Considering What a Technologist Can Do About Climate Change

The essay “What can a technologist do about climate change?” by Bret Victor is arguably even more relevant today, than when it was written in November 2015.

Bret Victor is an interface designer, computer scientist, and electrical engineer known for his talks on the future of technology and his work on Al Gore’s book “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis“. A major motivation for Victor’s work is to make it easier and faster to use complex tools and ideas. As part of this project he wrote an essay about using interactive models when communicating about science, which popularized the term “explorable explanation“.

Key Points

• The primary cause of global warming is the dumping of carbon dioxide into the sky.
  
• The primary cause of that is the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum in order to generate electricity and move vehicles around (81,7%).
  
• In order to stop dumping carbon dioxide into the sky, the world will have to generate its energy “cleanly”, e.g. solar and wind, although geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and nuclear will all have parts to play.
  
• The scale and rate of change required is often unappreciated. Saul Griffith suggests that what’s needed is a major industrial shift comparable to retooling for World War II.
  
• In 1940 through 1942, U.S. war-related industrial production tripled each year. That’s over twice as fast as Moore’s law.
  
• In order to avoid the more catastrophic climate scenarios, global production and adoption of clean energy technology will have to scale at similar rates, but continuously for 15 years or more(!)
  
• The catalyst for such a scale-up will necessarily be political. Although even with political will, it can’t happen without technology that’s capable of scaling, and economically viable at scale.
  
• Today’s power grid, with its centralized control, aging machinery performing transmission and distribution, is not suitable for clean energy. The power grid was designed to take input from a handful of tightly-regulated power plants running in synchrony, not millions of solar roofs. It was designed for power plants that were always available and predictable, not intermittent sources like the sun and wind. To learn more about this topic it is highly recommended to read the book “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future” by Gretchen Bakke.
  
  There are certain companies e.g. Heimdall Power, that attempts to provide some of the pieces to this puzzle through inexpensive sensor units mounted on the overhead power lines to safely utilize more capacity (about 25-30% more capacity) and offer insights into grid health to increase uptime. However, to succeed in unlocking untapped potential at scale globally, to the benefit of all, such approaches requires political and regulatory willingness to embrace new technologies and ways of working, in order to counteract the inherent inertia and conservative mindset of the power grid industry.

• Energy networking (moving energy in space): the key idea that made the internet possible was the move from centralized circuit-switched networks to distributed packet-switching protocols, where data could “find its way” from sender to receiver. Now it’s energy that needs to find its way in a similar manner.
  
• Energy storage (moving energy in time) through e.g. batteries.
  
• Demand flexibility uses communication and control technology to shift electricity use across hours of the day while delivering end-use services at the same or better quality, but at lower cost. This can entail electric appliances coordinating among each other via the automated metering system and across households through price signals.
  
• Languages for modeling physical systems: If you believe that language design can significantly affect the quality of software systems, then it should follow that language design can also affect the quality of energy systems. If the quality of such energy systems will, in turn, affect the livability of our planet, then it is critical that the language development community give modeling languages the attention they deserve. This is something we have seen great progress in the recent years with machine learning and AI.
  
• Model-driven material can be used as grounds for an informed debate about assumptions and trade-offs. Modeling leads naturally from the particular to the general. Instead of seeing an individual proposal as “right or wrong”, it can be seen as one point in a large space of possibilities. By exploring the model, you are in a position to invent better ideas for all the proposals to come. As the current climate crisis is a global problem, discussion and debate will be central to figuring out the best actions to take. We need good tools for imagining, proposing, debating, and understanding these actions. It is time to move from “big data” to “big modeling”.
  
• Climate change is so important for us that citizens need and deserve reading material which shows context, how significant suggested actions are in the big picture, and which embeds models, formulas and algorithms which calculate that significance, for different scenarios, from primary-source data and explicit assumptions.
  
• Geoengineering refers to “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change”. Geoengineering is challenging because earth systems are complex and poorly understood, and interventions have unforeseen consequences. This should be a clear and urgent call for much better tools for understanding complex systems and foreseeing consequences.
  
• We allocate our resources to the point where we have thousands of engineers working on things like picture-sharing apps, when we’ve already got dozens of picture-sharing apps. Rather we should allocate our intellectual resources to important and urgent sub-problems of e.g. how to tackle climate change.