Updates and links April 2024

Time to make lemonade and/or giant diamond skyscrapers

This issue: some links and some personal updates. Plus a really good guide to digital greenwash & ethical labeling.

That’s that me, laid off

I’ve been absent from sustainableux for a while: my last job got complicated, and a bunch of us found ourselves out of work. I’ve spent the time since trying to find safe harbor for my team, personal stuff, and procrastinating.

Anyway, time to make some lemonade:

Looking for a climate career: this time for serious

I’ve often shared climate job resources here, with the intention of trying to get a climate-related job myself…some day. Now I’ve finally got the chance to put up or shut up.

I haven’t had to apply blind for a job in 15 years, so I’m having to learn all about how job hunting works in the age of algorithmic candidate screening and LLM-written cover letters. It’s a lot! So, I’m turning it into another newsletter post.

Already got a Climate UX job?

Share your story with other readers - email me.

Evaluating newsletter platforms

I’ve been dragging my heels on transitioning away from Substack, overwhelmed by the number of choices. Fortunately some green web folks have kindly shared recommendations and I can start planning to migrate. First, I’ve got to assess the different platforms. Current shortlist:

• Buttondown - except I’d have to relearn markdown. I never get the brackets right.

• Brevo - sounds like an Italian vacuum manufacturer

• EcoSend - “Green Product of the Year”

• beehiive.

  • Pro: some of my favorite newsletters moved there, good ethics (no nazis) .

  • Con: beehiiv links break in my browser because they don’t work with my routers ad filter.

I’m going to rank these for eco-friendlyness, nazi% (0% is the only correct answer), pain-in-the-arseness, and other.

I’ll be at UXPA Boston (May)

I’m popping into UXPA Boston conference this year - hopefully running a table topic & mentor session or two. Love to chat to any sustainableux people, don’t be shy.

Stuck in draft

I’ve got a bunch of posts piling up in my drafts folder.

• WSG cheatsheet - simplifying the WSG for new folks

• Finding a UX career in climate (ahem)

• Green checkout: evaluating Stripe’s climate checkbox

• Green footers, site labels: you know those “1% for planet”, “this is a green website” badges you see on the bottom of some sites? An investigation. Pairs well with the featured greenwash guide linked below.

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Links

LINK OF THE WEEK

Digital Greenwashing Guide (Mightybytes)

Recommended reading, because if you are trying to get sustainable digital initiatives going in your organization, its important to do it in an honest and transparent way. Otherwise, you end up with greenwashing - which is becoming illegal.

New regulatory guidance on greenwashing in the European Union (EU) and the United States may change how organizations can talk about their sustainability initiatives. In some cases, failure to make true claims could lead to potential fines or penalties. 

How might this impact your digital marketing or digital sustainability efforts? In this post, we dig into the details and share several digital greenwashing examples. 

The article points to some concrete examples of digital greenwashing in action, including

• bogus “this is a green website” badges

• misleading digital footprint calculators

• the COP 28 website (lovely takedown post here)

Team America! Climate Corps !

www.acc.gov

Actually this looks great:

“…a workforce training and service initiative that will ensure more young people have access to the skills-based training necessary for good-paying careers in the clean energy and climate resilience economy.”

So, more like the Peace Corp than Code for America I guess?

They currently have 270 open placements, only 2 hits for a search for “Design”:

• Learn urban planning and get paid $10 an hour (Duluth)

• Honouliuli National Historic Site AmeriCorps (Hawaii)

Learn about negative emissions through videogames

Scope of Work is making a game about Negative Emissions Technology. The post gets into a lot of the detail about what NET is, why it is controversial, and seaweed.

Interesting things I learned:

• It costs $600 to capture a ton of CO2 using Direct Air Capture. This has to drop to 1/6th the cost before it becomes remotely worthwhile;

• The current leading DAC plant captures as much CO2 as 200 cars, i.e. F.A.

• DAC is very power intensive. Killer sentence: “Heirloom paid a local utility to add more renewable electricity to the grid, but that begs an important question: Why use renewable energy to remove carbon from the atmosphere when you could use it to eliminate emissions in the first place?”

• (Sargassum CO2 capture sounds cool though)

• There are lots of NET ideas in development, none of them are significant yet, and the fossil industry loves to use them as a fig leaf.

I had a dream once where someone invented a machine that turns atmospheric CO2 into sheets of diamonds, and diamond became the most popular building material, and climate change was solved. Also DeBeers went bankrupt. I think this was the plot of 2061 - Odyssey 3? Anyway, sounds about as realistic as NET.

Low effort dream interpretation by ChatGPT

Designing sustainable services / School of Good Services / 2024

Registration and details.

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Social

• LinkedIn SustainableUX group

• Bluesky at jcux

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Misc.

Using AI For Neurodiversity And Building Inclusive Tools (Smashing)

This article illustrates how AI can be leveraged to build tools that can be inclusive with a little bit of an additional effort.

How I know when to quit my job, every single time (UX Matters)

It’s getting increasingly difficult to get a design or tech job; there are more steps involved when hiring for a position, and as if to quietly discourage quitting or a lack of appreciation for employment, companies are intentionally keeping a minimum difficulty level for their interviews before offering employment contracts.

We are no strangers to the circus show that is the tech hiring scene in general. But there are hints that this would be the norm moving forward.

Nobel Prize-winning economist calls for climate tax on billionaires

Getting cars out of cities

…a deep dive into those 24 studies, which covered 26 car-reduction efforts implemented by 23 different European cities, revealed 12 different types of interventions to reduce car use, the researchers report in Case Studies on Transport Policy.

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