Reads, takes and links. Posted here, before I forget them.
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Takeaways, trends and notes from Green IO Paris 2025
I just got back to Berlin tonight after being at Green IO, a conference in Paris in its third year, that is dedicated to the fields of digital sustainability and Green IT. Before I forget, I figure it’s worth sharing a few takeaways from sifting through about a bajillion pics of slides, and all notes…
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Wow tech firms STILL need to report their revenue from oil and gas sector, even after reporting standards have been ‘simplified’?
In Europe, I’ve been tracking the passage of a set of reporting standards that a significant law, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) uses to layout precisely what a information large companies have to disclose. Even after an effort to gut reporting laws, it looks like companies STILL have to report their revenue from the…
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Are the big hyperscalers reporting power consumption in Germany like the laws say they’re supposed to?
I noticed something recently that I can’t find an clear explanation for, so I’m posting it here to help understand what’s going on. In the European Union, there is a sort of law called the Energy Efficiency Directive, which I’ve written about before, and this relevant when we think about data centres and decarbonising the…
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Default to calling it ‘carbon pollution’, not ‘carbon emissions’, when talking about climate change
I’ve heard a few people use this specific framing of greenhouse gas emissions when talking about climate change, but it hasn’t become a real habit for me. This is a quick note for me to refer back to later. There is a now lots and lots of peer reviewed research, and advice from communications professionals…
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Can you phase out oil and gas in the UK with CFDs at 14 GBP per MWh?
This is a quick note, because a report I was keeping an eye out for is now in the public domain. As I understand it, it was commissioned by Dale Vince of Ecotricity, and presented at the UK Labour party in September, and lays out a ‘mid-transition’ argument for effectively bailing out oil and gas…
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Even with proprietary GenAI models, you can influence the environmental impact of use through supplier choice
I came across an interesting paper, How Hungry is AI? Benchmarking Energy, Water, and Carbon Footprint of LLM Inference via a post on social media by a friend of mine, Asim Hussein, and one of the details surprised me enough to want to capture it here. What was worth writing down then? It’s on page…
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Google’s expenditure on AI is eye watering
Before I saw this chart, I knew that the hyperscalers had been spending huge amounts on datacentre infrastructure, but I had some vague idea that Amazon was spending the most, followed by Microsoft, then and Google. Boy was I wrong. Google has been outspending the other huge hyperscalers since 2018 This chart is from an…
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AI the tool vs AI the project
It’s the weekend, I’m trying to close down a bunch of tabs, and one tab I hadn’t realised I had open was this piece by Andy Masley about AI-generated images he’s been creating with Midjourney. Before it disappears into the either, I figured it was worth jotting a few thoughts down. Here’s the quote(s) that…
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What’s the single thing you would do to make a web service more sustainable these days?
From between 2018 and April 2025, I was an organiser of an online community called climateAction.tech. I’ve written about it a few times before on this blog. In the community slack, someone who I respect asked a valid question: For context, they work in a business selling what I consider domain names at the higher…
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A few notes on the quest for £1/kg H2, and relating it to fossil free datacentres
This post from Rivan, a hydrogen startup, makes a few key points that I think are really interesting in the context of the research into fossil-free molecules you might need for aviation, shipping, all year round power generation, and a fossil free internet. I’ve mainly written for my future self as much as anyone else,…
Got any book recommendations?