š CAT Newsletter #207 - 2024-02-18
Hey CATs,
Welcome to issue 207 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 outĀ our onboarding checklist.
Remember you can unsubscribe from this newsletter at any time - the link is at the bottom.
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CAT Community News
š Get involved
- 3min:Ā Submit a reflectionĀ on what makes climate tech imperfectly beautiful to you.
- 10min:Ā DonateĀ via OpenCollective
- 30min+:Ā Become a volunteer! We're looking forĀ content / wiki editors,Ā Slack moderators, and for folks who canĀ help put together these community news.
š° Mini grants
We're happy to celebrate the conclusion of our first mini grant project.Ā :tada: @Mark ButcherĀ wrote a blog post sharing his research findings:Ā Sustainability, a surprisingly successful KPI: GreenOps survey results.
And we'reĀ kicking off our next round of mini grantsĀ with two funded projects this time round:
1ļøā£ Sustainable AI manifesto: Reach out toĀ @abhishekĀ if you want to get involved or learn more.
2ļøā£ "How to become a Climate-Conscious Product Manager" case studies and CAT conference:Ā Reach out toĀ @FranƧois BurraĀ andĀ @Antoine CabotĀ to learn more and get involved.
Find more information about the projectsĀ |Ā More about mini grantsĀ |Ā Apply for a grantĀ (next evaluation is in March)
The mini-grant program is funded by CAT donations. If you want to see more of these, donating via OpenCollective is the fastest easiest way to support this work.
š CAT events
š Mon, Feb 26 - London [in person]:Ā CAT co-owned event with Code Green London
šŗ Wed, Feb 28 - Americas, Europe, Africa:Ā CAT Open Organizing meetingĀ [more info]
š¬ Wed, Feb 28 - Americas, Europe, Africa:Ā Presentation discussion: Building a Greener Web
š Thu, Feb 29 - Munich [in person]:Ā CAT meetup
Other local events were shared inĀ #local-chicagoĀ andĀ #local-san-francisco-bay-area
š© Community networking
Get to know other CATs and make some friends in the community.Ā Every 2 weeks, we match 2-3 CATs so you can connect over a quick 30-minute call. Simply joinĀ #cat-roulette, pick your region and wait for a message fromĀ DonutĀ about your match! Our next round of matches will go out onĀ Fri, Mar 1. More info
Media, events, and news
šŗ CAT recommendations
š± A cutting from Branch
Open call for Branch Issue 8 (Spring 2024)
The next issue of Branch will be released at the end of April 2024 and sets out to explore the theme 'Finding beauty in the imperfect'. We'd love to hear your reflections on what makes climate tech imperfectly beautiful to you. Our aim through collecting these reflections is to present a set of short, diverse perspectives and stimulate exploration. There are no right or wrong answers, and the phrase "climate tech" is deliberately open for you to freely interpret.
ā¶ļø CAT videos
10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.
Planet A: How India wants to (literally) fix e-waste
Electronic waste is one of the fastest growing types of rubbish on the planet. India, which is becoming ultra digital, is trying an old trick in new ways to deal with its growing and dangerous dump yards. We dive in to learn more.
š¤Ā Podcasts
The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs
Catalyst with Shayle Khan: 2024 trends, part 2: ESG, carbon certifications, curtailment, and AI
There was so much to talk about in Nat Bullard's 200-page slide deck on 2024's biggest decarbonization trends that we broke the conversation into two parts. Shayle and Nat cover topics like: How ESG has become the new third rail of finance, Whether you can have too many carbon certification standards, how biodiesel is eating up Europe's biofuel supply and more
Carbon copy: A dive into the different business models shaping virtual power plants
If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants.Ā The ideas has been around for nearly 30 years, but as the US faces a dramatic increase in peak demand by 2030 ā the urgency for deploying them has increased. This week on The Carbon Copy, we spoke with DOE's Jen Downing about the different ways that virtual power plants are getting built ā and the need to build many more.
