The Week in Green Software: Greenwashing

In this the latest episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by first time Environment Variables guest Tammy McClellan and regulars Anne Currie and Asim Hussain. They discuss the concept of greenwashing; what it is and how companies can avoid it, and why green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector. They cover various statistics about the environmental impact of data centers and cloud computing, the importance of optimizing code and algorithms to reduce emissions, and how developers can’t just rely on hardware to reduce emissions. The hosts also touch on some valuable resources to further your knowledge in the world of Green Software - links below!

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Asim Hussain: 80% of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits, and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved tick!

Okay, everyone trusts you now, rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and today we're discussing the growing issue of greenwashing in tech and the importance of reporting and communicating corporate sustainability accurately.

Before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guests and colleagues with this episode of The Week in Green Software. Today we have Tammy. Hello, Tammy.

Tammy McClellan: Hi there.

Chris Adams: Asim

Asim Hussain: Hi.

Chris Adams: and Anne.

Anne Currie: Hello.

Chris Adams: And if you're not on first name terms, let's do proper introductions. First of all, I'll hand over to, um, Anne. You'll be the first person to introduce.

Anne Currie: So my name's Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly three decades, which is quite depressing and good. And good, depressing, but but also good. And I am part of the Green Software Foundation along with everybody else here. So today I've been working on the introductory chapter of a new book on green software, which we can't yet talk about who the publisher is, but it's a good publisher.

Next time I'll be able to tell you who it is.

Chris Adams: thank you for that, Anne. All right. Next in the alphabetical order would be Asim Go for it.

Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel. I'm excited to be here. I also do, I also, oh, I grow mushrooms, which is an active hobby at this time of the year, so

Tammy McClellan: No way!

Asim Hussain: Growing. Oh yeah. Have we not told you about that, Tammy? Yeah. Spring time's coming. So we're getting, as you are, I imagine, Tammy getting ready for a growing season. But anyway, I'll let you introduce yourself now.

Tammy McClellan: Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Tammy McClellan. I work for Microsoft. I'm a cloud solution architect, developer advocate. So along with Anne, I've been in the tech industry for a really long time. I think I probably just passed the 30 year mark. I'm also the co-chair of the community working group along with Anne here, and, uh, recently became the chair of the oversight committee.

So I'm super excited about that. And I also, as Asim alluded to, I have a small sustainable farm here in Chelsea, Michigan, where I grow lots of veggies and flowers. So happy to be here.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you.

Asim Hussain: What's the name of your farm? Tammy. What's the name of your farm?

Tammy McClellan: It's called Wonderful Tiny Farm or WTF for

Chris Adams: Sure

Asim Hussain: wtf

Chris Adams: That's very good. That's a, I think that's an appropriate lead in for the stuff we'll be talking about actually. Alright. All right. Before we start, I'm just gonna share a reminder for anyone who's listening, everything we do talk about will be linked in the show notes. So there'll be a link for every single story we do cover, plus some supplementary links for the things that do come up as we scrabble around to try to find them as we discuss them.

And with that, I think we'll start on the first story on our list, actually. So, What I have here is greenwashing, the red flag of sustainability. This is a piece from the Intel Podcast put together by Intel called the Intech Technology Podcast. They recently published an environmentally focused episode with I think Caryn Herder Fritz, one of the marketing initiatives sustainability initiative leads.

Speaking about how companies can avoid some of this greenwashing explaining what greenwash actually is. So, I suppose now is a good time as any, to answer the question, what is greenwashing here? Anyone want to go forward or volunteer something here?

Asim Hussain: So I actually work with Caryn. It was really exciting to hear her talk about this. It was interesting cuz I actually have a slightly different definition of greenwashing as well, personally, which is interesting. But she was describing greenwashing as a term to use to describe when companies make misleading or false claims about the environmental benefits of their products or activities in order to appeal to consumers who are concerned about sustainability.

So that's the definition that she gave about greenwashing. I'm actually interested to hear what, how do other people feel about that definition? Is that aligned with your thinking?

Anne Currie: That sounds pretty good, but Asim, you, you feel different, you say,

Chris Adams: What's your,

Asim Hussain: What a leading.

Anne Currie: so we who we're agreeing, disagreeing.

Chris Adams: what's your, are

Asim Hussain: or incorrect? According to my. My definition of greenwashing? No. I would also, cause I like, I don't know, I think about it a lot. I actually think about it a lot. I think about, I'm in corporate industry, so I think about it very carefully. I think about the messaging that I'm we're giving out.

