> You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what.

My opinion is that the very first things people should do are:

1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.

2. Accept the situation. Too many are in denial, with variants of "it's not that bad" or "it's because those in power are stupid, I would certainly fix the world" or "it's because of foreigners".

3. Vote accordingly.

It's too easy to say "we don't have any viable candidates" and "I don't understand why they haven't fixed the problem yet, they must be stupid (somehow implying that "in all likelihood I would have solved it by now")".

In relatively-functional democracies, the reason the people doesn't have viable candidates is because the people does not vote for competent people. Either because they vote for competent politicians (with modern politics being about getting elected, not exactly solving big problems) or because they proudly vote for extremists (which is of course even worse).

In a democracy, the people is the government. When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.

I think it is fundamentally a demographic problem. We have a growing aging population in the worst-offending western countries, soon to be the majority voters (in some countries we are approaching 50% voters above age of 50). Wealth and fortune tend to come with age, so the same group sits on the assets needed to make a change (and are the worst offenders regarding CO2 production). At the same time, this group cares the least about the future livability of the planet, as the worst symptoms will only start to show when they have already passed away.

That is a fundamental problem that you will not solve by asking youger folks, who are actually affected and have all reason to agree and comply, to make a change.

Money/finance is the problem here, we've had the technology to make surplus exergy damn near free (in the ExROEI sense) since the 1960s but financial systems we had in place combined with political reticence and NIMBYISM/Nuclear fears have made the transition to the only energy source than can keep our modern civilization alive unattractive on the fiat ledger, and our civilizational malaise will continue to grow as our useful surplus exergy shrinks and shrinks with the available fossil fuels getting harder and harder (exergetically) to extract. Hydrocarbons were our consumable rope ladder to nuclear fission breeding cycles but we are almost out of remaining rungs to to make the climb IMO. Ban fiat currency, ban debt spending, ban the wallstreet casino and start the most ambitious project in human history to build out massive industrial parks around advanced cycle fission breeder reactors where we perform electrolysis, haber-bosch, direct carbon capture (atmospheric or from industrial exhaust) and manufacture synthetic hydrocarbons, while we directly electrify every single part of our civilization that is sensible to power that way (like homes, offices, stores and consumer transportation) with wind and solar.

> clean energy hardware

This sounds interesting. Tell us more?

Any tips for a senior SWE who would love to move away from coding and into the clean energy space?

I have been working in Climate Tech for a while but not as long as you.

Unfortunately my conclusion is that Climate Tech companies in general have been delusional thinking the mission is enough and there is no requirement to be a business.

The reason I am saying this is not to discourage from working in Climate Tech. The reason I say this is to please not go in with eyes closed which is all too common.

Climate Tech needs to grow and be sustainable both for the mission as well as a business. And for far too long I feel business smarts have been missing completely in this sector.

A major problem, I think, is that humans insist on making everything a big package deal bound up with tribalism and ideology.

If you think climate change is a problem, you're more likely to be on the left of the political spectrum and hold a wide range of other views that have absolutely nothing to do with reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

(I'm not just picking on the left. Everyone does this with everything. It's human primate tribal behavior.)

The constant shifting winds are a result of political shifts and power struggles, often struggles over issues that are unrelated to climate change but are linked to it by this mechanism. It makes rational discourse and consistent action hard. The more bound up an issue is with politics the harder it is to even discuss reasonably.

Of course, people with a short term vested interest in not doing anything about this problem love it this way.

The problem is simple and the solution is to switch to power sources that emit far less CO2 or preferably none at all. This remains true regardless of our political, social, or cultural beliefs. Physics doesn't care.

> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours.

Why should the average person reduce his/her life quality in order to save the climate, when the average billionaire emits as much CO2 as one million people from the bottom 90% of the population combined? I do care about the climate, but it's clearly irrational to make sacrifices, when other people are unwilling to do that. Having a higher quality of life is more valuable to me than the tap on the shoulder I can give myself for playing my part in living responsibly.

I just read 'The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry', a selection of his essays and speeches. I'm quoting a relevant chunk of his 2011 speech 'The Future of Agriculture':

What must we do? First, we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too lightly risk the lives of people, places, and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it. Second, we must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization. Third, we must quit solving our problems by ‘moving on.’ We must try to stay put, and to learn where we are geographically, historically, and ecologically. Fourth, we must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives. Fifth, we must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature. Sixth, by way of correction, we must make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence, and local work. Seventh, we must understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation. This is an agenda that may be undertaken by ordinary citizens at any time, on their own initiative. In fact, it describes an effort already undertaken all over the world by many people. It defines also the expectation that citizens who by their gifts are exceptional will not shirk the most humble services.

Maybe your optimism is what we need, but I don't see the logic of it.

