Low Carbon Software Collective

“The Low Carbon Software Collective is an informal group of programmers who make targeted and measured contributions to open source software in order to reduce global energy usage.

Energy usage from software makes a significant impact on global energy usage. If business continues as usual, by 2024, computing will use up more than half of the emissions budget acceptable to keep global warming below 1.5°C, as it will be responsible for at least 10% of global CO2 emissions.

In 2023, Microsoft fixed a Windows defender bug that affected Firefox, and as a result saved approximately as much energy as shutting down a coal fired power plant.

Our mission is to identify inefficiencies in widely-used open source software that increase global CO2 emissions, and to send patches to correct these inefficiencies.”