This may seem like a shallow suggestion (and even a faintly ridiculous one), but there is some logic to the idea.
When PHP 7 was released, Rasmurf Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, talked about the performance gains from version 7. The performance improvements meant fewer servers, smaller memory use and reduced CPU activity - all of which equalled less power or electricity consumed. When you consider the millions of servers in use, that additional language efficiency adds up to a substantial saving in electricity use. You can watch a segment from his presentation where he talks about this here: https://youtu.be/umxGUWYmiSw?t=15m16s
Today, dynamic programming languages are the most popular - and sometimes the least performant and least power efficient. The most common solution, often espoused on these forums, is to throw more energy-guzzling hardware at the problem because hardware is cheap. And cheaper than picking a more performant, more energy-efficient language.
Before you dismiss this as completely ridiculous, consider how other industries approach energy efficiency and resource usage. The focus is mostly on reducing consumption of resources - a key selling point for customers. What would you think if a manufacturer said that they were going to make energy-guzzling fridges/washing machines or other appliances without regard to energy-efficiency?
But in the computing field, we readily encourage "throwing more energy-guzzling hardware" at the problem until the program runs fast enough because it's a cheap solution. It's hard to think of any other profession that cares so little for energy efficiency than programming. Everything is for the ease and comfort of the programmer and screw anything else - the user, energy use and ultimately the environment.
Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How does energy, time, and memory relate?
https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages
Here's the Hacker News discussion:
It's amazing how many people think showing up to work at a soup kitchen, and only then on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, when they're way overstaffed, is going to solve homelessness, when they could have achieved 100x the benefit by working those hours at their regular job and donating the cash proceeds.
Don't fall for the same fallacy when it comes to climate change.
A lot of the environmental nonprofitsare staffed by people who don't have a lot of technical experience. I've built websites, helped organize CRMs (tracking volunteer membership), helped setup email templates, etc. I know free computer help was deeply appreciated, and I got a lot better with my communication skills in the process.
If you would like to help out with this, whether through research or development, please feel free to get in touch with me via email. I own 512TB HDD storage, 512GB RAM, 10TB NVMe SSD storage and 136 vCPUs for this purpose, and the work is in active development.
On a more personal note, I'd recommend you also look at ways you can change your habits and lifestyle. If you can cut back on eating beef that's helpful; you can also try to bike more often and use less electricity.
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Please don't use JS or npm. Downloading the entire internet while doing a simple change is not efficient.