Hey CATs,

Welcome to issue 316 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

🫴 You're invited to our Town Hall on Wed, June 3rd

CAT Directors & Organisers will share ongoing and upcoming projects and where CAT is heading and we'll welcome our new CAT Organisers. Find the full agenda and feel free to add questions for the Q&A in Outline here.\nRSVP on Luma

📗 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)

Wed, Jun 3 - CAT Town Hall - learn about ongoing and upcoming projects, where CAT is heading, and meet the new CAT Organisers

🍩 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 22nd. More info

Media, events, and news

▶️ CAT videos

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

Bloomberg Originals: The $10 Billion Hunt for the Rocks That Power the World

Rare earths are the backbone of modern technology, and China has cornered the global market for the commodity. The country produces and processes more than 80% of the world's supply. As it uses that dominance as geopolitical leverage, can other countries break its grip?

🎤 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!

Zero, the Climate Race: Electrons will be central to the next era of geopolitical stability

With wars raging and supply chains blocked, we're in an era of geopolitical chaos. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi talks with Gerald Butts, chairman of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group and former chief of staff to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They discuss how investors and companies are responding to the energy shock, where the green transition might falter and who will emerge winners a decade from now.

Environment Variables: The New Push for Comparable AI Carbon Data

TWiGS hosts Adi and Valeria explore the latest conversations shaping green software, from the environmental impact of AI and data centers to the growing push for better measurement and accountability in tech. They discuss how developers, companies, and policymakers are responding to rising energy demands, while highlighting practical ideas for building more efficient and sustainable digital systems. It's a thoughtful look at the challenges behind modern computing and the opportunities to rethink how software is designed and operated.

Techologie: #106 Le numérique dans le secteur culturel avec Christine Debray, Camille Pène et Romane Clément

Au sommaire :

• Poursuivre en justice un vendeur informatique
• Transition écologique dans le monde de la culture et comment mettre en action les organisations
• Quels sont les enjeux environnementaux et sociaux du numérique pour l'administration publique et comment y remédier ?
• À l'heure des enjeux géopolitiques pregnants et des relations qui se tendent, comment les sujets de numérique responsable rejoignent des enjeux de cybersécurité, de souveraineté et de résilience ?
• Quels sont les prochains défis écologiques auxquels les institutions et acteurs culturels devront faire face ?

Contents:

• Taking legal action against a computer vendor
• Ecological transition in the cultural sector and how to get organizations involved
• What are the environmental and social challenges of digital technology for public administration and how can they be addressed?
• In a time of significant geopolitical issues and increasingly strained relations, how do responsible digital practices intersect with cybersecurity, sovereignty, and resilience?
• What are the next environmental challenges that cultural institutions and stakeholders will have to face?

Asynchronous & Unreliable: Anne Currie & Sara Bergman Chat About The Energy Transition and Tech

Discover how the rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewables, especially solar and wind, is shaping the tech industry and global economy. Hosted by Anne Currie and Sara Bergman, this episode explores the exponential growth of renewable energy, the role of software in optimizing energy use, and the geopolitical and environmental implications of this transition.

The Climate Question: Is this climate change or just crazy weather?

It's one of the most commonly debated questions in the climate world: Is this weather we're experiencing natural, or is it linked to man-made climate change?

In this episode of The Climate Question, Hosts Graihagh Jackson and Jordan Dunbar are joined by BBC Lead Weather Presenter, Matt Taylor.

Matt chats to Graihagh and Jordan about the crucial difference between weather and climate, and the challenge of communicating this on air. They discuss why heavy snowfall will still be possible in a warmer world, as well as the likely increase in droughts, heatwaves and extreme weather.

📅 Submitted events

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

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.

Wednesday May 20, 2026 - Live Build: Interactive Climate Storytelling with Claude Design & Claude Code

Build an interactive, scrolling climate story from scratch. Using Claude Design to create the page and Claude Code to wire in real data, interactive charts, and scroll-triggered transitions. By the end, you'll have a stunning, visual storytelling app you can publish.

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/

Thursday Jun 11, 2026 - Ask a Chief Product Officer -- Office Hours for Climate Tech Founders

Office hours for ClimateTech founders & CEOs navigating MVPs, traction, and early product-market fit. Get direct feedback from Renee Davis, Fractional CPO and 5x Head of Product with 16+ years scaling SaaS across startups, unicorns, and Fortune 500s.

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.

Tuesday Jun 23, 2026 - Sustainable IT Impact Summit

Green IT isn't just compliance—it's a growth driver. At the 2026 Sustainable IT Impact Summit, leaders explore building the business case for sustainable IT, cutting costs via circular tech, deploying responsible AI, and turning sustainability into lasting business value.

📰 News Highlights

Futurism: In Irony-Soaked Incident, Amazon Data Center Shuts Down Due to High Temperatures

On Thursday, Amazon Web Services said that one of its major data centers in north Virginia was overheating so much that it had to be shut down.

According to The Next Web, AWS engineers were forced to throttle their services and then reroute customer traffic to other facilities, affecting customers like the crypto platform Coinbase, which experienced an "extended outage of core trading services."

Smithsonian: This High School Student Invented a Filter That Eliminates 96 Percent of Microplastics From Drinking Water

Virginia teenager Mia Heller's filtration system harnesses the power of ferrofluid, a magnetic oil that binds to microplastics in flowing water.

Wired: What It Will Take to Make AI Sustainable

Researcher Sasha Luccioni argues we need better emissions data and a better sense of how people are using AI in the first place.

Sustainability Online: ISG launches new study to assess digital sustainability service providers

Information Services Group (ISG) has launched a new research study examining firms that provide digital sustainability services and technologies aimed at helping organisations improve operational efficiency, emissions management and sustainability performance.

Eco-Business: Japan launches programme to cut data centre emissions as AI power demand surges

Government-backed scheme will fund low-carbon cooling and optimisation technologies as rising AI-driven electricity use raises concerns over emissions, water consumption and grid strain.

EndGadget: Tech companies lobbied away stricter rules on gas-powered data centers

A pollution watchdog has dropped a proposed ruling that could have cut CO2 emissions from data centers "dozens of times faster" than the current system, The Financial Times reports. Following lobbying by tech industry groups, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) decided to not recommend a protocol that would have made it more difficult for tech companies to use clean energy investments to offset fossil fuel pollution. 

MongaBay: In Guatemala, new AI technology will be 'listening' for illegal deforestation

A new project in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve will install bioacoustics devices that can "listen" for illegal activity, using AI models trained to identify chainsaws, gunshots and other sounds associated with environmental crime.

💚 Papers We Love 💚

Texas Tech University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Energy Efficient or Exhaustive? Benchmarking Power Consumption of LLM Inference Engines

Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable advancements in recent years and have revolutionized the field of natural language processing. To reduce latency and improve inference throughput, many inference engines hsave been proposed such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and DeepSpeed. This paper benchmark the power consumption of LLM inference engines on one single GPU node with 2 H100 GPUs.

💼 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

Verna - Head of Engineering - £Competitive + share options, commensurate with a senior role at a start-up - Permanent - Flexible - remote ok

Lead engineering at a fast-growing start-up, building software for nature recovery.

Support our work

You can support us financially on Open Collective.