[Haskell-cafe] How are we helping? Climate Strike / Earth Strike fri 20, fri 27

[Olaf Klinke]

Haskeller working in the renewable energy sector here. 

Richard O'Keefe has good points, it is hard for the average programmer to have a real impact on climate change. Power consumption of computing equipment, though, is indeed a huge part of our electricity usage, so any progress will be very welcome in this sector. Ask your cloud computing vendor where the data center sources its power. <shameless advertising> It ought to look like this. [*] </shameless advertising>
My suggestion is to help make renewables the cheapest power source in the market. It already is in some countries, and both China and India are investing massively in wind and solar power, not beause of morale, but beause it is cheap. 
So go ahead and develop good SCADA software, help the grid operators balance their volatile loads, use deep learning and so-called AI to make maintenance cheaper and life cycles longer. And, but this has nothing to do with programming, keep pestering your first-world governments. Even if your country's share in the global emissions is minute, showing that even industrialized countries can reduce their emissions hopefully leads to others following. But this is only going to work if saving the environment is also cheaper compared to going on as usual. 

Olaf

[*] http://windcores.de/en/homepage/#!/who