Equating climate change activism with all other forms of social justice is a common trend I see. They seem so different to me–the difference between empirical reality and ideology. While the outcomes of climate change will be ideological–save climate refugees or preserve competitive advantage and wealth–the immediate concern of attempting to mitigate the impacts of climate change are relatively rational.
> if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles
Have you tried putting on your role-playing hats and empathising with some of the points being made on the environmentalist side?
If the people who could solve the problem were trying to solve the product, activists wouldn't be necessary. As long as activists are involved, there's going to have to be a narrow focus excluding most of the problem.
I mean this sincerely: I’ve been deeply involved in political and civic activism for the past couple years, and have learned a ton, especially from other people—but I also find it deeply frustrating when seemingly well intentioned folks offer unspecific feedback on how the significant investments of time, money, and energy I and others around me could be spent activisting better.
Direct action, however, tends to put more emphasis on the activists themselves as the problem instead of whatever their platform is. This is only useful when it demonstrates a sufficient commitment by a large number of people, which can demonstrate wide popular support— rallies, peaceful protests, etc. that involve enough people to potentially change the outcome of an election.
My problem is really with the publicity stunts done by a small number of people. From outside, it looks like an egotistical act and, if not dismissed entirely, hurts the reputation of everyone doing useful work in the same field. Antagonizing people is a poor way to convince them of anything.
As for why I don’t go into politics myself, it isn’t my calling and I don’t have the temperament to be successful at it. I believe I’ll do more concrete good in the world by being kind and helpful to those I meet in this journey we call life than by trying to force my concerns to the forefront of attention.
select * from users where supports_climate_change = true
becomes
select * from users where supports_climate_change = true AND supports_cause_b = true AND supports_cause_c = true
Ultimately you get way fewer users...
Most people who actually understand climate change also don't expect beachfront homes to be under water in the next few years. It's a slow death/dramatic change of our planet, something that will take place over the next few generations, not the next decade. And if you - or anyone else - thinks it will only impact the poor, you're grossly mistaken.
Perhaps more to the point: our world is stuffed to the rafters with complex adaptive systems--both man-made and natural--themselves threaded together by positive and negative feedback loops, punctuated equilibria, and participants trained on making decisions under these conditions.
We don't know which threads will snap, nor when, nor where. We don't know how the other systems and participants will react to the ripples. We don't know if, how long it will take, or where disrupted systems will settle into new equilibria.
In the face of uncertainty on this scale, I think there is some value to catastrophizing. We do this with uncertainty all the time. We imagine threats (both banal and catastrophic) to our systems and game them out. We make plans and run exercises. I'm not sure it's a bad idea, per se, to be gaming out dead-end scenarios.
This is not how I would characterize the last 300 years of our efforts as a species.
Characterizations are not mutually exclusive.
There's no catch clause in the universe's code to stop our most-impressive inventions from ultimately killing us, our most-creative disruptions from sundering our societies, or our most endearing traits from tucking us neatly into the geologic record.
I lived near a barrier island that would get hit with hurricanes each season, and every 5-10 years a storm would devastate it. Despite that, property owners would rebuild their several million dollar vacation homes exactly where they last stood, but raised just a little higher than the last time.
I don't blame them, it's an amazing spot in the summer.
Are Amazon employees going to demand that Amazon not do business with companies that do business with fossil fuel companies? How many layers down are they going to demand?
> won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data?
We do have examples of that. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
SPC Manning, in particular, was particularly vulnerable to exploitation due to her dysphoria and her chain of command's inability to recognize this problem and mitigate it. And Wikileaks recruited and turned that asset.
Snowden was certainly regarded as a HUMINT asset by someone, but he's more the self-motivated ideological case that you're talking about.
In both cases, the penalties are much more severe than a private company can bring against an employee, so it's realistic. At the same time, I'm honestly surprised that there weren't more. There are a shitload of government contractors since the usual requirement is a clearance and a pulse.
> I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing.
It's the classic insider threat scenario. And so Amazon does have strategies to limit what rogue employees can do, as selling corporate clients on cloud services would be a nonstarter without it. I didn't have broad enough knowledge to speak to how effectively they're able to mitigate the threat.
