Serendipity

At many discussions about the climate crisis that I’ve had with professional colleagues, the conversation inevitably turns to how we (as individuals) can make a difference by reducing our personal carbon emissions. So sure, our personal choices matter. And we shouldn’t stop thinking about them. And there is plenty of advice out there on how to green your home, and how to make good shopping decisions, and so on. Actually, there is way too much advice out there on how to live a greener life. It’s overwhelming. And plenty of it is contradictory. Which leads to two unfortunate messages: (1) we’re supposed to fix global warming through our individual personal choices and (2) this is incredibly hard because there is so much information to process to do it right.

The climate crisis is huge, and systemic. It cannot be solved through voluntary personal lifestyle choices; it needs systemic changes throughout society as a whole. As Bill McKibben says:

“the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.”

Now, part of getting politically organized is getting educated. Another part is connecting with people. We computer scientists are generally not very good at political action, but we are remarkably good at inventing tools that allow people to get connected. And we’re good at inventing tools for managing, searching and visualizing information, which helps with the ‘getting educated’ part and the ‘persuading others’ part.

So, I don’t want to have more conversations about reducing our personal carbon footprints. I want to have conversations about how we can apply our expertise as computer scientists and software engineers in new and creative ways. Instead of thinking about your footprint, think about your delta (okay, I might need a better name for it): what expertise and skills do you have that most others don’t, and how can they be applied to good effect to help?