Learn how to use your voice and your tech skills to help solve one of the greatest challenges of the 21st Century.

Learn to Fight Climate Change

Illustration of browser window with climate-related symbols

Climate change affects all of us. You may have already seen news stories about some of its scarier impacts, like larger wildfires, stronger storms, and melting ice caps. But those brushes with climate change can leave us with more questions and fears than answers and solutions.

That's why Codecademy has teamed up with the environmental nonprofit [350.org](350.org) to create "Learn to Fight Climate Change,” a course about what climate change is, what's causing it, and how you — yes, you! — can make a difference. After all, we need a stable, healthy planet in order to write our best code. 

If you're already familiar with climate change, why it's bad, and what's causing it, feel free to skip ahead to [section 6](https://www.codecademy.com/courses/learn-to-fight-climate-change/lessons/learn-to-fight-climate-change/exercises/how-can-you-join-the-fight-against-climate-change) to learn about how you can join the fight against it — including by using the technical skills you can learn on Codecademy!

Introduction

Today, Apple has a reputation for taking climate change seriously. But this hasn't always been the case. 

In 2005, Apple was facing mounting public pressure from environmental nonprofits over its inadequate recycling policies and use of toxic, unrecyclable chemicals. The nonprofit Greenpeace gave Apple's environmental friendliness a 2.7 out of 10 rating in its "Guide to Greener Electronics" ([source](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-launches-anti-whali/)), and environmental activists went as far as to picket outside Apple's annual shareholder meeting ([source](https://www.cnet.com/culture/jobs-defends-apples-record-on-environment/)). It took two years of hard work, organization, and public pressure, but eventually Apple stepped up.

In May 2007, Steve Jobs [shared an open letter with the world](https://web.archive.org/web/20070504070018/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/), unveiling a set of environmentally friendly policies that Apple would begin to follow. This initiative, fittingly named "A Greener Apple", included ending the use of the toxic substances mercury, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium in all Apple products. It also unveiled an expansion of a free disposal and recycling program for iPods to all of Apple's stores worldwide, and the promise to publish an assessment of Apple's environmental impact every year going forward. 

The story of Apple represents the story of much of the most impactful climate action in our lifetimes: It begins with individual people, like you and me, making their voices heard. 

We'll spend the next rest of this course discussing ways that you, too, can make a difference!

How Can You Join The Fight Against Climate Change?

Imagine you're inside a greenhouse, surrounded by plants. Sunlight streams in through clear glass walls. The glass traps the energy of the sun in the form of heat, warming up the air, water, and surfaces around you. Simple enough, right? 

It turns out the Earth’s atmosphere works in a similar way. Sunlight travels through the atmosphere and hits the ground, warming it up. Some of the heat that's in the ground stays there, but some of it shoots back upward, through the atmosphere. But remember how the glass walls of a greenhouse trap in heat? It turns out that certain gases, including carbon dioxide, do the same thing. When heat tries to pass through them, they capture it and reflect it back toward the Earth for a second time. The more of those gases that are in the atmosphere, the more heat they reflect back, and the hotter the Earth becomes.

This process explains why the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been so closely tied with how hot the Earth has been over time. And the similarity between this process and the way that greenhouses work has earned it the name "the greenhouse effect", as well as the name "greenhouse gas" for the types of gas that cause it. 
___
Image credit: [Wikimedia](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greenhouse-effect-t2.svg)

Diagram of sunlight bouncing off greenhouse gases and heating the Earth a second time

The Greenhouse Effect

But wait! As a Codecademy learner, you have (or are soon to have!) a powerful set of technical skills that you can apply to pretty much any problem, including climate change. Web development, data science, cybersecurity, and more are all skills that you can use to multiply your impact on climate change in ways that most people can't. 

##### Volunteering
Climate hackathons are an accessible, powerful, and low time-commitment way to contribute to the cause. You can learn about upcoming ones on boards like [devpost.com](https://devpost.com/) or [earthhacks.io](https://earthhacks.io/), or by just looking on a search engine!

Climate nonprofits are also always looking for volunteers! Send a message to a local organization and offer to share your technical skills, or find a remote opportunity on volunteer job boards like [Idealist](https://www.idealist.org/en) and [VolunteerMatch](https://www.volunteermatch.org). 
* Even if you don't see a posting that matches your skills exactly, you should still reach out! You'll be surprised by how in-demand technical skills are. 
* Volunteering is also a great way to get real-world experience and improve your resume before applying for your first paid job in tech.  

##### Bonus Fact 
Code that's more efficient in terms of time is also more efficient in terms of energy! That's right, optimizing for that O(1) runtime is helping to save the planet, just a little bit at a time. 
___
Photo credit: [NASA](https://unsplash.com/@nasa) via [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com)

Illustration of a computer monitor with plants and the Earth on it

How To Apply Your Tech Skills, Part I

Photo of smoke billowing from a smokestack

So we know it's getting hotter outside, and we know that the reason it's getting hotter outside is that there's way more carbon dioxide in the air now than there has ever been in human history. That brings us to our last question: "Where is all this carbon dioxide coming from"? 

