That's a very naive worldview. I'll skip the first part of what you said and focus on this though:
>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.
It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.
Code things in the absolutely simplest way you can think of and be ready to throw it away at any time when you think you understand the problem enough and have a good solution. Don't spend hours trying to design the perfect system, spend those hours coding it stupidly with the thought that you're going to throw it away later. Sometimes you do throw it away (but now you've gained a lot more experience with this particular problem, so coding it again will be a lot faster and with higher quality), sometimes you don't.
Either way, to code fast you just have to code a lot and throw stuff away a lot. Don't listen to people telling you to stop and design the program properly in an organized way before writing a single line of code, it almost never works properly.
http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m... This post goes further into the shame idea and explores how communities use shame to self-censor and censor others from doing any supposedly-shameful activities, and on top of that explains some of the importances of anonymity in a way that I think most people on HN haven't considered before.
>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.
It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.