Author: chris
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Is the problem just GenAI?
I’m trying to make sense of some of the figures shared when we talk about the environmental impact of AI, and what the specific drivers of it are, in terms of the specific kinds of AI being deployed around the world. Here are some notes, and a request for help to point somekind of useful…
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Is the GHG Protocol including “enabled emissions” in Scope 3 in future?
I found this when I sitting down to read Killian Daly’s recent update on the Energy Tag blog about how the GHG Protocol is changing how organisations report the greenness of electricity and it seemed interesting enough to jot some notes here for others, as I hadn’t seen it coming at all. The next version…
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Getting my head around power factor when we talk about power usage of the internet
I was recently a technical reviewer of a paper by the Greening of Streaming folks, called “Overview of Power Factor in Streaming“, and the there’s a few takeaways that surprised me enough to want to make a note to come back to it in future (here’s the linkedIn post announcing the paper). Power factor was…
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On conflating different kinds of AI in the climate context
I’ve found myself looking for this quote 3 times this month, and LinkedIn is a real pain to use to find it, so I’m posting it here. This quote from David Rolnick, one of the founders of the non-profit Climate Change AI is a useful one to have handy, because its coming from someone with…
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What is the easier to understand way to say “building with cloud primitives?”
I’ve been following Bert Hubert on social media since coming across his posts a couple of years ago, and this weekend he asked an interesting question: “Going to the cloud’ can mean anything from renting a VM, deploying containers, or building on top of advanced (hyperscaler) cloud services (queues, buckets, customer IAM etc). Is there…
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Who is publishing sustainability reports “the right way” in Europe now that we have the CSRD?
This post dives into what ought to be possible with sustainability reporting in 2025, and is intended to provide some context for ongoing discussions about how changes to disclosure laws pan out in Europe, now that there’s a push to strip out what are seen as the most socially useful bits of them. If you’re…
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Sustainability *via* tech, vs sustainability *of* tech
I’m sharing this post here, because I’ve found this diagram useful in clarifying recent discussions about green IT, or sustainability in the tech sector recently. Here’s the diagram I’ve been using in a few talks and to support discussions. Sustainability via tech / sustainability via IT These are the sustainability benefits you can acheive by…
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Why some people in Virginia get miffed about datacentres
Every year, there is an absolutely stellar deck from Nat Bullard, the former chief content officer of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, about climate, and this year, one of the slides caught my eye enough to share here – slide 169, which I’ve added below. We’ve heard stories about datacentres using around 20% of all the…
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Some quick notes before diving into the Euro stack report
I’m sharing this as a British person, now living in Europe, who is currently working through reading theough the recent Euro stack report closely. I am dashing this post out, in response to a question in a private chat where an American person reading about this Euro-stack idea for the first time, very reasonably asked:…
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Discovering Docling
A couple of years back, I started using a RSS reader again. I find it really useful for compiling notes for the CAT newsletter I’ve been editing and publishing most weeks, but I also end up with loads of links that are interesting, but do not fit. The first of hopefully a series of small…