About 200 years ago, people started burning oil, coal, and other **fossil fuels** in large quantities to create energy. You may have heard this shift referred to as the **Industrial Revolution**. Burning fossil fuels helps to heat our homes and charge our computers, but it also produces by-products, like the exhaust you've seen coming out of car tailpipes. Well, it turns out that one of the main components of these by-products is carbon dioxide. 

And we're burning a lot of fossil fuels. In 2021 alone, we burned enough fossil fuels to release 36.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ([source](https://www.iea.org/news/global-co2-emissions-rebounded-to-their-highest-level-in-history-in-2021)). To put that number in perspective, that's the equivalent of 800 trillion pounds, or the combined weight of 5.7 trillion people. That's a lot of carbon dioxide, and it's also the last piece of our puzzle. All of that heat and dangerous weather is being caused by a huge jump in carbon dioxide, and that huge jump in carbon dioxide is coming from burning fossil fuels. 

###### Other Greenhouse Gases
Carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas! You may have heard of others like methane and nitrous oxide. We're releasing those into the atmosphere at historically high rates too, from things like landfills and fertilizers. Each type of gas has different properties. Methane, for example, stays in the atmosphere for much less time than carbon dioxide, but is 25 to 80 times more effective at trapping heat. 
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Photo credit: [Kelly L](https://www.pexels.com/@kelly-l-1179532) via [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/)

Where Are Greenhouse Gases Coming From?

###### Companies and Organizations
You may be wondering "What companies and organizations should I try to change first?". The answer is simple: The ones you're already a part of! That could mean your employer, your school, your place of worship, or just about any other institution you care about. 

Here are some examples of ways that companies and organizations often reduce their carbon footprints:
* **Divesting** from fossil fuels. In other words, moving the money in a retirement fund, endowment, or other type of investment fund out of fossil fuel companies. 
* Buying 100% of their energy from renewable sources
* Allowing working from home, or livestreaming events so everyone who wants to participate from home can do so

###### Government
Governments, from the local to the national level, have powerful tools at their disposal for fighting climate change. Here's a partial list of things they can do:

* **Local:** Enact building codes that require energy efficient construction, provide tax credits for renewable energy infrastructure like solar panels, permit dense development so that more land elsewhere can remain undeveloped, and commit to buying 100% renewable energy
 * To get involved with the transition to 100% renewable energy, check out [the Sierra Club's Ready for 100 campaign](https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100-toolkit/what-ready-for-100
)!
* **State/Provincial:** Permit renewable energy production facilities like wind and solar farms, end tax subsidies that are currently being given to fossil fuel companies ([source](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds)), implement a carbon tax, expand public transit networks, and increase vehicle emission standards
* **National:** Everything that local and state/provincial governments can do, but bigger!

Here are some ways you can encourage your government to make these changes:
* Call or send emails to your local, state/provincial, and national representatives. Make your voice heard!
* Attend local government meetings, like for your city council, and speak up when they allow comments from the public
* Volunteer for the campaigns of political candidates who take climate change seriously
___
Image credit: [The United Nations' #ClimateAction campaign](https://www.trello.com/c/eGR5RoiH/551-climate-action) via Trello

Illustration of a group of people pulling a wind farm over a polluting factory

Systemic Changes

Driving an electric vehicle, eating less meat,  biking, and reducing power consumption

Many climate change resources will tell you that there are changes you can make to reduce your personal carbon footprint. Think of actions like:
* driving less
* eating less meat
* reusing, repairing, and recycling your things rather than throwing them out

Those personal changes are valuable, and if we all made them we could make a dent in climate change. However, personal changes are not nearly the most effective way for you to make a difference.

Why's that? The answer is that individual people, by and large, don't have big carbon footprints. The average person worldwide creates about 4 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year ([source](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm)). That means unless you're one of the unusual people who own a couple of private jets, your personal changes can only ever reduce your footprint by somewhere around 4 metric tons.

So instead of focusing on personal changes, we're going to spend the next section talking about systemic changes, or ways that you can help convince corporations and governments to reduce their carbon footprints by _millions_ of metric tons at a time.
___
Image credit: [The United Nations' #ActNow campaign](https://www.trello.com/b/bK5ioIoO/actnow-the-uns-climateaction-campaign) via Trello

Personal Changes

Illustration of a browser window with plants and code snippets

Interested in more than just volunteering? We've got you covered!

##### Careers
Many of the full-time jobs that are critical to understanding and fighting climate change revolve around technical skills. 
* Researchers that model the climate are really _data scientists_ in disguise.
* Carbon credits, a tool that some governments use to limit companies' carbon emissions, are increasingly powered by _blockchain engineers_. 
* Sometimes whole tech companies, like teleconferencing ones, help fight climate change without us even realizing it. Zoom, Skype, and their competitors allow us to travel less for meetings, reducing our carbon footprints in the process! 

