I've worked in "climate intelligence" for many years. The list overlooks one of the largest and most immediate opportunities around that market: the data infrastructure and analysis tools we have today are profoundly unfit for purpose. Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.
It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.
(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)
Agree 100%. This is big part of the motivation behind our new startup Earthmover: https://earthmover.io/
Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.
My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.
I'm curious, have you considered using PyTorch or JAX for tensor processing? ML libraries seem to be much further along when it comes to performing compute-intensive, hardware-accelerated operations on Tensor's. And you get gradients basically for free (in terms of developer time). Also, the kernel compiler being added PyTorch 2 looks very promising.
Companies with good climate intelligence tech tend to evolve in to marketplaces because that gets them closer to the money. Climate projects can't afford SaaS, but offset buyers are willing to pay a premium for offsets re-verified by high-tech climate intelligence SaaS.
Out of curiosity, is accessing & working with large datasets a problem in your areas of work? I run a weather/climate site that makes some of this less painful, taking datasets such as GFS or ERA5/ERA5-Land much faster to access. We have some enterprise clients who really value the time-saving aspect of this but I also feel like everyone has their own data-processing set up and problems are different for everyone.
There are a couple issues I see with basic access and working with large datasets. Ease of access for typical users is also a valid issue.
First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data. In many cases, more time is spent shoveling data over the network than actually doing the computation. This has become worse as storage density has increased, hundreds of TB/server is ordinary.
Second, the data is rarely organized in a way that makes it efficient to extract arbitrary subsets. There is still a lot of what is essentially "grep at scale" going on. Again, not a problem if the data is small but if I need a specific 50TB subset of a 10PB source, this becomes prohibitively slow. The data needs to be organized such that we can slice and dice it with high selectivity in place, much more like a proper database and less of a distributed filesystem. Because spatiotemporal analysis tends to involve iterative join-like operations, you want this to be efficient as possible.
The other big problem is many of these data sources are too large for everyone to have their own copy. Or if they did have their own copy, it would be extraordinarily wasteful. This is adjacent to the first issue. EDIT: And herein is the likely business model.
Any chance you guys provide a free api for the little guy? I would love to have access to climate data via a json rest api. Specifically historical temperature and precipitation data at minimum.
I poked around a while back and wasn't able to find much of anything on the web. Maybe I missed it?
Many lessons to be learned from Climate Corporation. They used satellite data and drones to make robust crop insurance and ended up being bought by Monsanto and changing their direction.
Would you mind elaborating on say a few specific asks for tools climate people would want to have, that are low-hanging fruit that people might be able to write in their spare time?
I'm very interested in doing something for climate change but I'd like to know what people want.
> Just about everyone is essentially using cartography tools to do large-scale spatiotemporal analysis of sensor and telemetry data. The gaps for both features and practical scalability are massive.
Could you point to any readings or resources that would explain these gaps? I'd be quite curious why our current spatiotemporal analysis techniques would be insufficient. Is it the analysis tools that just need new techniques or is the problem at the source (i.e. the sensors)? Or?
There aren’t really any problems. Some people see that because all of this data can be spatially and temporarily referenced, it can be accessed better, as if there could be one format and one application that could let you do anything you want across the space time, regardless of the source.
The reality is that a lots of models using this data are developed against a specific sensor or dataset, and just don’t work or scale.
I don’t think this will be solved in this domain by pangeo or any startup in particular.
There is an awesome new STACspec that every geo company should be adopting, and that’s the direction to move towards.
But each step towards standardizing the GIS process will require something that truly everyone can adopt, sort of like JSON.
I would also love any references to existing companies, research groups, or the problems in this space if you have the time to share. I found the posted list underwhelming and more of a marketing shotgun approach to try and take advantage of the push for "climate tech" but not solve any real problems.
I guess it would help to be more specific about how this differs from some of the measurement related startups they list. Taxonomies are difficult, so maybe they do need an entirely separate category, or enlarge the one related to measurement.
We need sensors for carbon presence over distance and time in the ocean. At huge scale, to test the viability of various carbon sequestration schemes. That's pretty expensive, with a large non-software component.
I know this from a peripheral involvement in one the XPRIZE projects.
This is an excellent point. I think the problem is that because it's such a pure software problem it doesn't have an immediate "climate tech" alignment, so it stands to "dilute" these kinds of calls for funding.
I hesitate to link to Twitter here, but Joe Morrison has his finger on the pulse of this and offers a tongue-in-cheek perspective that I appreciate: https://twitter.com/mouthofmorrison
Don't think of it as a "climate intelligence" system. It is really an "analyze complex dynamics in the physical world at global scale" system, one application of which is climate intelligence. Everything is fundamentally anchored to space and time, and connected by it.
