In this episode, we stay in Denver and Montpellier with Cameron Casher, Clean Tech Strategist at ThoughtWorks, and Benjamin Davy, Sustainability Director at Teads. Being both hands-on engineers 👨‍💻 and well-known voices in Cloud Sustainability 🌱, we decided to have this extra episode to go "beyond carbon" and talk about hardware, water consumption, recycling and resources exhaustion. The next challenges for any responsible technologists using Cloud services. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: Cameron's LinkedInBenjamin's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Cameron's and Benjamin's sources and other references mentioned in this episode: The Green Software Foundation  and Assim Hussein’s talk at the GSF Globa Summit l GSF Global Summit London – Hosted by Microsoft, Accenture, Avanade, Goldman SachsGautier Roussihle's blog BoavitzaAurore Stephant's talk on Tinkerview (in FR but auto-generated subtitles in English make it perfectly understable)FinOps Foundation Sustainable Digital Infrastructure AllianceDavid Mytton's interview on Green I/O podcastChris Adams' interview on Green I/O podcast part 1 and part 2TranscriptGaël: Welcome back on the show, Cameron and Ben, are you still happy to be there? Cameron: Definitely!Benjamin: Of course. Gaël: Okay, thanks a lot. In the first part of this episode we discussed intensively about the system dashboards released by AWS, GCP and Azure as well as the benefits of using CCF to try cloud sustainability. And of course you gave us meaningful insights on how to act upon these metrics to reduce the carbon footprint coming from anyone's cloud operation mentioning especially all the work being done in the Green Software foundation. What I'd like to start talking about now is “let's talk beyond just the greenhouse gas emissions made by the sole electricity consumption of data centers”. So first of all to kill a bit a debate that doesn't really need to happen, reducing those emissions is never a waste of time - by lowering the carbon intensity of the energy mix or even better when focusing on reducing the electricity consumption because a good watt remains a negative watt and we should be aware of the eviction effects when this low carbon electricity cannot be used for all the needs. But what about the carbon footprint of all this equipment inside the data center, the so-called embedded carbon? Can it be tracked? What's your take on it?Cameron: So the way that Cloud Carbon Footprint open source tool tackles embedded or embodied emissions is considering it as the amount of carbon emitted during the creation and disposal of a hardware device. So in order to estimate embodied emissions in the cloud, we need to calculate the fraction of the total embodied emissions that should be allocated to your particular amount of usage or workload. For example, if you are only utilizing a subset of virtual CPUs that are available on a given physical server, then we need to allocate a relative amount of embodied emissions to represent this. And CCF is able to leverage the first version of the software carbon intensity, the SCI specification, which defines a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system. We've also leveraged the research published by Teeds in Benjamin Davy here in order to apply this to AWS, GCP and Azure. So by applying the formula, we're able to get embodied emissions estimations but at this time we are only able to include compute usage types for each cloud provider. But having said that we're welcome to any contributions to apply embodied emissions to other types of cloud usage is as well.Gaël: Ben, do you want to highlight this study that has been done? Benjamin: Yeah, sure. And thanks Cameron for using this and improving it. So with Teads and also with the Boavizta collective, we looked at the state of the art to define basically emission factors to estimate the manufacturing emissions depending on the server hardware specifications. The issue is that there are really few publicly available reports and data and even the most advanced studies, we found they rely on a few reports from electronic components manufacturers themselves and these reports are starting to be a bit old dating sometimes for five or seven years, basically the state of the art on assessing the embodied emissions of digital hardware is really, really limited. Even specific lifecycle databases that you need to pay for. They do not really have much better data. So in fact, we had to make some guests and I used what was best available. So these emission factors, they have their limitations, but it's the best we could find and I think we need to start somewhere. So it's already interesting to estimate calculate something. And on top of that, it's even more difficult if we think about hyperscaler hardware because they usually have custom made electronic components, hardware. They build their own network hardware. They have a custom-made intel cpus they have their own  CPU design firm. So,it's getting even more difficult. So yeah, embodied emissions is really where we should push as an industry as a practitioner for more transparency from manufacturers. Ultimately goes down to the extraction of all the metals and minerals that are used to build these resources.Gaël: Going back to what you say, we definitely need more transparency from manufacturers for regular - I would say standard - equipment. But what you've mentioned regarding hyperscalers that seems to lead to a unique conclusion that we need more transparency from them as well. Is it something that you are optimistic about? Both Ben and Cameron because you've got different positions with them.Benjamin: So if we think about carbon and scope three emissions, I'm fairly confident that all providers will follow what Microsoft did and report scope three, but if they report on a monthly basis and on a service level they will not disclose, I think industrial secrets. So that's something they can do, I hope and I am pretty sure they will. However, disclosing with more details, the other impacts from manufacturing, the infrastructure and hardware, I think it's very early and we will need more push from regulation and this is coming in Europe and in France. So maybe at some point there will be pushed to do this. But without any regulation, I wouldn't be confident about this.Gaël: What's your take on it, Cameron?Cameron: I would agree with Ben that, you know, now that Microsoft has sort of started the trend, it will push the others to follow suit. I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon because I think there might be some hurdles to be jumped to be able to provide that sort of data. I also agree that it's really going to be driven by regulation like Ben said, and you know, some companies disclose some of this data today, but a lot of it's done on a voluntary basis and I think this kind of gets in at least into the US where we have some of these SEC proposals which would, you know, help accelerate some of this to go beyond carbon a bit and take a look into, you know, more scope three guidelines that you need to report on. Besides just the cloud carbon footprint.Gaël: And this regulation might also help us having more homogenous way to report and maybe even a bit more academic background with more research etcetera because what I understand is that we've got very little consensus on how they should be measured. Plus we've got very little transparency on the data these non consensual methodology are calculated upon, is it correct?Cameron: Yeah, I would definitely say there is very minimal data out there right now but you know from the time I first started getting involved in this space to now I think there's been a lot more in the space, partially thanks to you know, people like Ben and his colleagues publishing more and more research but that you know, that's what makes it hard for our team to calculate our methodologies and we're relying on estimations since we're not actually able to deal with the the actual energy consumption data, we have to measure and use averages from publicly available data until we are able to source more of this. And until there is more research done to understand what a good calculating coefficient could be for measuring networking usage, something like that.Gaël: We mentioned it several times and I think it's actually time to move beyond carbon. Had a discussion recently. I wanted to know a bit more about the SDIA and I reached out Max Schultze its founder. He was very straightforward on several points like the lack of transparency, the need to focus on LCA, ... I think he was very provocative saying “stop focusing on carbon”. His point was that we need to focus a lot more on the other environmental impacts of the digital sector and then you started to mention it. So what's your position on it?Benjamin: when we think about optimizing our footprint and using the carbon as the main KPI some of our reflects or some of our ideas to do that might transfer impacts somewhere else. So let me give you an example. Each year providers are adding newer instance types that are more power efficient. This hardware is manufactured and manufacturing it has an impact if I only look at carbon emissions due to the use of electricity and even if I take into account her scope three and embodied emissions pushing the industry for renewing often the the hardware we use for electricity efficiency reasons is creating a lot of issues on the environment because to manufacture these we need to extract a lot of metals. This topic is being more and more discussed due to the energy transition. We talk about it because of lithium and batteries but actually it's the same for all metals. We need to be cautious on our usage of metals because we used to live in a fossil world and we are entering a metal world. So all of the things that Tech we are using rely on metal and it's not an infinite resource. The solar panels and the windmills are using metals, a lot of metals. This is something we need to have in mind. Is that on top of optimizing the energy we use the electricity we use, we might also want to avoid renewing too often the hardware we use.Gaël: But the question I actually wanted to ask you, Ben regarding what you stated about resource exhaustion is “But what about reusing and recycling?”Benjamin: Today? We do not really recycle electronic components. We moved them to a recycling facility and then we are not today able to - or maybe it's not economically viable - but to get the raw materials back. So it's today there's not a complete loop on the recycling it's difficult to separate the elements. So maybe in the future…Gaël: Yes. In the digital collage, when I facilitate the workshop, the digital collage, I always use the example of the ratatouille, that's almost impossible to Benjamin: Exactly Gaël: Create back a tomato once you've put it in the ratatouille Benjamin: Yeah, that's exactly the right image. So recycling is not today, not a viable solution for many reasons. So the best way to approach this is to use the existing hardware much longer and to be frank most of the hardware  we have today is already pretty good. And as soon as the electricity grid is a bit less carbonized, this will push the problem on manufacturing and we can focus on maybe making sure that this hardware is used longerGaël: to avoid the transfer of pollution.Benjamin: Exactly. We only talked about metric extraction but there are dozens of impacts that are analyzed in lifecycle analysis methodologies and for digital hardware we can think about the use of water. It's also interesting because data centers for their run also use a lot of water. So it's not only a manufacturing problem. The water usage is also a use and operation problem, but yet there are many other issues related to this. And when you were talking about recycling today, it's not recycled. It ends up in landfills and it creates echo toxicities issues because these materials and products are not meant to be dumped in the nature.Gaël: Yeah, let's bounce back on this water question as well because you mentioned that it is widely used on the run phase. According to some leaders in the industry, the water consumption of data centers might become a thing of the past because of free cooling. So my question to both of you would be: “do you believe that free cooling will solve this water consumption issue?” And my second question is “Is it truly to cool down data centers or to actually use water to produce the electricity that will power them that we use a lot of water? Sorry folks, two questions in one.Benjamin: So to answer the second question, what I'm referring to in the water usage is the cooling part. So using water to cool down data centers. I'm not a data center expert but I guess that before all the existing data centers move to a free cooling technologies we’ll continue to use a lot of waterGaël: Cameron. Do you have a position on this water consumption question?Cameron: Yeah, my thought aligns with what Ben was saying. I think if data centers are offered free cooling, I can't imagine it would have an immediate impact. You know, it would probably take some time to do that sort of migration or transition. And I'm sure there would still be a lot of water used for that process for who knows how long you know, until it's more generally available.Gaël: Fair point. Knowing that I should have mentioned my source actually who is David Mytton? Who studied the water consumption caused by data centers and it's pretty high to cool them down but it's even higher to produce electricity. Just not sure about the exact number but I think was like 80% of the water consumption that could be attributed to the data center is actually because of the electricity production that is used to power it and only 20% to cool it down. But this is still still very big numbers and I guess it depends on the regions. So water usage, transfer of pollution, resource exhaustion, water usage, definitely a need for more life cycle assessments! Do you believe that this is something that would happen in the near future? Could it happen without some kind of regulation pushBenjamin: there are initiatives pushing a life cycle assessments in Europe as well. There are some regulations pushing for these methodologies to be more widely used. So I'm pretty confident we have more and more data studies examples and maybe it will also point out the lack of primary data that are required to do these life cycle assessments. I'm pretty confident we'll have more in the future. Maybe not as fast as I would hope. ButCameron: yeah, I just wanted to call out that David is actually a big contributor to our open source tool, so he's been great and he's been a community expert that we've been able to speak to our methodological decisions too. But back to your question, it's you know, it's hard for me to see major improvements or research being formed without any regulation, especially here in the US. It seems like most of the strides that I'm seeing at least are coming overseas across the pond in Europe especially. So I would agree with Ben, you know, if, you know, we start to see some of these regulations, then you know, there might be more data available for more research and being able to make more knowledgeable decisions.Gaël: Well actually that triggers a question about where we are in our industry, because Green tends to become a bit trendy. We hear more and more about it, but are all the organizations serious about it? Do you believe that some greenwashing takes place as well? So yeah, I would love to hear about what are the main trends that you see today in the digital sustainable area.Cameron: So I think what I've seen personally is more excitement from different organizations, you know, as I work for a consulting company and we're having regular discussions with potential clients or existing clients about considering a more sustainable cloud infrastructure. It's a very lively discussion, there's a lot of interest at the end of the day, it needs to get the buy back from the executives and I think to this point along with regulations,you need to identify the relationship with the costs as well from a financial standpoint. And a lot of the decisions that are coming down from this level are heavily based around cost. And what I've come to realize recently is, you know, I've been more involved in the FinOps Foundation, specifically within the sustainability working group. And we're starting to define the relationship between FinOps and what we're calling GreenOps and you know, when you combine all those together with software engineering, we're trying to define something called SustainableOps in general and you know, once you're an executive leader at an organization that you know, might want to try and make some changes in the digital sustainability space, but you need to justify it alongside costs. You know, some of what we're trying to do is help you make that decision, see some of the data, create a new culture around FinOps and GreenOps best practices. And so I think alongside regulations, I think, you know, building out this culture leveraging, FinOps best practices is how you might see a new trend take place across organizationsGaël: and pushed mostly by new regulations or pushed by other stakeholders as well?Cameron: You know, I would say mainly regulations. But I also think there's something to be said about, you know, a company's brand name and this is where you could consider the issue of greenwashing. You know, maybe there's more and more pressure to promote clean and sustainable brand. And maybe that's becoming a general member of the Green Software Foundation, but you know, to avoid greenwashing, it's important to actually prove that you're able to make actionable changes and you know, this starts with understanding green software principles, understanding how you can make GreenOps or sustainability across functional requirement when you're making day to day decisions.Gaël: And Ben you wanted to say something, I think I actually interrupted you sorry about that,Benjamin: What I can say about the greenwashing issue and talking from a digital advertising background is that like in all initiatives I think we need to be humble. We said time and time again that we used estimations, that the data was not robust enough. So this is a topic where we can all work together and without any competing problems that we need to be humble to be transparent on what we are able to do and not do some big announcements on having solved the problem because we all know that's a long journey. So yeah that would be my my answer to the greenwashing riskGaël: Fair point. So Cameron and Ben regarding what you've described with the latest trends toward more sustainably in our industry. Are you globally optimistic or do you believe that they are still very significant hurdles that will prevent us to reach the transparency that we discussed before and to get a full grasp on all the environmental impact that cloud operations haveCameron: You know, I would say from the work that I've seen without so much regulation taking place at this time, I see a lot of excitement whenever we have discussions with clients at ThoughtWorks talking about you know green initiatives or green software principles in greening of their IT. So it seems to me that there is a lot of interests actually. Executing on some of this is what's tough without the regulation. But the interest alone is making me optimistic and you know if you can get enough buy-in from organizations across the globe, then, you know, maybe they'll start making some of these optimization changes and start using the cloud when it's operated by renewable energy on the grid. And you know, that alone could snowball and create enough pressure to make the cloud providers a bit more transparent or just get more information released. So I think there is a positive trend going and I'm optimistic that we're heading in the right direction.Benjamin: I totally agree with you Cameron. And I'm usually a very pessimistic person! But if we look at the bright side, we can see that the digital sustainability topic overall gathers more and more people that are genuinely interested in creating open source comments and acting positively. Big companies, big cloud clients and users, are pressuring the providers to share more, to move faster on this topic. So I think we can hope that the customers can get some more pressure in the end and make things go forward even though the regulation might help but will be a bit late to the party. So I would say I'm pretty optimistic on the fact that a lot of people are pushing on this topic.Gaël: You see a lot of traction which leads me to the final question - being mindful of time and especially yours - All these newcomers entering the digital sustainability field and even more precisely the cloud sustainability field, they will be looking for information. Where would you advise them to start looking for?Benjamin: I can start, I personally learned a lot reading articles from David Mytton that you already mentioned in the UK. And also in France on another approach the work from Gautier Roussihle. So I would definitely suggest following them.Gaël: Spoiler alert! David will be on the show before the end of the year and maybe Q3. I still need to work on inviting Gautier, but that will be also amazing.Benjamin: So yeah, so the best thing you could do is a follow-up on the Green I/O podcast and [laughing]Gaël: [laughing] That's a nice one, That's a nice one. Benjamin: But yeah, apart from from these two, I would recommend following the work from the initiatives we mentioned like the Green Software Foundation and Boavizta because both publish great articles.Cameron: So a couple things come to mind here for me, I would say, you know, recently the Green Software Foundation just had an annual summit take place globally different locations around the world. We helped in New York here in the US. Asim Hussain, who's the Green cloud advocate at Microsoft and a Green Software Foundation Board Leader gave a great presentation that was recorded  describing what it all means when you talk about net zero, carbon neutral, climate positive, carbon negative. So I would definitely recommend listening to that talk. I would also say, I think, you know, another Green I/O member formerly Chris Adams, I think he's a great thought leader in the space. He's the executive director for the Green Web Foundation. He's got a lot of great content. I actually just had a catch-up with him recently and we talked through some great things like how to deal with reporting when you have evolving data and methodologies in the space. So Chris Adams, Hussain, those are some great thought leaders in this space. In my opinion.Benjamin: Another reference would be the work from Aurore Stephant about the beyond carbon stuff and the use of metal resources and the extraction.Gaël: She has done an amazing three hours interview for a French online channel called …Benjamin: Thinkerview!Gaël: Yeah, Thinkerview! Thanks a lot. That was a great conversation that we had on many, many different topics. I especially enjoy how much fact-based you were describing very precisely what you can find in the different tools, what you cannot find, what are the issues,  being super super transparent about the lack of data and the fact that we are estimating rather than precisely assessing things. So thanks a lot. It was great having you on the show.Benjamin: Thanks a lot for the invite and having me. Cameron: Thanks for having meGaël: And just a side question - and the answer will be recorded! How was it to join your first podcast ever?Cameron: In my opinion. It was a great experience. I will admit my heart rate was a little higher during the first few minutes but it calmed down after a little while.Gaël: That's because you talked about things that you masterize already. And what about you, Ben?Benjamin: It was a smooth experience. Thanks for making us comfortable. You're a great host.Gaël: [laughing] I just let people talk, you know, that's really the idea. You're the one with the knowledge. You're the one I want to put under the spotlight, not to shine for the sake of shining, but because I really believe that the work you do is highly available for the entire Tech community. So thanks a lot to both of you and good night for the two of us and good afternoon Cameron.Cameron: Yeah, thank you. Take care of both of you. Benjamin: Thank you. Talk to you soon.Gaël: My dear listeners, I hope you have enjoyed this episode as much as I did making it for all of you, the responsible technologists scattered all over the world! Our next episode will be live Tuesday 27th and as requested in the latest poll, we will talk about sustainable design. We will take a Eurostar train - virtually - to travel between Paris and London and meet Anne Faubry and Tom Jarrett, who are both great thought leaders in this field.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

In this episode, we go to both Denver and Montpellier to meet Cameron Casher, Clean Tech Strategist at ThoughtWorks, and Benjamin Davy, Sustainability Director at Teads. Being both hands-on engineers 👨‍💻 and well-known voices in Cloud Sustainability 🌱, they were the perfect match to assess the Sustainability dashboards provided by AWS, GCP and Azure as well as pro and con of Cloud Carbon Footprint, the open-source tool. Which one can truly help responsible technologists to assess 📏 their GHG emissions ?❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: Cameron's LinkedInBenjamin's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Cameron's and Benjamin's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:The Green Software Foundation Thoughtworks’ Tech RadarTeads' engineering blog Benjamin’s talk on sustainable architecture on AWS Cloud Carbon Footprint: the open-source measurement and analysis ToolClimate Action Tech communityCameron’s talk at AWS re-InventMicrosoft Azure white paper on their sustainability report and how they approach Scope 3 GCP methodology on sustainability AWS well-architected framework Tomorrow electricity mapSEC Proposes Rules to Enhance and Standardize Climate-Related Disclosures for InvestorsTranscriptGaël: In this summer episode, we do a premiere: Green IO first group interview on 3 different time zones. We went to Denver where we had the pleasure to speak to Cameron Casher. Cameron is a Senior Software Engineer as well as a Clean Tech Strategist at ThoughtWorks - Does the name of this huge Chicago-based Tech consultancy company ring a bell? Yes there are the ones best known for crafting the Tech Radar. But this is not the reason we have Cameron on the show. Actually, Cameron is one of the main contributors to the Cloud Carbon Footprint initiative as well as a founding member of the Green Software Foundation. We also had the pleasure to welcome Benjamin Davy on the show. Based in Montpellier Benjamin is Tead’s Sustainability Director. Tead’s name might not ring a bell except if you work in digital marketing but they are one of the biggest Media platforms worldwide. And with ads distributed to over 1.9 billions people every month they do have a tech stack worth paying attention to, especially knowing how much they use (and pay) for AWS and GCP services. However, if you navigate into the Digital Sustainability field in Europe, Benjamin’s name should ring a bell. He has been a restless advocate for cloud sustainability, sharing many insights on Tead’s engineering blog or in conferences like the AWS Summit or APIdays as well as volunteering for Boavizta whose API & open database track the environmental impacts of devices and servers. Welcome Cameron and Ben, thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today.Cameron: Thanks for having us.Benjamin: Thanks a lot Gaël, it's a pretty nice introduction.Gaël: I try to do my homework :). So, Benjamin, let's talk about you! Any misses in my introduction or some information you'd like to highlight?Benjamin: No, it's all good. And this is my first time on the podcast, so I'm glad it's on Green I/O.Gaël: Thanks a lot. It means a lot coming from you. And what about you, Cameron? What did I forget to mention about you?Cameron: Not much. Honestly, I also point out that this is my first podcast. So also happy that it's Green I/O but I guess I just wanted to mention that along with the digital sustainability side, I'd like to think that I have a deep connection with the environment living in colorado in the US where I try to center all of my favorite hobbies around outdoor activities, like hiking and camping and skiing in the winters. So, happy to be talking today,Gaël: I heard this is an amazing place for outdoor activity! I had a question for the two of you, which is a very standard question in my show. How did you become interested in sustainability in general and the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place?Cameron: So, I'd say my interest with the digital sector started when I joined ThoughtWorks as I started volunteering my free time in the sort of grassroots project to help define what our North America team wanted to focus their work on and I was assisting with industry research and interviewing folks involved in the sustainability sector across various companies, and as it turns out, this work really helped build the foundation around our team's goals and ultimately help towards the decision to start building the Cloud Carbon Footprint, open source tool that I now help maintain. So I'd say, you know, joining ThoughtWorks really helped jumpstart my interest.Gaël: I wouldn't have believed that such a big company like ThoughtWorks would have created a trigger for action for sustainability in the first place. So kudo to them,Cameron: it's really, I'd say more so individual contributors at the company tried to basically form an initiative and I was lucky enough to get exposed and connected with the right group people early on.Gaël: Okay, got it. Well, thanks a lot. And what about you, Ben?Benjamin: Yes, so I've been looking for ways to work or contribute to having a positive impact during the past few years, initially I was mostly interested in ways to fix plastic pollution. So I got really into open source projects like precious plastic, if that's something that was really listening to the podcast now. So, an initiative that created open source plans to build the machines to recycle plastic and wanted to apply also the same kind of initiatives internally and in my day to day job and discussing with my colleagues, I mean, might be 2.5 years ago now, we wanted to know more about the impact of our digital service and this is how I started to look into it actually.Gaël: Okay, so from plastic pollution to digital sustainability. That's cool. I'd like to start talking about the main topic of this episode, the sustainability dashboards. So let me introduce it that way. We have recently seen a lot of hype around the pledge made by the three big Western cloud providers to reach net zero emissions, being carbon neutral, etcetera. Some NGO pointed out that these environmental claims are not without flaws but today we'd like to focus the discussion not on the sustainability of the cloud - at least not only the sustainability of the cloud - but the sustainability in the cloud and having a hands-on discussion for all the CTO and their teams willing to green their cloud infrastructure so how AWS, GCP and Azure empower their customers to monitor and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. What's the state of the market regarding Cloud Sustainably if I may ask? And Ben I recall, your company is a big customer of both amazon web services and google cloud platform. What's your view on these tools? Both AWS sustainable console and DCP carbon sense suit.Benjamin: I think we could spend an hour already discussing only on these topics. I'll do my best to answer quickly to start. I would like to say that I had to spend quite some time learning about carbon reporting methodologies to be able to understand what was actually reported by these tools. So there are two important things I have in mind regarding these carbon calculators. First is that they can't really be compared as they all calculate emission on different parameters. So if we look at AWS and GCP, they focus on emissions related to the electricity consumption of their data centers on this topic. Most of the sustainability initiatives focus on renewable energy procurement. There will be a lot to say about this, but not all procurement schemes are equal in terms of impact - or positive impact - and it's hard to get precise data about this. So what's important is that in any case the electricity that is used by data centers comes from the local grid, the local electricity grid and when the grid is not available, it will be instantly backed up by diesel generators or more common power sources and not really by remote wind or solar generators. So this is important to focus on electricity. They talk about renewable procurement, but in reality we know that the electricity they actually use is from the grid and talk shortly about Azure. Azure reports broader scope including emissions related to manufacturing, transport and end of life of the hardware they use to provide the clothes services. So these emissions are called Scope three and are really important. We might talk about this a bit later and GCP and AWS actually communicated on the fact that they are working on scope three reporting as well. So the first thing is that each cloud provider has its own methodology and perimeter on which it covers this. The second point is that on top of reporting on different scopes, they also use different ways to allocate emissions to calculate how they distribute uh emissions to the use of cloud services. What I can say on this point is that Microsoft were the first were the first to look into scope three emissions documented how they calculate hardware, lifecycle emissions in a very detailed white paper. So it's really worth having a look. But I won't comment on the report itself. Maybe I'll let Cameron talk about it later as we don't run anything on Azure. Coming back to GCP and AWS. If we look at GCP the report details scope two emissions and they actually shared about the methodology. They used to allocate these emissions to the cloud products and most importantly, they also transparently disclosed the carbon intensity of the electricity grid that is used to power the data centers which is really nice. We can say so from a client perspective, user perspective, the report that they provide is interesting because it will reflect true carbon emissions related to electricity consumption. The report granularity is not perfect but it's already useful to observe the impact from architecture changes. For example, their reports are available on a monthly basis with a few days of delay and the split of the emissions is per google cloud projects. So it's not that granular but it gives some insights. Now if we look at AWS we don't really have any details on the methodology that is used and on top of this, the emissions related to the use of electricity reported using a market based reporting methodology. So to be simple, this methodology will consider that you can count zero emissions for the electricity you consume from the grid when this consumption is matched with renewable energy procurement and again it's hard to assess. We don't have all the details of how they procure this energy. So it's a bit difficult to say if it's good, really good or not that good. But more practically speaking, the report is available within a three months delay due to this procurement process and emissions are split per month and region. So it's a bit less granular and for example for teads our European activities are hosted in Ireland and the report simply tells us that the use of AWS emitted zero gram of CO2. So to be totally honest in our case this reporting might only be useful for corporate accounting and again, it's only covering part of the total emissions. We would like to have a view on this on. I would simply conclude by saying that these reports are not yet granular and complete enough to be used by engineering teams to make educated decisions on how they use cloud resources. It's a good first step. It gives some insights depending on the provider. It's more or less documented. More or less granular but it's not as detailed as I wish. It would be.Gaël: Ben just to wrap up what you've said actually, what should be assessed with these reports is a/ the openness of the methodology; b/ the granularity - by granularity what you mean is really, is it just the bulk of all your services or you can go very deep into tracking? And there is also this geographical granularity. So this is the third point. And the fourth point for AWS is you’re based on market based and that's not actionable. Isn't it any ways when you use the AWS console that you can switch from market based to location based and vice versa?Benjamin: No, not directly. And I forgot to mention that it's for us. It's also split by main services. So like you mentioned, so you have EC2, S3 bucket, and the main big services in the region. You cannot switch to a location based. However they share about the amount of renewable electricity that, so they give some information on how they calculated the market based. So you could reverse engineer it, but it's not really accurate because there are some subtle things in the calculation. So you could maybe try to reverse engineer the report, but that's not really a precise or accurateGaël: before jumping to Azure with Cameron. I'd like to ask your opinion on PPA.Cameron: I think the important thing to consider and Ben has been touching on this fact that Cloud Carbon Footprint focuses on location based and not market based. So we're not concerned with any Power Purchase Agreements or Renewable Energy Credits, we're only concerning ourselves with the pure amount of carbon or CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. And I think it's also worth arguing that estimates by definition are not, you know, the most accurate and how much they are useful is more important than being accurate. I think it's what I might say.Benjamin: I would say that the issue with PPA. Is that they are not disclosed. We don't really know which PPA is powering which data center. So if we add more transparency into this topic, we might be able to include it in calculation. But again, if we even look at the GHG Protocol, the standard for carbon reporting, it's written on this standard that you must - you shall, I think that's the exact word that is used - report, do a dual reporting, so reporting both location based to have the actual emissions and market based to also show that you have initiatives to fund new renewable energy generation plants. So ideally I think we would like to have both which is what GCP is doing. So some are doing it, I hope everybody will be able to at some pointGaël: and that's a very very interesting statement that should be done. If we were to follow a GHG protocol! And Cameron, can we go back to actually Azure because we didn't speak that much about Azure and I know that you practice it quite a lotCameron: sure. I'm happy to share some of you know the notes I've taken around the tool. So Microsoft's emissions impact dashboard I believe is available generally to those with a power bi pro subscription. The dashboard provides insight into total Microsoft emissions associated with your Azure cloud use which includes Scopes 1, 2 and three. These emissions calculations take into consideration emissions associated with the full life cycle of hardware devices used in their data centers, data center efficiency and the grid emissions factors for each data center. It accounts for the energy used to run your services and takes a market based approach by factoring in renewable energy purchases by Microsoft. The dashboard allows you to see this data in various ways, including year to year comparisons and trends and insight into projected end of year use on the emissions details page provides further granularity allowing you to view emissions and usage quarterly and understand the impact of subscriptions, services and regions. It also contains a map illustrating your emissions by location especially relevant to organizations assessing their move to the cloud. The dashboard includes a page highlighting the estimated emissions avoided due to your current Azure cloud use. It provides a rationality savings with estimates of the amount avoided due to data center efficiencies, renewable energy purchases and factors in the carbon spend of the migration. It puts this in real terms with an estimated percentage saved and the equivalency in terms of driving distance and the emissions impact dashboard aims to assist organizations as they look at reporting emissions, allowing you to export data, generate custom reports and view an auto generated preliminary GHG Preparation report and a description of the methodology approach can be viewed within the tool and links to additional resources, resources such as the validated scope three methodology white paper. So in my opinion, I think the Microsoft tool is very robust. I think the emissions impact dashboard was the first out of the three major to come out and as Ben mentioned, it does consider scope three and also the market based approach.Gaël: It sounds more robust than the others, indeed! Do you know how they assess them? Savings made thanks to the migration,Cameron: not in too much detail, I know that they provide a white paper around how they consider what some of, you know, the migration emissions might be. I think AWS does something a bit similar where they track what the potential savings could look like with the migration as well.Benjamin: Yeah. I think most of the providers did this type of study to compare an average data center workload running in average data centers and estimating the impact from moving to the cloud in terms of the use of resources and the efficiency gains by having a better PUE for example. So most of the providers did this type of study. Sometimes you can argue that some hypothesis that they took is maximizing the efficiency gains we could discuss about this at length.Gaël: They don't offer a way to fine tune “where do you come from?” for instance “Were your datacenter being powered by mostly renewable energy versus being on the very carbon intensive grid” that's not an option. It's just an average data center around the world or at least in the region where you start from?Benjamin: Yeah. For AWS, they did studies specifically for Europe for the US I guess. And each time they adapt the methodology to take an average data center profile specific to the region.Cameron: I do believe too that Google's more transparent methodology states that they use hourly emissions pulled from tomorrow's electricity map, which I think is pretty awesome.Gaël: Kudo to them. So your feedback on the three dashboards is very interesting and I'd like to link it to a discussion I supported in the Climate Action Tech community between Drew Engelson and Ismail Velasco the tech lead at graze.com. He wanted to try the carbon footprint on individual AWS services and super soon they pointed out that cloud carbon footprint was a much needed tool, and Cameron correct me if I'm wrong, but you joined this conversation as well. So maybe it's time to start talking in depth about Cloud Carbon Footprint and also how useful it can be when you use AWS, when you use GCP and maybe is it still useful or not when you use Azure? Because it sounds pretty robust what you've described with the Azure emission impact dashboard.Cameron: Yes. So I'm a big fan of the climate action community. I've got the slack up on my computer frequently, so I like to see what the latest news is and ongoing discussion threads. So I was happy to notice that conversation take place. Yeah, I think um, you know, when the CCF development first started these tools by the cloud providers hadn't really been released and now that they have, I don't see that in a negative way. In fact, I think it's actually helped the emissions calculations behind the CCF methodology a bit, as we've been able to maintain really solid relationships with some of the people behind the scenes at google and AWS and Microsoft and you know, understand how our calculations might differ and get them into the same order of magnitude difference based off how we might be going about different approaches. So it's been really nice to collaborate in those ways, but I think the main difference I would say that CCF provides and why it may not have become obsolete yet is that it's a cloud agnostic solution. So we're talking about how AWS, Microsoft and Google have their own dashboards with their own methodologies. Well if you're using multi cloud, like a large percentage of organizations are, how are you going to realistically compare and contrast those results? And that's where we think CCF can be a bigger differentiator using the same methodology across the three major cloud providers. You can see your results in similar terms. I think there's also something to be said about the granularity of the data that we're working with since, you know, there's only so much we can grab from the cloud providers themselves. Cloud Carbon Footprint is really doing the best it can with the given data that's available right now. So along with the, you know, cost and usage reports and billing data that we're querying to base our estimations off of, we can't grab a lot of these carbon metrics. So what we have to do is use our methodology that we've validated, source some open data sets online, including spec power database where we can view, you know, wattage values, memory values associated with specific servers and try and map those to some of the data we're able to retrieve in the billing and the fact that we're able to use these average values from the open data that we're sourcing allows us to get into a more granular data set. So what the CCF tool is able to provide is data by day without a lag! The only lag is the data we're able to get from the cloud providers. How frequently we’re able to pull that billing data. I could talk a bit more about, you know, what's working well for CCF tooGaël: I would love to, I just had one question before: is CCF totally open source?Cameron: Yes, So that was a big decision right out the gate when CCF was being developed, deciding to make an open source, it just seemed like the right decision. Before my time ThoughtWorks had a history of developing open source tools for the community. So I think that was a really fun journey to start on creating Cloud Carbon Footprint as an open source solution has really benefited us in a lot of ways. And you know, that's how I was able to connect with Ben in the first place where you know, once we started gaining traction, sending out calls for actions about, you know, working with industry experts to try and, you know, let's say, get a solid calculation out there for calculating memory consumption in the cloud, you know, that's where we were able to connect with Ben and discuss what his thoughts were, you know, work to build that back into the tool. So we're getting a little bit of validation there from, you know, industry and community experts being able to see what our source code looks like and provide feedback in real time.Gaël: And do you consider now that you've managed to build a good enough ecosystem of peers being able to provide feedback from the different cloud providers, different partners in the industry? Cameron: Yeah, so part of my day to day work includes being a maintainer of the Cloud Carbon Footprint tool along with my team. So you know, each day we're monitoring for new issues, new pull requests, we have a Google group forum where anyone can email us directly with questions or insights and you know, the traction hasn't really slowed down there. There's a lot of community involvement and you know, I'm happy to hear any time. There may be a new organization adopting Cloud Carbon Footprint.Gaël: Ben mentioned earlier that the AWS Dashboard was very interesting to get a general idea but that it was not really actionable for an engineer. Do you believe that CCF has managed to be truly actionable for engineers to make an educated decision?Cameron: You know, we have a demo that you can view that has mocked data right on our website and it shows you what our front and dashboard looks like and what sort of data you can view and we think that this data could be utilized from different levels through practitioners all the way up to sustainability executives who might want to see trends over time or spikes on a given day, if you see a time series chart there. Otherwise, if you're a practitioner or a developer that are really wanting to investigate what a spike might be on a given day, you can really analyze the data you're given, see what service it's coming from, see what day it is, see what region it's located in, see what account it's associated with. And then we also provide actionable recommendations. These are provided out of the box, just based off what we're able to query from the cloud providers, which is mostly right sizing recommendations. So you might be able to, you know, terminate an idle instance, which I would think most developers are aware of most of these recommendations but piece that we're able to add through our dashboard is the equivalent carbon savings and energy savings associated. So not only costGaël: Fair point and Ben, is it the way you use it as a practitioner?Benjamin: So we used this bottom up approach starting from the granular data for different things. We initially used it to perform life cycle assessment for digital service. So it's a big, big study to understand the overall emissions of our platform. But actually this type of bottom up solution can be used for many things to report carbon emissions per service. We usually report cost per service and our teams are accountable for the cost of the service they manage. Being able to also report carbon emissions is quite interesting because you can compare evolution in cost and evolution in carbon. So that's an additional insight that can be rewarding when you work on optimizations! You can also use it not related directly to bills, but during the design phase, use the data from the Cloud Carbon Footprint. The data set to help choose between two technical solutions or even calculate positive impacts of adopting best practices like the ones AWS published with its well architected framework. They did a great job on this part. So actually what we're able to do with CCF data is to yeah, have a deeper and more granular analysis on day to day activities optimizations, having more metrics and on our daily jobs thatGaël: And at Teads your infrastructure is with multi-cloud providers. And Cameron, you  say that CCF is especially valuable for a large company having several cloud providers. Is it still true for a smaller company having only one cloud provider? I mean maybe not one running on AWS because obviously Ben has described pretty well that it's not that much actionable. But for instance if you had a company running solely on either Azure or GCP, do you believe that they should still invest a bit of time and energy into using CCF?Benjamin: Actually as most reports are on a monthly basis, CCF is on a daily basis. So even here you can see that the granularity can serve different use cases.Gaël: So CCF is definitely a silver bullet when it comes to being immediately actionable I would say. Benjamin: Yeah it might be.Gaël: But Azure report comes on a monthly basis as well Cameron? Or do you have access to it on a daily basis as well?Cameron: So as far as I've seen, the lowest granularity that you can get is quarterly.Gaël: OKCameron: In theory you could get monthly by selecting one month at a time to view the data. But when looking at emissions data and emissions savings, it seems like quarterly is as granular as you're able to see. I think I may have mentioned this you know, it's useful to take in all the different perspectives and if you have Azure data, you know, use the dashboard alongside CCF or use the AWS carbon footprint too alongside CCF. And you can even plug in the billing exports from GCP and plug those into CCF. So you could even see your GCP data in the CCF dashboard. So.Gaël: Thanks a lot Cameron. And another point is “okay, so I might have several cloud providers, but I might, - yes, that's true. That happens especially in the public sector, but not only; in heavily regulated industries for instance - I might still have my own data centers, my bare metal servers. Can I use CCF to help me with this infrastructure or do I need to look for something else?Cameron: I think that what we aim for CCF to do is provide transparency first and foremost with what your data looks like and then from there and this kind of gets into what ThoughtWorks can offer as an organization from a consulting standpoint is allowing our teams to go in and really assess what your cloud infrastructure looks like and based off the data, we're able to view from CCF or also the cloud provider tools in tandem. We can, you know, go in and assess and analyze what your current systems might look like and identify ways that you could improve the infrastructure based off green software principles. And I just want to call out that currently I'm involved in a working group at the Green Software Foundation where we are developing green software principles, patterns and practices So principles being the main educational piece that we're still working out a training for to be able to understand first and foremost, like what you're dealing with with green software, what the main core principles are with learning objectives. And then patterns is how you would apply the principles to your infrastructure and then practices is giving real time examples of how you implement some of those patternsGaël: And could you give us an example for instance or is it still too early?Cameron: No, I could give you an example of, you know, an optimization strategy. There's this idea of being carbon aware and that pertains to identifying the best time of day or location to be using your system. So if you were to be able to view that during a certain time of the day, maybe around noon where the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, there might be more renewable energy resources on the grid. That might be a more optimal and efficient time to be running any batch jobs you might have or by location. You know, if uh if you were formally running services that were based in you know Iowa in the US, that might not be the cleanest region. So you could switch regions and workloads to run in a cleaner region, which means more renewable energy is on the grid maybe in the UK. So that would be, you know, one of the principles and the pattern could be identifying how exactly you want to set up that batch job to understand when it should run, where it should run. And this is where you could utilize certain KPIs like tomorrow's electricity map to understand hourly emissions data. And then maybe building out a machine learning or even a i to be able to measure that and know to switch times or switch locations when those batch jobs should be running.Gaël: Okay. Ben, do you have also some feedback to share on these green computing principles? I mean, did you get involved? Benjamin: We simply try to optimize the resources we use and use them as efficiently as possible. So most of the work we did was rather finding ways to automatically shut down. For example, see the CI/CD is useful during certain times of the week. And during weekends or at night, it's not of use for anybody, so we shut it down, and full of machines and we we also worked on many, many optimizations so that the infrastructure team at Teads did that. Adding an carbon aware logic into this is something uh we discussed internally, it's something we can imagine for as a Cameron said, so for batch processes, for example, for machine learning training that are done regularly may these are the types of service of processes of workloads that can be delayed in time or maybe moved in space, but it's still very early days to… I don't know any framework that would ease this and maybe I hope that's the next frontier for open source.Gaël: Well, that's very interesting because with see that this is very, very early stage. But folks, I'd like to… just before jumping on the second part of the show, there is one point that actually I forgot to ask you: “And what about the other cloud provider?” So I did my homework, I tried and I managed to reach out to some of them in France, UK and Switzerland and this is actually the discussion I'd like to report here. The discussion I had with Nico Schottelius Data Center Light CEO. They're based in Switzerland. They've got their own hydro power plant and we had a very meaningful discussion and he was pretty straightforward regarding CCF saying “I’d love to participate, I don't have enough resources and I've got almost no push from the market”. So after the discussion, I was like “maybe this is not the best example because obviously these customers know that they're truly green powered - like locally green powered”. But that's also a message that I've heard from other people like Scaleway and friends, etc. “we do it on a voluntary basis, but we don't have that much market push to join CCF or to disclose better metrics on our carbon footprint. So what is your take on it?Cameron: So um, you know, at the root of what CCF is doing is it's utilizing the methodology that we've worked on to convert billing and usage data to energy in CO2 emissions. And what we've been able to do is hook that up to the billing data that we've called via API. To the major cloud providers. And we've built the tool in such a way that it is extensible to add more cloud providers outside of the main three. You know, as long as you can get the necessary metrics to make the calculation then there's no reason you can't add those in and you know, with all the demand that we have with the tool we've had to really try and prioritize what some of the work should be laid out on our roadmap. Um currently, you know, we're trying to work on performance optimizations on our backlog by adding other cloud providers, but truly we're driven by the demand of the community and our clients that we're working with with the tool. So I would love if, you know, there were some open source community members that wanted to work on adding something like this and creating a pull request in the repository and GIThub. But as far as market push, I think, you know, we're starting to get into a phase where there might be more regulatory pressure from governments here in the US. You know, there's SEC proposals about having more diligent reporting take place and you know, this is where organizations might need to start thinking about this sort of thing and this might, you know, traditionally be done by a Chief Financial Officer, but this is where you could involve a CIO as well and really have someone that's more closely related to the digital sustainability side and have their inputs weight out as they might need to start reporting on some of these different greenhouse gas protocolGaël: Thanks a lot Cameron! Folks. Let's switch to the second part. Maybe because I think you've already shared quite a lot of knowledge. It was a good walk around all these dashboards and what CCF can do. So thanks a lot to both of you for joining the show. And my dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we did, making it for all of you. As you rightfully guess, the next episode will be live within a week, and we will stay with Cameron and Benjamin to talk in depth about embedded carbon and other environmental impacts of cloud computing.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

In this episode, we go to London and meet David Mytton the co-founder and CEO of Console and also an academic doing his PhD on sustainable computing in Oxford University 🎓. All David’s work follow a consistent thread that could be described as “Effective Sustainability requires reliable and transparent information”. Under this angle, we discussed the environmental impact of datacenters and why the estimates vary so much, the accuracy of carbon footprint calculators for websites as well as the choice of language and CI/CD when we aim to develop greener code 👩‍💻. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode!Learn more about our guest and connect: David's blogDavid's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   David's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:Aslan J. et al. "Electricity Intensity of Internet Data Transmission: Untangling the Estimates" August 2017Shehabi, A. and E. Masanet US Data Center Energy Usage Report January 2016Google LighthouseGerry McGovern's newsletter David's article "Data centre water consumption" February 2021David and Masaõ Ashtine's article "Sources of data center energy estimates: A comprehensive review" July 2022Pereira et al. "Ranking programming languages by energy efficiency" May 2021 and the older version "Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate?" October 2017David MacKay's book “Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air” January 2009John Andrews and Nick Jelley's book "Energy Science" November 2021TranscriptGaël: Hello, everyone. For this episode, we go back to London to have an amazing talk with David Mitton, the co-founder and CEO of Console, an Angel investor and an academic doing his PhD on sustainable computing in Oxford University. Now, let's be honest. Interviewing David is both a privilege and a challenge, a privilege, because he ranks super high on my list of world class experts in digital sustainability among people like Gauthier Roussilhe, for instance, but also a challenge because he covers so many angles in green IT that I would like to record a 4 hours long episode. Still, there is a consistent threat among all David's work that could be labeled as “Effective sustainability requires reliable and transparent information”. Under this angle, we discussed the environmental impact of data centers and why the estimates vary so much, the accuracy of carbon footprint calculators for websites, as well as the choice of language and CI/CD when we aim to develop greener code. But let's talk a bit about David first from 2009 to 2018, David was co-founder and CEO at Server Density, a London based SaaS infrastructure monitoring startup which got subsequent VC funding and achieved to attract more than 700 customers. When StackPath acquired the company, he joined it for two years as their lead product engineer. Then he completed an environmental technology MsC at Imperial College, London, where he developed his interest in sustainable computing. He continued that research on the sustainable team at Uptime Institute. Eventually, he launched Console in early 2021 to provide the best tools for developers while starting a part-time PhD in Oxford University. Welcome, David. Thanks a lot for joining Green Area today,David: Hello. It's very kind introduction, Thank you very much.Gaël: First of all, what did I miss in your bio? David: It's a good question because my hobbies overlap very much with what I do on a daily basis, which is the console.dev newsletter to help engineers find tools. And I just really enjoy playing around with computers. And so I do that all day playing with dev tools and Cloud infrastructure and then at the weekends - and sometimes during the week as well - I'm also investigating the sustainability of everything I've been playing with during the week because I think it's important for us to be able to continue using all these digital services whilst reducing the environmental impact. And so my hobby is the academic side of things, which is why I'm starting a PhD at Oxford to continue the work that I first got interested in at Imperial in sustainable computing.Gaël: So you could describe yourself as a sustainability geek.David: Yes, I think so. Technology broadly and then sustainable technology, specificallyGaël: How this interest in sustainability, and especially the sustainability in ICT came first. Did you have some kind of ha ha moment?David: It came once I sold my company in 2018, and I joined the acquirer as you mentioned StackPath and ran their product engineering team for a bit. But then I was thinking about what challenges we're going to face as a civilization over the coming decades and how I could apply my time, my skills to contribute to solving some of those issues. And I decided that climate change was a major challenge that really needed to be fixed. This was pre-covid, of course, so that was the biggest challenge that I saw at the time, and I decided I needed to bootstrap my knowledge in environmental technology and environmental sustainability in general because I have absolutely no or had no background in it prior to that. And so I did a masters degree at Imperial College here in London, in environmental sustainability and technology, and that really covers, covered, everything from fisheries management through to clean energy and vectors for disease control with mosquitoes. But I specialize specifically in energy technology and that I chose that because I thought that was the most tangible and applicable area that was currently in motion at the move to renewable and clean energy essentially. So specializing in energy, I then was able to link my experiencing cloud and software to start getting into the sustainability aspects of the usage of I t globally.Gaël: So we mentioned reliable metrics being a pillar of your work, both as an academic and as an entrepreneur. And I'd like to have your opinion on the carbon calculators for websites which are blossoming across the world. Sorry if this question might be a bit controversial but are they reliable? All of them? Only some of them? And what could be the use?David: Generally they're not very reliable, and they're not much use. In my opinion, the problem comes down to the methodology and I would distinguish general website calculators from the Cloud Carbon footprint calculators that are provided by the cloud providers, which all three of them Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they now will have their own calculator. I put those in a separate category, the ones that I think you're referencing just general Calculators are available from a number of different places onlineGaël: and dedicated for websites, not not the full infrastructure. Most of the time.David: That's right. Yeah, So the way that they are working is they generally scan your website and look at all the assets, CSS, images, JavaScript, all that kind of stuff and calculate the total page size. And then they apply an energy factor, which is typically taken from academic literature and then multiply the energy factor by the page size, and that gives you the total amount of energy that is consumed on a single page load. And then that can give you a number that you can use to calculate based on the number of visitors to your website, and that gives you the total energy consumption and then governments around the world they all published carbon factors, which allows you to convert that energy consumption into carbon emissions. And that's the number that usually gets out of these calculators. But it makes a fundamental assumption around the energy factor, and typically you see these being taken from academic literature that provides a single number. It's often kilowatt hours per gigabyte, and then they multiply that by the data transfer. And that has some major limitations, which means it's essentially inaccurate and not much use. And this is compared to the carbon footprint calculators you get from the cloud providers, which will go into your full infrastructure and all of the details. And they look at their actual energy consumption from all of the data centers and the full footprint of the infrastructure, whoever it is that you're using. And then they are portioning it across all their customers, so far more challenging with those because different companies are more transparent than others. But because they're using actual energy consumption rather than the calculators which are just using factors multiplying them, they're significantly more accurate.Gaël: We had an episode dedicated to Cloud Carbon Footprint and the different methodologies and pro and cons regarding the big three - I would say - carbon calculators with Cameron Kasher and Benjamin Davy. It was a fascinating discussion. But going back to the website calculator, is there any other bias?David: The first challenge, I would say, is that it drastically simplifies how website infrastructure works and how websites are actually delivered to users. So if you're just looking at the page size and using that as the total amount of data transferred, then that misses out a huge part of what's going on behind the scenes. So, for example, is that data downloaded every single time you load the page? It is the first time, but on the second and the third times it's not. It's cached by the browser. And then you've got caching happening on the infrastructure behind the scenes because there are content delivery networks. There's also processing that can happen in the browser. So if you're executing JavaScript or playing a video, then there's processing happening in the browser. But there's also processing happening on the service side if you're doing any kind of service side rendering or querying databases, so you're missing out some major components in just how the page is rendered. And then the energy factor, this number that you get kilowatt hours per gigabyte.This is an average, so it doesn't really capture any of the key differences between different types of applications. It's just looking at the average amount of energy per unit of data and misses out things like Web browsing versus video streaming, for example, which is much more intensive on the data volumes. Often you'll see a number that has been cited from a paper by Aslan from a couple of years ago as linear. Commonly, you'll see it as 0.65 kilowatt hours per gigabyte. That's assuming the number has been correctly adjusted because the number that they publish in the paper is actually for 2015. And you have to make adjustments for projected improvements in efficiency where they project. It's going to fall by half every two years, so you have to project that out to get the current year. The further out you make projections and make these changes, the less accurate they are, because it's very difficult to predict changes in infrastructure and improvements in efficiency and also that number from the Aslan’s paper. It only refers to fixed line networks. And that excludes a major source of traffic, which is mobile,Gaël: Which is crazy because - and I speak about something that I have experienced when I was working in the prop tech industry -  very often platforms reach 70 or 80% of traffic being done via mobile.David: That's right, yeah, so the application is really important. And then finally, I think it only refers to infrastructure in countries with modern equipment, and that's relevant for countries in Western Europe. But as you have more infrastructure being deployed in countries that are not as advanced, then you're missing out potentially significant components of the environmental impact of that. So all of these things combine to mean that the number is basically useless, that you get from the carbon calculators. And actually it's more useful to look at something like the Google Lighthouse to use performance as a proxy for energy consumption. Because if the page is loading faster and you reduce asset sizes and you tweak your cashing and all those kind of things, then you're making more efficient use of the infrastructure justGaël: To close the topic of website carbon calculators. I understand you don't believe in the accuracy of the numbers provided but are they consistent? Meaning that the number is wrong but the evolution could still be interesting to follow and to track just to know if you're going into the right direction.David: I don't think so, because many of the things that you change as a result of, say, the Google Lighthouse project would not be reflected in the carbon calculators, the website carbon calculators. So, for example, if you improve the caching and the calculator doesn't look at the caching - it's just looking at the full page load - you've made an improvement that is invisible to those calculators, and it would still show the exact same carbon number. The challenge is that it's somewhat unintuitive that increased amount of data would have minimal or no effect on the amount of energy consumed. Because you assume that if you're using more data then it needs more energy and generally that's not the case. This is an emerging area, I suppose, in academic research, and there's a limited amount of our papers to point to. But over the last two years, thereabouts, there have been some papers that look into this in more detail and the approach I describe around using the factor multiplied by the data transferred is known as kind of an allocation method where you're allocating the data to the energy or vice versa, and that has its uses. It's useful for reporting because if you know the amount of data that you transferred, the amount of energy that you've consumed by looking at your electricity meter too, then you can divide them and allocate them and then you get an intensity figure and you can look over time at your those two numbers and hopefully see a reducing energy. Improving energy efficiency to reduce intensity factor. So over time, if you're transmitting more data but you're using less energy, then your intensity would decrease over time, and that is useful to track. But it assumes you've got access to the data volume, which generally isn't that difficult to get access to. But it's more challenging to get access to that energy number because it's not exposed by the cloud providers. And unless you are racking your own equipment in a data center, you're not going to be able to get access to it. And the challenges that this unintuitive nature of how networks work, it comes down to understanding how those networks are deployed and, as it turns out, the way that networks work as you deploy the network equipment. And it has a baseline amount of energy consumption, which is a factor of the capacity of that piece of equipment. But it is almost completely disconnected from the actual usage. It's not correlated. Certainly not linearly correlated. So networks are provisioned for peak load and they’re provisioned for redundancy. And when you add that new equipment, that's when the energy increase occurs.Certainly the energy increase that is significant in terms of measuring. It's not when you push more data through the equipment, at least not on a linear basis, and that is the common error that is made with these carbon calculators. The website Carbon Calculators is that they assume that energy consumption is linear and it's proportional to the amount of data that is transmitted, which isn't the case.Gaël: Thanks a lot for your honesty and straightforwardness about these tools. We could already start grasping it, and I mentioned it in my introduction, you’re a true infrastructure expert as well. You wrote several articles, academic articles on the environmental footprint of data centers both Cloud and Private Data Center. I'd like to start by not talking about energy for the moment and focus on water. Thought leaders in digital sustainability like Gerry McGovern, for instance, in his New Thinking newsletter are more and more vocal about it. Several hyperscalers experienced severe pushbacks in the Netherlands or in Denmark, for instance, regarding the water consumption. And I rediscovered recently that actually you wrote something about it back in February 2021. So what could you tell us about the water consumption of the infrastructure and maybe more specifically, the data centers?David: Water consumption of data centers is an interesting topic because it is a lot more challenging to explain than energy consumption and carbon emissions. So when you're thinking about carbon emissions our goal is zero - net zero essentially - for carbon emissions, and that's a very simple marketing message. It's a very simple goal, and everyone can understand what we're trying to do. So when we're transitioning to clean energy, we mean zero carbon energy, and the goal is obvious. Water consumption is not so clear cut because the goal is not always zero water and you have to understand the context of the location of the data center to decide what the goal should be. So if you have a data center that is deployed in a region that has abundant water, perhaps it's next to a lake or a source of water that is not stressed in any way and is well maintained, then the water consumption - you should pay certainly for access to water, and you should consider the efficiency and making sure that your usage is reasonable - but it doesn't need to be zero, and you can invest your resources, your capital resources elsewhere. That is completely different from building a data center in a region that is very hot and has challenges with the governance of the water supply, or has other users of the water supply that are potentially of higher importance and where there might be drought and common problems with stress to the water system and in those regions, then zero water might be a goal that you use, but it depends on what you're trading off, because sometimes reducing water consumption can mean an increase in energy consumption and so you have to understand which one you're trying to optimize for. There are also some challenges of what you mean by water consumption, because in a data center there are two different types. There's direct water consumption, which is typically what people think of when they're thinking of what data centers do with water. And that is the use of water for cooling, typically in air conditioning and chiller units within the data center to keep the environment at a set temperature so that the IT equipment that can operate efficiently. But that's actually the smaller part of water consumption. Indirect water consumption is quite significantly larger, and that is the water consumption associated with the power generation that goes to produce the electricity for a data center. Because around the world we are still using majority fossil fuels and fossil fuels are part of thermo electric power generation. Water is a key component in how our electricity is generated because the fuel is burnt to turn water into steam and the steam turns the turbine and that is what generates the electricity. Or if you're using hydropower in some regions, then there can be even higher water consumption there because the water is being used to generate the power as part of the hydroelectric dam. For example, whether that is a true consumption depends on the downstream users. You might use that water somewhere else. Um and so you kind of got a dual use for it. But sometimes the water is discarded, or, um is not used again, and that can be actual consumption. And so you have to combine these two factors to think about what the data centers actually drawing, and where is it drawing it from, and also where you're generating your electricity for the data center, which could be quite a long way away from where that data center is and what is the water footprint in that region? And understanding the relative stress of both of those locations is important to understanding the true water footprint of a data center.Gaël: And you say that a significant part of the water footprint is actually caused by electricity consumption. Could you give a rough estimation?David: Off the top of my head? I think it's 2 to 3 times more water consumption from the power generation, but I would have to refer you to the paper that you mentioned that I wrote. There's a graph in there. There's also a graph in the 2016 Data Center Energy Report by Shehabi and Massenet, which includes a good breakdown of the water consumption data centers as well. So for the actual numbers, have a look at those two papers.Gaël: I will. And actually, my listeners know that every article, document that is mentioned in an episode is put in the episode show notes. So now that we talked a bit about the water footprint - and thanks a lot for sharing this bit of counterintuitive information once again; the second one in the show - let's go back to energy. And, you wrote very recently an article about - I'm sorry to put it in plain English - but the mess about estimates around the data center energy usage. Could you tell us a bit more why? Which one should we rely on? And are we on the verge of a catastrophic increase in electricity consumption in data centers that will imperish the energy transition or not? [laughing] Scary musicDavid:  [laughing] So you're referring to a paper that I co authored with my colleague at Oxford Masaõ and we looked at all of the data Centre energy estimates from 2007 to 2021 this was just published in July as a review article, and we looked at 46 papers or at least 46 were suitable for inclusion. We actually looked at hundreds and hundreds of papers, but we had some quite strict inclusion criteria because we wanted to ensure that they were original calculations. The calculations were transparent enough that we could have a look at the sources and the methodology, and that they applied to a specific region that was large enough to be an estimate for a particular geography. So, for example, it could be a country, or it could be a region of a of a larger geographical area such as the EU, and we extracted 258 individual estimates and looked into almost 700 different sources because the key to creating accurate estimates is the variables that are used in the methodology and the values that you put in for those variables, and our results showed that over 30%, or thereabouts 30%, were from peer reviewed publications, but the majority were not so 38% were from non peer reviewed reports. A large number of those lacked clear methodology, and it was difficult to find where the data had come from. And both IDC and Cisco made up almost 60% of all of the sources. So just two companies provided the majority of the sources. And the particular challenges that many of the sources about 11% had broken Web links and 10% we just couldn't find. And whilst the goal of the review is not to highlight any individual publication, but we did give some examples of some good publications about their methodology, we made some recommendations to people who actually are using these numbers and producing them. So three groups, in particular the general end users, so journalists, people working at nonprofits or advocacy groups who don't necessarily have a scientific background looking at the academic articles and be able to trust the numbers that are published are actually correct so they can do their wider work. Then there's the research community who's actually producing these, which is typically academics. But also the third group, which is particularly important, is growing in importance is policymakers and regulators within the grid operators, for example, people within the energy sector who are planning the infrastructure that delivers electricity to data centers and to homes and offices and cities because it takes a very long time to build out the energy infrastructure. And so the challenge that we spotted originally was just the wide variance in the numbers you mentioned. You can find energy consumption estimates ranging from 200 terawatt hours a year to almost 8000 terawatt hours a year, depending on the year that the estimate is for. And that range is completely absurd. Because it's so wide, multiple orders of magnitude. It just makes it completely useless. And rebuilding our energy infrastructure to deal with two or 300 terawatt hours of total global energy consumption is completely different from building something out to deal with 8000 terawatt hours. And so the motivation behind the article was to figure out where all these numbers are coming from and try and understand why there might be such variance in the literature.Gaël: These numbers, these extreme numbers, do they come from, I would say non academic, non peer reviewed articles and studies, or actually well documented and written papers following a methodology which is replicable with open data, etcetera. They actually agree to disagree also, and they also find a very wide range of energy consumption.David: It depends on the methodology of the paper. So there are several different approaches to creating data center energy estimates. You've got bottom up modeling so that looks at the equipment that is deployed and the energy characteristics of that equipment from the manufacturers and from databases like spec Power, which do testing of equipment. And then that is combined with market data. To try and calculate how many of these pieces of equipment, how many servers, how many these drives all those kind of things have actually been sold and deployed. And how is that going to change over time? And so by creating these models of how much has been sold? This is what is the power consumption of that equipment you can start creating some numbers around. What would the energy consumption of that equipment be? The next method is a top down methodology, and this is an example where you would get numbers from an organization or a government that has actually looked at the amount that's consuming. So a classic example is a telecoms operator or an owner of a large scale data center they would look at all of their energy consumption, and then they'll publish it. And by taking that single number of the total energy consumption, you can apportion it across users or data transferred or something like that to provide a kind of a historical estimate of what was actually used and then apply that per user or per subscriber. And then there's a third type of methodology which uses either of those two top down or bottom up methodologies as a baseline and then applies an extrapolation figure out into the future based on some or several scenarios of what they expected growth will be. And this is useful to make projections out a couple of years into the future. And when you look at the bottom up methodologies and top down methodologies. They do this, they will take their historical figure, and then they will apply a growth factor and consider what it might look like a couple of years into the future. The difference with the extrapolation based models is that they project very far out into the future. And as I said earlier, the further out into the future you project, the less accurate your projections are going to be, because it's very difficult to account for all of the potential changes in infrastructure and energy efficiency and government policies and all those kinds of things. And what we see is that the very large range of estimates typically comes from the papers and the reports that use this extrapolation based methodology. They say If these trends continue or something happens, then energy will increase significantly over time. But the common characteristic of all these is that you never see that massive growth in the past. You see it gradually growing, sometimes plateauing, but there is never a sudden massive increase. But then, in these projections, you'll see at a certain point the growth factor will be applied and the graph in the paper goes exponential and you see crazy growth. And that's when you get the numbers as high as 10,000 terawatt hours. And these are just not realistic because they haven't seen that happen in the past. But B, that is not how technology tends to evolve because there are efficiencies and that you get from new technologies and things change. That means that these values just don't make sense.Gaël: Fair point. So albeit the energy consumption of data centers is something that is very important, that should be well taken into consideration in the energy mix to meet Paris agreement regarding greenhouse gas emissions that should not be covered with an apocalyptic tune.David: I think what generally happens is the person who is writing or creating a project has already decided what they want, the number to show, and they then go and find the academic research that supports those numbers. And you can see this in several examples that we use in the paper, which reports that publish value judgments based on whether data is useful or not, or whether we should cut back on wasteful behavior. And whilst there is something to be said for changing user behavior, my view is that's a waste of time and should be down to the user to decide what is useful to them, and nobody else should be making judgments about how they're using technology and actually our goal should be to make technology sustainable broadly so that regardless of what the user does, then they can benefit from sustainable infrastructure because I don't think we're going to change user behavior sufficiently enough to have an impact. And we should make that change on behalf of the user by changing the infrastructure, so essentially they have no choice about it. But when you make value judgments about whether technology is good or bad, or certain technologies are good or bad, then I think that gets into too much of a kind of like a nanny state type approach where you're controlling what people are doing based on your own perspective rather than based on what the users want to do. And like with anything, you can find statistics to back up any point you'd like to make. And that has been a particular challenge. I think, in the realm of data center energy consumption, because you can use these papers that have since been quite significantly debunk. There have been challenges made to the methodologies, but you continue to see people citing the older papers just because they back up the point that they had already decided they wanted to makeGaël: Thanks a lot for all these insights regarding the environmental footprint for data centres. I wanted to ask you a very simple question, which might take a bit of time to answer. Let's say I'm a CTO. I'm a lead engineer. I'm just simply a concerned Software developer. How should I get started to write greener code, not taking into consideration the infrastructure? Because sometimes you're in an organization where the infrastructure is as it is, not necessarily in a devops environment. And I've got this crazy question also, at some point, do you believe that at some point we will see in good CI/CD pipelines, sustainable variables being taken into account?David: There's a good paper on this by Pereira et al., which was published in 2021 as a follow up to a paper they published a couple of years before that, which looks at the energy efficiency of all the major programming languages. And it gives some advice on how engineers how developers should think about this because it does come down to language choice. But it also comes down to what you're trying to optimize for, and often we think that well, because energy is basically power multiplied by time, then you can reduce the time of the execution to reduce the energy consumption, and that does have a factor to play. But there are challenges with how code is deployed. That means that might not necessarily be true. So, for example, you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to complete a calculation by deploying that calculation across 10,000 servers. Assuming that the operation is parallelised, for that doesn't reduce the energy consumption, but it does reduce the time. Then you have to think about “Okay, so what are you trying to optimise”? Are you trying to optimise for just the raw energy consumption? Are you trying to optimise for the time it takes to complete the processing or you're trying to optimise for memory? And that third one is the one that's often forgotten because there is an energy impact for memory consumption, and you can kind of see that by how the cloud providers bill for things like serverless functions like AWS lambda. There's a compute component, and there's a memory component, and you pay for more memory to be allocated to your serverless function. And whilst it's not always the case, that price is a direct proxy for energy consumption. It stands to reason that the price of energy is a component in how AWS decide to price their services. And so understanding how these different components of your code play together will inform what you're trying to do. When it comes to which language is the best, again you have to ask the question or for what. But as the two papers I mentioned show, C is generally the best language for all of them, although not quite the case for memory. But in the top two or three languages you've always got C and Rust and Go is pretty good as well when it comes to execution time in memory. But if you're writing everything in C, then you're trading off other things like memory safety and understand the maintainability of the code. Because writing in C is very low level, it is very high performance, but is the result the result of writing in memory unsafe languages is the cause of a large number of security issues we've seen over the last few decades. Those are somewhat mitigated by switching to Rust, but Rust is a very difficult language to learn. That's certainly what I found when I was learning it. And I think most people say that there is a quite steep learning curve. Once you get it, then it's a good language. But there is that learning curve there, and these are the challenges that CTO has to think through is what are they trading off? Maybe it's developer productivity, and it takes a bit longer to get code into production because you've got onboard new engineers into Rust. At a large company, that might not matter; at a small startup where weeks or months of additional development time could mean the difference between success and running out of money then maybe that is more of a consideration. And writing Web services in C, I don't see that very often. It's more typescript and JavaScript. As a product develops, then maybe you split things out and you might have a particular component that's rewritten in a more performant language. Writing algorithms in C that certainly makes a lot of sense compared to writing in Javascript, but it really depends on what you're trying to do. So thinking about these things, I think, is important and having those numbers appear in the CI builds would be interesting. You might want to see code coverage. You might want to see the cost of your infrastructure. You might also want to see the carbon impact or the energy impact of your infrastructure. And then you can then see which of those you want to optimize for which you want to change. I think it's more likely that it's going to be trying to avoid sudden spikes, certainly with cost. You want to see that your code didn't inadvertently deploy something that's going to cost you 10 or 20 times more than you expected. And I think potentially we'll see the same thing with the carbon impact. And you don't want to see a sudden spike of carbon impact that you weren't expecting. And removing those unintended consequences, I think, is probably going to be the first step. But as soon as you get into the optimization of very small numbers or you're starting to spend a lot of time optimizing for things like energy consumption, you'll probably also optimize for memory and also trying to understand how to make that particular operation more performance, and that comes with scale. And so these are all the things that are considered as part of a project rather than just focusing on a single number.Gaël: That's very actionable tips that you shared right now! Being mindful of time, my last question would be “What would be your recommendations to learn more about digital sustainability and sustainable computing - your area of expertise?” It can be books, video experts to follows, articles, et cetera.David: I think the best way to learn more about this is to get into the fundamental science of how sustainable energy and energy science works in general. So I would highly recommend the master's degree that I did at Imperial College. But in the absence of being able to spend a full year full time and the cost of that, then there are two books which were on the reading list for the course. The first one is a book simply called “Energy Science”. It's an Oxford University press publication by Andrews and Jelly. I think it is that is a fundamental it's fundamental science about how energy systems work and a brand new edition was just published this year, I think which is good more broadly in terms of sustainable energy. There's a book by McKay called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, and that is a very pragmatic and realistic look at what it would take to solve the energy challenges that we have and the transition to clean energy. Because often there's a lot of talk around big projects like “Well, let's just plan hundreds of millions of trees” or “let's just shift to solar energy” without actually understanding the big challenges were “just” doing that thing. And the emphasis is often on the word “just” rather than trying to think through what it practically means. And that book actually does all the math behind it. It's slightly out of date, but it is still generally valid, and that gives you a very good understanding of how sustainable energy should work and can work.Gaël: Thanks a lot. So go back to basics that will be your main message with these two books.David: I think so, Yeah, understanding the science because that's the foundation of everythingGaël: Which is very consistent with everything you shared with us in this episode. So thanks a lot for attending. I feel that there are a few dozen questions that I would have loved to ask you and to go a bit more in depth. But maybe another time! So for that episode, thanks a lot for being with us today.David: Excellent. Thanks for having me on.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

In our April’s episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this second part, we discussed Digital Sustainability in general, past trends as well as expected developments. Chris also shared with us a mountain of references and people to follow in order to learn more about how to green the Web and beyond.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Chris' twitterChris' LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Chris' links and other references mentioned in this episode The Green Web Foundation (GWF) website Climate Action Tech websiteKate Diehm's talk at the New Design Congress The Guardian article "The ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown" A quick introduction to the POUR principles for Accessibility by AEM CenterChris Adams’ presentation at FOSDEM talking about his GOLD framework  Blau Engel software certificationShift Project's report Lean ICTGauthier Roussilhe’s article The fog of enactment Melissa Chung's articles and Fickle Yanson's articles are available on the Green Web Fondation Fellowship page Adam Turner’s LinkedIn post on talent shortage in Sustainable ICTThe British Computer Society - The Chartered Institute for ITThe Green Software Foundation The Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance Terra.do Tim Frick's book Designing for SustainabilityTom Greenwood's book Sustainable Web DesignGerry McGovern's book World Wide Waste John cummy's book Numbers to knowledge Alice Bell's book Our biggest experience: An Epic History of Climate ChangeKimberly Nicolas' book Under the sky we make: How to Be Human in a Warming World Amy Westervelt's podcasts Ian Morse's Green Rocks Newsletter Germanwatch Electronics Watch War on Want's report A Material Transition Ingrid burringtonMaddy StoneAnne Currie's on the Green Software Foundation's Environment Variables podcast and the ethics whitepaper she contributed to Louise CrowTranscript (Automated - Human-reviewed version expected in August)[00:00:00] Gaël: Hello, everyone. Welcome back. I would say to this fourth episode of Green I/O, part number two. I still have the chance to be with Chris Adams. We decided to split the episode because we had so many interesting topics to discuss that we wanted not to make any compromise. So last time I checked, Chris is still the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. And if you want to know everything about him, just listen the first part of this episode, and now I'd like to welcome Chris again for the second part. Hi, Chris! [00:00:36] Chris: Hi Gaël. How are you? How are you today?[00:00:37] Gaël: Wonderful. Wonderful. Back in Latino young. So if you hear some birds singing in the background, that's perfectly OK. Biodiversity is still up here pretty[00:00:49] Chris: well. If you hear a garbage truck going fast flat, then yeah, that's not quite as pretty, but there will be a little bit noise, I think. But I'll do my best to try and catch it and close the windows if I do hear them coming, OK.[00:01:00] Gaël: Oh, that's okay. I've been there one week ago. I know exactly where you are, and it's still a lovely neighbourhood in Berlin. So I really enjoy thanks for having me there and welcoming. And thanks for the barbecue as well.[00:01:14] Chris: You're welcome.[00:01:15] Gaël: So beyond green hosting, I know that sustainable design is also keen to your heart. You've signed the sustainable Web Manifesto and in a CAT talk you spoke about having a gold approach Gold standing for G O L D. Could you elaborate a bit?[00:01:34] Chris: So gold? The reason I kind of like shared gold as it were, was large because I was inspired by the success is people have had in the accessibility world. And in the accessibility world, there is a pneumonic kind of like acronym, which is poor, which I believe that stands for perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. And, uh, I'll just run through these and then kind of speak about gold so perceivable with this idea that if you build a digital service, you want it to be perceivable using more than one sense. So if someone is blind, it can still be perceived in another way. So maybe there's a screen reader which can read something out to someone. So that means there's your thinking about perception in multiple ways operable is the idea that, yeah, you might assume a mouse. But if someone doesn't have, say, motor control, or maybe they're holding something at the time or they've recently injured themselves like maybe you've broken your wrist and you have to use your other wrist, there's like an idea operability, making it easier to work there and then understandable is pretty clear. If you if you can't understand an interface and you can't really use the interface and then robust is this idea of making a interface, which basically degrades somewhat gracefully and might work in, say, low bandwidth connections or might work in less than ideal connections? This was actually be really, really useful, and these principles were basically the underlying basis for what people end up using when they basically grade websites for their accessibility and because they can be graded. You ended up seeing groups like, say, the public sector, mandate this in their contracts, and you've seen people start to encode this in scenarios where it's part of how they purchase things, for example, or even in cases where where people are shut out from using services, they've been able to successfully sue companies to say It's unfair that you're doing this. This is wrong and we can point to examples of, say, like Domino's pizza, where people were basically where Domino's Pizza's website was sued because blind people were not able to access the service and order their food right. So we figured we need something like that for digital sustainability and you need something which is kind of memorable. And the whole idea of poor was actually kind of handy for people because it was something you could ask for developers. And it was easy to present in a in a deck. So I came up with gold largely to kind of capture some of these ideas. So gold stands for green green energy green inputs open as an open source and open data and open culture so you can actually see where the improvements are possible. Lean in terms of not using more than you need to and distributed in terms of, well, there's got to be multiple ways of accessing a particular service and ideally from more than one provider as well. So that was kind of gold, because I figured that it's a memorable thing that you can use and it allows you to think about pay digital service like Am I running on green inputs, for example, like are the inputs as green as possible? Open is like which parts are open that I can I can I I can look into or I can see or I can actually see where there is scope for improvement and likewise lean and distributed in the same way. Like am I relying entirely on one provider who might be doing things which I disagree with, or my organisation, which might not align with my organization's values. So that was kind of the way that why was actually sharing this largely as a way to kind of see if it might work. If it's a way that you see what sticks and see if anyone picks up on it, really,[00:04:56] Gaël: I do hope it will. So, Chris, we decided to focus almost another full episodes on what is going on in the digital sustainability field. You are one of the older experts in digital sustainability, so I would love to get your insights about Web sustainability. In general, it's evolution. What are the main trends you've noticed since two years? What should we expect in the forthcoming news?[00:05:23] Chris: Okay. All right. So, first of all, um, this is kind of amusing. I was 40 this year, and I'm one of the older people in this in this society that says everything about the tech industry and how it has a strange bias towards, like, you know, like dudes dudes in their twenties essentially right. So, yeah, there is a I have been, uh, involved in this for a while, basically. And I think since graduating, I've been kind of drawn to this. The thing your question about are there any trends that you've seen? I think there is. And I think even this term digital sustainability wasn't really a term that people were using that much until maybe two or three years ago at the absolute earliest. Um, you now are seeing a lot more interest from organisations who have basically figured out Yes, Well, I guess the power has to come from somewhere, and there is a person who I have a lot of respect for. His name is K d. M. At the new design congress. He speaks about sustainability, speaks about technology. He's basically says technology is a environmental, social and political accelerant. And I think this is actually really interesting, too be aware of in this kind of context, because I think the one of the trends you see is people looking at the environmental impact of I I c t or I T. But not necessarily being that confident talking about what you use it for. And most of the digital sustainability stuff is almost entirely inwardly for focusing. So we might talk about Okay, let's let's talk about like, making a I really, really efficient, right? And let's take the example of you know, we're going to use AI to drill for oil and gas. All right, so we'll talk about Isn't it great that we can make a really, really efficient model for drilling for oil and gas? Or isn't it great that we can use renewable energy for drilling for oil and gas without really talking about? Are we sure that drilling for oil and gas is consistent with whatever kind of values were trying to actually incorporate into our work in the first place? Now that part there, a lot of technologists have only seen as outside their pay grade or or beyond there beyond what's in there kind of sphere of influence. And I think this is the thing that you are starting to see a little bit more of right now but hasn't really been addressed so much. And the reason I referred to this is the science is really, really clear on this and when we did some research into this, we basically found that if you look at the kind of deals that are announced by some very, very large organisations, if they're going to if they're going to do a deal with a big oil company to help accelerate this stuff, just the carbon emitted from that alone is like the same carbon as Facebook in a single given year, right, and that's a lot of service. So I think it's important that we we are able to move away from just looking at the inside stuff and looking at okay, what do we use it for when you talk about like not just innovation but decisions basically, But to go back to the original question? Yes, there is absolutely an uptick in appropriate people being interested in digital sustainability, and you can see this from the big cloud providers having these tools. But you can also see it from this kind of explosion of companies now offering digital sustainability or some kind of transformation, where before they would only talk about, say, digital transformation without thinking about this kind of aspect of it.[00:08:44] Gaël: So you've got a point Chris about it, because it seems that for a lot of technologies, they enjoy some kind of neutral position. Do you believe in this position like this neutrality position?[00:08:56] Chris: I don't I think it's really I think it's very convenient to not talk about any of this. And because it means that basically, you get to open up to more customers, theoretically, right. But I think that if you're interested in this, it's worth asking yourself. Well, why am I interested in this whole idea of digital sustainability in the first place? And why am I putting these kind of specific and artificial limits on how I think about this stuff? Because I think that given the state that things are in, we can't not talk about this and just assume that it's totally okay and I there and I think in many cases you basically do see it because a lot of the time it's pretty good for business to be able to sell something like digital sustainability. You can make really good arguments about how you're saving money. You can talk about how you're saving carbon. You can talk about how, by using green energy, you're saving lives because it's like nine million peoples whose lives ended early each year from just like the particular and all the kind of poor air quality and fossil fuels you can Even you can say, Well, it's great for us, a retention with your staff, you can make these arguments at the same time. It's not really touching on what you're choosing to enable. With this and a lot of time, it's because right now if you're going to kind of say, Hey, I don't think we should be doing this a lot of the time We don't really have any kind of really common or well used ways to really have these discussions in a way which some people might see as kind of career limiting, and I think this is actually one thing. This is probably the next part of this, and the organisations are able to start interrogating and engaging with the subject. I think they're going to have a do better by actually actually having some of the brightest and best people who are really, really quite informed about this whole field. They're probably going to be attracting those kinds of people. But you do have this kind of inertia right now, or people saying, Well, you cannot move too quickly on this because we're set up one way and it's OK for us to talk about this as long as we save money. But the thing is, if you look at the numbers, the numbers actually don't Even there was a bigger prize by moving away from things like, say, a fossil based society. If you look at, say, the I A e A, which is the international energy agency these folks talk about, OK, well, what we need to have a transition in line with the science and they say Well, over the next day between now and say 2030 you're probably going to need something like $300 billion of continued investment in the existing oil and gas fields that you do have just to maintain some kind of production or to manage that decline carefully, because over time all these kind of all these reserves will decline because you're getting stuff out of there, right? But they say, Well, there's maybe 3, 300 billion per year between now and 2030 Then they said. But if we're going to shift away from this fossil based society, then you're looking at something like three or four trillion investment each year between now and 20 now and 2030 And that's such a bigger prize to go for. And I feel like if you're gonna make it, you're going to look at this stuff, take a slightly larger view and realise that there is this massive opportunity that your many ways closing off if you just focus on this kind of local optimisation of just helping oil and gas rather than help and more advanced humane form of power for this stuff,[00:12:25] Gaël: does it include the fossil bombs recently mentioned by The Guardian? Because that was very scary.[00:12:31] Chris: So this is the thing that's actually worth being aware of. So there's basically continued investment in what you and the existing reserves that we have, and I This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of basically the energy industry who have said, Well, if you want to stay within the science, then we cannot open any more or do any new exploration. The only thing we can do is keep the existing ones, but the thing is, they will deplete over time. So if you want to just maintain the same level of production for this, then you will need to continually invest because it's going to get harder each year to get that. Basically, to get those hydrocarbons out of those depleting reserves.[00:13:07] Gaël: That's a very good point. What about I'm a CEO? I'm a CPO. I'm even a CEO facing the board and wanting to drop part of my today's business to make the case for tomorrow's business, which should be low carbon business and, hopefully, fossil fuel free business. What can I do? And what can I expect from outside help? I would say, Do you believe that we need to wait for some kind of regulation carbon price? Or is it still pretty easy to make a case without waiting for external pressure?[00:13:39] Chris: I think it depends where in the world you are basically so in, say, America, you now have things like basically coming into law, a requirement to basically disclose the climate risk in your organisation if you're above a certain size. And that means that people who are investors in your company will want to know this, and they will be asking you for this kind of disclosure. And if you don't have this information, is going to be harder for you to raise investment in future. You'll be closing doors, and the cost of capital is going to be higher, which is going to make it harder for you in the long run so you can actually make that argument and say, Well, legally, we have to do this. We're not going to get the investors took it, Get on board for this so you can make an argument. They're quite well. And like this argument is what you see from companies like Oh, Persephone E, for example. In America, they're doing that in Europe, for example, where I am, it's slightly different. We don't have the same kind of regulatory drivers just yet, but we literally just yesterday or the day before we have this basically war in the Ukraine, which is acting as many ways as an accelerant for this kind of transition or saying well, we can see right there in front of us. Europe, for example, is spending. It may be doing all these things from a humanitarian point of view, but if it's buying massive amounts of oil and gas which is literally directly being used to finance the war machine, there's an argument there. The point I'm probably trying to get out here is that different parts of the world will have different drivers in Europe. Right now, we've seen a massive package of investment that's come out, which kind of shows that there is a real direction of travel towards a much more kind of much more low carbon society. So for context, I think the the amount of investment that was announced was something the region of 290 billion in clean energy 33 years ago, which is basically and they said, Well, we want to do is we want to double the amount of solar installed in Europe by 2025. So in 2.5 years, the plan is to deploy three Germany's worth of new solar panels across Europe as a way to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, for example. You can look to like trends like that and say, Well, which are these trends? Do we want to ride? Do we want to ride the depleting one, which is going to make it harder for us to hire people or retain people and not and which is at best, a shrinking market would go for this much, much larger market, which is going to give us much less volatility. It's going to make it easier for us to attract people, and we're also going to feel much better about what we're doing because there are all these other kind of benefits which might not be directly captured inside your organisation but would be helpful for attracting people to your organisation or anything like that. And I actually feel like if one of the things you're struggling for is talent in this world, then doing something to make it really, really attractive for talent is probably a fairly compelling argument right now.[00:16:20] Gaël: Chris, I'm surprised you didn't mention the recent W three c workgroup regarding sustainability, so I know that the Web is only part of our digital tech word, but it's a big part, and it's the most visible one. Do you believe part of the answer will come from us?[00:16:36] Chris: Yeah. So I think that we've had previous examples of this, and I think the thing that we have found and we are seeing more signs of people trying to find ways to codify or figure out what to ask for or what to provide, partly because if you're a CEO or a CPO or you manage projects, you need to have some things you can point to, just like how inaccessibility you can point to like the wch, the Web content, accessibility guidelines or the whole kind of poor thing, which is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, these kind of criteria for describing digital products. There is absolutely a push for that. And in Germany, for example, we see a real kind of interest in the Blau Angle certification, which is basically eco certification for software, specifically, so governments can say we have our own targets that we need to meet. We need to incorporate this just the same way that we need to have accessible software because we need to serve all the people in our country, for example. You do see things like that, and I think it's it's not necessarily a regulation. You are seeing people kind of formalising or starting to agree on these kind of conventions. We don't really have ones which are that used right now. Like Blue Angle only had their first piece of software this year, for example, and there is only one other country in the world Hong Kong, that has this kind of set of guidelines right now released a certification. But France has its own kind of recommendations to follow, and this is stuff which is being built into procurement now. So basically, how governments are going to be spending money for this, so you do see things like it. But the thing you generally see is right now, people don't quite know what numbers to optimise for, and a lot of time they're reaching for what numbers are available, which results in people tracking things like, say, carbon first, because we've had 20 or 30 years of tracking carbon, and there's a huge amount of science pointing to carbon. But that's not the only thing you attract. For example, So I think what you are seeing is organisations leading to this and with the W three c specifically standards or conventions or things like that which are designed at that point, or that people agree on. There is actually a fast track to go from there through to creating an ISO standard which would be available to everyone for free anyway. So it's likely that the changes or the things that get agreed by organisations like the W three C will end up being things which browsers might end up designing for. Or people might be referring to just the way we've seen with accessibility.