Green IO Newsletter - September 2025
Building a greener digital world, one byte at a time
Hello responsible technologist!
Despite being a stubborn perfectionist, seeing the glass mostly half empty (I plead guilty, I’m still French from time to time), I have to face the facts: Green IO London was a massive success. Period.
Speakers, attendees, volunteers, sponsors, positive feedback poured from everywhere. And this dazzling ecosystem should get all the credit for it. Kudo to the 300 responsible technologists who made it. Next stop: Wembley Stadium!
Joke aside, this success sends a positive signal to all our other locations and validates our strategy: create a qualitative, science-based and kind place for responsible technologists to meet in-person and they will join. It takes time but eventually it works. Fun fact, nurturing impactful conferences is much more like farming than building digital platforms as I used to. A full year is your time unit, feedback is slow, and … the harvest can be massive! I’m talking about harvesting impact here, not money (we don’t know yet if we’ll manage to break even one day and … that’s fine!).
Now what did I get as a privileged witness from this conference? Among the many insights, I’d like to share the 6 audacious moves which struck me the most (this choice is highly subjective and cannot possibly encompass the richness of the 2 days):
Daring to think out of the box: what if datacenters were in everyone’s home instead of massive buildings? Heata deploys servers attached to a hot water tank in households. And the water is heated for free with a 125% reduction in carbon emissions compared to the same server in an alley. So far away from the conventional representation of a DC…
Daring to scale: the One Login service of GOV.UK is used by 11+ millions of citizens every day. Yet, the team managed to reduce its carbon emissions by 75% through shifting to managed services and fine tuning lambda power to the point of diminishing returns. And from this simple but efficient approach they iterate to a more rigorous Life Cycle Analysis, now linked to cost and delivery analytics. Scaling is doable indeed - as illustrated also by Andri Johnston’s talk about Cambridge University Press’ journey. However, internal buy-in is pivotal, and the storytelling from both speakers illustrated that their soft skills were also part of the success criteria.
Daring to face the risks: starting with the case study of a major power failure due to a heatwave at Guys and St Thomas’s hospital in London, Ben Tongue and Claire Robinson presented an impressive system mapping of climate risks from NHS. It made the reality of tech & climate change super tangible. Very much a "here and now" problem rather than an "at some point in the future" consideration as Sandra Pallier wrote. And a perfect illustration of the power of systemic thinking done well.
Daring collective intelligence: DWP built a game on top of a game. Facing the limits of "gamified awareness" workshops like Climate Fresk, Digital Collage or Planetary Boundaries - effective for raising awareness yet difficult to translate into practical steps - Steve Chinnery and his team designed a full accompanying frame to ensure the momentum is kept and actions are made concrete and embedded in everyone's role. Bespoke action cards based on the digital product lifecycle has been crafted and incorporated in this comprehensive process. When collective intelligence hits limits, double down on collective intelligence to overcome them.
Daring transparency: the GWF carbon.txt project presented by Hannah Smith could be a game changer for making reporting on carbon emissions more visible and searchable. The question remains about the level of adoption needed to reach tipping point. This lack of exploitability of ESG reports will be explored soon in a future Green IO podcast episode with Cathleen Berger.
Daring to embrace the big picture: Ian Brook’s talk echoed Will Alpine’s talk at Green IO New York. Paraphrasing here Michelle Barker’s excellent wrap-up: “We have to think beyond just the products we’re building, and challenge what we’re building them for”. Ian’s provocative statement that we need a permit to add an extra floor to our house (rightfully so), yet no IT Impact Assessment is required to launch an app which will destroy 10K jobs gave me a lot of thinking. As did the discussions during the post-conference happy hours session on the trade-off between alienating future responsible techies working in the “wrong “ sector vs calling out “Tech4Bad“. Knowing that drawing the line between “Tech4Bad” and “TechGoodEnough” is a delicate exercise, we need to also “avoid reversion toward the middle, where we land in an inoffensive but ineffective middle ground” (quoting here Ismael Velasco).
Food for thought!
Gaël Duez
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What’s been happening lately in the Green IO community?
🎙️ Podcast episodes
#E65 “Green IO London 2025 special episode” 10 speakers interviewed in collaboration with Architect Tomorrow. Listen
#E64 “Why we hate recycling” with Elaine Brown & Ross Cockburn. Listen | 5-mins read
#E63b “AI & Energy Efficiency: just follow the money” with Anne Currie. Listen | 5-mins read
#E63a “AI & Energy Efficiency: why was DeepSeek a defining moment” with Anne Currie. Listen | 5-mins read
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🔔 Never miss an episode!