The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.
Almost all climate tech is greenwashing; superficial solutions. Climate issues require deeper system changes. We need a system which encourages financial prudence and frugality instead of one which encourages financial recklessness, infinite growth, consumerism and bullshit jobs. The problem needs to be solved at the lowest monetary incentive layer.
How much energy is wasted by people travelling to and from their bullshit jobs? How many flights they need to take each year for holidays in order to heal from the accumulated stress of their mind-numbing jobs? How much surplus consumption do these bullshit jobs generate? How much plastic is thrown on the side of the road and into the ocean because people are too concerned about their own survival to give a crap about the environment and the future of mankind?
It's quite clear that if we all had less money and worked fewer hours, we would produce less greenhouse gases and live healthier, more fulfilled lives. Unfortunately, the current system is only good at depriving money from some of the population (while giving others a huge surplus) and it only ever demands more hours of work from everyone... So it barely even solves half of the first problem while making everything else worse.
It's even worse than that, listen to the politicians and economists all parroting:
- the economy needs to be kicked into gear
- we need to inspire consumer confidence to spend more
- GDP growth over anything
- employment rate needs to be high
This is systematic need for spinning money by producing garbage and then using a lot of marketing-advertising to inspire people buying that garbage. Mostly so some people can skim off a bit and get ferraris.
It's all so stupid, a much more cooperative and equitable society would mean better life for everyone (including the would be billionaires who would not need to worry about the rabble attacking them and taking away their toys) along with less pressure to the environment.
I get we are genetically wired to survive at the harsh game of life, but we have also made profoundly uncool some things like murder, rape, etc.
We need to make "being rich" or "baller lifestyle" to be uncool. But we cant because a lot of marketing relies on this to sell their garbage.
Yes and no. Sure, tech solutions are superficial and can only ever be partially successful. But we know how to build tech. We do not know how to manage 8 billion people stuffed into a couple of hundred unruly 'sovereign' nations. Certainly not to the extent necessary to hold back trivial desires created by corporations/marketing, which now form the core of most world cultures.
I have no idea whether or not it's possible to create a viable network of global human cultures which can constrain themselves to live as part of reality (what some call 'nature'), but I'm pretty sure if it is, it's no less than a century away. Probably longer. And we don't have that much time to stop fouling the nest.
I see climate change tech as a stopgap. Without it (BAU), or with fantasies of immediate revolutionary change, we're fucked. Tech might help keep society viable long enough to create what's really needed, in a century, or two, or three.
That's one cultural point of view. Another point of view is that we should get ourselves in a position where we can produce (and consume) infinite clean energy, for example, but building a thousand nuclear power plants. Team mushrooms vs team cocaine.
We'd still have to take care of the plastics problem and also any population growth problem which would arise from that. It seems that historically, any improvements in efficiency has lead to population booms which negated the efficiency improvements. That's why I think the solution is systemic and cultural. The best that technology can offer IMO is to support a cultural shift and new incentive structures based on scarcity.
Be that as it may, I think this initiative by YC is mainly because they noticed a lot of talented founders were starting Climate Tech companies. pg had a tweet about this a while ago.
I'd say that the solutions should start from the top first.
100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.[1] That's a mind-boggling statistic.
The counterargument is, of course, that these companies are supplying the demand; that consumers should vote with their wallets, change their habits, recycle, reduce their "carbon footprint", etc. This is the usual deflection propaganda pushed by the companies themselves, and shills who benefit from them.
But the reality is that if only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes to lower their emissions, or—heaven forbid—reduced their growth and shareholder profits, the positive impact would be far, far greater than anything individuals could ever do.
It's ludicrously counterproductive to invest in _new_ companies to reduce our effects on the climate, while existing companies are the major cause of the problems we're trying to solve. It's like we're in a sinking ship, trying to remove the water with buckets, instead of patching up the hole the water is rushing in, and stopping the assholes who made it in the first place.
I'm not saying climate tech companies shouldn't exist. But let's get our priorities straight first.
>100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.
I've always found that stat to be misleading, as it uses the word "responsible" in a very unconventional way: essentially, GHG emissions come from fossil fuels extracted by these companies, even though the companies themselves aren't the ones using the fossil fuels nor producing the GHGs.
This upstream analysis just doesn't seem very useful to me. You mention
>If only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes[...]
but I fail to see how China Coal (top 1), Saudi Aramco (2nd), or Gazprom (3rd) could do anything about their process to significantly reduce the amount of emmisions from their products.
It's true that the world does need to structurally change to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but going after the producers would at best be a confusing way to apply a carbon tax.
Other solutions from climate tech like better electricity production and storage needs to happen simultaneously, not after by "getting our priorities straight".