You've seen how the "money can't help itself". Individual choices matter only to a certain extent, and I haven't seen any evidence that "enough individuals making the right choices" is sufficient to effect any measurable positive change.

The logical conclusion of the evidence I've seen so far is to change the system. Capitalism sucks when your goal is not to make as much money as possible. But changing the system seems too hard (and too much like a commie/revolutionary/extremist), so instead people just try to try harder. It sounds almost like a religion (cult) -- if you are not favored by $deity, you don't have enough faith, so try to believe harder and your wishes will be granted.

It's not to say I don't respect your decisions and commitments. Just that there's 8+ billion people in the world and individuals are just one out of 8+ billion, and "try harder" doesn't seem to work so well given these numbers and facts.

> But you, individually, can make the choice to keep your eye on the ball. You can commit to working on this problem until it’s done, no matter what. You can choose to find the others to organize and prepare, so that the ideas closest at hand when the next crisis comes are yours. > It’s the best solution I’ve come up with so far, and in spite of the challenges, it’s still working.

This helped. It’s pretty much the only thing you can do.

The system is looking for growth, not for sustainability, which is someone else’s problem.

Not to mention, this is all going to assume resources in America and issues from an American perspective. Not to ding America, just that the conversation will cluster around the topics that matter to funders.

>We crossed the 1.5 degree threshold because the money can’t help itself.

Which is why I think we need carbon pricing / tax. If the politicians focused on that then the forces of capitalism and startups would be unleashed to bring down co2. Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

It could maybe be brought in quite gradually in a decade or two ahead so people have time to install renewables, heat pumps and the like.

We are better off focusing on the top 10 countries and just forget about the rest. But we don't we do symbolic things that do not matter. Why?

Top CO₂ Emitters by Total Volume • China: ~13.12 billion tons (9.13 tons per capita) • United States: ~4.63 billion tons (13.59 tons per capita) • India: ~3.15 billion tons (2.19 tons per capita) • Russia: ~2.01 billion tons (14.06 tons per capita) • Japan: ~972 million tons (7.79 tons per capita) • Iran: ~829 million tons • Indonesia: ~812 million tons • Saudi Arabia: ~653 million tons • South Korea: ~588 million tons • Germany: ~580 million tons

line must go up forever, otherwise you are a communist or a luddite it seems.

> At a time when basically all VC funding, and in many ways the entire productive capacity of the economy, is shifting to AI, it would have been smarter in some respects to just pivot to AI. I sat out the crypto bubble too, in which some of my peers made a lot of money by working on projects that were either useless, or straightforward scams.

This is the problem with the "individual action" angle to fix structural problems. While it is commendable that you stood your ground and committed to your priors, structural problems are not fixed by good individual actions.

Capital demands that line goes up. Corporations are optimized to increase profits, all else be damned. Governments are beholden to GDP and Inflation goals, not to degrees Celsius.

A good example is meat consumption. Obviously it would be better for the environment if everyone went vegetarian, but doing so on an individual basis is foolish when governments give subsidies for raising cattle.

In other words, I would vote for banning meat consumption, but until it is tackled structurally, I am eating another ribeye.

> But you, individually,

Here lies the flaw of your argument. You, individually, can't do shit. You can work as much as you want in green tech while another GPU is fried while someone vibe-code their next slop copy of some open source software.

Because, as yourself said, money can't help itself. Self-destruction is inherent to the system. It's on the best interest of every individual to kill the world and keep raping its corpse while it makes another buck.

The problem is that most people do care about the environment but are hopelessly misinformed about what to do about it.

They think that personal acts of minor inconvenience like tolerating soggy paper straws saves the environment while fighting things that actually make a difference, like blocking transit to save a nest of bats; or blocking urban development to provide an extra 3 minutes a day of sunlight on a surface parking lot; or that somehow them flying across the USA to visit a national park and connect with nature or something is offset ecologically by token actions like reducing how many plastic grocery bags they use throughout the year. Most ordinarily people don’t understand the tradeoffs of their choices in the slightest.

And on top of that culture wars and geopolitics is getting in the way of progress - we could be blanketing the world in solar panels and batteries and EVs on the cheap right now, but it’s dominated by enemy #1, China, so we won’t; not to mention that the right in the USA seems to think that renewables are for girly sissies. And the alternatives we have, like nuclear power, are being shut down across EU countries because people have no idea of just how self sabotaging that action is, given that the alternative is going to be fossil fuels coming from Russia and the Middle East. They’d rather die of heat stroke than use energy efficient air conditioning, so the powers of most people’s imagination are shockingly weak.

Popular opinion wants to blame everything on capitalism when the reasons for these problems don’t actually stem from there. Capitalism will be the way out if it’s given the chance, but it’s not popular to say that, so it won’t.