October 22, 2023

🌍 CAT Newsletter #193 - 2023-10-22

CAT 193 - 2023-10-22

Hey CATs,

Welcome to issue 193 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.

Remember you can unsubscribe from this newsletter at any time - the link is at the bottom.

Stay safe & healthy 😌 💚 🐱

CAT Community News

🐾 Show your CAT PAWS

What did you get up to in 2023? Share Projects, Actions, Wins, or Stuff you learned at CAT (PAWS!) by adding a slide to our CAT member PAWS presentation. These slides will be part of our 2023 - year in review presentation which is shared and celebrated publicly and in our end of year events (eastern-friendly | western-friendly).

Some examples of what you might want to share: A talk you held this year (like N who talked at this weeks’ Design for Planet festival), a green win in your company (like T who shared that his employer now has an official methodology for estimating carbon emissions of their projects), or something you learned from a CAT Slack post or from our events (like learnings from the summer book club that M hosted).

🪙 Apply for a mini grants

Got a project in mind for 2024? Applications are open for our next round of mini grants! Apply through this form and your project will be evaluated in December. More info

#️⃣ Slack channel highlight

• #behaviour-psychology: A shared the Climate Emotions Wheel. How are you currently feeling? Where do you land on the wheel? Share in the thread

• #greener-infra: C is looking for folks to share their thoughts on this paper about the growing energy footprint of AI. Have a read or check out an article citing the paper and share your thoughts in the thread

📅 Online CAT events for the rest of the year

▶️ Thu, Nov 2 - Americas, Europe, Africa: Watch Party: Workplace organising in the tech industry

🎉 Tue, Nov 21 - Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania: CAT 2023 – year in review and celebration (share your 2023 project/win/action here)

🎉 Thu, Dec 14 - Americas, Europe, Africa: CAT 2023 – year in review and celebration (share your 2023 project/win/action here)

🍩 Community networking

Our next round of #cat-roulette matches will go out on Fri, Oct 27! Join the channel, pick your region and Donut matches you with other channel members every other week! More info

🌱 A cutting from Branch

Issue 6 - Indigenous just transition(s) and visionary work: An interview with Heather Milton-Lightening

How can we build new worlds, and find the sweet spots for innovation? In this interview, we speak with consultant Heather Milton-Lightening about her organization, just transition work, and how innovation can help us create the futures we want even ‘when the sky is falling’.

🎬 CAT videos

CAT videos, geddit? 10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.

Vox: The race to mine the bottom of the ocean

This video explains the history and the debate over mining metals in the deep sea and why one Canadian company, The Metals Company, is leading the rush there. There are huge environmental implications for digging up seafloor ecosystems as well as ethical ones: Metal-rich zones like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone lie in international waters that technically belong to everyone. Our land-based deposits have met our needs so far, but it’s unclear whether they will continue to, or whether we’ll want to keep destroying the environment to do so.

✋ Looking for volunteers

📅 CAT online event volunteer • minimum 2hrs / month

Help organise and/or run our online events. You can sign up to do this for just a few months or stick around for longer.

📆 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 Oct 25 2023 - Berlin Climate Tech Drinks

Meet collaborators and make friends at a monthly Berlin-based relaxed drinks meet-up for anyone working in or interested in Climate Tech!

Thu Nov 09 2023 - Climate x Deep Tech Happy Hour #15

​For those of you in Paris we meet in-person every month to chat about climate, deeptech, science and entrepreneurship. Attendees typically include Founders, scientists, engineers, operators, investors, etc.

Can't wait to meet you there!

Thu Nov 23 2023 - SDIA Green Coding Summit

The SDIA Green Coding Summit, 23-24 November 2023 in Berlin, invites you to join the leading experts and communities brought together in one historic location to advance a shared roadmap for Green Coding, with talks and free workshops from world experts in the field.

Check #external-events in the CAT slack for more.

🎤 Podcasts

The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs

Environment Variables: The Week in Green Software - Net Zero Cloud

This week, join host Chris Adams in a conversation with Tereze Gaile, global Sustainability SME at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company. Together they cover topics in sustainability from her organic sustainability role at MuleSoft, to various tools that are available to aid in the decarbonization of software. They touch on resources to help you learn important concepts and skills, how to bring sustainability into an organization, and much more on this episode of TWiGS.

Zero: Peak oil is here. Well, maybe

Peak oil is here, or is it? Depends on how you measure, but at least one person is sure crude isn’t coming back. This week Akshat speaks with Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling about why he thinks the world has reached peak crude oil demand, what comes next, and what it all has to do with the American soap opera Dallas. 

Outrage and Optimism: 217. Greening Shipping

Ahoy! With Christiana at the helm this week we’re raising our anchor and charting a course into the fascinating and complex world of greening shipping.

We’ll hear how 90% of what we consume, wear and use in our homes comes to us via a ship. And how the predominant use of dirty fossil fuels means that the shipping industry currently contributes around 3% of the world’s global CO2 - that’s the same as the whole of Germany or Japan’s emissions.

GreenIO #25 - W3C Sustainability Guidelines with Ines Akrap and Lukasz Mastalerz

On August 31st this year, the W3C released its first ever Sustainability Guidelines (draft version). Ines Akrape and Lukas Mastalerz, two of its core contributors, share insider insights in this episode on how it will impact the way of working for millions of web developers, designers, ops and data folks.

