Hey CATs,

Welcome to issue 298 of the ClimateAction.tech (CAT) Newsletter - your weekly summary of what's happening inside the CAT Slack community (join here and check out our onboarding checklist), and in the wider world of climate and tech.

Join #fosdem for more info on FOSDEM 2026, and to co-ordinate with other CAT members!

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

Stay curious 😌💚🐱

CAT Community News

▶️ A day in the carbon life of an LLM prompt

The recording of @Ismael Velasco's Green IO Paris talk is now available on our YouTube. And you can continue the conversation on this topic with other CATs in #greener-ai

💬 End of year conversations

#3-questions-and-ideas channel host @Chris is asking you all to  "Which reflection practice helps you stay focused?"

#cat-roulette channel hosts @Aram and @Brett Duboff invite you to close out your last CAT Roulette conversations of the year with reflections on what you learned about climate action in the tech industry

Want to thank a CAT member for their advice, guidance, feedback, or help this year? Post a message in #kudos!

📅 CAT end of year celebration event on Dec 16

Join to reflect on 2025 and celebrate community progress & member PAWS (Share your PAWS - Projects, Actions, Wins, and Stuff you learned at CAT - by adding a slide here. We've also booked an in-person space in London (UK), so if you're able join in-person, pls RSVP accordingly:

RSVP for online participation

RSVP for in-person participation in London, UK

⏸️ CAT break: Dec 17 - Jan 4

CAT organisers and volunteers will be taking a break from Dec 17th. In this time there won't be any #cat-roulette matches or newsletters. We'll be back on January 4th!

Media, events, and news

😺 CAT recommendations

🌱 A cutting from Branch

▶️ CAT videos

10-15 minute videos providing accessible explainers to climate related issues.

Planet A: Solar's hidden problem (and how to solve it)

Solar is booming worldwide, slashing costs and driving the clean energy transition. But this rapid growth comes with its cost: grids in countries like Spain, Australia and Greece have buckled under the pressure. But there are ways to handle this.

🎤 Podcasts

The latest climate-related podcast episodes. Don't forget, if you're looking around, there's a list of podcasts maintained by CATs - and there's a full playlist of all the podcast episodes shared in this newsletter in 2025 so far, on ListenNotes.

Thinking on Paper: The Electric Stack - Why the World Runs on Chinese Batteries and Magnets – Part 1

China controls every Tesla, drone and electric toothbrush. Why? Because it produces over half of the world's lithium-ion batteries and more than 90% of all neodymium magnets. They are the core ingredient in Teslas, drones, robots, and every electric motor you interact with daily.  China also mines 70% of global rare earths and processes 85–90% of them. The Electric Stack is Chinese.

In this episode of Thinking on Paper, Mark and Jeremy read Packy McCormick's Not Boring Essay: The Electric Slide to understand the history, economics and technology of the electric stack. Because if it can go electric, it will go electric.

Catalyst: Can AI revolutionize EPC?

Big construction projects in the U.S. are notoriously unpredictable, often finishing over budget and behind schedule. Part of the problem is the inherent complexity of these kinds of projects, like data centers and first-of-a-kind plants. But there's another problem: the companies that actually build these projects — called EPC firms for engineering, procurement, and construction — often lack strong incentives to control costs or deliver on time.

Environment Variables: Root and Branch and SCI-Web

Host Chris Adams talks with Adam Newman and Oli Winks of Root & Branch about their new Software Carbon Intensity Web model for measuring the real carbon footprint of websites. They break down why current methods miss the mark, how their bottom-up approach captures actual energy use across servers, networks and devices, and why better measurement can lead to smarter, lower-carbon choices for teams. It's a candid look at what it really takes to make the web greener, and the tools that can help developers get there.

The Climate Question: What does the ocean do for us and the planet?

What do you think of when you think about our oceans? Maybe you see a picture of our planet with a big patch of blue? Maybe you think about storms or dramatic ocean voyages? Maybe fish or coral reefs?

In this edition of The Climate Question, Hosts Graihagh Jackson and Jordan Dunbar explore how our oceans are even more important than you might imagine. They help put the brakes on climate change and regulate our weather - even in faraway deserts. They provide food, and even influence the rise of great civilisations, like Ancient Egypt.

Energ'ethic: Heat, Light, Silence: What I Needed to Say About Europe and Energy Vulnerability

Energ' Ethic host Marine Cornelis takes listeners inside the speech she delivered in Besançon for the French Day against Energy Poverty. A space filled with people who meet energy vulnerability every day: social workers, housing professionals, energy advisers, local officials. People who understand the transition not as a strategy, but as the temperature inside a room, the state of a wall, the anxiety behind an energy bill.

