Ask HN: How can I as a Computer Scientist contribute to battling climate change?

Earn lots of money and then invest it in an early-stage organization that has a decent plan to battle climate change.

It's amazing how many people think showing up to work at a soup kitchen, and only then on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, when they're way overstaffed, is going to solve homelessness, when they could have achieved 100x the benefit by working those hours at their regular job and donating the cash proceeds.

Don't fall for the same fallacy when it comes to climate change.

Intelligent algorithms can run smartgrids with power efficiency towards renewable sources of power. AI can help reduce resource wastage

Please don't use JS or npm. Downloading the entire internet while doing a simple change is not efficient.

One thing that CS needs to do more to battle climate change: pay attention to the energy foot print of the stuff you develop.

It's a political problem. So you can volunteer with or fund organizations that are pushing for change politically.

Apply at companies like Tesla or Solar City. They have a similar mission you can contribute to.

An indirect suggestion: advocate for energy-efficient programming languages and programs.

This may seem like a shallow suggestion (and even a faintly ridiculous one), but there is some logic to the idea.

When PHP 7 was released, Rasmurf Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, talked about the performance gains from version 7. The performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed. When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. You can watch a segment from his presentation where he talks about this here: https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s

Today, dynamic programming languages are the most popular - and sometimes the least performant and least power efficient. The most common solution, often espoused on these forums, is to throw more energy-guzzling hardware at the problem because hardware is cheap. And cheaper than picking a more performant, more energy-efficient language.

Before you dismiss this as completely ridiculous, consider how other industries approach energy efficiency and resource usage. The focus is mostly on reducing consumption of resources - a key selling point for customers. What would you think if a manufacturer said that they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency?

But in the computing field, we readily encourage "throwing more energy-guzzling hardware" at the problem until the program runs fast enough because it's a cheap solution. It's hard to think of any other profession that cares so little for energy efficiency than programming. Everything is for the ease and comfort of the programmer and screw anything else - the user, energy use and ultimately the environment.