🌍 CAT Newsletter 233 - 2024-08-18
CAT 233 - 2024-08-18
Hey CATs,
Welcome to issue 233 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
🙋 Get involved
1️⃣ Missed the CAT July Open Meeting, during which we discussed CAT projects and mini grants, updates on CAT as a CIC (Community Interest Company), and more? Fear not, you can catch up with Melissa's thread in #4-cat-events or see the full meeting notes in Outline (log in with your CAT Slack account to view). A few particular areas that need help:
- #climate-careers: How can we make the channel more useful? Reply in the thread 🧵
- New short-term committee: Help us create standards & a process for vetting potential collaborators (3-5 meetings) - interest form
2️⃣ Get involved in local things! Local events were shared in #local-vancouver, #local-san-francisco-bay-area and #local-australia. G said hi in #local-scotland and O said hi in #local-aotearoa. A shared a volunteer opportunity in #local-uk. L talked about the tech workers coalition in #local-netherlands. @Aydin Mshared a speaker opportunity in #local-germany. And there were also events in #local-leeds, #local-munich, and #local-new-york recently. Did you attend? What did you learn?
🏝️ Taking a break
- #cat-roulette will be back in September (see channel host @Brett Duboff's message in the channel)
- CAT organisers are taking a break from Aug 5th - Aug 18th
🧠 Knowledge base deepdive
Films, Books, Media: Looking for climate-related content recommendations for your summer (or winter) vacation? Log into the CAT knowledge base with your CAT Slack account to explore what other CATs are reading, watching, or listening to, and help a fellow CAT learn something new by adding your own recommendations.
Media, events, and news
😺 CAT recommendations
🌱 A cutting from Branch issue 8
Small steps, big goals: Building sustainable change
"Reaching sustainability is such a complex task for humanity, it might seem to you like we can never get there. And we might not. But we can work together to get us as far as we can. Small steps go a long way and it is important that we don't give up, that we stay engaged and encourage others to do the same without pushing for perfection."
▶️ CAT videos
10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.
TED: The Tipping Points of Climate Change – and Where We Stand – Johan Rockström
We're nearly halfway through the 2020s, dubbed the most decisive decade for action on climate change. Where exactly do things stand? Climate impact scholar Johan Rockström offers the most up-to-date scientific assessment of the state of the planet and explains what must be done to preserve Earth's resilience to human pressure.
🎤 Podcasts
The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs
Volts: The prospects for offshore wind in California
After decades of talk about offshore wind, California seems closer than ever to actually supporting an industry. But to meet the state's goal of five gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, a lot of as-yet-nascent pieces need to fall into place. In this episode, Adam Stern of Offshore Wind California and Jocelyn Brown-Saracino of the US Department of Energy discuss California's recent policy efforts and the state of floating-wind technology.
Zero: Healthy? Extreme heat could still threaten your life
This week on Zero, Reporter Akshat Rathi sits down with Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a leading expert on the health impacts of global warming. The intersection of health and climate change is a growing area of research, and an increasingly urgent one: Heat deaths among seniors, for example, are projected to increase 370% by mid-century. But even the young and relatively healthy are at risk.. "The take-home I want everyone to go away with is that we all are at risk for this," Salas says, "especially as we get into more and more extreme conditions."
Catalyst with Shayle Khan: The cost of nuclear
There's new interest in nuclear power from electric utilities, the White House, and the public. While NuScale's deal to build a small modular reactor failed last year, TerraPower is currently building the U.S.'s first advanced non-light water reactor in Wyoming. So we're revisiting an episode from last November with The Good Energy Collective's Dr. Jessica Lovering unpacking one of nuclear's biggest challenges: cost.
Environment Variables: A Greener Internet that Sleeps More
Host Chris Adams and guest Romain Jacob delve into the often-overlooked energy demands of networking infrastructure to discover A Greener Internet that Sleeps More. While AI and data centers usually dominate the conversation, networking still consumes significant power, comparable to the energy usage of entire countries. Romain talks about his recent Hypnos paper, which won Best Paper at HotCarbon 2024. He shares his team's award-winning research on how energy demand for networking kit powering the internet can be reduced by simply by powering down links when not in use.
Green IO #43 - Digital sustainability in a Tech behemoth: Japan with Trista Bridges and Paul Beddie
How can a country defining itself as an high-tech spearheader can embrace IT sustainability? Japan is a fascinating example of both the contradictions and the synergies that such a journey creates. In this episode, Gael Duez welcomes two long-time Japan-based experts: Paul Beddie, VP and Sustainability Lead at Capgemini, and Trista Bridges, the co-author of Leading Sustainably, and a member of EcoVadis' Purpose Committee. Their exchange on IT sustainability initiatives in Japan led to many takeaways including: the stakeholder-oriented nature of Japanese society, the emergence of Japanese startups focusing on sustainability, the role of regulations in driving sustainability efforts in Japan, And much more.
