw it at pursuing on massive-scale geoengineering and&#x2F;or pursuing exotic carbon sequestration methods that may or may not already exist. A good example of this being YC with this page <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;carbon.ycombinator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;carbon.ycombinator.com&#x2F;</a><p>I really wish I could get one of these people to liten to me. I&#x27;m not a CS type, I&#x27;m not an ivy league degree holder (or a degree holder at all), I didn&#x27;t sell my first company for eleventy-seven mibillion dollars, so I&#x27;m not welcome at the table.<p>I wish I could get one of these individuals, or several of them, or even a company, to spin off a non-profit to start hardcore investigating what is going on, what the immediate issues are, what the projected issues are 10-20 years out, and what we need to start doing. if OpenAI can get 1 billion dollars in pledges to build not-so-mean sky net, can we get 10 million, 100 million, pledged to you know... saving the flippin&#x27; planet?!<p>Seriously. Sama, throw me at this.<p>Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Dustin Moskovitz, Jan Koum, Travis Kalanick, Jack Dorsey, Google, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Reid Hoffman, Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, Palantir, WeWork... do you want to keep your customers, your gardeners, your drivers, your personal chefs, your dog walker, do you want to see your bloodline continue with grandchildren or great grandchildren? Then wake up, we&#x27;ve got to do something, we&#x27;re listing to port and if we don&#x27;t act fast it&#x27;ll be &#x27;all hands, abandon ship!&#x27;<p>Let&#x27;s get out there and talk to farmers, climatologists, scientists, researchers, grad students, material scientists, oil&#x2F;solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;geothermal engineers, agricultural science people. I&#x27;ll go spend a year, two years, going from university to university-company to company-skype call to skype call, talking to as many of these people as possible so we can come up with a solid look at the issue and then start working on a battle plan.<p>&gt;It seems like if we don&#x27;t do anything then in ten or twenty years (my lifetime!) there will be a &quot;crunch&quot; where something truly horrific may happen.<p>Personally I feel that if we aren&#x27;t at least countering the greenhouse gasses we are emitting annually 100%, then  we will be up the creek without a paddle and will need to immediately start to focus our efforts on creating &#x27;blueprints&#x27; for rebuilding civilization from scratch as a backup (maybe gold plated titanium etched sheets on how to build basic machines and general engineering&#x2F;physics&#x2F;etc information in caches around the world) and throw everything we&#x27;ve got into long-term energy and indoor growing technology. I don&#x27;t think humanity will go extinct but I think if we haven&#x27;t at least ceased adding more greenhouses gasses 5-10 years from now then we probably will not be able to gain control of it before it spirals (thawing marshes&#x2F;permafrost releasing methane pockets etc) and we will then need to just focus on ensuring that over the coming decades, or even century, that some record exists for our children or even great grand children to rebuild in the event we collectively lose the know-how to do a lot that we&#x27;ve accomplished because we were too busy trying to survive radical changes to weather and massive food shortages.<p>---<p>Even if a company made viable&#x2F;affordable cold fusion TODAY it would take decades to replace all of the current power plants assuming zero increase in demand as there are over 60,000 power plants in the world and just since the year 2000 the world has more than DOUBLED the power generation from coal plants (China alone is building some 300 coal plants around the world as investments and receives something along the liens of 70% of their power from coal). The concrete alone to build all of those facilities would release an insane amount of CO2.<p>China is also adding millions of new drivers to the roads annually, as well as building a massive amount of roads&#x2F;highways&#x2F;bridges all across the country so either fossil fuel use will continue to rise or there will be millions and millions of EVs demanding even more power generation.<p>---<p>As I&#x27;ve spoken to Silicon Valley types with the means to actually fund looking into this sort of stuff over the past year or so, including consulting on it for compensation, I&#x27;m just shocked at how naively optimistic some of them are and worse, how some just refuse to acknowledge it as a problem. Attitudes like &quot;don&#x27;t worry, we will figure it out because we have to&quot;. Yeah, sorry, no, that&#x27;s not always the case... I hate hate hate how VC&#x2F;Startup culture is like &quot;we can do anything, promise, we got this, we can code so relax we&#x27;ll figure it out, stop being pessimistic and go away&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s easy to sit in San Francisco where weather varies wildly between blocks anyway due to microclimates but, hi, hello, I live in central Indiana... you can normally start harvesting corn next week here however due to the abnormal rains we&#x27;ve had the past 2 months there is corn in fields out there that&#x27;s knee high because it couldn&#x27;t be planted. I drove by so many fields two weekends ago on a 120ish mile trip to northern Indiana that had standing water in them and still hadn&#x27;t been planted. About a mile from my apartment there exists a new pond, it isn&#x27;t actually a pond but it is a field that has now had standing water in it for a month due to far more rain than normal.<p>This isn&#x27;t just in central Indiana either, this is a large part of the country. Higher than normal rains are going to seriously impact crop yields this year, while in Australia they produced roughly 20% less grains than normal last year because of their drought being worse than normal. Anchorage might see 90F this week per a news article I saw this morning which will be a record in recorded history. France has at least one nuclear power plant that might need to go offline due to running out of cooling due to the heat. There are micro plastics in the air now, &#x27;raining&#x27; down hundreds of miles from any known source.<p>But hey, it&#x27;s ok, Silicon Valley&#x27;s brightest coders are working on it <i>headdesk</i><p>Come on, let&#x27;s do something about this. I don&#x27;t have the means, I have the drive though. Those that have means, wake up, come on, throw money at this! Think of yourselves as the aristocracy on the titanic, did all that wealth do them any good as the ship went down?<p>If someone with the financial means legitimately wants to attempt to take a stab at this I will walk away from my job and throw myself 100% at it. Let&#x27;s start by talking to as many experts in as many fields as possible. Farmers&#x2F;scientists&#x2F;engineers&#x2F;etc, let&#x27;s compile all of the data we can and we can even make a series of video interviews with those that are already feeling the impact of our actions as a species and start getting that content out there, raise more and more awareness. A handful of people working on cold fusion, or C4 rice, or trying to geonegineer the planet aren&#x27;t going to do a damn bit of good unless we get a majority of the population to recognize, and admit, that there is something happening and that we need to stop it fast. Let&#x27;s get out there and get started.<p>Some of the people I mentioned way above have individually donated more than a billion dollars to other types of causes... look I get that sanitation for remote villages is needed, that gender diversity in the workplace is, that immigration reform is a good thing, but what is the point of all of it if billions of people die from thirst&#x2F;famine&#x2F;hurricanes&#x2F;storms in the next century?!?!