š CAT Newsletter #185 - 2023-08-27
Hey CATs,
Welcome to issue 185 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. New to CAT or looking to re-discover the community? Try out our onboarding checklist.
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Stay safe & healthy š š š±
CAT Community News
#ļøā£ Slack channel highlights: #cat-roulette channel refresh
As channel host Brett mentioned on Slack āĀ channel members have been removed from ourĀ #cat-rouletteĀ channel for our yearly refresh. š If you want to continue being a part of CAT Roulette, please rejoin it.
What is #cat-roulette? A Slack integration called Donut matches members of theĀ #cat-rouletteĀ channel every two weeks at random. Thoe matched CATs then pick a time when both/all can virtually meet in the following two weeks. It's a great way to get to know members of the CAT community. More info on Outline
The next matches are on Friday, September 1st.
š Book club events
Mary & Melissa hosted part 1 of our āHow to Blow Up a Pipelineā book club last Thursday. The group was surprised by some of the historic examples of violence in social movements. They questioned how important non-violence is to the climate movement and explored what benefits it brings and the group talked about how the learnings from the book might apply to the tech world.Ā Notes from the event can be found on Outline (log in with your CAT Slack details) here. Up next are event 2 & 3 in this series:
2ļøā£ Thu, Sep 7 at 5pm UTC / 1pm ET Ā·Ā Book Club āHow to Blow Up a Pipelineā Discussion 2Ā |Ā Add to GoogleCal
Join us onĀ Thurs, Sep 7, as we discussĀ Section 2: Breaking the Spell.Ā In this section, Malm advocates for sabotaging CO2-emitting devices to deter further investment, citing historical sabotage examples and differentiating property destruction from violence against people.
3ļøā£ Thu, Sep 21 at 5pm UTC / 1pm ET Ā·Ā Book Club āHow to Blow Up a Pipelineā Discussion 3Ā |Ā Add to GoogleCal
š¬ CAT videos
CAT videos, geddit? 10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to topics related to climate.
Planet A: Are short-haul flight bans just nonsense?
The shortest flight in Europe takes less than a minute ā and itās getting increasingly hard to justify emissions from such trips as the planet heats up. So, some countries in Europe have begun to outright ban certain routes. Will others follow? And ā will such bans make any difference at all?
ā Looking for volunteers
Co-host a summer book club (one-off)
If you want to not just read āHow to blow up a pipelineā this summer but help host a one-off CAT book club event, let us know in this thread.
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.
Wed Sep 13 2023 - How to win more and larger complex B2B deals (Megadeals)
Are you in a B2B ClimateTech trying to commercially scale but are experiencing challenges? The #Megadeals discipline, grounded in research and outlined in the book by the same name, offers strategies to navigate these B2B sales challenges effectively.
Wed Sep 20 2023 - Mission from MaRS: Announcing the Carbon Dioxide Removal Climate Champions
Join MaRS Discovery District as we launch our newest accelerator, and learn more about the 6 Canadian companies taking greenhouse gasses straight out of the air.
Wed Oct 04 2023 - Evergreen DeepTech Expo
]Wednesday, October 4th, Evergreen Climate Innovations will be hosting the DeepTech Expo! Join us to discover new impactful climate technologies, network with innovators, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders, and hear the latest on the regionās thriving innovation ecosystem.
Check #external-events in the CAT slack for more.
š¤ Podcasts
The Carbon Copy: As debate over carbon removal intensifies, the US steps up funding
A U.N. panel has expressed concern that carbon-removal technologies arenāt ready to scale. But the U.S. government is spending big bucks to support the industry. This week, Savvy Bowman, a program manager at ClearPath, joins us to explain what this all means for the future of carbon removal technologies and policies.
Catalyst with Shayle Khan: Navigating the electrification gauntlet
In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners. As we electrify the economy, adding gigafactories, charging stations and green hydrogen hubs to the grid, the demand for power is growing for the first time in decades. We face massive challenges to deliver the power needed for electrification: yearslong interconnection queues, a shortage of transformers, an uncertain regulatory environment ā the list goes on and on. Itās the electrification gauntlet. Can we make it through?
Zero: Methane leaks are the low-hanging fruit of the climate crisis
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 25-year period. However, it also degrades much more quickly than CO2, meaning cuts in emissions now can have a quick and significant effect on reducing global warming. On this bonus episode of Zero, producer Oscar Boyd talks with host Akshat Rathi about the methane problem and the ways to solve it.
