How Can a Technologist Start Fighting Climate Change?
Another major climate report from the United Nations. Another dire warning that we must act now. Many of us in tech know that we must be a part of the solution. But how?
Many people think that focusing on our personal carbon footprints is the best way to impact climate change. In fact, that usually isn’t true — we can have far greater impact by positively influencing the networks and communities around us. And if you work in tech, you have a lot of power at your fingertips.
In fact, on global warming, the scale of the impact tech sector workers can have is vast.
Note that in this article we are going to focus on how tech workers can take advantage of their position to help make positive change. If you are interested more in how you can use your tech implementation skills, we’d recommend this excellent article by Bret Victor.
Let’s begin by looking at your carbon footprint. Consider this general guide to reducing personal carbon emissions. The cited report shows that a person in a wealthy country has about 1.2 tonnes a year of potential carbon dioxide savings to play with. And that’s at the top end, achievable only with difficult, major life choices, like choosing to have fewer children.
Compare that to what the cloud-based software company Workday saved in 2017 by implementing a stringent sustainability policy. In that year they saved a staggering 27,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere.
How much impact can one tech worker have?
Workday is a company with thousands of employees. No doubt there was a collaborative effort to achieve that saving, including senior executive management through to local green teams and many more in between.
However, consider this. A small group of employees within the company will have been the ones responsible for driving the initiative into existence in the first place.
Those employees invested their time to generate an annual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It’s reasonable to think about how much these employees each gained for the personal time they invested.
Before we do the calculation, we need a quick disclaimer. There is no accurate way to credit individual employees with these carbon savings — we don’t know precisely who did what, and there is no way to quantify exactly how important any given hour of time investment was to achieving this outcome.
So we are not doing that.
What we can do is this. We can run a quick and dirty thought experiment to give us a very rough idea of just how much comparative climate leverage tech professionals have. And we can be really conservative with our estimates to make sure we don’t overstate the potential for impact.
There are currently 8200 employees at Workday. Let’s be generous and say that 500 of them were responsible for driving the sustainability program into implementation. That’s one-eighth of their entire workforce! So we are being extremely conservative. In reality for a company this size, it is common for a much smaller number of collaborating employees to drive these initiatives forward. But let’s move forward with the calculation.
27,000 tonnes / 500 employees = 54 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide savings per employee.
By this measure, Workday employees creating and supporting the sustainability initiative each now have 45 times more annual impact than if they had maxed out their 1.2 tonne potential personal saving. That’s forty-five times more impact for each tech worker’s time invested, and that’s being really conservative.
Of course, we are not saying you should ignore your personal carbon footprint. However it is clear that if you are a technology professional you can multiply your impact way beyond the level achievable by personal changes alone.
How to leverage your position
That example gives an idea of the incredible scale of impact possible in the tech industry. Of course, if you work in tech you are probably already used to thinking about scale.
However there’s more. If you work in tech — whatever your role — you are in a prime position to help ensure these scaled impacts are delivered. Compared to most professions, tech workers have an incredible amount of influence over their employers.
Bidding wars over talent mean that companies are always looking to invest in employee priorities, rather than lose staff to a competitor. Its up to workers to make sure employers know what those priorities are, and to help put practices into place.
This puts tech sector employees in a prime position to help their employers step forward. We created ClimateAction.tech as a network to help technology professionals find and support each other, and learn how to take it to the next level, in partnership with employers.
The next step if you are motivated would be to join our network. Please contact us and join our slack. Say hi and tell us where you are at. We can likely help you work out how to move things forward.
