KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- People are generally friendly and generous in the space, and will help point you in the right direction
- If people do give you their time, make sure you actually use it properly, if they give you leads, follow them up, I think I only landed further conversations with someone because in follow up calls I showed that I had additional questions from researching pointers they gave me in our previous conversation.
- Spend as much time as you can upskilling with the certainty of income, because whilst the issue is critical, I’m not too sure if I see as much movement in the space as I thought there would be, and this is not a unique opinion.
- If you are approaching sustainability fresh, lean on your previously existing skill set, it has been enough of a challenge simply getting into it, let alone learning from scratch, the urgency of the problem also lends itself to using what we already have, it’s also the correct thing to do from a sustainability perspective.
- Oftentimes, the way you think things work in this space, and the way they really work, are vastly different things, spending some time finding good quality sources of first hand information will drastically reduce the number of false starts.
In early July I started learning the basics of sustainability consulting at OnePointFive Academy after being accepted into the Cohort 5 intake. Through this process I have met a variety of people with a host of different backgrounds, stories and motivations for moving into sustainability. One of the things that has stood out to me is how few people are engaging in this educational process with the backing of a company, with many people taking sabbaticals, or outright quitting their jobs to move into the space, and I find it admirable that so many people have such strong convictions as to what they wish to work on, that they personally risk skin in the game in order to contribute to a more sustainable planet. I wanted to take the opportunity to write about my own journey into sustainability and climate tech, in order to hopefully show people another path, and offer advice to those maybe considering a similar move.
Every story has a beginning
I started off my journey in sustainability during the COVID pandemic; within a series of long lockdowns. I wanted to know what was lies and what was truth in the climate change space, as I have on various occasions in my life, found myself bewildered and overwhelmed by the screeching voices of modern media. As a result, I removed myself from social media some time ago due to not engaging with the style of discourse that it presented. Climate change as a concept didn’t (and frankly, still does not) seem to differ from what most would recognise as a common issue today, the argument seemed extremely polarised, loaded, as well as carrying a significant political charge. So I started digging deeper into the whos, whats, whens, wheres and whys, and simply started finding good resources that were reputable and trustworthy. I quickly discovered that the consensus was hilariously stacked to the side of climate change being anthropogenic in origin, and that the “against” side was largely made up of pay for play actors that have been playing dirty for quite a while.
After realising where the science stood, I embarked on a fairly open ended self education process, learning about sustainable development from the course from Columbia, and one of the main things I learnt throughout this self education process, is that Climate Change will be solved via multiple work streams being developed in tandem. The effect of solutions in one area of the decarbonisation process will be used by and relied upon by other work streams. A good example of this would be the push towards electric vehicles, which help reduce the emissions footprint of transportation, but the major benefits will come via the grid being transitioned from high co2 emitting fossil fuels to renewable and clean energy sources. However, in some places, for example, the US, grid decarbonisation will be more difficult due to there being no national grid, whilst in Europe this process is being made simpler by trans national grids. This is made evident when looking at Electricity Maps, where you can view the energy flows from one country to another, for example, France supplies clean power to other countries within the greater european land mass.
However, I learnt that whilst we need to find better ways to grow food, reduce food waste and lower our level of meat consumption and therefore production, I am unlikely anytime soon to become a farmer. I'll be honest, whilst I’d like somewhere quiet in the future, I really enjoy the city.
I also learnt that whilst the grid electrification and push to EVs, and renewable sources of energy like solar and wind are really awesome, I have accepted that perhaps a 5th attempt at university isn’t quite what I have in mind right now, and so I’m also unlikely to become an electrical engineer and help with that.
And I found that whilst new materials and processes are going to be needed to find better solutions to plastics, packaging made from biodegradable components and general other cool stuff, and while I might find graphene fascinating, I’m also unlikely to be able to hop into material science any time soon.
One thought that did constantly pop up for me throughout all of this learning, was wondering what tools currently existed to accurately account for the carbon emissions and identify carbon hotspots at varying levels of granularity? There would have to be some sort of analytical process that enabled questions that needed to be answered. This process would both require and produce a lot of data, and with my background as a Software Engineer, this felt like a very natural place to slot myself into. So after doing a bit more digging, I discovered the vast space of Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Accounting.
Talking to someone that has a clue is probably important
Whilst I did my best to understand Life Cycle Assessment, any real understanding that I gathered came largely as a result of conversations with Ellie Williams from Pre-Sustainability starting in November 2022. I am eternally grateful to Ellie for the time and wisdom she so willingly gave when I was entering a space where I knew literally nothing.