> Tesla for home appliances: re-inventing home appliances (water heaters, induction stoves, clothes dryers, etc) to create better consumer experiences using specific advantages of electric technology.
> Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement.
With how Tesla vehicles are rated, and the unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners, no way in hell am I do I want to "Teslify" everything in my home. In order to prove that there's something wrong with the current consumer experience, you have to bring an example to show it. So far, I've only seen ways to further add more surveillance and advertising into everyday people's lives, not to mention the increased disposability of appliances. No thanks.
I came here to post this as well. For one, it doesn't even make sense. Tesla is a car manufacturer and makes objectively worse cars than the competition. They just happen to be EVs. Making any thing "Tesla" inside my house means it will be flashy but work less well than existing solutions, in addition to removing all knobs. All of which is the opposite of what I want. I've already de-smartified my Nests because, surprise, they aren't actually smart and end up being worse than me controlling them.
Isn't the big problem with smart appliances exactly this?
I was in the market for a new pellet grill recently and I ran into huge problems, almost everything on the market is bluetooth this or wifi that. The last thing I need is an unreliable radio to be at the center of the controls for my outdoor appliance, or for any appliance whatsoever, to have a dependency on my internet connection and the availability of some manufacturers servers.
Because who know what might happen. The manufacturer might decide it doesn't like your hardware anymore and push out a firmware update that bricks all your devices in 60 days, but don't worry, they'll give you a coupon for buying the latest and greatest from them (looking at you sonos).
Want to know how to not get me to buy your product? Make it dependent on some unreliable technology that gives no benefit to the device, but makes the device dependent on the goodwill of the parent corporation.
What's amazing is the failed potential of these devices that do include things like Bluetooth and WiFi. In so many cases, they sporadically fail to pair with their respective apps, or are slow to pair, if they can reliably pair at all. Even when the connection works, you'd better hope the app actually alerts you when your food is ready or whatever. Whooops, our API returned a 500! Our bad, bruh!
I'm particularly baffled because, in my experience designing and manufacturing my own PCB with a BLE IC on it, integrating something like BLE and having it work reliably doesn't seem that difficult. BLE is an annoyingly complicated standard, but it's by no means impossible to work with. The app I wrote could pair with the device instantly and reliably stay connected while receiving data in real time. I don't get why other BLE devices I've owned have issues while my pissant attempt had none of them. If it's BLE, you can count on seeing some loading spinners frequently unless it's being paired with another devices designed specifically for it (like a game console).
The only wireless digital technologies I've found are beneficial are WiFi internet and Bluetooth audio (which is still awful in most cases but AirPods work OK). Everything else ends up being a gimmick, more of a hassle, and even a trojan horse for more privacy violations.
The way I see it when talking about Tesla it’s talking about the pre/post Tesla (aka the transition from ICE to EV in all auto makers) and not the build quality of Tesla per se !
Tesla started as a luxury brand (Roadster and then luxury sedans) and the only innovation they have managed is name recognition; even the adoption they have driven in the US has been mostly trough public policy like tax incentives.
Exactly, they are asking for technology that can shift their industry. They aren't asking for Tesla's baggage any more than a request for "Uber for X" implies they want a company that will ignore regulatory requirements.
^ This. There is just a backlash on HN with Elon hurting so many people's feels about Twitter & having an alternate political view, that everyone is seeing him in a negative light.
Tesla helped push ICE to EV even though technologically some of the efforts may have been done at other companies and products before - yet Tesla pushed the experience mainstream.
> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners
I'm an owner and I have a lot of confidence in autopilot. Generally, if it's possible to use autopilot on the road I'm on, I do. So that's one owner you're witnessing who's not part of that "unanimous".
> unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners
You must talk to a very narrow band of Tesla owners.
Auto pilot is basically enhanced cruise control, and Tesla do this quite well.
If you’re referring to fulls self driving (FSD), then I agree. FSD is best seen as slightly advanced autopilot (it can change lanes, etc.) and self-parking in very tight spots like small garages. The FSD name is largely a misnomer, and it has given the features that have been implemented well (listed above) a very bad name.
Related to the request and your comment, I personally wish that home appliances would have Tesla-esque features, just without the Elon over-promising bluster.
Considering what a terrible year this has been for Tesla stock and their absentee CEO it would be more fitting in 2021.
The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.
Tesla is indeed a strange choice for a simile, considering that Tesla cars use prodigious amounts of energy compared to other electric cars, or other cars in general. I doubt they're even more environmentally friendly overall than a compact combustion engine car. Tesla made electric cool by building an over the top luxury car, what we really need is the opposite.