What does it mean to be authentic? And one thing I haven't quite resolved in my head is the intention behind the work. And I think Anne, you've said something about this in the past, so if you did something without the intention of it being sustainable and then afterwards went, oh, actually, if we look at it through this lens, is it sustainable?

Let's talk about it from a sustainability perspective. I dunno where that lands

Anne Currie: I'm okay with that.

Asim Hussain: of

Anne Currie: I'm more of a consequentialist . I'm fine with people saying, Ooh, it was good. I'll talk about it being good.

Asim Hussain: Accident. Oh damn. I did something good by accident. Yeah.

Chris Adams: There are two things which are really interesting at the podcast that caught my eye, so first of all, one of them was, so there was a stat shared from some UK surveys, I forget this particular poll came from, but they basically said 81% of comm's messages about environmental measures from tech firms are not trusted by their audiences at present.

So this is one of the key things that she was saying was, This is a real problem that needs to be addressed right now. The other thing that came out of this, and I guess putting the question to Asim is quite an interesting one, is the genuine idea that using the word green itself is a bit of a red flag because it's so wooly and so kind of open.

I think Asim, I think you are about to speak to this particular as the director of the Green Software Foundation.

Asim Hussain: And what are you the director of again Chris?

Chris Adams: I'm a member of the Green Web Foundation, so I may also have things to say here as well, but after you first.

Asim Hussain: No, I think that was a really interesting insight. Now, the point she was saying was because greenwashing has the term green in it, and if you then just use the term green, it just reminds you instantly of the word greenwashing before you've said anything. So already frames. Like really pulls up that thing in their mind.

I was like, damn. Where were you Caryn? Like, where were you like maybe four years ago when we were like coming up with the name for this thing. But I would also argue a different point because I tell you that when we were coming up with the name of this foundation, and I've apologized to Chris Adams like so many times for this because I knew Chris and he had the Green Web Foundation, and the very first name that came to my head was the Green Software Foundation.

I always intended it to be like a pinhole name, and then we'd come back to it later and we never came back to it and they just ended up being the Green, Software, Foundation. But the other thing was, there was actually another organization called Sustainable Software or Sustainable Software Foundation. There's actually another organization out there, but they're much more focused around, can you, as a developer, can you, on a human level, sustain.

Chris Adams: Yeah, the Software Sustainability Institute, can you keep things going? So it's nothing to do with climate at all, it's just am I able to keep working without code collapsing under its own weight from like bugs and issues and usability problems and stuff like that.

Asim Hussain: So that's where the idea, it was like you either pick sustainable or you pick green. In my mind, I personally felt green was a bit more targeted than sustainable. That's why we went for the green in the first place. So that was my thinking on it.

Chris Adams: Okay. That's fair.

Anne Currie: Well, it's interesting, so the, the book that I'm currently working on, I originally pitched. Sustainable Software, but the publishers chose the name Building Green software and presumably that's because they're much better at marketing than I am . They obviously feel that green is the word that people want to be using or be interested in.

So that is to a certain extent, then that becomes greenwashing. Cause everybody likes the phrase, but everything that's more specific, I really like 24 7 carbon free electricity, for example, but it's very boring and it's quite specific, and it does not really get to appeal to folk in the same way. So

Chris Adams: Actually, I'm kind of glad you mentioned this Anne, cuz this was the other thing that Karen was saying. So she said there's green washing and there's gray washing where you go so far away from emotional and evocative images. The unit was something which is accurate, but basically impossible to get anyone to remember or respond to in any kind of meaningful fashion.

So I think that's actually, I've never heard it come across the term graywashing before or anything like that, but that's caught my eye. The thing that it might be worth actually talking about in this context is that, and Asim, you touched on this idea of is it intentional or unintentional? You can see parallels right now with the basically misinformation and disinfo discussion online right now.

Because one of the big problems about the internet, which is not necessarily being fixed by things like generative AI search engines, is that you have a real problem with it being very difficult to find reliable information online. All right, and in those circles, people call things misinformation, where you're unintentionally misleading people or disinformation if you are intentionally misleading people.

And like the kind of mental model that I've been using for this is, it's a bit like murder and manslaughter. You know, manslaughters, I don't intend to cause harm, but it's happened. Whereas murder is very much like a degree of intentionality. This is actually part of it. You might wanna think about where in your organization,

this kind of comms function might actually be alright if they're in finance compared to marketing, you're gonna have different drivers, but there's plenty we can refer to there. And I suspect the thing that might be worth looking at is that there are various kind of non-profit organizations who do try to keep track of all this stuff.

