Hi folks!
I’m one of the organisers of ClimateAction.tech (I’ll refer to as CAT), I gave this talk at Heart of Clojure back in 2018 about climate and tech, and I also worked in a company, Mastodon C, where a chunk of the company’s time and effort was spent figuring out how to use clojure to work on climate.
Here’s an interview with the then CEO, Francine Bennett from 2012. I’m also a big fan of clojure and it’s community, and it has changed how I think about programming, even if I don’t do any paid work in it.
I think it’s good to that this is being discussed, and I figured it might be useful to share some of what I’ve learned if you want to go down this route.
I think @otfrom might have something to share there too, as he has personal experiences in this field, and might be able to share some of his experiences.
Joining something existing and making it richer, vs starting something new
I actually joined CAT after running sustainability and tech meetups in London and Berlin, I felt that it made sense to join something that was already there, and contribute to it, rather than make my own thing.
For what it’s worth, we deliberately try to be cross disciplinary, and act as a place for both cross community and cross organisational discussions on these topics.
There’s a few reasons for this - very generally, one of the big problems in sustainability themed communities or movements is fragmentation. This a) keeps lots of the these conversations happening away from where there’s actual power and money being deployed with very real consequences and b) also means that the people who tend to make up the community tend to end up with pretty similar backgrounds.
We already wrestle with this in CAT where lots of programmers join, and basically say:
Hello there! I want to keep doing exactly what I’m doing, but also feel good about the climate and all my prior life choices validated. How do I do this?
I have hard time with this personally, because in many cases, the most effective thing a technologist can do on climate is actually get better at learning about the problem and levers there, rather than getting better at coding or clojure. It’s a different skillset.
TBH, even the effective altruism approach, I find problematic in some ways, because throwing money at a problem without engaging critically with it, generally results in avoiding necessary discussions about what we need to do differently as a society, in favour of what that lot over there need to do differently, and tends to favour maintaining a state of affairs where the altruists are the ones who get to say what altruisim is effective, and what isn’t.
Making it easier for clojurians to work on climate instead of in banks
(For what it’s worth, if there’s a mechanism for clojurians to find meaningful work that pays something close to fair rates, then I think that would be a good thing. The line above was a joke, BTW - I know it’s used in lots of cool places that aren’t finance, and anyway banks, because through their choise of who to finance can actually be pretty good lever for change on climate)
If the sustainability sector has history of being underfunded, the emergence of a very fast growing ‘climatetech’ sector means there is money pouring into this general area now.
And one thing that might be worth thinking of, that isn’t coupled to any decisions about what platform you use is simply to address the issue of there not being much meaningful climate focussed work in clojure out there yet.
I have looked and I haven’t been able to find any resources to explain to someone working on climate who isn’t already into clojure, why they might choose it for a new project, or even consider using it for part of their stack on their next climate project, or even point to other companies doing so.
Does this exist anywhere?
I would love to be able to point people to this, as the work I see in climate companies, tends towards python/django for web (sometimes php), and react on the front end.
This might help address the supply problem because if you want to clojurians to be hired, there needs to be someone agreeing to stump up some cash to hire them.
Setting up any climate project that could afford developers is hard enough, as devs are just so much more expensive than other members of staff already, so tools or resources to make it easier to get buy-in to start a new initiative in clojure, would really be a boon.
Hope that helps.