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Simon P. Couch wrote about energy consumption of LLM usage and shares some of his napkin calculations (in lieu of data being made available my large AI vendors).

He concludes that it isn't too bad:

Personally, I don’t know that this scale of energy (and, ostensibly, water) use is significant enough to make me decrease my use of coding agents

(From: Electricity use of AI coding agents | Simon P. Couch – Simon P. Couch)

Chris Adams went to Green IO and wrote up his notes

I figure it’s worth sharing a few takeaways from sifting through about a bajillion pics of slides, and all notes scribbled down over the last three days, for others and my future self. Off we go.

(From: Takeaways, trends and notes from Green IO Paris 2025 - Reads, Takes and Links)

Thomas Broyer on what battles are most worth picking when you want to make software more sustainable:

So, what have we learned so far?

• It's important that end users keep their devices longer,
• we can't do much about networks,
• the location (geographic region and datacenter) of servers matter a lot, more so than how and how much we use them.

(From: Climate-friendly software: don't fight the wrong battle)

Matt Mullenweg is at it again:

Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week—an action prominent tech journalist Kara Swisher has described as “bizarrely heinous behavior.”

(From: Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash - The Repository)

Dude shows once again he has too much power over too large of a project. Fershad Irani wrote that he likely never cared about sustainability anyway.

In Why should there be a WordPress Sustainability Group? Chris Adams explains open source CMSes should have a sustainability group for many reasons, including reducing risk:

If you expect people to use your product or service, you might be expected to help people responsible for compliance when using it now.

Through our carbon.txt project we propose a standardised, yet distributed place on website domains, to efficiently surface the structured data that companies now have to publish anyway.

Carbon.txt would become a single place to look on any domain for public sustainability data relating to that company, that would allow anyone to build a database.

(From: Introducing carbon.txt - Applying lessons from crowdsourcing net zero data - Green Web Foundation)

In Branch, Michelle Barker suggests a new mindset for the web:

If “move fast and break things” is Silicon Valley’s rallying cry, then the flip-side is “move slow and mend things”.

(From: The perfect site doesn’t exist - Branch)

She says we should center sustainability in our work on the web, be intentional in content and code, and prioritise being human to being perfectionist. I could not agree more.

In Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data, Michelle talks about the environmental cost of creating and storing so much of our data in the ‘cloud’:

the need for limitless digital storage bumps up against the very real physical limits of our planet.

(From: CSS { In Real Life } | Design 11Patterns that Encourage Junk Data)

She explains it's not only a huge amount of data, a lot of it is probably unnecessary:

It’s estimated that up to 88% of the data stored in the cloud is ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) data, or “dark data”: data collected by companies in the course of their regular business activities, but which is not used for any other purpose. It all amounts to a lot of junk data that has no purpose, that will never be needed or looked at again.

Yup, I definitely store a lot of photos and emails that I will never need to look at again. I should set aside some time for cleanup.

I agree with Michelle. Design could help consumers decrease their storage. I want my software to encourage deletion, not (or not just) addition, bring it on!