I don’t know what I can do about climate change, I hear you say. ‘I know I want to do something, I know I want to pour my energy and my skills into something useful, but I don’t know the best way to do it’. This is, I think, a very common first world problem for people who are, or at least think themselves to be, ambitious. Sometimes I don’t know which camp I fall into. 

When I have thought about this problem in the past I found myself at the doors of companies, of corporations. I knew that I didn’t have enough information, and that I had things to learn (a lot of things), and so I picked an interesting problem and found a company to hire me to work on it. This is what led me to Canonical, to Ubuntu, and is the train of thought that dropped me off at South Pole, where I am now.

Recently however, in talking with friends and colleagues, I’ve realised I want to do more. I’m plateauing. I’m not learning as much as quickly, and I’m not working on problems I really care about. Instead, I hired people to work on those problems while I wrestle with bureaucracy and people management to empower them. 

This is fine, I’m supporting good work, and I like managing my team very much, but it’s not as fulfilling or challenging as ‘proper’ product management once was. So I’ve been thinking about what more I can do.

Previously, I went for ‘open source technology’ companies, and then ‘sustainability companies’ because I didn’t know enough to be more specific. But now that I know more about these domains, and now that I have developed skills and knowledge to navigate ‘tech’, the question is not ‘what should I do?’, rather ‘how should I do it?’ 

Let’s walk through the ‘what’ first. 

What is there to do?

My interests lay squarely in the ESG space (environmental, social, governance). This is usually an industry term associated with corporate targets and reporting, but that’s not what I mean, I mean I’m interested in solving problems associated with these things on a global level as they relate to climate change.

Each word in this acronym  is incredibly broad, ‘on a global level’ widens the field further, and saying ‘as they relate to climate change’ is meaningless on its own. So let’s get more specific. 

Each of these three things have countless problems associated with them that are caused by, or affect, climate change. When you look for something to do you need to be looking for problems to solve, and the best way to identify problems to solve, to diagnose a problem, is to break it down and look at its symptoms. Let’s do a bit of that for climate change.

Symptoms of climate change

The symptoms of climate change can be seen across the board spectrum of ‘ESG’: 

• Environmentally the effects are perhaps the most obvious; wildfires, floods, droughts, unusual weather patterns, natural disasters, biome collapse, etc. These are all measurable effects of a changing climate. 
• Socially the symptoms can be seen in the migration and aid (or sometimes lack thereof) of people affected by climate disasters, and in how people’s behaviours are changing as a changing climate becomes more obvious, and so sustainability more important. 
• And in governance it feels like I hear about a new protest or climate rebellion every other week, I hear about research that describes the rather cataclysmic possibilities that could arise from governments not taking action, and the sheer amount of corporate investment in sustainability is rocketing. These are symptoms that relate to governance.

These are the symptoms of climate change that drive people, companies, and world governments to do things. However, addressing the symptoms themselves isn’t how they, or you as an individual, find something to do. Instead you need to address the underlying problems that cause the symptoms, not the symptoms themselves. 

Problems

Climate change itself is a broad unhelpful term that is the result of an awful lot of things, done by an awful lot of people, that result in an awful lot of problems. 

Let me give you an example. A country like the UK burns a metric shit tonne (not a technical term) of natural gas every year. This alone doesn’t necessarily have a large effect on the climate, but it contributes to a global emissions profile that means there is more CO2 in the atmosphere every year too. That extra CO2 traps more heat, warms the earth, and results in some of the previously mentioned impacts:

• Environmental impacts like wildfires in California
• Social impacts like mass migration away from said wildfires
• And governance impacts like wildfire insurance, evacuation policies, and actually paying for all of this

There is a lot to do here, a lot of problems to solve even if we just look at this problem. The root cause in this example is the CO2 emission from burning natural gas. Problem: burning fossil fuels. But of course there’s only so much you can do there so another problem is: the (environmental) impact of wildfires. But there’s only so much you can do there too so another (social) problem is getting people away from wildfires and preparing them. But there’s only so much you can do about that as well, so another problem is the quality and scale of (governance) systems in place to manage these problems. And on, and on. 

It gets more complicated too because different people, different companies, and different countries are un-equally equipped to address these kinds of problems. Continuing with the example, if the UN were to say; ‘everybody shut down all of your natural gas plants this year!’ some countries could probably manage it, but others just couldn’t. They haven’t had the time to build up the infrastructure to not rely on fossil fuels. Which is really a problem for E, S, and G. 

If you look at this one holistically you’ll see that the real problem at the heart of it is powering an unequipped countries without additional natural gas and removing CO2 from their already installed necessary energy sources. But I digress. 

There are a lot more examples that you can think of yourself, it's really easy, think about something you’ve been told is a contributor to climate change, be specific as you can (UK burning natural gas, your mum flying first class, not recycling, anything), think about the impact that thing actually has, and then break it down into ESG problems. 

Go ahead, I’ll wait. But then stop because it can get quite upsetting and you need to keep reading. 