I came across Ellie by reading her insightful articles on Life Cycle Assessment, and after I reached out to her to have a chat, she introduced me to a world that I knew very little about, and over the course of a few months, we would have semi-regular conversations where I would go off and do a little research, and then come back with some (mostly incorrect) ideas, and Ellie would help me course correct and off I’d go again.
It was during my conversations with Ellie that she explained to me some of the more pressing issues of Life Cycle Assessment and would introduce Product Carbon Footprints. Ellie described the problems inherent in the current processes, namely that it was a bit of a nightmare to exchange product carbon footprints once the results of an LCA were generated by an environmental consultancy like Pre-Sustainability. This is what led me to the Partnership for Carbon Transparency, or PACT, the Pathfinder Framework and SINE Foundation.
Getting into the weeds
After finding some code online, I started off by just reading the documentation (link) and then going through the data-exchange-protocol repository and adding some typo fix edits, which introduced me to Martin from SINE Foundation, another person that has shown a great deal of generosity with their time as I have gotten deeper into my carbon transparency journey. I hopped into the SINE Foundation slack group after contributing a few edits to technical documentation and started chatting with various members of the Foundation. Soon after, I became a member of the SINE foundation, which has been a very interesting and rewarding experience. SINE Foundation regularly host talks on issues of Data Sharing and along with the overall focus on creating a values based community, it’s also an organisation that gathers a group of really smart people working on cool problems and projects. Along with becoming a member of SINE, I have also had the great fortune to meet Martin Pompéry, who has been an always encouraging sounding board for ideas and I’m happy to have the opportunity to work with him and chat about Carbon Accounting on a regular basis.
After contributing a few small fixes to documentation and such, I decided that in order to understand the problem domain at a deeper level, I would need to actually write some code, and from May 2023 I started developing a Proof of Concept version of the data exchange protocol in private, and over the next few months I ended up coming up with one false start and one fairly scrappy first version of zero_twenty_fifty, This initial version didn’t have any tests and was full of bugs, but it was a good starting point and I learnt what I set out to learn from this experience.
At this point I went on a long overdue holiday through Europe for a few months, which was excellent fun, I learnt that I am an avowed Francophile, and a butcher of the French language, but also used the time to drop in at Pre-Sustainability, and say hello to Martin and and say hello to Ellie and her team, who invited me to their team lunch and chat with me about various things in sustainability.
After the holiday, I got back into programming in December, moving the process out of the Proof of Concept stage and into a more bug free phase of the project, moving code and writing tests into an open source codebase which is what continues to be developed today. However, after a number of months developing that, I finally managed to achieve the status of PACT Conformant for our zero_twenty_fifty solution in May.
From here, I ran up against a number of things in the software that I knew was going to need some more heavy duty abstractions that didn’t need to exist within the application itself, and I’d had some faint ideas around creating a library that could be used to build apps related to the PACT Ecosystem, and so that’s where most development has been focused since May, and that library is getting close to an initial release and will be available via Pypi soon.
In the meantime, I’ve also been focused on building up a bigger web presence through informational and hopefully educational long form content that is hosted here and posted on a fortnightly basis, sometimes more frequently depending on the complexity of the topic, but quality of writing is my absolute top priority. I’ve been really enjoying the process and hope to continue this, as well as building a monthly newsletter to try and keep readers abreast of technology developments within the product carbon footprinting space.
Overall, it’s been a challenging journey, but it’s had a lot of really fulfilling moments.
Would I do it again?
I am a Software Engineer with 8 years experience in a variety of backend focused roles, from DevOps, Cloud, Automation and Site Reliability Engineering and more recently with Python development and hands on programming, I can also say that I have some level of domain knowledge and expertise in the implementation of software to suit product carbon footprint exchange standards, and in the development of libraries to model Carbon Accounting frameworks. I also have a small amount of experience and understanding of Large Language Models and AI Development.
I mention this because in industry, I could probably have a fairly easy time, with interesting work and a stable income. At the moment, I make very little money and work obscene hours with zero stability. However, I am having a lot of fun, and watching the start of something from the ground floor has a certain air of magic, and so whilst I’d probably change a few things (I’d start my newsletter a lot earlier, and I’d probably learn about how social media works because I am absolutely useless at it), I’d do it all again for sure. The people I have met along the way are fascinating and the work itself provides a sense of pride in (attempting to) making a difference.
If you’re an organisation looking to build software, unblock data silos, develop programs and practices for the use of product carbon footprints with technology, or improve the primary data make up of your current GHG inventories, feel free to reach out and have a conversation, I am always happy to talk about this work and better understand the overall ecosystem.
If you’re a human that wants to have a chat about the space, getting into it, staying in it, or just want to converse about things, also feel free to reach out, I’ll answer what I can and help in ways that I’m able to.