The speech is in French, Marine's mother tongue, because some truths land differently when spoken in the language where they were first felt.

📅 Submitted events

Want an event listed here? Use this event listing form to submit the details so we can add it in the newsletter.

Tuesday Dec 23, 2025 - Overcoming Climate Anxiety Community Discussions

We are hosting these community discussions in response to the current political climate and economic conditions we are facing. These discussions are designed to connect you with others who are facing similar fears about climate as you, help you remain hopeful for the future.

Thursday Feb 05, 2026 - GovClimate Show and Tell

The monthly GovClimate Show and Tell

First Thursday of each month at 4pm

People from across the public sector sharing work, challenges and ideas about the climate crisis.

👉 Sign up for reminders and info at https://bit.ly/govclimatereminders

📰 News Highlights

Mongabay: What Central Park's Squirrel Census says about conservation tech: Interview with Okala's Robin Whytock

At the end of New York Climate Week this year, ecologist Robin Whytock spent a few hours in Central Park counting squirrels. His mission was to prove how scalable tech solutions could help make biodiversity monitoring easier and more efficient. Whytock, who runs AI-powered nature monitoring platform Okala, said that while data-gathering tools have become easily accessible, analyzing massive amounts of biodiversity data still remains a challenge.

LSE: Why local communities must have access to environmental information in data centre development

At COP30, Brazil speaks of reforestation and indigenous wisdom. But Bruno Bioni, Mariana Rielli, and Rafael Zanatta argue that the country's generous tax incentives for data centers must be tied to the collective right of access to environmental information, or risk deepening the very injustices the climate summit seeks to undo.

Financial Content: The New Gold Rush: Battery Metals Powering the Green Revolution

The global financial landscape is witnessing a seismic shift, driven by an insatiable demand for the foundational elements of our electrified future: lithium, cobalt, and nickel. These critical battery metals are at the heart of a burgeoning market, propelled by the relentless expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) and the urgent need for robust renewable energy storage solutions. This boom is not merely a fleeting trend but a fundamental reordering of global supply chains and economic priorities, with profound implications for technology sectors, resource-rich nations, and the everyday consumer.

TechCrunch: One startup's quest to store electricity in the ocean

Pumped-storage hydropower, or "pumped hydro" for short, has been around for over a century. Such facilities are some of the biggest "batteries" humans have ever built. Globally, pumped hydro reservoirs store 8,500 gigawatt-hours of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Pumped hydro can generate electricity for hours on end, and the power plants have grown in importance as intermittent energy sources like wind and solar have become more widespread. But there are only so many places on Earth with suitable topography to host a pumped hydro reservoir.

Startup Magazine: National climate tech accelerator to scale the UK's climate innovators

Sustainable Ventures and Barclays Eagle Labs have announced the launch of The National Climate Tech Accelerator (NCTA), a new programme designed to rapidly scale high-potential climate tech startups across the UK.

FTI: From Enthusiasm to Execution - Why Operational Rigor Will Define Climate Tech's Next Chapter

Climate technology has attracted over $312 billion1 globally from venture capital and private equity between 2014 and 2024, marking its emergence as a core pillar of the energy transition. These sectors are still evolving, and while investment has accelerated, operational discipline has not kept pace. The result: ideas often outpace  execution.

The Guardian: More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.

💚 Papers We Love 💚

Google: Attention Is All You Need

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. The authors propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.

💼 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.

https://behold.cam - Mobile app developer (hybrid) - €46,000–€55,000 - Permanent or contract - Totally remote

We’re looking for a skilled, creative mobile app developer who can take ownership of the hybrid app development at Behold, making our app work seamlessly (and sustainably) with our physical Behold Cam-1 and remote services. If you want to work on encouraging meaningful behavioural change, increasing engagement and repairing relationships with the animals you share your local environment with then this might be the time to do it.

Vizzuality - Front End Engineer - 24000 Eur to 38000 Eur x year. - Permanent - Totally remote

Do you want to help build a fairer and sustainable future? Are you currently looking for a new career opportunity?

👉 Lucky you, we are hiring a Front End Engineer with experience in React and Typescript

WHY JOIN US?

At Vizzuality, we commit to a fair and sustainable planet by creating tools that radically empower people to make positive changes. We’re always looking for passionate people who strive to use their creativity and skills to make a difference in people’s lives and help make the world a better place. Finally, we know how life goes and are open to exploring full-time and part-time contract options (with a minimum of 80% time dedication).

Support our work

You can support us financially on Open Collective.