Do I need more data to find important climate work?

I’ve written about how the data on emissions is hard to find, how the visualisations are too high level, and how the data exploration available should be better. I’d like to see an Atlas of Economic Complexity but for data on which industries and sub-industries are impacting climate change and how. I still think such a tool should exist, it wouldn’t be too hard to build a basic version based on the data we can pull from UNFCCC flexible queries.

However having read much more on climate change I have realised something quite obvious. We need renewables and nuclear as energy sources, we need energy storage (especially if we can’t convince people to accept nuclear), and we need to convert the machinery of our economy to electric power. To do this we need carbon taxes, engineering, and inventors.

So why do I need data on which specific industries are causing CO2 emissions to find where to work? I believe the answer is that I don’t. It would be useful to learn and better understand our economy, but it is not a key piece of information for a citizen finding where to contribute.

The question of where to contribute is not solved by a clean dataset from the UN. Billions is being spent on clean technology, thousands of great initiatives already exist, if you can think of it someone somewhere is most probably exploring it.

My genius plan of the moment is to keep reading and learning. How is machine learning contributing to nuclear fusion? Can we create a European grid that would reduce the problem of intermitent sustainable energy? There is so much happening and I know very little about most of it. It will take a lot more exploring before finding a high impact problem that my skills line up with.

That’s no excuse not to start. Doing something is important and helps find the problems that actually need solving. So onto the next grand idea…