> I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud.
I don't think you can crack down on people like that. They'll just go dark.
And my read of the senior guys is they're genuinely sympathetic to these causes. Maybe one response is, "you say you want urgent action, but you're engineers. You know that it's the slow grind that delivers solutions, not the sturm and drang."
It's interesting to speculate what would happen if an employee did leak customer data... many companies have gone through crises you'd think would wreck their reputation forever and the market turned out to be shockingly forgiving.
Or maybe we'd find out that private clouds are actually quite economical, you just get some standardized racks and run various management services. Hell, you can even resell excess capacity just like how Amazon got started.
The right in the UK and the rest of Europe may not be doing enough to mitigate the problem, but very, very few of them are denying there is a problem. Or trying to associate those agitating for more action with political or moral crusades. A majority of voters, of all political hues, seem to agree with the need for more dramatic action.
To the greater point, all companies will have to adjust to a low or zero carbon world. If they don't they can expect greater action from activists, regulators and governments, and changes to what constitutes legal activity. Even the London stock market recently adjusted the categories companies were in - to make it easier to identify those firms people might increasingly want to divest from for being fossil related.
HN, please don't turn the following in to a flame war. That said...
How does this fit in with companies that de-platform organizations that they see as promoting extremism? There have been some high-profile cases where services like Patreon, CloudFlare and YouTube have banned people who weren't breaking the law, but were doing something management found politically unacceptable. This is interesting because YouTube is run by Google, who also offers cloud services.
And this is a good thing, because reliable contracting is foundational to a developed economy. If you can’t rely on your contracts being honored over arbitrary non stipulated issues then your operation becomes massively less efficient.
So is allowing corporations in the first place, that is also not a result of some innate sense of perfect knowledge of everything surrounding the issue.
Too many companies, too many people in them want the cake and eat it, they want societies to uphold their responsibilities towards them, but not the other way around.
A similar situation existed in many Western countries during the Cold war. Communists were afraid to speak their mind because they would be labelled Russian spies and they would be blacklisted. There were of course lots of people that spied for the Soviet union though. But crucially, only one (that I know of) were a devout Communist. All the others were spying for monetary reasons.
+ - Last I heard an American senator recently proposed that the US should stop selling crowd-control equipment to China. If a politician can propose that, why can't an employee propose that Amazon should not host oil exploration companies?
You've conflated a few different ideas there under the banner of 'moral crusades'. Law enforcement and climate change issues have very little in common. Your initial quote calls out "oil and gas extraction" - we're not talking about like, making more efficient cars, we're talking about literally pulling more carbon out of the ground so that someone can chuck it into the air.
The distinction is between "something that someone probably should care about" and "something that everyone must care about".
[1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-...
CC is not some subjective moral agenda we could disagree on. It's a scientifically proven disaster that had already happened, and have been known and ongoing for almost half a century now.
Ok, then where are the thousands of people dying? Where's the "disaster" part? Proclaiming something to be a disaster when the average person can't even tell something is wrong without being told something is wrong is the problem. "It's a disaster because our computers and scientific instruments have predicted it to be so!" doesn't carry much weight. People need tangible evidence that impacts their bottom line.
If you are in the Bahamas right now and you told someone "Hurricane Dorian is a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened," they would believe you, because they can see the carnage with their own eyes. They can see that their house is missing. They can see trees torn out of the ground.
Say the same thing about climate change and they'll think "huh, this summer didn't seem any hotter than when I was a kid. And last winter we still got tons of snow like we always do." and they'll write it off as hyperbole.
Currently, mostly in India, Africa and Middle-East.
>People need tangible evidence
And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience.
Right, and when we do, that will be the fire under humanity's collective butt to mobilize and act. It might be too late, it might not. I have faith that we will pull through.
you're wrong.
This type of stuff will be the bane of large companies migrating to cloud. A lot of large companies are involved in defense initiatives, law enforcement, fossil fuel extraction, mineral extraction etc. If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud.
In addition, if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles, how confident are you that one of those people that is walking out to try to get you kicked off the platform, won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data? I mean if the cause is worthy enough, all sorts of activities that would be illegal are considered justified. I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing.
I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud.