š CAT Newsletter 220 - 2024-05-19
CAT 220 - 2024-05-19
Hey CATs,
Welcome to issue 220 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.
Stay safe & healthy š š š±
CAT Community News
š Get involved
Our fundedĀ mini grantĀ projectĀ "How to become a Climate-Conscious Product Manager" case studies and CAT conferenceĀ is now looking for case studies - practical examples to bring the theory to life and inspire action.Ā Share your storyĀ if you've taken any actions towards making your digital product and/or organization more climate conscious and more sustainable (successfully or not), we'd love to hear from you. Submit your case study here, and we'll review for potential inclusion the next version of the Playbook:Ā https://forms.gle/R4vEgtRLcZD3TxjW7
#ļøā£ Slack channel highlights
_In light of some queries raised the #community-feedback-channel, and online, we have requested an opt-out from Slack's processing of customer data in their global models. You can see more of the discussion in slack _
#greener-design:Ā M shared theĀ Manifesto for a Humane WebĀ inĀ this post
#greener-games:Ā E started aĀ discussion on cloud gaming
#greener-marketing: O reflected onĀ an articleĀ featured in a past CAT newsletter and asked a question about digital greenwashing. What do you think of the examples? How are you attempting to apply the recommended advice to avoid greenwashing?Ā Join the discussion in the thread.
#greener-data-ai:Ā A shared a proposal forĀ Energy Star Ratings for AI ModelsĀ inĀ this post
ā¤ļø Help a CAT
AĀ askedĀ Does anyone know about a product/service that introduces green tech principles for new employees?
š§ Knowledge base deepdive
Green Teams: Interested in starting a green team or project at your workplace? Log into the CAT knowledge base with your CAT Slack account to explore resources and tips from fellow CATs who have done it before.
š CAT events
Tue, May 21 - Vienna [in person]:Ā CAT meetup
Tue, May 28 - London [in person]:Ā Code Green London May Meetup (Community Organised Event)
Other local events were shared inĀ #local-london,Ā #local-italy, andĀ #local-aotearoa
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, May 24. More info
Media, events, and news
šŗ CAT recommendations
š± A cutting from Branch issue 8
What can digital sustainability learn from accessibility?
"We are becoming ever more aware of the impact we have on our environment, and the effect our digital experiences have on it. But we're 25 years behind accessibility when it comes to creating clear standards on how we can ensure our online creations aren't detrimental to the planet."
"Thankfully this is changing, and as with many things relating to the web, it's changing quickly. We have a draft version of the new Web Sustainability Guidelines."
ā¶ļø CAT videos
10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.
Planet A: Why electric planes may never go big
Electric planes are silent, cheap to operate and would be a great solution to a lot of aviation's problems including air and noise pollution. And they seem to be on the cusp of going commercial. I flew in the first ever e-plane certified to take off to figure out whether we will all soon be flying electric.
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
Outrage and Optimism: 246. Trump's Oily Offer, Mobilizing Young Climate Voters and The State of Scientists
This week, with Tom away, our hosts are joined by Dr. Sweta Chakraborty, Climate Behavioural Scientist & CEO of North America, We Don't Have Time. Together they wrestle on the spectrum of outrage and optimism with the news of Trump's message to oil and gas executives, the part young people play in the climate vote and what impact the survey of IPCC scientists published in the Guardian had on the global community.
Catalyst with Shayle Khan: Delta's chief sustainability officer on the early days of buying sustainable aviation fuels
Airlines are lining up to buy as much sustainable aviation fuel as they can, despite it costing two to three times more than conventional jet fuel, according to BloombergNEF.
United Airlines has secured 2.9 billion gallons of SAF, and others like Delta, Air France-KLM, and Southwest have secured around 1 billion gallons each. And yet to meaningfully decarbonize aviation, the SAF market needs to grow thousands of times larger than it is today. BNEF estimates that global production capacity will grow 10-fold by 2030, but by then supply will still only meet 5% of jet fuel demand. So how are airlines thinking about scaling up their procurement of SAF?