There are some cars coming out next year that are more energy efficient than a Tesla, like the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but I don't know of any currently widely available vehicles that are.
The agriculture section is disheartening. What is the VCs worlds' obsession with cellular ag and mushrooms? Totally missing the forest for the trees here.
Global calorie supply is dependent on the Haber-Bosch process i.e. Nitrogen fixation.
The next big agricultural breakthrough will be some form of nitrogen fixation:
1. That is not affected by a reduction of fossil fuels
2. Is on par with Haber-Bosch in terms of elemental Nitrogen application
3. Does not require a massive shift in consumer preferences
Also, the food industry is heavily reliant on energy sources that are not easily replaced by renewables. It needs dense energy like diesel and natgas. So there's another topic that should be funded.
They use electricity from wind and/or solar power to electrolyze hydrogen from water. Then the hydrogen gets combined with nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch process like usual. This is not a good bet for VCs because the capital commitments are large (billions of dollars' worth of physical chemical plant) and there's no prospect of winning the market by being early. Big industrial players are already earlier than VCs could hope to be at this stage.
In some ways this is a trip back in time. In the 20th century, many renewable ammonia plants were constructed and operated using hydroelectric power:
It peaked in the 1960s (figure 6). A combination of rising demand for electricity at home and industry, plus optimization of hydrogen production from fossil feedstocks, made electricity-to-hydrogen (and from there to ammonia) less popular. But now rising natural gas prices and climate concerns, plus falling costs for renewable electricity from wind and solar, make it attractive again.
worked on control & modelling software for some of these PtX plants. Pretty neat stuff, although I got the impression there are quite a few already running
> Does not require a massive shift in consumer preferences
This is getting more and more irrelevant by the day. If “climate tech” fails to “fix” climate change (a goal which I believe to be impossible), then it’s not going to matter what people’s preferences are — the choices are going to be made for them and it won’t matter what they like/dislike.
You're confounding the people of today with the people of the future. We've learned over the last couple of decades that the people of today in general refuse to make any sacrifice for the people of the future. This doesn't change when the people of today are negatively affected because any sacrifice is felt in the future and doesn't mitigate the negative consequences of today.
Then ignore it, but rest still applies and requires innovation.
But keep in mind that if two companies provide N-fixing technology, and one of them doesn't require changes in consumer preference, then they will be the winner
It would make sense for heavy machinery to use hydrogen rather than batteries as an energy store because it is a lot more energy dense (and lighter), but it's still not as energy dense as fossil fuels.
The missing thing: international incentive structures.
Today, most things are done the most economical way. And that might involve emitting carbon.
A country which regulates the emissions of carbon will end up producing goods and services using carbon free methods - but those methods will often be less economically efficient than the carbon producing method, even at scale.
So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Solve that problem, and the world will decarbonize itself almost overnight.
It appears that all solutions to this problem require one of:
* All countries to agree on an incentive scheme (unlikely - although big trading blocs like EU/China/Russia/USA might be able to bully the rest of the world into it with the threat of sanctions if they do not agree)
* Some countries to agree on a scheme, and to break WTO rules to penalize (carbon tax) imports and subsidize exports to/from those who do not.
Or... the world continues on the current trajectory of decarbonizing highly visible things only (Electric cars, solar panels on the roof!) to appease voters while avoiding decarbonizing anything that much affects nationwide competitiveness (eg. steel/fertilizer production).
> So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons writ large?
It makes no sense for anyone really to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Why should I stay at home riding my pushbike to the artisan markets when my neighbour will gleefully fly to Hawaii for his holidays, undoing in a few days whatever carbon reductions I've achieved in a year?
The logical course is to accept that your actions mean nothing and live a greedy life, amassing wealth at the cost of the planet's health and hoarding it for when things get bad, whether that's this generation or the next.
YC can’t solve that. I agree it’s an important cause, but it’s really hard coordination problem. If we can make progress without, just by using tech to lower emissions, that’s a clear win.
Having said that, a CO2 tax just makes the financial incentives for change better; someone still needs to build the better system after funds are reallocated. So if you already started a cost-reduction startup, you’ll have first-mover advantage when the CO2 taxes come into play.
Here are some of my unsolicited and harebrained climate startup ideas. I’m poor and I can’t afford to pursue any of these but I believe a carbon-neutral future will require these things:
* Cheap EV chargers for people who don’t own houses. Young people are the most likely to be open to EVs, but they’re also the least likely to own a house. Charging is a major barrier to entry. Create something so cheap and ubiquitous that charging is not a concern. For example chargers built into lamp posts.