The Verge Decoder: AI has a climate problem — but so does all of tech
How do you decide if AI is 'worth' the energy?
But putting a bunch of computers in a data center and running them at full tilt is how basically everything works now. If you have a moral objection to AI based on climate concerns, you might have a moral objection to TikTok and YouTube as well, which are constantly ingesting and encoding millions of hours of video. What framework should we use to evaluate the climate impact of those and how we feel about how they're used?
To help sort it out, I've invited Verge senior science reporter Justine Calma on the show to see if we can untangle this knot. Let us know how we did.
📅 Submitted events
Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it in the newsletter.
Sun Aug 29 2027 - Biodiversity Basics for Product Professionals
The products we build rely on and affect nature. This workshop will address:
- What is biodiversity and why is it relevant for product professionals
- What can you do & practical examples
- Your takeaway: first biodiversity analysis along your product's value chain
Thu Sep 19 2024 - Green IO London
The go-to conference for responsible technologists in London. Get the latest insights from thought leaders in Tech Sustainability and hands-on feedback from practitioners scaling Green IT.
Thu Sep 19 2024 - How to: Embrace Imperfect Climate Action - with Sami Grover
Join Sami Grover, writer and author of 'We Are All Climate Hypocrites Now' to explore how embracing our limitations can unlock the power of a movement. Sami will help us move past blame, shame and carbon footprints to practical pathways to action that actually make a difference.
Wed Oct 02 2024 - BBC Climate Creatives Conference 2024
Climate Creatives returns for its fourth annual conference in association with BBC Academy Fusion.
Tue Oct 08 2024 - The Global Nature Positive Summit 2024
Global Nature Positive Summit aims to boost private sector investment to protect and repair our environment. With a focus on solutions to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.
Fri Oct 11 2024 - Better Software
Italian Conference about Sustainable IT
Mon Oct 14 2024 - SxSW Sydney
From a grassroots start in Austin TX, 1987 to a new, second home in Sydney Australia. Tech Innovation with track focus on Energy, Climate & Sustainability
📰 News Highlights
Nature: Who is legally responsible for climate harms? The world's top court will now decide
The International Court of Justice will clarify states' legal responsibility for impacts of climate change. Although non-binding, its opinion will matter for thousands of climate lawsuits.
Carbon Brief: Q&A: What does deep-sea mining mean for climate change and biodiversity loss?
The deep sea has emerged as a new mining frontier in the global race towards energy security, with countries vying to explore and exploit its reserves of metals, such as nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese.
As the International Seabed Authority meets in Kingston, Jamaica for another round of critical talks on deep-sea mining, Carbon Brief unpacks what mining could mean for climate change and biodiversity.
The New Stack: Sustainability - How Did Amazon, Azure, Google Perform in 2023?
Now that the three biggest cloud providers have released their environmental data, the head of the Green Software Foundation's Real Time Cloud project weighs in.
(Editors' note - this was written by a former
VP of Sustainability Architecture at Amazon, with deep domain expertise. It gives a good idea of the problems cloud providers face when trying to decarbonise their operations, along with an honest review of the measures being taken. It's very rare to get this kind of context in these discussions.)
The Register: Small datacenters face the axe under China's new energy policy
China's digital infrastructure providers have been told they need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption, plus consider ending use of smaller facilities, under a sweeping "comprehensive green transition" plan announced yesterday. The policy calls for authorities to "Promote the construction of green and low-carbon digital infrastructure, promote energy-saving and carbon-reducing transformation of existing facilities, and gradually eliminate 'old, small and scattered' facilities" China is already relocating five million datacenter racks to bit barns powered by renewable energy sources – so infrastructure operators are on notice that Beijing wants them to improve energy efficiency.
Financial Times: Big Tech's bid to rewrite the rules on net zero
An in-depth, but accessible piece about how large firms report their carbon emissions, how it can be problematic, and the growing fight about how to report it in future. (archive link, since the original article with the whizzy graphics went behind a paywall)
Green Coding IO: When does it make sense to replace old hardware from a CO2 impact perspective?
A friend recently sent me a news headline in which a company is promoting that they will use their servers 15 years. While this initially sounds like a great idea, once you think about it, for a little while, you realize modern servers are far more energy efficient than old ones. This got me thinking, when is the point where the energy efficiency of the modern server outweighs the embodied carbon of the new machine.
Offset.Labr.io: Offset News 2024
We are thrilled to be back to work generating carbon credits using novel and unconventional methodologies and publishing these to our carbon registry and (soon to be launched) marketplace.
We've also just added some new offsets to our registry that continue to explore the application of the "Industrial Sabotage as Temporary Carbon Storage" (ISTCS) methodology. ISTCS generates offsets from instances of industrial sabotage and direct action against fossil fuel infrastructure by using a carbon-counting technique called tonne-year accounting, a technique that is mostly implemented within the forestry industry.
(Editor's note: Just in case it's not clear - this is an art project, not a real startup)
BBC: Trump's chat with Musk on X fact-checked
In a two-hour discussion with Elon Musk, on the billionaire's platform X, Donald Trump made a number of questionable and false claims - which went largely unchallenged. The Republican presidential candidate returned to some familiar campaign themes, such as illegal immigration and rising prices, but he also talked about climate change. BBC Verify has been checking some of his claims.
Green Web Foundation: EU sustainability regulation experts: can you help us?
We're excited to get to work on our recently funded project by the European Commission's Next Generation Internet Search Initiative to address the lack of transparency/discoverability of environmental sustainability data.
We think we have some good ideas on how to create a burgeoning data eco-system to solve this problem building on our carbon.txt prototype. For this project's first stage, running until 30th Sept 2024, we're looking for expertise on the EU's CSRD sustainability regulations and how they will be adopted in practice.n
Powering the Planet: Learning from California As It Becomes An Orphan Petrostate
By 1910, California was producing roughly a fifth of the world’s crude oil. Today it is producing roughly a fifth of the oil consumed by the state.
In addition to experiencing serious oil production decline, California is also a “fuel island” due to the geographical and regulatory constraints on the state. Which makes it an excellent case study for what happens when one of the world’s major economies, with a history of crude oil production, has a dying oil industry and declining gasoline consumption.
California is currently facing a question the rest of the country and world will be facing at some point: how to manage the decline of the oil industry?
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. Remember: if you're looking for advice finding a role, check our #climate-careers channel.
Icebreaker One - Django developer - 400 GBP day for around 5 days - Contract - Flexible - remote ok
We are looking for a django developer to take an existing open source community directory application, designed for finding members with complementary skills and interests, and customise it needs within our network for a short project. The open source project is linked in the job description.
Open Energy Transition - Full-stack/Backend/Frontend Software Engineer - EUR 40-80K/year for full-stack/backend, 30-60K for frontend/UX - Permanent - Totally remote
Open Energy Transition is a non-profit energy tech company that uses and develops open-source software solutions and contributes to open data to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable, accessible and reliable energy. Our goal is to increase the pace and reduce the cost of energy system planning decisions through open collaboration and innovation. We are looking to hire 2 software engineers for two projects: a cloud compute solution for solving large energy models, and a solver benchmark website that compares various OSS/proprietary solvers on energy modelling benchmarks. The goal is to build robust, secure, and efficient open-source software to be used for energy and climate modelling and play a part in accelerating the climate transition.
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.
BlueConduit - Data Scientist - $125-145K - Permanent -
BlueConduit was founded in 2019 in response to the Flint water crisis. First in Flint, and then across the country, we pioneered the predictive modeling approach to lead service line identification and replacement, accelerating the removal of this significant health concern and saving communities millions of dollars in avoided digs. We are passionate about using data science and AI for public good, improving social equity, and protecting the environment, and are now working in new ways to help serve communities' needs outside lead service line replacement.
Verna - Software Engineers (multiple) - circa £70k + share options - Permanent - Totally remote
Verna builds software to help people manage land in the best way for the environment – enhancing biodiversity and drawing down carbon, whilst making sustainable returns. Our main B2B SaaS product supports ecologists and planning professionals to ensure that developments enhance nature. Verna has been backed by the UK Government and investors including Octopus Ventures. We have substantial, and growing, revenues and reserves.
We are looking for two software engineers to expand our product development team. We seek talented, flexible, creative engineers who are happy to get stuck into all aspects of developing compelling, effective, and accessible product experiences.
Like ecosystems, teams are more vibrant, innovative, and resilient when they are more diverse. We welcome applications from everyone, and particularly people from under-represented groups of every kind.
Fresh Food Connect - Board Member - Volunteer
Fresh Food Connect is a nationwide nonprofit that mobilizes gardeners to support hunger relief through homegrown produce donations. We're looking to expand our board this year and would love to consider a CAT community member.
Are you passionate about food/ag systems, hunger relief, gardening, local climate solutions, and/or community building? Do you have experience in tech development, strategic partnerships, legal, or finance? If so, please consider applying! Bonus if you're in San Diego or Seattle, our next two expansion cities.
Zendo - CTO Co-founder - Monthly stipend (£2.2k) until first investment round in Nov + Equity - Permanent -
About Us
We are an early stage (pre-seed) energy tech startup on a mission to mitigate the climate impacts of AI. We believe in a greener, fairer and more resilient energy system, which we can achieve through software solutions that help data centres optimise energy consumption, monetise spare capacity and support the grid. We are seeking a CTO co-founder who is passionate about this space to join our team and lead the development of our technology platform and infrastructure. We are currently on a VC-backed venture builder in London. See JD for qualifications!
Support our work
You can support us financially on Open Collective.