Part of our work at the Green Web Foundation involves working with other organisations that do cutting edge research, and more widely share the insights from this work in the field of digital sustainability. We co-produce the Environment Variables podcast with the Green Software Foundation, but also appear on other shows too, and in December in Paris our director of Technology and Policy, Chris Adams joined a live recording of the popular Green IO podcast, to talk about changes in the law, corporate transparency, and procurement as a lever for climate action. Read on in this post for a round up of some of the highlights from recent episodes, and why they’re relevant to responsible technologists.
Speaking to Green IO’s Gael Duez about carbon.txt, who really holds the power for buying sustainable digital services, and the changing legislative landscape around Green IT
In December, we found time to speak on arguably the most popular podcast about digital sustainability globally, Green IO, about a few topics close to our heart, like standards, corporate transparency, getting organisational buy-in for greener digital services, and making sustainability data easier to discover with one of our big projects, carbon.txt.
Listen and you’ll learn how we’ve learned that while relying on heroic efforts by sustainability champions in digital companies can help, a massive lever if you want more sustainable digital services lies in procurement. This is because setting guidelines here can cascade through an organisation to set new defaults in how people spend money, without everyone needing to be sustainability enthusiasts themselves.
We also cover what’s changed in 2025 – what we’ve learned when corporate transparency and climate laws around the world come under attack, and why having a single place on any website for sustainability data is a good thing.
Speaking to Root and Branch about building against recognised software standards like Software Carbon Intensity
On the Environment Variable podcast in December, we spoke to the UK company Root and Branch, and their journey building a platform, Cardamon, to accurately measure the environmental footprint of web applications, and generate sustainability scores that follow the Software Carbon Intensity ISO standard.
We have written about Software Carbon Intensity before, and are leading an effort to develop a more focussed version, called Software Carbon Intensity for the Web, taking the “rough consensus and running code” approach of common in the internet world.
Here, rather than design a standard first, then hope people implement against it, our approach is to arrive at consensus among groups who have built existing platforms that calculate software carbon intensity scores for web applications, so end up with interoperable services, and easier adoption amongst end users – somewhat like we did when buliding CO2.js back in the early 2020’s. As authors of the paper with the same name as the standard we’re leading, SCI for Web, it made sense to speak to Oli and Adam at Root and Branch, and in the interview we cover how they overcame the transparency challenges that many people come up against when building on top of infrastructure provided by common cloud providers. As members of tech worker collective ClimateAction.tech, they are now working as co-chairs to develop SCI Web as an ISO Standard through 2026.
Diving into the world of AI language model energy transparency with GreenPT
Finally, while it’s hard to ignore the subject of AI right now, it’s also one of the least transparent parts of the tech industry right now, so in January we spoke to the Dutch folks at GreenPT, about their experiences building carbon and energy measurement into their own services, to allow end users and developers to understand the environmental impacts of the products they use.
At the time of this post going live, GreenPT, a company of maybe 6 people is the only company in the world that offers a dedicated AI chat product that shows you the environmental impact of using it based on directly measured energy readings. Why does this matter? Well, for a start this is something you can’t do with comparable products from Mistral, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI, despite the billions they are spending on new digital infrastructure.
In the podcast we cover the options available to people building digital services with AI if they want to understand and managed their environmental impact, and design decisions needed to make this possible.