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
Blog post: Power consumption of JPEG, WebP, and AVIF
Not a news story per se, but the #greener-webdev loved it. A deep dive into the resource impact of different image formats in web design, from fellow CAT @fershad. "Earlier this year, I worked on getting carbon emission estimates into the Firefox Profiler. Since then, Iāve had an itch to use the Profiler to test out the actual power usage of some stuff in the browser. In this post, Iāll be scratching the first of those itches - image formats."
Al Jazeera Mapping the scale of Canadaās record wildfires
Canada is battling more than 1,000 active fires, and nearly two-thirds of them are out of control. While Canada experiences fires every summer, this yearās blazes have scorched at least 15.3 million hectares (37.8 million acres) of land, nearly 10 times more than 2022 and roughly the size of New York state. An accessible backgrounder on the extent of wildfires in Canada, exacerbated by climate change
Nature: These veteran female activists are fighting a pivotal climate case with science
A group of more than 2,000 older women that has, this year, taken the Swiss government to the European Court of Human Rights over its climate-change policy. A win by the plaintiffs would be internationally significant. āA confirmation by the European Court of Human Rights of the adverse effects of climate change on our convention rights is bound to shape future climate action far beyond Switzerlandās borders, marking an important advance in the climate law-scape.ā Decisions about the three cases are expected by early 2024.
Republican candidates spark outrage with sweeping climate crisis denial at debate
Observers and experts were dismayed as seemingly all but one candidate onstage during the first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate seemed to deny the universal scientific consensus that human behaviour is causing the climate crisis.
Heatmap: How the Climate Fight Was Almost Lost
This is a personal account of the final days of the fight to pass the nationās first comprehensive climate law, and of how the Inflation Reduction Act remarkably arose from the ashes of near-defeat, by Jesse D. Jenkins, one ot eh
Canary Media: Your cheat sheet to the climate lawās consumer incentives
The Inflation Reduction Act has a bevy of programs to help you install everything from a heat pump to better insulation. Hereās how to navigate it all.
Ecuadorians vote to halt oil drilling in biodiverse Amazonian national park
Indigenous peoples Ecuadorians have voted in a historic referendum to halt the development of all new oilwells in the YasunĆ national park in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Voters opted to safeguard the unique biosphere by a margin of nearly 20% with more than 90% of the ballot counted ā with more than 58% in favour and 41% against, according to Ecuadorās National Electoral Comission. Voting took place in the first round of presidential elections on Sunday.
Pioneering wind-powered cargo ship sets sail
A cargo ship fitted with giant, rigid British-designed sails has set out on its maiden voyage. Shipping firm Cargill, which has chartered the vessel, hopes the technology will help the industry chart a course towards a greener future. The WindWings sails are designed to cut fuel consumption and therefore shipping's carbon footprint.
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.
Cercula - Software Developer - Up to Ā£55,000 - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok
Cercula is an award-winning construction tech & sustainability startup, working towards the decarbonisation of the construction industry. In short, we take a list of materials for a construction project, match each one in our database of materials carbon data, and produce a report on the building's whole-life carbon impact. We're looking for experienced developers to work on our API and databases, at the core of Cercula's business, as well as on our user-facing front-end and AWS deployment. Our stack is primarily TypeScript and Postgres on AWS (including serverless). If you are interested in social and climate change, and want to contribute to solving major environmental problems by decarbonising a high-impact industry, please reach out!
Overstory - Full-stack software engineer - 60-75k eur - Permanent - Totally remote
Full-stack software engineer role to create web appls and data visualizations - mostly of trees! Vegetation is the single greatest contributor to power outages and wildfires caused by our electric grid. Overstory provides utilities with visibility, risk analysis, and optimization recommendations for vegetation management, using machine learning and satellite imagery. Overstory is a flexible and diverse remote-first climate tech startup and this role would suit someone with experience with deep tech / remote sensing / cartography / GIS especially but these arenāt essential.
Revalu Impact AG (IT partner: i-ways) - Multiple - 15 - 25 LPA - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok
Revalu Impact AG is an Indo-European start up with a focus on Sustainability in buildings- sector. As part of expanding our teams in India, we are partnering with our IT partner, I-WAYS to recruit multiple senior developers.
Deep Science Ventures - n/a - 50k GBP - Founder in Residence - Flexible - remote ok
Deep Science Ventures is looking for a Founder in Residence to lead the development of a decarbonisation insights platform for industrial plants and help avert 7.5 Gt of CO2 emissions/year. The software developer/data scientist will develop a technical platform that can perform quick techno-economic analysis to allow companies to formulate a decarbonisation strategy and implement it easily for their manufacturing plant.