If you're interested in learning more about how to land a job in climate tech, check out [this blog post from Codecademy!](https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/climate-tech-jobs-for-programmers/)

##### Donation
Tech jobs tend to make a good deal of money — that's one of the reasons so many of us are learning how to do them! If you've landed a tech job and you're not able to dedicate time to fighting for the climate, consider donating to a climate change nonprofit instead.


How To Apply Your Tech Skills, Part II

Graph showing global temperature increasing over time

Scientists first started thinking about climate change when they noticed an unexpected trend: It's getting hotter outside. In fact, the 10 hottest years ever recorded have all been since 2005 ([source](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature)). 

Researchers began connecting the dots: 
* Hotter air holds more moisture, leading to stronger storms.
* Hotter oceans cause melting of ice caps and higher sea levels.
* Hotter temperatures cause subtle changes in wind and weather patterns that have major ripple effects.

But if hotter temperatures are causing the dangerous weather, what's causing the hotter temperatures?

Scientists considered various causes, like sun flares and volcanic eruptions, but in the end they found one clear answer: carbon dioxide (a type of gas). The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been extremely closely tied to how hot the Earth has been for millions of years in the past, and, just like you might have guessed, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot way up in the last 150 years!

So scientists are pretty confident that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is _correlated_ with how hot the Earth is. But is carbon dioxide _causing_ the hotter temperatures? How would that even work?

###### Bonus Video
If you're interested in a visualization of the different factors scientists considered to explain rising temperatures before they landed on carbon dioxide, check out [this video from CarbonBrief](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDWW9WlPSc).
___
Photo credit: [350.org](https://350.org/science/)

What's Causing It?

Drought, hurricane, wildfire, and flooding

Wherever you live, the weather is changing, and it's changing faster than ever before in human history. Here are a few examples of extreme weather from just 2020 and 2021: 

* In the summer of 2020, wildfires burned 47 million acres of land in Eastern Russia, an area bigger than the entire country of Greece. This record-breaking season capped off a decade in which twice as much land burned in Siberia as in the previous ten years. ([source](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfires-sibera-russia-burned-area-larger-than-greece-heat-wave/))
* In Germany, two months of rain fell in just one day in July 2021, killing 220 people in a record-breaking flood. ([source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/16/weather-pattern-climate-germany-flooding/))
* In June of the same year, Canada recorded the hottest temperature in the country's history, 121ºF (49ºC), in the middle of a heatwave that left more than a billion sea animals heated to death on the shore. ([source](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/intertidal-animals-ubc-research-1.6090774))

Add those to famine in Madagascar to rising sea levels endangering Pacific island nations to a cold snap that crippled the state of Texas' power grid and caused $20 billion in damage ([source](https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/09/03/climate-change-arctic-texas-cold/)), and it's clear that something's going wrong. 

The only way for us to stop these natural disasters from getting worse is to understand what's causing them in the first place. Fortunately for us, many dedicated scientists have been researching just that.  
___
Photo credit: [Mike Erskine](https://unsplash.com/@mikejerskine), [NASA](https://unsplash.com/@nasa), [Joanne Francis](https://unsplash.com/@nipawinnews), and [Saikiran Kesari](https://unsplash.com/@saikirankesari) via [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/)

Weird Weather

Photo of protesters holding signs at a climate march

Thank you for reading! Climate change can be scary to think about, but the good news is that we have the tools to fight it — and now you do too! If you're interested in learning more, check out some of the resources below. 
* To learn more about 350.org's activism and how you can join them, [visit their website](https://350.org/).
* Some other leading climate change nonprofits in need of volunteers are: 
 * **United States:** [Sunrise Movement](https://www.sunrisemovement.org/) and [Sierra Club](https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100-toolkit/what-ready-for-100)
 * **India:** [Fridays for Future India](https://www.fridaysforfutureindia.com/)
 * **United Kingdom:** [Green New Deal](https://www.greennewdealuk.org/)
 * **Canada:** [350 Canada](https://350.org/canada/)
* To learn more about the underlying science, head to [the Environmental Protection Agency's guide to climate change science](https://www.epa.gov/climatechange-science).
* To learn about the most effective ways to donate money, take a look at [this guide from The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/12/how-to-donate-to-fight-climate-change-effectively/617248/).

Interested in gaining the tech skills to make an extra difference for the climate? Check out these Codecademy resources to get started:
* Learn to visualize climate data with [Learn Data Visualization with Python](https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/visualize-data-with-python)
* Go from zero to a full-stack engineer with the [Full-Stack Engineer Career Path](https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/full-stack-engineer-career-path)
* Or poke around [our Catalog](https://www.codecademy.com/catalog) to find what's right for you!
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Photo credit: [Vincent M.A. Janssen](https://www.pexels.com/@vincent-ma-janssen) via [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/)