Hey CATs,

Welcome to issue 315 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.

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

Stay curious 😌💚🐱

CAT Community News

⭕ CAT Coaching Circle

There are still seats available to join six other CATs for six sessions to talk and share about having a positive green computing impact in corporate organisations aka. at work.

This group will be facilitated by CAT volunteer @Jon Sleeper and you can sign up by messaging him directly or by reacting to this message with a 👍

📗 CAT Book Club

We're planning to get together to discuss "Empire of AI" this month. React to this message with a 👍 if you're up for meeting in May and we'll finalise a date. Join the #cat-book-club channel to stay up to date with the conversation

📅 CAT events (see all)

Thu, May 14 - Seeing the Big Picture: Climate Action Tech with En-ROADS Simulator [online] - this #cat-systems-series event will provide an insightful discussion to gain a systemic understanding of driving climate action within the tech sector

🍩 Community networking

Every 2 weeks, we match 2-3 CATs so you can connect over a quick 30-minute call. Join #cat-roulette, pick your region and wait for a message from Donut. The next round of matches will go out on Fri, May 8th. More info

Media, events, and news

▶️ CAT videos

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

Bloomberg: How AI Is Pushing the Semiconductor Supply Chain to the Limit

The global semiconductor industry powers everything from artificial intelligence to everyday electronics, and is on track to become a $1 trillion market. But its supply chain is under growing strain, as geopolitical tensions and rising demand force companies and governments to rethink how chips are made and where they come from.

🎤 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 this year so far, on ListenNotes - catch up with last year's here!

Environment Variables: Asynchronous and Unreliable

Host Anne Currie chats to Sara Bergman and they unpack the latest developments in green software, exploring how AI growth, infrastructure demands, and policy shifts are reshaping the sustainability conversation. They discuss the real-world impact of energy use, the importance of better measurement and transparency, and the practical steps teams can take to build more efficient systems. It's a grounded look at the tradeoffs behind modern software and how the industry can move toward more responsible innovation.

Outrage + Optimism: David Attenborough at 100

Monarch butterflies crossing a continent. Peregrine falcons above Manhattan. A giant lemur most of the world had never heard of, until one man pointed a camera at it. For seventy years, Sir David Attenborough has been asking us to look - really look - at the world we share with three and a half billion years' worth of other life. 

This week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac, and Paul Dickinson mark the 100th birthday of the world's longest-serving television presenter. To celebrate, they're reaching into the archives to share the very first episode of the podcast - a conversation recorded in person with their friend Sir David himself, at the Attenborough Centre in Cambridge in 2019.

Green IO: Can AI be applied for Sustainability? It's complicated… with Jeremy Tamanini

Is AI genuinely helping us build a more sustainable world — or are we papering over inconvenient trade-offs with a shiny new tool?\n\nOn today's episode of Green IO, Gaël is joined by Jeremy Tamanini, a researcher and consultant who has spent years investigating applied AI for sustainability use cases. Jeremy brings a refreshingly grounded perspective to one of the most hyped conversations in tech: can AI actually move the needle on environmental and social outcomes, or does the framing of "AI for good" obscure more than it reveals?

Zero, The Climate Race: The Iran war shows why clean energy is the more secure choice

Everywhere you look, you see two types of technology existing side-by-side. One that runs on fossil fuels and one that runs on clean electricity. There's an ongoing struggle between the two, a tug of war between two very different futures. Some call it the mid-transition, and it comes with costs that make it politically fraught. This week on Zero, Emily Gruber, professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame, tells Akshat Rathi how to navigate the mid-transition, and the better energy system that exists on the other side.

Sustainable IT Talks: What is sustainable computing – and is AI helping or hurting?

What does sustainable computing actually mean in practice?

In this episode of Sustainable IT Talks, hosts Allard Pheifer (CHG-MERIDIAN) and Ola Fagerström (Microsoft Sweden) take a closer look at how we can reduce the environmental impact of IT, and what sustainable computing really involves.

The conversation explores how organizations can minimize the footprint of their IT, while also navigating one of today's biggest questions: what role does AI play in all of this?

Invested in Climate: The Abundance Playbook for Renewable Energy with GoodPower

Most people assume the main barrier to clean energy in America is technology or cost. Neither is true anymore. The sun is cheap. The wind is free. The turbines work. What doesn't work is the system we've built around them. Between 70 and 90 percent of renewable energy projects started in the US never reach construction. The ones that survive face a gauntlet of federal reviews, local ordinances, interconnection queues stretching years, and organized opposition campaigns funded by interests that don't want to see the grid change. We're talking about over 2,000 gigawatts of clean energy projects sitting in line waiting to plug into the grid — enough to power the country many times over.

Today's guest is doing something about this problem.

📅 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 May 12, 2026 - Newsletter Nerd Club - newsletter superpowers

Newsletter Nerd Club helps people create and run newsletters that reach, engage, inspire, and activate audiences. We'll dig into what newsletters do best (like reaching new audiences) and how newsletters can lead with both values and value.

Wednesday May 13, 2026 - AI Literacy Salon: Signal and Sign

AI can write. It cannot mean. This salon explores the gap between pattern-matching and genuine comprehension — and what it means for how we communicate, think, and work alongside tools that sound intelligent but hold no concept within.

Thursday May 14, 2026 - Founders Connect

An event laser-focused on founders to tap into incredible resources and free advice from experts through 7 types of office hours (legal, branding, fundraising), founder fireside chats, and problem-solving workshops.

