Very Easy/Cheap
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Not | Highly
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Effective | Effective
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Very Hard/Expensive
> [...] changing that light bulb in your closet to LED and saving a couple kW while the home stands, versus a small fraction of an industry that consumes gigawatts of power.
Yes and now. By changing light bulb bazillion times, we were able to save gigawatts of power. It did require just a little bit of work and investment from everyone, but it was more attainable than building new ecologically sound power plants. If just 1mln bulbs were replaced, and each saved 50W /day - we were able to save 50GW of power each and every day. How much more work/money/politics would be required to save as much by building cleaner power plants?
> right now your dollars are a lot more effective at the Against Malaria Foundation.
That might be right, but we have enough resources, to tackle all of the important projects, however due to the way our society is structured we waste these resource on stupid, pointless stuff.
The problem is, this work adds up superlinearly. The thing about humans is that coordination is hard.
In order to change enough lightbulbs to have an impact on global energy use, you'd have to convince many millions of people to act against their personal, short-term, economic best interest (if it was already in their perceived interest, they'd change the bulbs by themselves). This is a kind of problem you can't really take on directly. An indirect approach would be to e.g. significantly reduce the cost and increase distribution of the better bulbs, leveraging technology and market economy to your advantage. This way the bulbs will start making economic sense, and people will switch by themselves. It's a difficult approach, but much less difficult than persuading people directly.
But then again, you may discover that optimizing power usage in data centres can save as much power, but requires less work and less convincing than the lightbulbs scenario. It would be better to start from that.
This is the kind of solutions we need to prioritize - low effort, high impact.
And I fully agree, but we have a lot of "technical debt" in our society. We have to keep supporting our existing "software", and fix all critical bugs, but we should also dedicate some time to refactor the society, even if it requires building version 2.0 from scratch, adding only these libraries that make sense.
As far as optimizing power usage in data centers - armies of engineers are already working on it, and there is really not much more we can gain there, but changes in software, to be more efficient, simpler and less bloated is something that would have a large impact. This however, as in the case with the light bulb, requires coordination of many different people/companies/technologies. This will simply be impossible not because it's hard, but because our society spends too much effort on making stuff look great, and making sure that we can be tracked by advertisers so they can sell us stuff we don't know we need or want.
Non-profit non-government education programs. I'm designing one currently.
The main idea is to create a learning platform for 9-13yo kids, with high quality apps to learn English, basic coding, and (!!) life skills like personal finance, critical thinking, even using Google efficiently. Then you can just download and deploy it on RaspberryPi/OrangePi or old PCs in your country and distribute it to disadvantaged kids.
While it seems impossible (and most likely it is), there is only one way to find out - try.
I don't know about you, or anyone else here, but I bet there are thousands, if not millions of people here who don't give a ff about having the newest phone in their pocket, newest social app, etc. but would give all the time and money they have to create a better world if not for themselves - at least for their children.
"How do you propose doing that?" most people will ask - a very good question with a very simple answer - I don't know, but I'm sure that it's not something that few like minded people could figure out. We would possibly fail, but so what? Either way, it seems like we're doomed, so we have nothing to lose.