📰 News Highlights

Verge: Google wants to be at the center of all your climate change decisions

Another wide-ranging set of announcements from the tech giant aimed at helping people and organizations shrink their carbon footprint.

Mysociety: Council climate scorecards are back — and this time they’re measuring action

Today, we’re happy to join in the excitement around the launch of the Council Climate Action Scorecards.

Just over 18 months ago, we were pointing at the first iteration of this work by Climate Emergency UK (CE UK), which marked every council’s climate action plan according to a detailed schema. Back then, we were impressed by the scale and quality of what they’d pulled off, and pleased to have been a partner in delivering the work. But if that was impressive, what’s been achieved this time around is even more so. While climate action plans are simple documents, with all the information in one place, unpicking how climate action is progressing at the local government level is a much more complicated matter. 

Datacentre Dynamics: Meta resumes construction of Texas and Idaho data centers with new AI design

Meta has restarted construction at its data centers in Temple, Texas, and Kuna, Idaho. The Facebook company stopped construction at Temple back in December 2022, amid a global pause of data center projects first reported by DCD. The "data center will represent an investment of more than $800 million and support approximately 100 operational jobs," the company says.

Ars Technica: Hydro dams are struggling to handle the world’s intensifying weather

Climate change is robbing some hydro dams of water while oversupplying others.

Carbon Brief: Rubber drives ‘at least twice’ as much deforestation as previously thought

The clearing of forests for growing rubber “has been substantially underestimated” in figures used to develop policy on deforestation, new research finds. The study, published in Nature, uses satellite data to produce high-resolution maps of rubber-driven forest loss in south-east Asia since 1993. It finds that more than 4m hectares of tropical forests have been lost to rubber plantations in south-east Asia over the last three decades – at least two-to-three times more than previously thought.

Business Insider: Data centers are sprouting up as a result of the AI boom, minting fortunes, sucking up energy, and changing rural America

It's less than a year since ChatGPT launched to the public, triggering a boom in artificial intelligence investments, and forever changing our comprehension of the technology. And while the rise of AI has already changed our digital realities, it's also beginning to impact our physical world, too.

Grist: Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels

Meeting the Biden administration’s goal for the United States to be a net-zero greenhouse gas emitter by 2050 is a monumental challenge that must be tackled at an even more daunting pace. But the nation’s top scientists envisioned that future and laid out a plan for realizing it in a report released on Tuesday. 

The Atlantic: If You’re Worried About the Climate, Move Your Money

As many people as possible need to act like we are in a world worth saving. Becoming part of the divestment movement and greening your 401(k) is a quick and underappreciated way to do that.

💼 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.

Ecosia - Platform Engineer - €62,000 to €76,000 - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

We are looking for a Platform Engineer (all genders) with expertise in cloud-native application development and in developer experience best practices to join us remotely or in our Berlin office. As an engineer on our remote-first (comfortable working within and adjacent to the CET time zone) Platform team, you will improve & scale Ecosia’s cloud infrastructure and make development frictionless and operationally safe.

Elemental Excelerator - Director of Innovation (Industry & Water) - $97,400 - $163,500 USD - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

For this position, we are looking for an individual who can help develop a set of investment themes, recruit companies, design projects, manage deliverables and reporting, provide thought partnerships on portfolio company strategy, and work with the other Directors of Innovation across sectors and organization functions. This role will focus on Elemental’s companies across the industry, drinking water and wastewater portfolios, and will report to the Managing Director, Portfolio.

QuantumScape - multiple roles - Salary ranges from $116k to $213k - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

We develop improved batteries for electric vehicles that could lengthen range, decrease charging time, improve safety, and be more recyclable than lithium ion batteries. We are hiring in a number of roles, including cybersecurity, data science, data engineering, and software engineering.

Marble - Founder, Critical Minerals (Mining / Refining / Geology) - €2,500 to €3,000 per month - Contract - Flexible - remote ok

We're hiring mining innovators to create new mining companies for critical minerals in the energy transition! At Marble, we're deeply involved in this field and confident in the opportunity to foster new mining champions! We seek entrepreneurial scientists with deep technical expertise with critical minerals. Our next Founders-in-Residence cohort starts late November in Paris.

Icebreaker One - Multiple - See job descriptions - 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. We have three roles available:

• Open Engagement Manager (Strategic Innovation Projects) Up to £350/day, 3 days/wk, Oct-Mar
• Technical Analyst (Granular weather data for asset management) Up to £500/day, Up to 2 days/wk, Oct-Mar
• Technical Analyst (Grid Connections Project) Up to £500/day, Up to 2 days/wk, Oct-Mar

Please visit the website for details of each role. The deadline for applications for all three roles is 0900 BST, Monday 16 October.

We’re launching the Catalyst Fund to support the burgeoning ecosystem of actors working on the intersection of digital rights and climate justice to build cross-territorial strategies and weave thematic threads across movements.

Green Screen Coalition Catalyst Fund - up to 40k USD project funding - Project based - Remote OK

We’re launching the Catalyst Fund to support the burgeoning ecosystem of actors working on the intersection of digital rights and climate justice to build cross-territorial strategies and weave thematic threads across movements. The Fund seeks to support proposals addressing a range of issues and a range of different scopes. The grant period will be no longer than one year and with a total grant amount between $10k and $40k with three tiers.