And one of the things that, if we could talk a little about, say some of the things that companies have, but, so I work for a nonprofit called the Green Web Foundation. We did a whole thing about net zero targets and uh, you can. There are some ways to tell if you have a good net zero target or a bad net zero target based on the kind of organizational changes you might need to see happen.

So if someone has a very far off net zero target, for example, where there's no meaningful action, the hat needs to happen in the next five, five years

Asim Hussain: We'll get it done by 2050. We'll, 2050.

Chris Adams: If you have that, then it suggests that maybe you're not prioritizing it. And the reports that from groups like say the corporate climate responsibility monitor and stuff like that, they basically say you need to have a net zero target by 2030, and sorry, you need to have something with interim actions in the next five years for this to seem meaningful.

Asim Hussain: Did any of you read? I don't think, we didn't appear in the last news that I, it might been one of you that posted it on, on, so I can't remember, but it was something somebody shared about, oh, it was cdp. It was, it was a report they had done about, if you are an organization that has a climate target that is a, an SBTI what's the term?

Chris Adams: Science based target? Is that what you're referring to here?

Asim Hussain: Is it is if your climate targets have been vetted by the SBTI? I think that's a term you are far more likely to over overdeliver on your climate achievements than if you haven't. And I think I wondered, cause one of, one of the foundation was starting like one eighty percent of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved. Tick. Okay, everyone trusts you now.

rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.

Chris Adams: Brief sidebar for folks who might not be familiar with SBTI. The SBTI stands for the Science-Based Targets Institute. They're a group of peer-reviewed scientists and and experts who look at various sectors to figure out what kind of changes and reductions in carbon emissions you'd actually need to see on a year by year basis in order to actually be responding in line with the climate.

They do work for various sectors, but specifically in 2020, they released information about the tech sector. So they basically said, you need to be hitting these targets for your actions to be considered credible. That's all. Sidebar over. That might be useful for folks who might not know what the SBTI is, cause we should have actually come in with that one.

Okay. There's a bit more here we could talk about. And there's a link here to zerotracker.net, which does track some of these targets and some of these actions by organizations. And there's even one pointed to specific companies. So you can see are they recording and are they reporting against these kind of figures that you've listed here.

But I suspect we might need to move on to some of the other stories we have if we wanna go on from here. So what's next on this list?

Anne Currie: So this is an article from Forbes. Green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector, although I think I would've called it no longer optional for the tech sector, otherwise it feels a little bit like it's saying the very opposite of what I think it's trying to say. But anyway, yeah. So a few weeks ago we did talk about, uh, some interesting and quite terrifying statistics that the cloud considered over 7.2 million data centers across the world, which actually is, that suggests that there's about a data center per thousand people in the world, which seems like the, the hardware utilization on data centers must be really bad for that. That's quite scary, although not totally implausible. If you think there's maybe about 7 million businesses across the world and each one has a, at least a couple of servers in there,

Chris Adams: I feel like you need a loose definition of data center here for that to be plausible, right?

Anne Currie: Yeah. I think it would have to be. I think it'd have to be, but even with that, actually, that really suggests cuz a thousand users. And these are not simultaneous users, but as Asim pointed out last time, these days everybody's pretty much connected all the time. So fundamentally far, then talking about a thousand simultaneously connected users.

But anyway, so we've got a cloud of 7.2 million data centers, one data center per thousand people, loads of energy and water and all that embodied carbon. Or embedded carbon, depending on how you like to say it's involved in the hardware and that cloud computing is responsible for broadly a percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which now says it is about twice as much as the whole aviation sector potentially.

But broadly speaking, I always like to say it's about an aviation sector from the tech industry, which gives us some feeling and likely to surge, but might not surge because we get better at it. But fundamentally, we use computers for more and more. So those are the numbers that we're talking about.

Asim Hussain: So I think this article in particular, I liked it cuz it also touched on software. It didn't just say, data center's bad, go fix it, data center people. It was like, no, no. The one statement that I really liked was organizations of risk developing software that will run hot unnecessarily for many years if they do not improve the sustainability of their software today.

And for me, when I think about building inefficient applications, like I forget, like it's just gonna run like that forever. 10 years. Some of this stuff just runs forever, unnecessarily, and then just dies. I remember the, like, I won't name it the company I used to work at prior to working at Microsoft. It was a very small startup and the technology was so unbelievably inefficient.