What I’m trying to illustrate is that there are a lot of problems to work on. There are the ‘root cause’ problems from an ESG perspective; burning fossil fuels (E), getting the public educated on sustainability (S), and paying for infrastructural change (G). But there are also secondary, tertiary, and fourthiary(?) problems to address. The problems are everywhere, the question is what can we do about them? 

Solutions (things to do about it)

Let’s start with broad strokes and then get more specific. A wise old man (I wonder if he’ll read this) once said to me:

 ‘Solving these problems is going to take some bloody serious engineering, social science, and economics’. 

I’ve held onto this statement for years because it resonated with me and lays out the three things we need to do.

Engineering

Both the IPCC and IEA say we need ‘negative emissions’ to get close to our targets of stopping climate change from being disastrous. That means removing CO2 from the atmosphere, reducing the emissions we are currently producing, and avoiding producing more. Each of these things require massive engineering effort. And naturally, ‘bloody serious engineering’ is hard, it takes a lot of effort, and like anything impactful, requires a lot of people. 

Removal

There are natural ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere but none of them ‘naturally’ operate at the scale we need them to. They need to be engineered and designed to scale and to be optimised. And then of course there are artificial ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, some you’ve likely heard of, like direct air capture, and some you likely haven’t, like biochar. 

There are lots of these methods (things to do) out there and plenty of funding for it. YCombinator, a famous startup accelerator is actively looking for new ideas that have promise for removing CO2. They highlight phytoplankton, electro-geo chemistry, cell free systems, and desert flooding as particularly interesting for example. 

Reduction

Reducing emissions is about changing what we are doing now to produce less CO2. This perhaps has the broadest amount of opportunity for things to do in terms of engineering. You can work out what to do by looking at the big problems we mentioned before and thinking about engineering-y solutions. 

Problem: burning fossil fuels, thing to do: work on alternative energy sources; renewables, nuclear, hydrogen, etc. Problem: large scale energy demands, thing to do: work on energy infrastructure, storage methods, or energy supply and demand management. Problem: stupid mass consumerism, thing to do: understand and reduce emissions at check out, work on more circular economic methods, etc. 

There are companies that are looking at each of these things and then some, so if you want to be part of the engineering side of the solution you can find these companies, or do some research to come up with your own, and invest your time and energy in them. 

Naturally, there is a social and economic component to all of them, and if you don’t have a PhD or a highly technical engineering degree it's unlikely you’ll be able to focus solely on the engineering component but good engineering doesn’t happen in a silo, if you like the engineering side, figure out how you can apply what you’re good at to supporting it. More on that later. 

Social science

Even though your climate guilt is bullshit and you don’t really need to worry about going on holiday, it's accurate to say that most people could do more to reduce their footprint. The same can be said for companies, and for countries. Getting these different ‘levels’ to play along is probably the biggest (though not the only) social problem we face.

Starting with individuals, there’s a lot of work to do to raise awareness and educate people on the issue. A friend of mine recently said he wants to find a way to make sure that in 50 years no one can say to him ‘oh I didn’t know it was happening’ if/when the climate has irreversibly changed. This is a social problem, a communication problem, an awareness problem. If that’s what you’re good at, that’s something to do. 

Thinking about the company level, where you start to have more of an impact, if we can affect supply chains or manufacturing operations we can affect measurable change. But this doesn’t happen without leaders, customers, and workers at those organisations deciding and pushing to make a change. That’s something to do too. 

Finally, looking at a country level there’s a lot of ‘talks’ happening but in the world we’ve built for ourselves politics only moves with money and representation. We’ll get to money in the next section but representation is just as important. Politicians and governments aren’t going to be able to make the hard decisions we need them to make without proper support. 

There’s lots to do there; how can you change social norms to make politicians listen to climate policy advisors and how can you encourage the people to push for more action? How can we make climate action politically agnostic so whoever’s in power does something?

There are lots more examples where social science is going to be incredibly important but it’s easy to think it’s not you. Or ‘it’s not a me problem’. But no, there’s always more you can do. For example, there are ‘environmental activists’ who really care about the environment but don’t like big hydroelectric dams, or big offshore wind farms, or nuclear power plants. And so, with good intentions, are blocking real progress. Big oil and gas have to come with us and someone has to ask the activists to check themselves too. These are more things to do.

Economics

Most things revolve around money. If the economics, if that maths doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter what we want to happen, it simply won’t. The idea of building massive solar or wind farms is nice, but how are we going to pay for it? How are we going to build the infrastructure and do the paperwork for it? 

The idea of massive flood prevention measures, or planting masses of mangroves, or building the infrastructure for EVs into every country, are great, but how are we going to pay for them?

The International Energy Agency develop 3 main emissions scenarios each year:

1. What if we carry on with the current policies we already have in place? 
2. What if we actually do all the new policies that get announced at the various COP summits? (we usually don’t)
3. What would it take to get to below 2 deg. This one is called the Sustainable Development Scenario or the SDS if you want to read more about it.