Open Supply Hub (OS Hub) - Principal Gifts Officer - 80-90,000 USD - Permanent - Totally remote
Open Supply Hubās Principal Gifts Officer is an exciting new role in the global Business Development team. Reporting to the Business Development Director, this role will lead on income generation from principal donors (in particular large institutional donors including private foundations and governmental donors). This is a relatively nascent fundraising area for OS Hub and will involve all aspects of the funding cycle from research and outreach to grant management, reporting, and stewardship. While the portfolio grows, the successful candidate will support the BD Director in all areas of business development and fundraising, including strategy and systems development, developing communications materials for new business, new business research, and proposal writing for all funding disciplines.
Vayda - Growth Specialist - $70-110K (+equity and performance bonus) - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok
Our team is looking for a Growth Specialist! This is the only marketing role in our team, currently - so an opportunity to grow with the function. Vayda is a technology & services company accelerating the transition to regenerative agriculture - we operate our own commercial scale proving ground farms! We are a Series A company backed by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and a Public Benefit Corporation on track to being a B Corp.We are working in the ag industry, so it is heavily B2B focused. Ag industry experience is a plus, but not required.
Vayda - Fractional Engineering Lead - $100-200/hr depending on experience - Contract - Flexible - remote ok
Hi everyone! We are hiring our first Eng Leader on a fractional basis to drive development of a data-centric product in the regenerative agriculture and climate space, building off of the company's direct knowledge and experience in regenerative farm operations. The company is a Series A startup backed directly by institutional investors (lead: Ontario Teachers Pension Plan).
Carbonara - Multiple - $120k-$180k - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok
Carbonara is a fast-growing tech company building a sustainable future by empowering companies to reduce their carbon footprint.. Our mission is to minimize the environmental impact of technology by automatically measuring and recommending actionable code and infrastructure optimizations.
As a Full Stack Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, developing, and maintaining our cloud-based systems and large-scale platforms. Your expertise in system design, data pipelines, and distributed systems will be instrumental in shaping the future of our products. You will have the opportunity to work with a talented and passionate team, contributing to projects that drive meaningful change.
Sirona Technologies - Machine Designer - 40k-80k - Permanent - Onsite only
At Sirona Technologies, we are developing direct air capture (DAC) technology to remove CO2 from the air and combat climate change. We are a young startup in the R&D phase, scaling up our lab prototype into larger and larger machines.
Singularity Energy - Multiple - $100k-$140k, 0.02%-0.2% equity - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok
In order to decarbonize the grid, the world needs better carbon data and analytics. To support this mission, Singularity Energy is building the world's highest quality view of historical, real-time, and forecasted grid carbon emissions. Today, grid carbon data is siloed, outdated, and lacks spatial and temporal granularity, and with new climate pledges and decarbonization plans being announced every day, there is a tremendous need to get the underlying data right. We started by launching a data and analytics platform (with 1B+ data points and growing) that helps companies build carbon-aware products, and we're looking to grow our team in order to improve the sophistication of our offerings and expand our capabilities to become the 'carbon intelligence layer' for grid operators, utilities, companies, and service providers to build data-driven decarbonization solutions.
Alder & Co. - MID-SENIOR COPYWRITER - $70k-$90k depending on experience - Contract-to-hire - Totally remote
Alder is a woman- and minority-owned strategic brand marketing agency focused exclusively on climate tech. By joining Alder as a copywriter, you'll help our clients scale their impact and propel your career in marketing for mission-driven companies and learn from the best in our industry.
AimHi Earth - Engineering Lead - Climate EdTech - Ā£65,000 - Permanent - Totally remote
Wildfires are raging, floods are displacing tens of millions, tropical diseases are intensifying, crops are failing, and nature is collapsing. The climate and nature emergency is just beginning. At AimHi Earth, weāre working to slow and then reverse it - to bring human systems into line with the natural limits of our only home. We combine technology and digital experience design to deliver scalable online experiences that rapidly shift mindsets and behaviours, upskilling and empowering people to take ownership and transform complex systems.
Weāre currently affecting hundreds of thousands. We want you to help us to take that to hundreds of millions.
Icebreaker One - Market Researcher (Carbon Calculators) - Up to Ā£600/day - Contract - Totally remote
Icebreaker One (IB1) is a UK-headquartered research & innovation not-for-profit accelerating the data sharing required for the transition to net zero. IB1 is working with the British Business Bank to gain a market view of carbon calculator solutions available for SMEs to inform whether it is possible for SME lending to require mandatory carbon calculations as part of the financing. Weāre looking for someone to conduct market research to understand the landscape of carbon calculator options available to SMEs. The contract is for 24 days until November 2023.