* Figure out UHVDC to enable clean energy surpluses to be sold internationally. Reliable UHVDC networks will allow clean energy projects to service more geographic area, making them more competitive. Eventually, storage might not even be necessary, since dark/non-windy regions can always pull from regions with wind or sun. And when fusion power comes online in a few decades, huge energy surpluses will be very profitable.
* Passive carbon capture via nuclear barges. We’ve had nuclear reactors in the water for decades, let’s put them to use capturing carbon.
* Floatovoltaics. Land isn’t always cheap. Put solar panels in other places. There are other positive side effects as well, such as reducing algae blooms and reducing evaporation.
For passive carbon capture, I don’t understand what you’re proposing. Let’s pretend: Joe Biden gives you a nuclear aircraft carrier and a team of nuclear engineers. Now what?
Yep. Also, I moved from France 7 years ago. Last year I went back for vacation and rented a EV on a whim.
I thought about charger after the fact.
Well; in those 7 year the territory got covered in chargers. Private / public mix. Some will likely disappear once things settle a bit but damn, I was surprised
Lately i've been thinking that right now may be a great time to start an oil company. Cost of solar is going down so capturing c02 and turning it into fuel is looking like a viable option. People would pay a premiun for carbon neutral fuel. Most climate companies, focused on carbon capture, tried to make the most efficient carbon capture possible, but what if one focused on scalability and reducing manufacturing costs instead? A device that loses 90%+ of the energy when converting sun to fuel, would be viable if the cost of the machine would just be low enough, and scaled up enough. Such a device would in theory have a near 0 cost of operation once installed, so with a long enough life span it would be profitable.
Thanks for the link! $15 is a reasonable price where a company hyper focused on lowering the cost of manufacturing of C02 extraction machines, could become very competative withing a reasonable timeframe.
This is the play that Terraform Industries is engaging in as well. Cost for synthesizing a unit of methane from atmospheric CO2 and water using solar power is set to drop lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.
According to their December newsletter, they project that point will occur in 2027 without subsidies and 2024 with the subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
> lower than the cost of drilling it out of the ground.
Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.
https://www.twelve.co is doing this (with fuels as well as other carbon-derived chemicals). Trouble is, this is carbon recycling, not carbon sequestering. It's better than the status quo, but I'm more excited about ideas that either sequester GHGs permanently or replace industrial GHG-generating processes permanently.
There's no fundamental difference between burning a synthetic fuel or burning a fossel fuel and sequestering the resulting carbon. Both are zero-carbon.
Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.
The first step is to reduce emissions, then stop them all together and finally sequester them to return to pre-climate-change level. I'd welcome all solutions along that spectrum.
Storing liquids (or solids) from at STP is far simpler than storing it in gaseous form. If we can cheaply extract CO2 or methane from the atmosphere and make liquid from it, we could sequester it in all sorts of trivial ways.
I think you're on to something, it makes me curious what the energy expenditure of one of these operations is in a conventional deployment, then what it would be over time with solar being the producer of energy.
Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.
That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.
Readit News
It has made most of the climate intelligence analysis we'd like to do, and for which data is available, intractable. And what we can do is so computationally inefficient that we figuratively burn down a small forest every time we run an analysis on a non-trivial model, which isn't very green either.
(This is definitely something I'd work on if I had the bandwidth, it is a pretty pure deep tech software problem.)
Our mission is to make it easier to work with scientific data at scale in the cloud, focusing mainly on the climate, weather, and geospatial vertical.
My cofounder Joe Hamman and I are climate scientists who helped create the Pangeo project. We are also core devs on the Python packages Xarray and Zarr. We think that a layer of managed services (think a "modern data stack" oriented around the multidimensional array data model) is exactly what this ecosystem needs to make it easier for teams to build data-intensive products in the climate-tech space.
And we're hiring! https://earthmover.io/posts/earthmover-is-hiring/
Example: Pachama https://pachama.com/
First, we still mostly move the data to the computation when we should be moving the computation to the data. Moving the data works fine when data is small but if the data volumes are large (as sensor/geo data tends to be) then it can take an incredibly long time to move the data. In many cases, more time is spent shoveling data over the network than actually doing the computation. This has become worse as storage density has increased, hundreds of TB/server is ordinary.
Second, the data is rarely organized in a way that makes it efficient to extract arbitrary subsets. There is still a lot of what is essentially "grep at scale" going on. Again, not a problem if the data is small but if I need a specific 50TB subset of a 10PB source, this becomes prohibitively slow. The data needs to be organized such that we can slice and dice it with high selectivity in place, much more like a proper database and less of a distributed filesystem. Because spatiotemporal analysis tends to involve iterative join-like operations, you want this to be efficient as possible.