We needed to buy one server for every 10 users.

Tammy McClellan: Oh my goodness,

Asim Hussain: but well. It was high net worth lending to high net worth, and it was very high profit business. They didn't care. But the, the software was built 20 years ago, and so for 20 years they've been running this unbelievably unnecessarily complex software.

And as far as I know, it's still running today. I haven't checked in on 'em for a while. I think that's really interesting, like when you write software. It will run unnecessarily hot for a long period of time, whereas a data center in harder will refresh. That was a really interesting insight for me. Yeah.

Tammy McClellan: Oh, good point.

Chris Adams: This provides a link to the next story, which is about moving things to the cloud. And there's points and counterpoints for that. Specifically. There's one thing I might share with everyone before we move on from this though. When you see numbers like say 1.5% moving to 15%, there's a really good paper by John Koomey, a well-known professor who basically has, there's a paper called Does Not Compute, avoiding Pitfalls in Assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts.

This is the guy who's been studying this for 30 years and generally speaking, if you look at our sector, People saying, oh, it's 2% now, but it'd be 15% by this time in the future. Aviation says that shipping says that every single sector, which is 2%, says they're gonna be 15% in the future. This is a recurring thing and it's really worth reading that to be able to interrogate some of these claims, cuz they can't all be 15% for this to be happening.

Anne Currie: There's a tacit assumption there that nobody else grows, as she said. But that's not a crazy tacit assumption that you are making your point that the point is gonna get bigger. It's already big and it's gonna get bigger. The fact that everybody else is getting bigger doesn't make your problem lesser.

And Dr. Koomey there, he has picked me up on this stuff in the past and said, oh, you can't say that this is going to continue. But I think there is a point here, to be made that, that we don't want these things to go up. The relative count doesn't really matter. It's, and, and it makes it, it makes a good point that we get more efficient as time goes, but we don't actually always get more efficient as time goes on.

Data centers get more efficient. Cloud data centers get more efficient. We use more of them. He has a platform which is all about, oh yeah, everything gets better and it'll all stay about the same, but it, you tends to use it to shut down people saying we should do better is my opinion.

Chris Adams: And maybe we should come up with a law for you, whereas Koomey's Law, maybe we need a Currie's Law as a counterpoint for this actually.

Asim Hussain: Everything will get worse all the time until the heat death of the universe.

Anne Currie: Actually, the thing is we do have a tendency to, over my entire career, 30 year career that Tammy and I have had. Hardware's got tons better, but utilization has been sacrificed to developer productivity. So machine productivity, no one cares developer productivity. Everybody focuses entirely on that, so we tend to move in the wrong direction, which then takes you down back to Asim's point that you end up with very inefficient software that could be a lot more efficient.

Asim Hussain: That's a really good point. Cause you're right and I have been using. I, I feel very much corrected cuz I have been using that percentage relativity. But that whole statement about relative increases is pointless because if everybody is saying it's going to increase by 15%, that also isn't a good thing.

It just means that. Maybe we should be talking in absolute terms of increases. Maybe that's the kind of statement. But I would also state that I think a lot of these things assume, like currently we are pressing 10% down on the accelerator pedal, and the statement is, if you keep pressing on the accelerator pedal, 10% you'll end up at this point in the future.

Doesn't mean you can take your foot off the pedal. If you take the foot off the pedal, then it just all just goes crazy. So I think it's important to note that doesn't just mean, even if, even with that statement of it's not going to be as bad in the future, I think that statement should be, it's not gonna be as bad in the future if we continue to put the pressure on that we're putting on.

It may not be that bad in the future, but if we just sit back and relax and say, apparently somebody says it's all gonna be fire in the future, then it won't be fine. I think it's about forces. We have to make sure we keep the force pressed to make sure that good actions happen. That's just one of our points.

Anne Currie: And so I remember when I see these statistics about the aviation industry, I remember about a talk I gave at a conference HashiCorp Europe in 2016, and I was the first talk I gave on green software. And I thought, oh, I need a really good statistic. I need a good statistic. So I had a look. And I would say it looked like the aviation industry.

We used about twice as much as energy. Maybe a bit more, but I thought, oh, I'm just gonna say it's the same, cuz then that's fine. I'm sure it'll get there eventually. But now everybody's talking about it being twice as much as the aviation industry. Things do. THe tech industry has got worse over the past five years in terms of carbon emissions.

No matter what Professor Koomey says.

Tammy McClellan: I'm just surprised you remembered what you were doing in 2016, so I'm just impressed by that.

Chris Adams: [laughing]

Anne Currie: So I I always felt a bit guilty cause it was a bit of a lie at the time, but I thought it's a bit of a lie, but it's going to happen, I'm pretty sure. So, you know,

Asim Hussain: At some point in the future or past it's true.

Chris Adams: I guess the good news we can talk about is that the technology sector is probably easier to decarbonize than aviation because servers don't need to fly through the sky all that often, and that's a nice link to the next story we have. Everything is moving to the cloud, but how green is it really?

Anne Currie: Yes, there were a couple of papers came out last week. One from Adrian Cockcroft, who is the member of the GSF, and there's a bit of an insider on this as well as a slightly more outside perspective saying that, and they made the interesting point, although the cloud is getting better from a very low bar, for some of them they have not been as good at helping their customers to become green as they said that they would be, or at least Amazon hasn't been. Google has been doing pretty well. Azure been doing okay, but AWS has really fallen behind and that is a, an opportunity for everybody because AWS. Amazon care what customers ask for.

So if you ask for it, you might well get it. And if they're not doing it, that might be a sign that people aren't asking for it. We need all need to make sure that we ask our AWS reps all the time for cloud carbon footprint measurement.

Chris Adams: So that was one of the papers. You mentioned there was another paper and so there's a piece in computing.com that I've shed a link to that pointed to basically some really detailed stats talking about the environmental impact of refresh rates on servers and stuff like that. This is actually worth being aware of because a significant amount of the environmental impact comes from actually making the servers in the first place and.

Asim as the guy at Intel, you probably have some insight on this one now, like there's a significant amount to making them and that part isn't particularly easy to decarbonize compared to the actual running of those. And this is the first paper I've seen, which basically challenges some of this narrative cuz this the reports that you do see that talk about the cloud.

Generally, like one of them is by 451 Research, which was commissioned by Amazon. So unsurprisingly, they say that Amazon's super efficient, but you'll see this are coming up quite a few times. It's quite hard to get some independently confirmed information from this, but this one seems to be more about where energy is coming from and how it's being sourced actually. That was my takeaway when I read through this actually.

Asim Hussain: Speaking to the point you just mentioned. Chris, it does surface an interesting stat. We're just gonna be like, maybe this podcast will just turn into one of us mentioning a stat and everybody else disagreeing with it. a, a well-researched stat from a very famous researcher and we just like that doesn't sound right, but the research seems that, that they say, the research indicates the energy consumption from data centers grew just 6% between 2010 and 2018.

well, its computing output increased 550%. And that I think speaks to what you were, you and Koomey was probably talking about, which is the computing industry is the efficiency has been increasing dramatically.

Anne Currie: I agree with you, and there's absolutely tons of efficiency improvements to be wrought from software. The difficulty there is that this quite difficult, takes a lot of time to do it, and this is my total stab in the dark guess. I think the next massive efficiency improvement will come from the, ironically, the same efficiency improvement that delivered to the industrial revolution, which is a move from generalists to specialists.

Has a tendency to deliver a thousand fold according to Adam Smith in the Industrial Revolution in his Wealth of Nations of 1775. moving to specialists. Is a thousand fold increase in productivity and performance, and I think that's where I have a dual hope for the cloud cuz that is specialists, that's people putting their homegrown software and saying, no, look, I'm not gonna write this.

I'm just gonna use the cloud stuff where they were specialists doing it for me. And also open source where they say, I'm not gonna write this library. I'm gonna use an open source library where specialists will have tuned this for me. I'm hoping that will to a certain extent, offset the end of hardware in terms of improvement.

But that might be my dream and an unrealistic one.

Chris Adams: Not necessarily. I feel there's a really nice paper called Plenty of Room at the Top, which basically it's a paper from the Journal of Science talking about specifically where the next generation of improvements are gonna be coming from. It basically puts this argument that, yeah, Moore's Law has slowed down over the last decade, so you need to find other ways.

And it says, yeah, the thing you need to be looking for is things like, Domain specific programming, matching the compute jobs or can matching the workloads too. The hardware much better. You can see examples of this right now. We'll share a link to some analysis. For example, Google using very specialized ASICS like application specific integrated circuits for video encoding or tools like that.