Thursday May 14, 2026 - Seeing the Big Picture: Climate Action Tech with En-ROADS Simulator

This workshop will leverage the En-ROADS simulator to facilitate a discussion around Climate Action Tech, specifically focusing on bringing sustainability and efficiency into the technological sector.

Monday May 18, 2026 - How to create a responsible climate chatbot?

We're hosting an online roundtable "How to create a responsible climate chatbot?" on May 18 with friends from Climate Academy and #semanticClimate who are building a chatbot prototype together as part of Open Knowledge's AI Learning Labs.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 - Climate Tech Time

Climate Tech Time is the UK’s largest monthly gathering for climate tech. We bring together 150+ investors, startups, government and climate enthusiasts for meaningful conversations.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 - Green Software Brighton - Automating Greener Code: Using AI Agents to optimise software efficiencyAutomating Greener Code: Using AI Agents to optimise software efficiency

In this talk, Max Mizzi from GitHub's Sustainability team gives an overview of Agentic Workflows, and will demonstrate how they can be used to improve software efficiency through both structured green software rules and autonomous performance engineering.

Thursday May 21, 2026 - The Reverse Pitch: Climate VCs in the Hot Seat

In a playful turn of events, the VCs will be taking the stage to pitch themselves to the room. After presenting, each VC will be put on the spot by a panel of founders, answering the questions founders care about, live on stage. Anyone in the ecosystem is welcome to join!

Tuesday Jun 09, 2026 - CiviCamp Birmingham

A practical one-day conference for anyone that uses or is interested in using CiviCRM (the open source CRM for non profits and similar). With a few sessions focused on case studies from sustainability and environmental charities - see https://brm2026.civicrm.org/sessions/

Friday Jun 19, 2026 - Pixel Pioneers Bristol

Pixel Pioneers, a conference for front-end developers and UX/UI designers, this year features a talk on designing and building for the low-carbon web. Sustainable web designer & developer Nick Lewis will explore how to reduce the footprint of our digital products and services.

Saturday Jun 20, 2026 - London Climate Action Week

London Climate Action Week harnesses the unique power of London for global and local climate action.

Mobilising London’s unparalleled ecosystem of climate and non-climate organisations to accelerate global climate action and supports action in London.

📰 News Highlights

ComputerWeekly: AI, energy, and the new rules of cloud sustainability competition

AI has made cloud infrastructure core to enterprise architecture – more valuable, strategic, and resource-intensive. It has also made vague sustainability claims less defensible.

Devtorium: Green Software Engineering

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and massive data pipelines become standard infrastructure, energy consumption has shifted from an environmental concern to a core technical challenge. That's exactly why Green Software Engineering (GSE) is becoming a required competency for modern teams and any forward-thinking software development company building scalable systems that minimize energy use and hardware load across the entire lifecycle, from the first line of code to the final UX interaction.

DownToEarth: The green industrialisation agenda for the Global South - A conversation with Ilias Alami

CSE's Avantika Goswami and Ilias Alami from the University of Cambridge discuss the green industrialisation agenda and how the Global South can advance this agenda for its own aims.

Green Software Foundation: We have expanded the green software learning pathway with two SCI courses

The SCI Fundamentals course guides you through the core Software Carbon Intensity methodology, the principles behind it, and how to apply it to any software system. SCI for AI Fundamentals builds on that foundation, showing how to apply SCI principles to AI workloads. Together, they provide a clear, consistent framework to follow, making it easier to track and manage your software and AI carbon impact.

The Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society: AI between climate change and climate protection

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Simultaneously, there is continuing interest in the use and development of artificial intelligence (AI), which requires large amounts of energy and natural resources to operate. This article explains how climate change and AI interact, and how AI can help in the fight against climate change. 

TechRadar: A 40-acre solar ranch is testing cattle grazing under solar panels

This first-of-its-kind solar ranch in Tennessee uses ingenious sensors to shelter cattle and cut carbon emissions — and it could help to offset $1 billion of US agriculture declines.

The Engineer: AI reduces wildlife monitoring from months to days

Artificial intelligence can significantly speed up wildlife camera analysis while delivering scientific results close to those achieved by humans, according to researchers at Washington State University and Google.

💚 Papers We Love 💚

University of Bonn & HuggingFace: From computation to environmental cost the resource burden of artificial intelligence

This paper quantifies the material footprint of artificial intelligence training by linking computational workloads to physical hardware needs. As computational demands rise, assessing the environmental impact of artificial intelligence requires moving beyond energy and water consumption to include the material demands of specialized hardware. The findings highlight that incremental model performance gains come at disproportionately high material costs, underscoring the need to incorporate material resource considerations into discussions of artificial intelligence scalability and sustainability.

💼 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.

Global Canopy - Full Stack Developer (senior level) - £500 per day inc VAT (£400 outside UK due to reverse VAT charges) - Contract - Totally remote

We're looking for a contractor to start the build of a new platform to help us assess how companies and financial institutions address their links to deforestation. These assessments feed into impactful data products like Forest 500 and Forest IQ. We have a PRD and SRS in place, so are looking to get started building asap. The contractor will work in close collaboration with the existing small team. Our tech stack is Python FastAPI backend, Next.js with TypeScript frontend, hosted on AWS and deployed using terraform and GitHub Actions. We have funding for 66 days but are actively searching for more.

Einride - Public Incentives & Sustainability Policy Manager - 155K-170K (for NYC candidates) - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

Einride is an autonomous and electric heavy-duty freight company; in this role you will be responsiblef or managing government incentive and grants, as well as transportation and sustainability policy

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