The other big problem is many of these data sources are too large for everyone to have their own copy. Or if they did have their own copy, it would be extraordinarily wasteful. This is adjacent to the first issue. EDIT: And herein is the likely business model.
I poked around a while back and wasn't able to find much of anything on the web. Maybe I missed it?
I'm very interested in doing something for climate change but I'd like to know what people want.
Could you point to any readings or resources that would explain these gaps? I'd be quite curious why our current spatiotemporal analysis techniques would be insufficient. Is it the analysis tools that just need new techniques or is the problem at the source (i.e. the sensors)? Or?
The reality is that a lots of models using this data are developed against a specific sensor or dataset, and just don’t work or scale.
I don’t think this will be solved in this domain by pangeo or any startup in particular.
There is an awesome new STACspec that every geo company should be adopting, and that’s the direction to move towards.
But each step towards standardizing the GIS process will require something that truly everyone can adopt, sort of like JSON.
Jupiter Intelligence (https://jupiterintel.com/)
Descartes Labs (https://descarteslabs.com/)
Microsoft Planetary Computer (https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/)
Coiled (managed Dask - python HPC) (https://www.coiled.io/)
CarbonPlan (https://carbonplan.org/)
Salo Sciences (acquired by Planet, satellite imagery company) (https://salo.ai/)
lots of others
I know this from a peripheral involvement in one the XPRIZE projects.
The applicability cuts across industries. It would enable managing many kinds of risks that have nothing to do with climate.
How much energy is wasted by people travelling to and from their bullshit jobs? How many flights they need to take each year for holidays in order to heal from the accumulated stress of their mind-numbing jobs? How much surplus consumption do these bullshit jobs generate? How much plastic is thrown on the side of the road and into the ocean because people are too concerned about their own survival to give a crap about the environment and the future of mankind?
It's quite clear that if we all had less money and worked fewer hours, we would produce less greenhouse gases and live healthier, more fulfilled lives. Unfortunately, the current system is only good at depriving money from some of the population (while giving others a huge surplus) and it only ever demands more hours of work from everyone... So it barely even solves half of the first problem while making everything else worse.
- the economy needs to be kicked into gear
- we need to inspire consumer confidence to spend more
- GDP growth over anything
- employment rate needs to be high
This is systematic need for spinning money by producing garbage and then using a lot of marketing-advertising to inspire people buying that garbage. Mostly so some people can skim off a bit and get ferraris.
It's all so stupid, a much more cooperative and equitable society would mean better life for everyone (including the would be billionaires who would not need to worry about the rabble attacking them and taking away their toys) along with less pressure to the environment.
I get we are genetically wired to survive at the harsh game of life, but we have also made profoundly uncool some things like murder, rape, etc.
We need to make "being rich" or "baller lifestyle" to be uncool. But we cant because a lot of marketing relies on this to sell their garbage.
I have no idea whether or not it's possible to create a viable network of global human cultures which can constrain themselves to live as part of reality (what some call 'nature'), but I'm pretty sure if it is, it's no less than a century away. Probably longer. And we don't have that much time to stop fouling the nest.
I see climate change tech as a stopgap. Without it (BAU), or with fantasies of immediate revolutionary change, we're fucked. Tech might help keep society viable long enough to create what's really needed, in a century, or two, or three.
100 companies are responsible for 71% of global GHG emissions.[1] That's a mind-boggling statistic.
The counterargument is, of course, that these companies are supplying the demand; that consumers should vote with their wallets, change their habits, recycle, reduce their "carbon footprint", etc. This is the usual deflection propaganda pushed by the companies themselves, and shills who benefit from them.
But the reality is that if only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes to lower their emissions, or—heaven forbid—reduced their growth and shareholder profits, the positive impact would be far, far greater than anything individuals could ever do.
It's ludicrously counterproductive to invest in _new_ companies to reduce our effects on the climate, while existing companies are the major cause of the problems we're trying to solve. It's like we're in a sinking ship, trying to remove the water with buckets, instead of patching up the hole the water is rushing in, and stopping the assholes who made it in the first place.
I'm not saying climate tech companies shouldn't exist. But let's get our priorities straight first.
[1]: https://www.cdp.net/en/articles/media/new-report-shows-just-...
I've always found that stat to be misleading, as it uses the word "responsible" in a very unconventional way: essentially, GHG emissions come from fossil fuels extracted by these companies, even though the companies themselves aren't the ones using the fossil fuels nor producing the GHGs.
This upstream analysis just doesn't seem very useful to me. You mention
>If only a fraction of these companies changed a fraction of their processes[...]
but I fail to see how China Coal (top 1), Saudi Aramco (2nd), or Gazprom (3rd) could do anything about their process to significantly reduce the amount of emmisions from their products.
