Category: Uncategorized

  • Emily Atkins on the vilfying the fossil fuel industry

    This extended snippet is from the Heated Newsletter: For readers who are new to this newsletter, I think it’s important to note that I am not a climate activist. I’m a journalist who went went to college for journalism and have only held journalism jobs. I’ve worked at news outlets with both liberal and conservative…

  • Making sense of the energy reporting deadlines for datacentres in Europe

    In the last 12 months, we’ve had a few laws passed in Europe that are likely to lead to us having access to new data about the energy demands of datacenters. Which laws specifically is a bit more complicated, and this post is an attempt to explain the mechanism to others, as well make sense…

  • What makes the web different from the internet?

    I’m not talking about specifics of protoocols like HTTP, but more the idea of who they should work for. Let’s look at the W3C Web Platform Design Principles They start with a short preamble about principles. I think this is a good summary what many web developers who love the web appreciate about it. Principles…

  • Being in the Green Driving Foundation

    I wrote this early one morning to partly as a way to help figure out what bothered me about many of the conversations around Green IT, and Digital Sustainability. I’ve phrased it in a way that I hope helps less technical people understand some of the dynamics in the industry, that are an open secret…

  • Notes on the Deutschland ticket

    I recently got round to subscribing to the Deutschland-ticket in Germany, and it got me thinking a lot about mobility in the wider sense. I’ve dashed out some thoughts now to come back to later. In Germany, where I know live, one of persistent areas where the country is underperforming on climate targets is on…

  • What gets to be called green online?

    I work at the Green Web Foundation, and part of my job is maintaining a platform to help people find providers of green digital hosted services. I was asked about whether recent changes in the law might impact what gets called a green hosted service there. I’ve shared my thoughts here because a) LinkedIn has…

  • I had no idea Nigeria had so much off grid energy

    While doing some research for a coming episode of the Environment Variables, I ended up looking up information about Nigeria’s power grid – I knew grid coverage was patchy, but I had no idea, there was so much off site generation. Look at the map below, from the IEA page! Most of the time these…

  • Half formed idea: energy gravity and an energy gradient

    I’m sharing this idea in half-baked form, because increasingly, when I think about electricity grid, I want to visualise it in this way to help understand the differences between various ways a power grid can be structured. If you think of energy has a gradient in the Z-axis where resources (as in generation) are peaks,…

  • How to have a Net Zero target whilst causing as much carbon pollution as possible

    I was on a call for Carbon Tracker webinar call about a coming report, and a the subject of the most damaging way to do Net Zero came up. One speaker mentioned a a scenario that really stuck with me – he outlined a way you lets you say you have a Net zero target…

  • How clean does electricity need to get for the European ICT sector to half its emissions by 2030?

    This post from John Booth from Carbon 3 about the recent coming European Energy efficiency directive, got me thinking about what kinds of changes are needed sector wise to meet their own targets by 2030. Here’s the good quote he draws attention to in his post: ‘The ICT sector is another important sector which receives…