Climate Change Takes Center Stage at Code Conference

pcmag.com:

One thing that surprised me a bit at this month's Code conference(Opens in a new window) was the intense focus on sustainability and climate change. This is of course an important and newsworthy topic, but it—along with big media—was the main point of discussion, while other technology areas, such as semiconductors or hardware of any kind, were lacking.

Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr talked up Speed and Scale(Opens in a new window), his book and plan for addressing the climate problems—laying out a ten-item action plan of things that need to be done now to get to net zero emissions: Electrify transportation, decarbonize the grid, fix food, protect nature, clean up industry, remove carbon, win politics and policy, turn movements into action, innovate, and invest. The first five of these collectively account for 59 gigatons of carbon pumped into the air a year, with the sixth offering the potential of removing 19 gigatons a year. He said it will take a mobilization of the world's resources to do this, claiming it is a bigger undertaking than World War II.

Representative Ro Khanna, who was interviewed along with Doerr, said one of the things driving action on this was the focus on production—building new things with technology in the US, from batteries and EVs to solar, steel, and semiconductors. He said for 40 years, we did not pay enough attention to factories and rural areas, and that is changing. If you want a trade surplus, he said, the only way to get it is to lead in clean tech production.

Doerr said climate science will be the new computer science and noted he had funded a new School of Sustainability at Stanford(Opens in a new window), to help accelerate the process. He thinks this will result in 1000 new