🌍 CAT Newsletter #153 - 2023-01-15
Hey Cats,
Here comes issue 153 of the climateAction.tech (CAT) Newsletter - your weekly summary of what's happening inside the CAT community, and in the wider world of climate and tech.
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Stay safe & healthy 😌 💚 🐱
CAT Community News
#️⃣ Slack channel updates
#climate-careers: Sandra just posted a channel check-in — where are you at on your career path?
#behaviour-psychology: Vinko had an interesting question around inaction due to a feeling that big emitters aren’t doing enough. Share your thoughts in the thread.
#greener-data-ai: The conversation Mike kicked off last year about emissions of ChatGPT is continuing. Chris and Kasper have both done some calculations. Join the conversation here.
📚 Branch magazine reading group
Volunteers Gaël and Poppe will be your hosts to discuss Bigger, More, Better, Faster: The ecological paradox of digital economies and hope to see many CATs join the session on Jan 26.
📆 Upcoming CAT events
If you're looking at organising event in your part of the world, you can ask for help in #events. There's a CAT event support kit, sample deck and so on to help.
☕ CAT Coffee (western)
Thu, Jan 19 • PT 10am | ET 1pm | GMT 6pm | CET 7pm | IST 10:30pm
📚 Branch Magazine Reading Group
Thu, Jan 26 • PT 9am | ET 12pm | GMT 5pm | CET 6pm | IST 9:30pm
We’ll discuss the article Bigger, More, Better, Faster.
🍩 CAT Roulette is back
#cat-roulette matches are back! Our next matches go out on Jan 20th. Join the channel, pick your region, and get matched with another CAT every other week. Volunteers Brett and Cary are ready to help if you need anything!
📆 CAT Submitted Events
Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it in the newsletter.
Jan 23rd 17:30 CET - Online Workshop Digital Collage
The Digital Collage is a playful and collaborative workshop with a pedagogy similar to that of the Climate Collage. The aim of the workshop is to raise awareness and train participants on the environmental issues of digital technologies.
Insightful talks combining tech and sustainability with three brilliant speakers - Dan Travers from Open Climate Fix speaking about forecasting solar generation, and two speakers from Yellow Sub, Melin Edomwonyi and Ed Holland speaking about water resources management.
Tue Feb 07 2023 - State of Open Con 23 - UK
The UK’s first conference on Open tech. We have over 100 confirmed speaker, including Jimmy Wales the cofounder of Wikipedia and Thomas Dohmke the CEO of GitHub. All tracks feature content on sustainability, we also have an unconference and a sub conference with sustain oss!
Check #events in the CAT slack for more.
🎬 CAT videos
CAT videos, geddit? 10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to topics related to climate.
Planet A: We need to talk about radical climate protests
The recent surge in radical climate activism is being met with a huge backlash. Does civil disobedience work or is it harming the movement? And why is everyone mad at the messenger, and not the perpetrators? We deep dive into the past and the present to find answers.
🎤 Podcasts
Natural-gas prices have fluctuated wildly, causing knock-on effects across climatetech. We unpack what’s behind the price swings — and what might happen next.
Which technologies get cheaper over time, and why?
In 2021, a group of Scholars at Oxford University published a paper that made big waves in the energy world. It argued that key clean energy technologies — wind, solar, batteries, and electrolyzers — are on learning curves which guarantee that, if they are deployed at the scale required to reach zero carbon, they will get extremely cheap. This episode is a conversation with researchers Abhishek Malhotra and Tobias Schmidt about why these learning curves happen.
The great electrician shortage
The table is set for widespread electrification. But do we have enough electricians to make it happen?
The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs
📰 News Highlights
UAE’s Cop28 president will keep role as head of national oil company
Sultan Al Jaber, the government minister for United Arab Emirates who will preside over this year’s crucial UN climate talks, will retain his roles as head of the country’s oil company and sustainable energy businesses, UAE has confirmed. Campaigners warn ‘breathtaking conflict of interest’ could jeopardise climate negotiating process
Exxon climate predictions were accurate decades ago. Still it sowed doubt
Decades of research by scientists at Exxon accurately predicted how much global warming would occur from burning fossil fuels, according to a new study in the journal Science. The findings clash with an enormously successful campaign that Exxon spearheaded and funded for more than 30 years that cast doubt on human-driven climate change and the science underpinning it. See more inthe handy climate documents site the ClimateFiles.
Can coal waste be used to make batteries?
Acid mine drainage has long been a scourge in Appalachia. Recent research suggests that we may be able to simultaneously clean up the pollution and extract the minerals and elements needed to power green technologies.
Here’s why everyone is freaking out over gas stoves this week
Gas stoves became the main character on Twitter this week. The current uproar was kicked off last week by the publication of new peer-reviewed research that attributed nearly 13 percent of all asthma cases in children in the U.S. to indoor air pollution caused by the burning of fossil gas in kitchens
Microsoft will soon push Xbox owners into energy-saving Shutdown mode
Microsoft is rolling out an update to Xbox consoles starting today that will automatically switch them to a power-saving Shutdown mode, instead of the more energy-hungry Sleep mode. Microsoft's post states that switching to Shutdown uses 20 times less power than Sleep, drawing 0.5 watts to charge and detect activity in controllers compared to 10–15 watts.
The green IT revolution: A blueprint for CIOs to combat climate change
McKinsey's latest report on Green Software was published in Sept 2022, but in January seeing the assumptions broadly panned by experts on Linkedin put it on the CAT Radar.
💼 Jobs
Remember only jobs listing salary ranges are listed here - to get your job listed, you need to list a salary range. Folks can still look in the #jobs channel.
Creative Commons Open Climate Data Manager - 9.1k -10.4k USD per month, 12 month contract - remote
Creative Commons is looking for an enthusiastic, well-organized and hardworking Open Climate Data Manager to facilitate the creation of a community-supported, long-term solution for the better sharing of large, distributed open climate datasets.