It's true that the world does need to structurally change to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but going after the producers would at best be a confusing way to apply a carbon tax.
Other solutions from climate tech like better electricity production and storage needs to happen simultaneously, not after by "getting our priorities straight".
> Tesla-like experience for home energy management: smart hub, including smart charging, load shifting, software-based load shedding for improved resiliency, and better circuit-level energy use measurement.
With how Tesla vehicles are rated, and the unanimous lack of confidence in "autopilot" I've witnessed in owners, no way in hell am I do I want to "Teslify" everything in my home. In order to prove that there's something wrong with the current consumer experience, you have to bring an example to show it. So far, I've only seen ways to further add more surveillance and advertising into everyday people's lives, not to mention the increased disposability of appliances. No thanks.
I was in the market for a new pellet grill recently and I ran into huge problems, almost everything on the market is bluetooth this or wifi that. The last thing I need is an unreliable radio to be at the center of the controls for my outdoor appliance, or for any appliance whatsoever, to have a dependency on my internet connection and the availability of some manufacturers servers.
Because who know what might happen. The manufacturer might decide it doesn't like your hardware anymore and push out a firmware update that bricks all your devices in 60 days, but don't worry, they'll give you a coupon for buying the latest and greatest from them (looking at you sonos).
Want to know how to not get me to buy your product? Make it dependent on some unreliable technology that gives no benefit to the device, but makes the device dependent on the goodwill of the parent corporation.
I'm particularly baffled because, in my experience designing and manufacturing my own PCB with a BLE IC on it, integrating something like BLE and having it work reliably doesn't seem that difficult. BLE is an annoyingly complicated standard, but it's by no means impossible to work with. The app I wrote could pair with the device instantly and reliably stay connected while receiving data in real time. I don't get why other BLE devices I've owned have issues while my pissant attempt had none of them. If it's BLE, you can count on seeing some loading spinners frequently unless it's being paired with another devices designed specifically for it (like a game console).
The only wireless digital technologies I've found are beneficial are WiFi internet and Bluetooth audio (which is still awful in most cases but AirPods work OK). Everything else ends up being a gimmick, more of a hassle, and even a trojan horse for more privacy violations.
https://www.reckontalk.com/electro-russian-tesla-first-elect...
The biggest manufacturer of electric cars worldwide is BYD
The biggest driver of sales (trough public policy) has been China and Europe, including things like announcing bans of ICE in city centers/cities:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Electric_car_use_by_country
Tesla started as a luxury brand (Roadster and then luxury sedans) and the only innovation they have managed is name recognition; even the adoption they have driven in the US has been mostly trough public policy like tax incentives.
Tesla helped push ICE to EV even though technologically some of the efforts may have been done at other companies and products before - yet Tesla pushed the experience mainstream.
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I'm an owner and I have a lot of confidence in autopilot. Generally, if it's possible to use autopilot on the road I'm on, I do. So that's one owner you're witnessing who's not part of that "unanimous".
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You must talk to a very narrow band of Tesla owners.
Auto pilot is basically enhanced cruise control, and Tesla do this quite well.
If you’re referring to fulls self driving (FSD), then I agree. FSD is best seen as slightly advanced autopilot (it can change lanes, etc.) and self-parking in very tight spots like small garages. The FSD name is largely a misnomer, and it has given the features that have been implemented well (listed above) a very bad name.
Related to the request and your comment, I personally wish that home appliances would have Tesla-esque features, just without the Elon over-promising bluster.
The brand has enough baggage by now that the second-highest comment chain is about its unsuitability as an ideal, rather than discussing the content itself.
Global calorie supply is dependent on the Haber-Bosch process i.e. Nitrogen fixation.
The next big agricultural breakthrough will be some form of nitrogen fixation:
1. That is not affected by a reduction of fossil fuels
2. Is on par with Haber-Bosch in terms of elemental Nitrogen application
3. Does not require a massive shift in consumer preferences
Also, the food industry is heavily reliant on energy sources that are not easily replaced by renewables. It needs dense energy like diesel and natgas. So there's another topic that should be funded.
https://www.bicmagazine.com/projects-expansions/renewable-su...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/08/26/avaada-to-invest-5-bi...
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/egypt-...
They use electricity from wind and/or solar power to electrolyze hydrogen from water. Then the hydrogen gets combined with nitrogen in the Haber-Bosch process like usual. This is not a good bet for VCs because the capital commitments are large (billions of dollars' worth of physical chemical plant) and there's no prospect of winning the market by being early. Big industrial players are already earlier than VCs could hope to be at this stage.
