Category: Uncategorized
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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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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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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…