Environment Variables: Greening Serverless
Chris Adams is joined by special guest Kate Goldenring, Senior Software Engineer at Fermyon. Together, they ask the real questions "is serverless computing the greener choice?" and "if so, under what circumstances is this true?" Tune in for an illuminating conversation on the current state, news, and future of green computing, digging into the topics of cloud computing, soft allocation, WebAssembly, and more. See also the shownotes and transcript on github, where PR are gratefully accepted.
Greenio #32 - How systemic thinking can empower sustainable design? With Sylvie Daumal and Thorsten Jonas
How can we make systemic design operational for sustainable design? Systemic design is dedicated to handling complex systems, complex questions, and complex issues. In this episode, we dive deep into the world of systemic design and how it can help us increase digital sustainability. Don't miss out on insights from Sylvie Daumal (acclaimed author of 'Design d'expƩrience utilisateur' ) and Thorsten Jonas (founder of the Sustainable UX Network)
š Submitted events
Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it in the newsletter.
Thu Feb 22 2024 - Gallery Debate Nights: Climate Series
Welcome to a special evening of Climate Debates at the Strike-Slip Gallery opening. This is the event, where we put away our titles and come together as friends, who have a lot to say about the current state of environment. Let's debate and spark transformative ideas together
Thu Apr 25 2024 - Eco Compute 2024
Discover EcoCompute, the first engineering conference on sustainability in hardware & software! Join us in Munich on April 25-26 at the House of Communication. Immerse in cutting-edge talks, connect with industry leaders, explore practical solutions. https://www.eco-compute.io/
Wed Mar 06 2024 - Business & Open SDGs data - A Hack Day
Wikirate is celebrating Open Data Day at its Berlin offices on March 6, with a hackathon investigating how German companies contribute to SDGs. The event is open to everyone passionate about sustainability, including developers who can leverage Wikirate's API.
Check #external-events in the CAT slack for more.
š° News Highlights
As an experiment, we're trying a new format for new highlights this week. We'll add a line explaining why the story is interesting, followed by a an intro of quote from the piece. Let us know if it helps!
The Guardian: February on course to break unprecedented number of heat records
While we're coming to the end of an El NiƱo that led to unprecedented high temperatures in 2023, spring is giving a preview of what 2C of warming looks like globally. March is typically the hottest time of the year for oceans because it is late summer in the southern hemisphere, and while El NiƱo weakening should ease temperatures in the equatorial Pacific from late spring or early summer, if the North Atlantic remains warm at that time, this could herald intense hurricane activity.
In the past week, monitoring stations as far apart as South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Japan, North Korea, the Maldives and Belize have registered monthly heat records. Morocco had seen 12 weather stations register over 33.9C, which was not only a national record for the hottest winter day, but also more than 5C above average for July.
Transport and Environment: Inventing the ā¬100 a month electric car
In the West, car makers have largely been selling larger, more expensive, high-profit-margin EVs over higher volumes of smaller, more accessible cars, and government schemes have often ended up subsidising these for already wealthy groups. This details a scheme designed to reach lower income groups for an more inclusive transition, and how it can be funded.
Populists like to portray the climate transition as a ploy by the cava sipping, Tesla driving elites. They're wrong to oppose climate action but they are right that we need a revolution in the way we think about clean energy support. EVs are a great place to start. The French and their social leasing plan, may well have found the solution.
Climate Home News: Switzerland proposes first UN expert group on solar geoengineering
For folks thinking "Yikes" when they read this, see this thread in the CAT slack for further discussion
Switzerland wants to advance global talks on whether controversial solar geoengineering techniques should be used to compensate for climate change by cooling down the earth. It is proposing to create the first United Nations expert group to "examine risks and opportunities" of solar radiation management (SRM), a suite of largely untested technologies aimed at dimming the sun.