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🎤 Green IO conferences
Paris, December 9th - 11th 2025
“Building European Green IT“ is the theme of our 3rd edition in 2025. Expect the “crème de la crème” of experts and practitioners from all over Europe with many NGO participating in the brand new “NGO track”.
Today is the last day to get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here (still a few slots remaining).
Singapore, April 14th - 15th 2026
A 3rd edition focusing on concrete use cases in the intersection of FinOps and GreenOps. Get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here.
New York, May 13th - 14th 2026
“AI as a contested force for sustainability” is the theme of our 2nd edition. Get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here.
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Do you want to contribute to Green IO?
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# Couldn’t attend? # Listen # Watch # Read # Tools # Participate # Study # Attend
What else has popped up on our Tech & Sustainability radar?
# Listen… We’re all ears
A great podcast resonating with our own E64 on the conundrum of prolonging the life of hardware, The Restart Podcast E101 focuses on how to engineer a repairable future for ourselves. Alphalist dives deep on the question of AI transformation at scale, and Outrage + Optimism E314 is true to its name in exploring how US states, cities & communities are fighting against the failure of federal leadership on climate issues. And of course, don’t miss out on EV E118 all about the Green Software Movement Platform which aims to connect practitioners, share resources, and turn conversations into real-world action.
# Watch… Sometimes video is worth its environmental footprint
How environmental systems shape tech ecosystems is the focus of ‘Architect Tomorrow’, and check out the ClouFest Blog on the correlation between digital and ‘enshittification’. Exposing the dark side of the US’s AI data center explosion from Business Insider, and a great Q&A session with Olivier Corradi from Electricity Maps on the new Power In Numbers video series.
# Read… Our coffee-break reading this month
Temperatures are finally dropping in Northern hemisphere, but the quantity of reading material is on the up. Google announced that Gemini in Chrome is going straight into every US user’s browser, no membership required, taking a different approach from Open AI’s Operator, which is available through a ChatGPT subscription. Google has also released the DORA report on how developers are using AI. And talking about AI (again), The Shift Project has just released their final report on AI, data, calculations & the infrastructure needed for a decarbonized world: ‘Intelligence artificielle, données, calculs : quelles infrastructures dans un monde décarboné ?’ - FR only for the time being but the numbers are pretty straightforward…
Post Trump visit to the UK, the tech sector gets a boost in investment, though as immigration rules tighten, skilled tech workers are denied entry. And Branch Issue 9 is out: ‘Attuning our Web Habits to the Natural World’. Also, if you don’t have time to listen to the EV podcast above, read here how the GSF and W3C aim to promote the adoption of sustainable web development best practices and standards.
And finally, ‘Climate Change: The Global South Facing the New Geopolitics of Innovation’. This is an immense report (EN /PT) on how digital infrastructures and ecological matters are shaping each other, and explores the narratives created around AI and tech as saviors of climate and environmental justice (see also preview in Branch Magazine Issue 9).
And, of course, follow the run-up to COP30 in Belém (10-21 November 2025), and how resilience is moving to the forefront of the agenda.
# Tools… Skill-up for a sustainable future
As ISO14064 & GHG Protocol standards merge, the hope is that it will clear up confusion, bring clarity, and lead to meaningful action.
All Tech Is Human has issued its 2025 Responsible Tech Guide focusing mostly on ethics and social impacts. The Responsible Tech Careers listing is filled with new roles worth paying attention to.
# Participate
Get involved through CAT community slack channels.
# Attend… Meet fellow responsible technologists
London Climate Technology Show, 1-2 October 2025, London (UK)
Green IT Day, 2-3 Oct 2025, Montpellier & Toulouse (FR)
Trellis Impact 25, 28-30 Oct 2025, San Jose (US)
GreenTech Forum, 4-5 Nov 2025, Paris (FR)
EcoCompute 2025, 13-14 November 2025, Berlin (DE)
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One last positive thought
If our children are the future, and the future is AI, then they and our educational systems will need to rapidly get to grips with it. A timely and much needed guide from MIT.
See you next month!
Jill TELLIER, Gaël DUEZ & the Green IO Team
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