In some ways this is a trip back in time. In the 20th century, many renewable ammonia plants were constructed and operated using hydroelectric power:
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4079/3/2/11/htm
It peaked in the 1960s (figure 6). A combination of rising demand for electricity at home and industry, plus optimization of hydrogen production from fossil feedstocks, made electricity-to-hydrogen (and from there to ammonia) less popular. But now rising natural gas prices and climate concerns, plus falling costs for renewable electricity from wind and solar, make it attractive again.
This is getting more and more irrelevant by the day. If “climate tech” fails to “fix” climate change (a goal which I believe to be impossible), then it’s not going to matter what people’s preferences are — the choices are going to be made for them and it won’t matter what they like/dislike.
But keep in mind that if two companies provide N-fixing technology, and one of them doesn't require changes in consumer preference, then they will be the winner
Climate change is a fixable problem. It is not anywhere near the point that choices will be made for people in the next two to three decades.
It would make sense for heavy machinery to use hydrogen rather than batteries as an energy store because it is a lot more energy dense (and lighter), but it's still not as energy dense as fossil fuels.
Today, most things are done the most economical way. And that might involve emitting carbon.
A country which regulates the emissions of carbon will end up producing goods and services using carbon free methods - but those methods will often be less economically efficient than the carbon producing method, even at scale.
So any country that goes all in on the carbon-free world will end up economically worse off -- it's goods won't be competitive in the global marketplace. A government cannot subsidize itself to competitiveness in all markets.
Solve that problem, and the world will decarbonize itself almost overnight.
https://www.ft.com/content/51e6bd85-dbb2-4071-b635-8ab9bd2ab...
* All countries to agree on an incentive scheme (unlikely - although big trading blocs like EU/China/Russia/USA might be able to bully the rest of the world into it with the threat of sanctions if they do not agree)
* Some countries to agree on a scheme, and to break WTO rules to penalize (carbon tax) imports and subsidize exports to/from those who do not.
Or... the world continues on the current trajectory of decarbonizing highly visible things only (Electric cars, solar panels on the roof!) to appease voters while avoiding decarbonizing anything that much affects nationwide competitiveness (eg. steel/fertilizer production).
Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons writ large?
It makes no sense for anyone really to make personal sacrifices for the planet. Why should I stay at home riding my pushbike to the artisan markets when my neighbour will gleefully fly to Hawaii for his holidays, undoing in a few days whatever carbon reductions I've achieved in a year?
The logical course is to accept that your actions mean nothing and live a greedy life, amassing wealth at the cost of the planet's health and hoarding it for when things get bad, whether that's this generation or the next.
Having said that, a CO2 tax just makes the financial incentives for change better; someone still needs to build the better system after funds are reallocated. So if you already started a cost-reduction startup, you’ll have first-mover advantage when the CO2 taxes come into play.
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* Cheap EV chargers for people who don’t own houses. Young people are the most likely to be open to EVs, but they’re also the least likely to own a house. Charging is a major barrier to entry. Create something so cheap and ubiquitous that charging is not a concern. For example chargers built into lamp posts.
* Figure out UHVDC to enable clean energy surpluses to be sold internationally. Reliable UHVDC networks will allow clean energy projects to service more geographic area, making them more competitive. Eventually, storage might not even be necessary, since dark/non-windy regions can always pull from regions with wind or sun. And when fusion power comes online in a few decades, huge energy surpluses will be very profitable.
* Passive carbon capture via nuclear barges. We’ve had nuclear reactors in the water for decades, let’s put them to use capturing carbon.
* Floatovoltaics. Land isn’t always cheap. Put solar panels in other places. There are other positive side effects as well, such as reducing algae blooms and reducing evaporation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture
DAC requires large fans to move air over a chemical filter. You need to power those fans with something that doesn’t release CO2.
https://www.itselectric.us
I thought about charger after the fact.
Well; in those 7 year the territory got covered in chargers. Private / public mix. Some will likely disappear once things settle a bit but damn, I was surprised
https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/fuels-us-euro...
https://terraformindustries.com/
Shipping is a huge component of the price of natural gas. So it'll be a long time before they're cheaper than the price of natural gas in Alberta or Siberia, but they'll be able to beat the price in Los Angeles a lot sooner.
Yes, sequestration can go negative-carbon, but that doesn't help anybody who has a difficult to replace fuel burning process.
Feels like there's already options there.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4078516...
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Chemex-goes-global-carbon-neut...
Although I'm betting it's better to just radically cut demand rather than try to invent a really good carbon-neutral/negative concrete. If we could sink a whole bunch of carbon into concrete though (significant carbon capture -> magic? -> concrete), that would be cool though.
That's a really uncomfortable fact with a lot of climate issues: it's way better to just not do the thing instead of trying to find a neutral/net-negative carbon process for the thing.