Carbon Brief: Unwraping the mystery over 'unexpectedly large' emissions from Africa's tropical ecosystems
Fascinating deep dive into how more much research is needed into GHG emissions in Africa:
A few years ago, scientists studying satellite data discovered that there was an "unexpectedly large" source of CO2 emissions coming from tropical Africa, particularly over parts of Ethiopia and South Sudan. This mysterious emissions source was so large, in fact, that if this region were a country, it would have been the second-largest emitter in the world, after China, in 2016 ā releasing a total of 6bn tonnes of CO2, according to the study. Now, newer research calls these results into questionā¦ With neither study using data taken on the ground in Africa nor including African scientists, authors on both papers acknowledge the need for ground-based CO2 measurements to help solve the mystery.
Mysociety: The Local Intelligence Hub: our latest launch helps you put climate on the agenda
An innovative, replicable use of open source software, open data about politician voting records, to put climate on the agenda, in the year that 4bn people globally vote in national elections:
mySociety worked in collaboration with The Climate Coalition, supported by Green Alliance to develop this site. The aim is to help you ā whether you're a citizen, climate campaigner or part of an organisation ā to understand and share the places where there is a strong mandate for environmental action, ensuring commitments to climate and nature are put firmly onto party manifestos. We've demoed it in front of organisations who've told us it's a total gamechanger! But enough words ā let's get straight to the action. Watch these short videos and you'll immediately grasp the power of the Local Intelligence Hub.
Canary Media: EDF and Google partner to map global methane emissions fromĀ space
Methane is more than 50x worse for global warming than carbon dioxide, and consistently underreported by firms. This provides a long overdue degree of visibility - which has been one of the big blockers for solutions.
MethaneSat is one of the most ambitious attempts to measure the world's massive methane problem. Its first satellite is scheduled to launch into orbit nextĀ month. By this time next year, aĀ new satellite will be detecting how much methane is leaking from oil and gas wells, pumps, pipelines and storage tanks around the world ā and companies, governments and nonprofit groups will be able to access all of its data via Google Maps.
Datacentre News: Opera to launch green AI cluster in Iceland by 2024
Google has recently baked new tracking features into Chrome that you can't turn off, and Mozilla has a new CEO, with a new intention of putting AI into the browsing experience. In this context, to get an idea of where browsing might be going, it's worth seeing what Opera, the pioneers of tabbed browsing, is doing, in this field, as they have had built in AI features in the form of Aria for a while already.
Opera, a Nordic firm recognised for its innovations in the browser development field, has stated its intention to set up a new artificial intelligence (AI) cluster located in Keflavik, Iceland. What sets this system apart is its complete reliance on green energy, marking a significant step in fostering environmentally conscious, high-tech development.
ClimateActionTech: Sustainability, a surprisingly successful KPI: GreenOps survey results
The findings from the first project supported by the CAT mini-grant fund is live, in the form of research you can use to share about how a drive to incorporating an awareness of climate manifests in the work of technologists. For the nerds: The underlying questions and data are linked for your own analysis too.
The survey got 2,680 responses from all corners of the globe, covering a diverse range of roles.Ā The results make fascinating reading, highlighting changing priorities, evolving motivations, and importantly showcasing how personal commitments and ethical beliefs are beginning to shape the future of IT.Ā
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.
TransitionZero - Product Manager - Ā£ 44,286.17 - Ā£51,808.55 - Permanent - Onsite only
We are a climate analytics not-for-profit established in 2021. We're building easy to use energy transition modelling software to give governments, businesses and investors the tools to understand and decide how to transition to carbon free energy. The Product Manager will work collaboratively with the Head of Product on the product strategy and roadmap for our energy systems modelling software. A key aspect of the role will be to drive usage of and engagement with the product.
TransitionZero - Product Owner - Ā£44,286.17 - Ā£51,808.55 - Permanent - Onsite only
We are a climate analytics not-for-profit established in 2021. We're building easy to use energy transition modelling software to give governments, businesses and investors the tools to understand and decide how to transition to carbon free energy. The Product Owner will work collaboratively with the Head of Product on our energy systems modelling software to collate, analyse, prioritise and translate requirements into user stories and detailed specifications for implementation by front-end and back-end development teams.
Support our work
You can support us financially onĀ Open Collective.