Most people want to reduce their environmental impact but have no idea where to start. Carbon footprint calculators exist, but they're either oversimplified (just flights), locked behind corporate paywalls, or require manual data entry that nobody maintains. There's no open, programmatic way to estimate carbon impact from everyday activities like commuting, diet, energy use, and purchases. An open API and toolkit would let developers build carbon awareness into any app.
Cloud cover is unpredictable, causing solar electricity generation to fluctuate wildly. Grid operators compensate by keeping fossil fuel plants on standby, undermining the climate benefits of solar. Open Climate Fix builds open-source ML models that use satellite imagery to forecast solar output hours ahead, but the models and data pipelines need ongoing improvement.
Computing workloads produce significant CO2 emissions, but most developers have no visibility into the environmental cost of training ML models or running data pipelines. Without measurement, there is no path to reduction. CodeCarbon is a Python library that tracks emissions in real time and suggests lower-carbon alternatives, but it needs broader hardware support and better reporting tools.