> But I think useful change can only be made using political means. Write your representatives and tell them how you feel. Vote for politicians who want to change things.

I like technical solutions because they're undemocratic - they can step around conflicting short-term agendas and force change by exploiting market / people's preferences. In the day and age when climate is at best a very distant concern for most people, political solutions seem like a hard work for little and uncertain effect.

I wish I could be proven wrong on that though. Are there any low-hanging, high-impact fruits one could focus on? Maybe one should refocus on local politics? It seems much less messy and corrupt than national-scale politics.

Improving local infrastructure to improve walkability and prioritize cycling over cars helps, but in the near term we need to stop producing GHGs completely. So unless you have a found a cheap way to get fusion power to market in the next fifteen years or so, or have grid scale power storage up your sleeves, a large scale, expensive shift of our whole economy seems necessary. I don't see how you can do that without politics.

Politics will necessarily have to be a part of it - even if you could bring fusion power to market in the next decade. Politics responds to the shape of the solution landscape, so I see working on technologies (and "social technologies") as one way to influence it, with possibly better ROI than just voting for people who promise to "fix things".

(Also, voting is really a low-hanging fruit, so the best response here would probably be "why not both?".)

My worries about engaging directly in politics - becoming a politician - is that I see it as a very inefficient process, in which you'll have to give away most of your morality (and possibly interest in the original problem) before you get in a position to effect big changes.

Data centers are about 1-2% of emissions.

Animal agriculture is comparable to all transit, while heating/cooling/electricity is heavily at the top.

If I were profiling I'd optimize the highest bottleneck first.

I don't think many people on HN have the skills to make other people stop eating animals, so I focused on computers.

I was walking one night and I noticed streetlights are always on. Why aren't they proximity detecting/linked to each other so they'd anticipate you moving to the next one. Also same with stop/go lights. I realize infrastructure.

Edit: I was thinking about lights, I don't know far away sensors maybe? Not helpful if the lights are always being used (lots of cars).

Liquid salt thorium reactor haha

I'd guess several reasons, or rather aspects of the issue:

- proximity detector is another potential point of failure; including it raises both installation and maintenance costs

- when you're walking at night, you'd like to see further than the distance between two lampposts; this would require the proximity sensor to trigger several lamp posts arond you (totally doable, I guess, but again extra installation and maintenance costs for having the lamps wired together in the right way)

- in the past, streetlights were using sodium-vapor lamps, which have a significant warmup time

- now lamps are switching to LEDs so warmup time is not a concern, but I wonder how constantly turning them on/off impacts their longevity

Wearing my optimist hat, I think city planners are comparing costs of the issues above with potential savings. But pessimist in me tells me that it's mostly because electricity is cheap and incentives to optimize streetlights aren't strong.

Yeah I heard of something similar regarding turning light bulbs on/off versus just keeping them consistently on.

It is pretty crazy how we just expect electricity to work, one day when everything is destroyed and we're back to the stone ages how long would it take to get back to where we are now I wonder haha. An offline version of wikipedia on how to turn ore into a generator. Oh well I guess we'll figure it out hopefully.

> one day when everything is destroyed and we're back to the stone ages how long would it take to get back to where we are now I wonder haha.

A long time. Technology level isn't just about know-how. You'd also need a global supply chain ensuring access to all the raw materials, subcomponents, sub-subcomponemts, etc. You need a civilized society and the rule of law so that people can specialize and still put food on the table.

> An offline version of wikipedia on how to turn ore into a generator.

That's the easy part. Some people are already working on it.

A "Hitchhiker's guide book" if you will haha