These are the things that are being used in production, a number of places which can provide these hundred or sometimes thousand improvements that there is an issue though about where you do if you wanna do something else. Cause we've seen exactly the same thing happening with cryptocurrencies, right? Where you get to an ASIC designed specifically for the Char 256 protocol.

So if you don't wanna do stuff for cryptocurrencies, I guess you might be to use it for your passwords on a website. But there aren't that many other things you can use it for. So there's a discussion there to be had. But no, you're absolutely right. We'll share a link to that cause it's a really interesting paper and it basically makes you an argument that you've described Anne but in lots of detail with those are really nice examples.

So we've spoken about those different tools and there's different ways that you can achieve some of these savings, both in software design and hardware design. And the Green software Foundation is maintaining and running a couple of projects like the Carbon Awareness SDK, the Patterns Project, and so on.

But recently, there've been some developments to how these project projects can be funded, or similar projects can be supported so people can organize and work on them a bit more. Tammy, I think this is something that you've. Been involved in, and I believe, yeah, congratulations in order for actually becoming part of the groups leading this now, maybe you could share a little bit more about the oversight committee for the Green Software Foundation.

Tammy McClellan: Sure would love to. I am super excited about this opportunity when talking to Asim and he basically came up with the idea of this oversight committee and the ability for G S F to scale as we get new members and organizations that are joining and it became pretty apparent, I think, that everything was funneling through Asim.

So this gives us an opportunity to scale at Asim's pace. And so I'm excited about that and being able to look at some of these technical experiments that we're doing and helping to drive some adoption in certain areas. But well, I'm just really excited about the possibility of advocating more in this space cuz I really feel that there's loads of opportunity here for us to make an impact in our overall carbon goals that we have.

And it's emerging tech, so we're flushing it all out. We're figuring it all out, and we're having some great success. So the Oversight Committee will also provide recommendations to improve the foundation's charter to set community norms and workflows and deliver budget recommendations to the steering committee, so folks like myself and Chris Lloyd-Jones will serve as the chair and the vice chair of the Oversight Committee, and hopefully we can get more OC members on this podcast to introduce themselves to our wonderful listeners here.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Tammy.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Congratulations Tammy.

Chris Adams: Okay. Yeah, that's it for our news wrap up for now. But before we leave, there's a new format for this final part of the show where we are gonna ask a closing question to our guests. It's gonna be different every week, but this one we're gonna try to see what kind of resources or recommendations you might actually point other people to.

So the question is, if you could point one of our listeners to one resource about sustainability and green software. What would it be and why? Anne I'll start with you first if that's okay. Cuz it looks like a sea is holding a child now.

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Oh yeah. One resource. One resource. Actually. So I'm gonna cheat and easily provide the one that everyone will do, which is, that's on the GSF websites available. Now from the Linux Foundation, you can get for free a certification in being a green software engineer, and that's two hours to do.

It's quite an easy read, and at the end you get a certificate of completion.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks Anne. Anyone else got one?

Tammy McClellan: I have one, although I'm cheating here as well, but it's the one I find myself going to all the time when I'm having internal discussions or discussions with customers. It's off the Green Software Foundation website, but it's the SCI guide. But it has just loads of guidance around applying the SCI some use cases, and it's just uh packed full of really good information.

Chris Adams: Okay. And the same yourself.

Asim Hussain: So yes, I had, I think I shared it on socials recently as well, so, Recently had a really great conversation with Lucas from the, from various things, but he is also involved in the W3C Sustainability group, and he shared with me just an amazing set of resources that they've been collecting over. I don't believe he was a particular person collecting, but he introduced me to it and will put them in the show notes as well.

There's all sorts of things in there from books to magazines, courses, events, media websites, even stuff from the Green GSF is in there as well. So just a great source of material.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Asim. So for folks who are following along the W3C have a Sustainable Web Group and they maintain a Wiki now, and that's where all that stuff is listed. It's a really good resource and we only found out about it in the last two weeks, but it's a really useful thing to look at.

So that's all for this episode are for The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below, and you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software. One word. DOT foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, leaving us a five star review.

If you didn't enjoy the show and you hated it, please consider leaving a five star review and tell us why.

Asim Hussain: We only listen, we only listen to five star reviews. That's the only ones we listen to.

Chris Adams: Yeah, that's the way that, that, that's the . Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. Cheers, folks. Bye Cheers.

Cheer.

Anne Currie: Cheers. Bye-bye.

Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.