Anyone else get creeped out and realize just deep and tangled our mindsets are when reading these articles lauding consumer products? The biggest and best companies are all laser focused on producing as much throw away consumer crap as they can while we are hurtling towards catastrophic climate destruction. These write ups lauding the innovative business strategies of convenient, throw-away luxury items feels like anesthetic. The world's on fire and the best and brightest have fatalistic attitudes towards doing anything meaningful and we're just heaping on more tinder.
Stopping climate change is mostly a political problem, not a technical one. An extremely difficult one since it requires collective action from the entire world. Even when it is a technical problem, it's not clear to me that software developers have anything productive to add to the research in this area that isn't already being done (renewable energy R&D, geo-engineering).
PS. The world is not on fire. Most of the 1st world will live through this with some bumps and scratches along the way, because we have sufficient resources to engineer our way out of any problems. It's only "catastrophic" for poor people near the equator. It's not fatalism, it's just being pragmatic about where the incentives are.