Environment Variables: Greening Software Procurement
Joining Chris Adams today is Mike Gifford, an accessibility and open web veteran, to look at the drivers adopting digital sustainability in the industry, learn from the field of accessibility and inclusive design how we can further sustainable software development. Mike tells us about the wins from the accessibility movement that we can learn from in this engaging episode.
Green IO #38 - Building Green Software with Sara Bergman
What are the main angles to be covered when you truly want to design, run, and sometimes decommission, software, in the greenest possible way? šļø In this episode, Sara Bergman, a seasoned software engineer and one of the acclaimed co-authors of the O'Reilly book "Building Green Software" joins Gael Duez to discuss the book, and more specifically the chapters on AI, measurements, and hardware
Datacentre Dynamics Zero Downtime: Episode 54 - Industry-wide sustainability with John Booth, Carbon3IT
Sustainability needs to be applied at all levels of the data center industry, and we are not doing enough, says John Booth of Carbon3IT. In this episode of Zero Downtime, we sit down with sustainability consultant John Booth to talk about how he got where he is in his career, and the fundamental sustainability issues that he is seeing in the data center industry. We also talk about a past trip to Belarus that proved more exciting than expected.Ā Tune in now for the latest episode.
Volts: Envisioning a more democratic, bottom-up energy system
In this episode, California electricity guru Lorenzo Kristov shares his vision of a just, democratic, "bottom-up" grid based in distributed local energy. Kristov was a principal at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which runs California's electricity grid, for more than 18 years. He left in 2017 to become an independent consultant, analyst, and all-around electricity guru.
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 May 23 2024 - Greening the Bid: Strategies for Addressing Sustainability in RFP Responses
āAre you a small or mid-size company facing mounting inquiries from larger corporations about your environmental practices? Are you feeling the pressure to provide sustainability data but unsure where to start?
Wed May 29 2024 - Green Software Ireland Launch
This meetup will be the jumping off point for our new community. We can discuss the ideas and goals of green software, what it means to us, what we want from a community like this and ideas for future events.
Thu May 30 2024 - Introduction to Digital Sustainability Workshop
This in-person workshop in Brighton on 30 May will pilot a Digital Sustainability Strategy card game. All welcome and free to participate, but places are limited. We'll explore the use of creativity and play to increase awareness and share best practice around sustainable ICT.
Fri May 31 2024 - ClimateCon! Boulder 2024
ClimateCon! is a launchpad that brings people together ā in person and online ā to boost collective action on climate change.
š° News Highlights
Links to discuss each story in the CAT salck
The independent: Freak April heatwave in Southeast Asia 'virtually impossible' without climate crisis
Scientists say heatwaves are now 45 times more likely in South Asia, making life tougher for millions living in poverty. The brutal heatwaves sweeping across Asia this year were made much more extreme due to the human-induced climate crisis, a new study has found. Since the beginning of April, dozens of countries in Asia from India to the Philippines have seen record-high temperatures leading to school closures and the triggering of urgent health warnings across the region. (discuss this in slack)
Deutsche Welle: German government must amend climate plan, court rules
A major state-supported environmental group won a suit against the German government, which will have to improve its climate protection plan after the court found it insufficient to achieve the country's climate goals. (discuss this in slack)
Carbon Brief: Clean cooking - What new global pledge means for climate, nature and gender goals
At an International Energy Agency (IEA) summit attended on Tuesday by heads of state and ministers from 27 countries, a total of $2.2bn was pledged to boost uptake of clean cooking technologies. Ensuring global access to clean cooking by 2030 could save 2.5 million people ā mostly women and children ā from premature deaths associated with breathing fire smoke, the IEA says. It could also save 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), around the same as a year of global shipping and aviation emissions. (discuss this in slack)
Climate Tech VC: A climate tech world tour
we're going to be asking the tool to answer a basic question ā does climate tech investment vary by geography? Zooming in, distinct local nuances emerge as regional trends start to diverge from each other, and sometimes, those global Big Three.