In the current SDS almost 35% of the CO2 reductions come from technologies that are in prototype or demo phase and won’t be available at scale without more years of R&D. A further 40% of the reductions rely on technologies that have not yet been commercially deployed in mass‑market applications. And those are just reductions, not removals, so who is going to pay for it? 

The fact is we don’t know how to deploy fast enough, or how to pay for it, and we’re missing a large proportion technologies that we already know we’re going to need. So, that’s more things we need people to do, raise money, pivot large scale factories and companies toward being able to deploy new kinds of infrastructure and technologies quickly. Adapting what we do have to fulfil a better future. 

I’ll be honest, this is my weakest point. I can see the problem but I’m missing a lot of ‘things we can actually do here’ that seem impactful, this is the big one. 

How to do it?

The unhelpful thing to say is, ‘just start working on it.’, so I’ll take it one step deeper; after resolving to work on it, the next steps are to 1. take time to understand a problem well, 2. work out what you can do to learn or gain experience in that area, and then 3. see how you can map your skills to a solution. Don’t start kicking and screaming and complaining that it's hard or that everyone needs to stop flying or eating meat, understand the issue and work on it. 

Let’s explore some possibilities. All of the above problems, and all of the above ‘things to do’ have big political components. Perhaps the best thing we all can do is get deeper into politics. Could you think about how to turn your skills (maybe you’re a marketer, a product manager, a salesperson, a carpenter, or a roboticist) toward politics? 

Political example

If the biggest root cause problem is the energy transition (fossil fuel emissions) then the biggest lever for having an ESG impact is global politics. Let’s apply my three steps to this problem.

1.  take time to understand a problem well. 

I’m based in the Netherlands but am from the UK. I think I could look at both counties and their political stance on climate change and understand either of them well enough relatively quickly. For the sake of this article let's assume I do that. 

2. work out what you can do to learn or gain experience in that area. 

Both of these countries have a relatively high climate/sustainability awareness, both have public, theoretically comprehensive policies, and should be doing things on a regular basis already. I could learn more and gain experience here by going to events, joining local groups, calling up companies working in the sectors I’m interested in and talking about what they’re doing. Etc. Doing proactive things that increase my knowledge. 

3. see how you can map your skills to a solution. 

Once I’ve done my research, and I’m getting some experience in the right area, what’s next? Well my professional skills lend most easily to joining companies or startups or NGOs focusing on this kind of political change, and supporting them. I could start looking for opportunities like that. 

Or assuming there are none, I can start by writing about it, creating a website for it, running a meet up for it, calling the council or the government, talking to experts in sustainability and politics and formulating a plan. This is all quite hand-wavy because I haven’t actually done steps 1 and 2, but you see my point, there’s opportunity if you look for it. 

But this is my problem, what I need to work out, I find it hard to apply my relatively ‘soft’ skills to these things. So let’s look at someone else.  

Chef example

Given everything you’ve just read, how can a chef contribute? Well, let's think about our three things to do, engineering, social science, and economics. 

For engineering if you’re a chef you can look for and support the most climate friendly engineering efforts. Whether that’s meat substitutes, supporting community cook stove initiatives, or only sourcing ingredients from sustainable regenerative agriculture proponents is up to you, but that’s a start.

For social science you could use your skills to raise awareness, even if you’re a BBQ steakhouse chef you could have an awareness event where you find a speaker to raise awareness about important issues or local climate politics. Or you could invest and join circular economic initiatives to lower the emissions of your waste.

And for economics, climate activists and people working on the energy transition need to eat and need the money. Maybe you could offer to cater for summits or events or political conferences for a discount if they are talking about positive climate change or if they vote for a particular kind of policy. 

The question is, how can you apply your skills to these ‘things to do’? For people with hard skills like cooking or coding or diving, the answer is a little easier and pretty transferable in whatever industry your in, it just requires decisions to be made. And once you know what you want to do you can more easily apply the three steps from the political example to work out how to do it. 

For people with softer skills like me you have to be part of a larger whole, whether that’s a company, a government, or something else. The way to work out how is the same; understand the problem, gain experience, and map your skills. But for marketers or product people or sales people that last step will likely mean finding a company that’s making a difference and contributing, or making a difference in the company you’re already a part of. The hard part is recognising this and making decisions to serve it. Good luck. 

Conclusion

When I think about what more I could be doing, what more anyone could be doing for the climate, I follow this train of thought; what is happening that is causing concern, what is causing that thing to happen, what can be done about it, and then how can I help. Climate change is so big and broad that in order to do anything about it you need to break it down into little chunks that you can better understand. 

Once you do you quickly realise the sheer volume of the things you could be doing and how big the problems are. Some bloody serious engineering, social science, and economics needs to get done all over the place. What can you do about it? Find something you care about, understand the issues, break them down, and either apply your skills or learn some new ones to attack it. 

I know the problems to work on, I know what I want to work on, and I’m at the stage now of working out what I can realistically most easily and impactfully apply my pretty soft skills to in order to do more. The hard part though is changing to this way of thinking. I hope this helps.