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Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

If you're working in what we commonly call tech, and you're not in the clean energy or automatization sector, you're part of the problem. I know I am.

After the clean tech bubble burst, there's a lot less funded positions that directly work on reducing GHG emissions. So you'd have to be willing to take a big cut in pay - and lifestyle, unless independently wealthy. Very few people do.

Anything else is at best neutral on GHG.

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I'd love to find ways to make my career focused on fighting climate breakdown and haven't figured out how to do so without defaulting on debts/obligations

You're not alone in that. People are out here working to pay not only their own debts but their landlords debts as well.

Debt, combined with shortages of necessities (often unnecessary) is a fantastic way to ensure people work on what makes the most money and not what they'd like to be doing.

https://www.climate.careers/

That doesn't make sense. If you offset your GHG emissions you could be better than neutral. Perhaps you could even do it more effectively. It's the classic case of the doctor treating and then using a percentage of his income to buy soup rather than working at a soup kitchen himself. In the latter case, comparative advantage is being thrown away.

There's no known way to sell (or buy) GHG offsets at scale. Current GHG offsets are all artisanal efforts that don't scale.

Scale would be something like the Sleipnir field Carbon Capture and Sequestration, times 40000. That's what it would take just to stop increasing athmospheric CO2. The Slepnir CCS sequesters at best 1M ton CO2 per year. Human emissions are currently 40 Gtons CO2 per year.

Yeah, but you're an individual. It doesn't have to scale. It only has to be economically comparatively advantageous to you doing it yourself. At some point the lack of scale will cause the price to rise to the point where your labour does not provide a comparative advantage.

Prices are currently not there and I predict I'll probably be carbon negative for the next ten years and still come out ahead working in something else and just buying.

For what it's worth, if you're really hardcore about it buy some grazing land and reforest it with native species (if appropriate - in some places peatland or wetland restoration makes more sense). You'll at least sequester the carbon that was lost when the land was destroyed for grazing and you'll make it infinitesimally more challenging to produce livestock, a very carbon-intensive activity.

In some places you can even get small grants for this - Ireland has a little bit of money for afforesting with native species, for instance.

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