We pulled the data (find our methodology at the end of this piece) and to understand why it looks this way, we spoke with local investors and founders about what's driving these varying concentrations of climate tech. (discuss this in slack)
The Register: Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI
Microsoft has increased carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 30 percent since 2020, making its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030 even more difficult, and it looks like AI is to blame.
The Redmond IT giant says that its CO2 emissions are up 29.1 percent from the 2020 baseline, and this is largely due to indirect emissions (Scope 3) from the construction and provisioning of more datacenters to meet customer demand for cloud services. These figures come from Microsoft's 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report [PDF], which covers the corp's FY2023 ended June 30, 2023. This encompasses a period when Microsoft started ramping up AI support following the explosion of interest in OpenAI and ChatGPT. (discuss this in slack)
Grist: Microsoft employees spent years fighting the tech giant's oil ties. Now, they're speaking out.
Inside the worker-led effort to get the world's most valuable company to stop helping the oil and gas industry drill. For nearly a decade, Holly Alpine (nƩe Beale) loved working at Microsoft. Shortly after finishing college, in July 2014, she landed a job there as a technical account manager. Less than four years later, Alpine was leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft's data centers are located. But at the end of last year, Alpine reached a painful decision: She could no longer ethically work at Microsoft. Writing on behalf of herself and a colleague who resigned at the same time, Alpine told the tech giant's top brass that the two were quitting in "no small part" due to Microsoft's work for the fossil fuel industry aimed at automating and accelerating oil extraction. (discuss this story in slack)
Hugging Face: Energy Star Ratings for AI Models
For each query sent to an AI model, we also use energy, whether it be locally on our computer or on a server in the cloud. The amount of energy that we use will depend on the characteristics of the model, such as its size and architecture, and the way in which it's deployed, i.e. the optimizations and engineering choices made.
The aim of the Energy Star AI project is to develop an Energy Star rating system for AI model deployment that will guide members of the community in choosing models (and ways to run them) for different tasks based on their energy efficiency and to analyze the effect of implementation choices on the downstream energy usage of different models.
The Guardian: Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought ā report
The economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought, with global heating set to shrink wealth at a rate consistent with the level of financial losses of a continuing permanent war, research has found. The paper places a much higher estimate on economic losses than previous research, calculating a social cost of carbon, which is the cost in dollars of damage done per each additional ton of carbon emissions, to be $1,056 per ton. This compares to a range set out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) thatĀ estimatesĀ the cost to be around $190 per ton. (discuss this in slack)
Grist: Vermont passed a bill making Big Oil pay. Now comes the hard part.
Last July, heavy storms lashed Vermont with record rain, leaving roads torn asunder, communities submerged, and farms washed out. In response, state legislators made a historic move by introducing the Climate Superfund Act to hold Big Oil accountable for the damages spurred by the emissions generated by the extraction and combustion of its products. Once the bill takes effect, Vermont will be the first state to make Big Oil pay for the impacts of climate disasters. (discuss this in slack)
Ars Technica: 2023 temperatures were warmest we've seen for at least 2,000 years
Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on recordāthat's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme. (discuss this in slack)
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.
Marble - Founder in Residence, Geothermal - Anywhere - 2.5-3K per month - Contract - Flexible - remote ok
Dive into the geothermal revolution and help unlock clean, sustainable energy for our planet. We're on the hunt for entrepreneurial engineers/scientists from geothermal, oil & gas, or similar sectors. If you're passionate about innovation and ready to explore cutting-edge approaches to power the net zero economy, we want you.
ExpectAI - Full Stack Engineer & Data Scientist - Ā£35-45K, commensurate with experience - Permanent -
Join me in building ExpectAI's climate action platform that enables our customers to find and take profitable decarbonisation actions with confidence
PowerX.co - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer - $136,000 to $204,000 - Permanent -
PowerX is building energy management solutions for businesses, starting with restaurants. We believe that by equipping restaurants with the best tools to use less energy and save money, we can tackle climate change, one store at a time. PowerX is seeking a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to play a foundational technical role in our product journey. In this role, you will be tasked with developing our product, which includes collaborating with other engineers, product owners, designers, and data team to architect, implement, and maintain new and existing features.
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