[00:18:59] Gaël: And that's very interesting because you mentioned AYSO and the French range of ISA, which is half nor as released recently, a norm, which is eco consumption of website. And that leads me to another question which is You've mentioned the blossoming of a lot of initiatives across the globe when it comes to digital sustainability, but today there is not that much consensus around it. So do you think it's OK? Because it's a phase that is needed where people are creating the tools for tomorrow and you've got competiting tools or complementary tools Or do you think it will actually slow down the process?[00:19:37] Chris: I think I actually don't know. To be honest, we did a report about this called the fog of enactment, specifically because we feel as in like the organisation that I work for. Our position is that we are in this stage that we've seen 100 years ago with the energy market, because there's lots and lots of parallels here. That right now when you're in a kind of field, which is relatively new, there's lots of innovation. It's also quite technical. There is this kind of face before people arrive at having these kind of particular regulations or normative kind of forcing factors that we referred to as the fog of enactment. This is actually Professor Leah Stokes term. The thing that you can't really have is right now when people don't know what the implications of setting these different standards are. Different ways to measure things. You end up with people kind of competing to kind of put forward their way of, say, tracking impact because it might favour the way they've got things set up. So if you look at something like, say, cloud compute. Write something with, like, say, serverless or object storage, something which gives you a very, very kind of granular way to track the carbon footprint of something like you're paying. You know, you can think about your CO two emissions in terms of just the emissions from you running a particular function for 100 milliseconds. Whether I'm to think about all the all the impact that's going to building a gigantic data centre, building all the H fact to keep the computers from overheating. All this stuff here, then you're going to end up with a metric which really, really favours massively. People who can invest tens of billions into massive data centres all around the world and could provide something like serverless. And that's probably not going to really incentivise or make. There's not going to incentivise things like, say, embodied carbon or re use of computers, for example. So if you had another set of people had competing standards saying Well, actually we think that the embodied carbon is much more important and we think that the embodied carbon should include the actual data centre as well, rather than just the energy. Then you're going to end up with something which favours another group. And I think what we see right now is that there is going to be this kind of jockeying for different groups trying to come up with a metric which tends to favour their existing business model. And I think that's what you've seen in other places. And that's probably what we're going to see here for the next 18 months. And I suspect that a lot of people aren't won't really be to aware of this kind of stuff, and they'll just generally look at these numbers to thinking, Well, okay, I've just got a number that I just optimist that without really being prepared to interrogate what kind of assumptions have gone into this, Because a lot of time we're not really paying to do that kind of humanity soft science, kind of critical thinking stuff. We're paid to make the number, go up or make it go down and like, this is probably the thing that I think is that needs a lot more research right now because the view in Europe that you see from, especially in France, has a massive bias towards the embedded carbon on with electronics, whereas if you look at, say, other parts of the world, there's a massive focus on just the energy so that we don't need to have any uncomfortable discussions about a new generation of smartphones each year are a new generation of hardware every every year. For example,[00:22:39] Gaël: are you confident that within two years or 18 months we will have okay enough standard to at least measure the carbon emission of a website and apps, including the embedded ones? Or is it just too early for people to agree on something like that?[00:22:56] Chris: So this is actually an interesting question, in my view, because there are two kind of fields, two schools of thought here that I've seen. So one school of thought is very much like Let's create a standard to make sure we catch all the complexity first, and then once you've got that standard, will be able to deploy that in lots and lots of places. And because we've got a really well thought through standard, the questions that have come up that will come up, we will already have a good answer, which makes it easier to get that kind of adoption across organisations and you can kind of see that approach somewhat in what you're seeing from an organisation called the Green Software Foundation, where there is this focus on making a standard called the Software Carbon Intensity Index, which really has a quite strong focus like that. So let's figure it out and then start working there and then figure out how to implement on that. Then, by comparison, you see in the kind of world of, I guess sustainable Web, for example, where people have taken a existing model which they know to be kind of imperfect. But they figured, well, let's start with this And then, as we keep using, it will find the the problems from useful raise, or we'll keep being raised. And as long as we have some kind of mechanism for addressing those issues, then we'll basically achieve adoption by having an imperfect thing that will improve over time. Basically, So I think I'm I think we already do have some numbers that you can use to give you some idea of where you need to be going, and the thing that it's probably worth being aware of is like is having an awareness of how much precision you actually need for, in order for you to make a decision or for you to kind of back a particular decision about choosing one more sustainable way of working versus another. All right. And we often confuse these two things. We think that, uh oh, I need a lot more precision or a lot more accuracy than I thought I did. But a lot of time, you probably don't. I suspect that we probably will probably have something now that you can use that organisations of basing decisions on already. And I think that you that will probably improve over time as the amount of research does come up. And I think that if people are prepared to basically give credence to numbers than just the fact that people are kind of making a number of making, making better decisions based on numbers means they're going to pay more attention and they will improve it over time. So I think that you do have two schools of thought, and I am slightly leaning towards this idea of kind of rough consensus and working code and then proving that in that kind of improvement, rather than trying to get something closer to having been really specified and then trying to deploy it. The jury is out on this. In my view, I'm not sure which approach will be more effective in the long run, but I do know that right now if you are looking at this, you can start with something like the sustainable Web design model that's been implemented, a number of places. Or you can look at, say, the one bite model used by the shift project. And be aware that there are some drawbacks for that. Or there are some things that there are some areas of contention where academics accompany duking it out. But the fact that you're using some metric and that you you start to incorporate this idea of a metric which is not just engagement money retention, this kind of stuff is actually kind of useful in the first place. And I feel like you kind of need to start with some kind of metric and then realise that your organisation will need to develop some organisational sophistication in making sense of what these metrics mean over time. So I think, yeah, I think we will have that. It's a case of how much precision and accuracy do you actually need in your organisation for the decisions you're basically making? Really?[00:26:33] Gaël: And I would say to start working better to have average metrics available immediately than just metric, that you will have to wait for you and a half. So it's really a question of starting a momentum. Correct me if I'm wrong.[00:26:45] Chris: Yeah, I mean, this is this is the thing. There's going to be a limit, right? So depending on how much clout you have to say, Well, we want to use CEO to Js or this sustainable Web design model or the one bite model as a criteria for our sprint planning, Right? So, like we're always going to track this and we're going to break the build. If these numbers go above a certain size right, you could start with something like that. But there may be some other places will basically say, Well, these numbers don't feel ready enough, and I don't see enough large organisations behind it. So I'm going to wait for the organisation which has Microsoft and get hard, blah, blah, blah, blah using this because it's easier for me to then make the argument internally and say, Well, it's not just us using this. It's those big companies over there and they can't all be wrong as well, right? So you do have this kind of This is a kind of deliberate decision about what kind of how much political capital you might be looking to kind of expend to get some of these ideas adopted. It very much depends on how big or how big the project might be. It may be that if you're doing a small project, you can just use some of the existing tools out there right now and provide the kind of caveats and warnings and saying, These are the numbers and this is where some of the things might be either underestimating or overestimating our actual numbers. So if we were going to do something like price carbon, then we should take this into account. For example.[00:28:06] Gaël: That's why the debate is so important here because beyond the carbon, all the stuff related to water consumption resources exhaustion is completely overlooked in my humble opinion, and this is a debate that we need to have so the Green Web Foundation is doing at the moment to help this debate happened. And what is your view on it, Chris? The[00:28:25] Chris: thing that might be worth being aware of is that we just come into the end of our first kind of round of a fellowship programme, where we basically had five different fellows from three different continents who were technologists in different roles, like either it directors or developers or bloggers or product managers. People like that, and we basically pay for some other time to research this stuff and blog the things that they were discovering and surface the papers and the reports that were useful in helping shed light on the situation. There is now a group on a piece of soft records of terror where we've been collecting all the papers and all the reports that we've been reading and discussing. And then if you go to our website, you'll see the blood posts from each of the fellows talking about the things that they've been engaging, too. Basically, cover this and I think there's a few people who I probably draw attention to. Specifically Melissa Chung in New York. She's been writing about all these kind of non carbon aspects of this so she's been talking a lot about a lot about some of the environmental justice aspects that use that we've just touched on here because there are impacts other than just carbon. And if you think about the fact that say we're going to be making electronics from things like, say, hydrocarbons and plastics and stuff like that, then we should probably be taking into account the environmental costs associated with extracting that kind of stuff. So she's done research into where this extraction takes place and how those costs are shifted onto people, for example. And dude, there's like, wild examples of, say, cities that we've heard of, like LA being full of oil extraction like oil wells and things, but have been disguised to look like, say, synagogues and stuff like that. And there are massive kind of health impacts for people who are living around there. Because these places these wells are basically being put right next to someone's house or literally on the same ground as a primary school, for example. So we've got some research there, and there's also some work by FICA Jansen, who's in the Netherlands. She's one of the other fellows she's been talking about this idea of data centres as sites of struggle where there are the kind of concentrated use of resources in a very in a particular place has all these other impacts associated So things like a water use, for example. And she points to how in the Netherlands you see a lot of local pushback from company from from local communities who have been unhappy about, say, wind turbines being cited next to them, but also about water being withdrawn at such rates that it has an impact on, say, the cost of water for them or their own supply. And you see the same thing happening elsewhere in the world like, say, Arizona and in North America, where again you see basically large, well organised organisations that are deploying data centres essentially getting kind of priority for water usage compared to people being able to use this for drinking and their own usage. So there are all these kind of resource questions related to this. There's also somewhat from Hannah. Smith has also been looking at some of the some of the other knock on effects when you might disrupt the economy that has been built up around the fact that we've been shipping electric waste. So say parts of Africa, for example, and that people come dependent on that. So even if you stop doing that, then you have this question of what happens to the people who are building a business or relying on that for essentially creating a livelihood, even if it's really, really unhealthy for them to be in unsafe conditions, melting down various kinds of waste to kind of reclaim things like lead or various other chemicals that they can then sell on the market, for example. So we've been we've been allowing people or giving them a bit of time and space to explore this stuff. But to be honest, we don't have really concrete suggestions at the moment. We're hoping to kind of continue researching for this because when we look around, there are some groups that are doing this that are kind of coming up with some concrete recommendations. But they're not in the tech sector there, groups that might be saying things like, Well, if you're going to be buying this, you should be prepared to speak to your supply about Do they have a community benefit programme or do they have, like, zero tolerance clause in contracts? So there is no fear of Reprisals for people who are actually pushing against this stuff in certain parts of the world. So there's a bunch of this, but it is something like we said is in the fog of enactment phase. We don't really know which kinds of regulations or conventions or things like contracts that you might you would use to really have the most impact right now to account for this. But we do know that it's really important. It does need to be addressed.[00:32:52] Gaël: Absolutely. I really love the title of an eggman. I believe this is gotta hustle. Who wrote the paper for the Green Web Foundation?[00:33:00] Chris: Yeah, I've really, really enjoyed goes to his work and the thing that I'm aware of this as a like primary English speaker and the English speaking world being basically a little bit behind France in many ways. On this stuff, we commissioned go here to work with us because we really liked some of the work that he'd been doing. But we also did it because we wanted to recognise that there was all this work happening, not in English that more people should see. And we figured by publishing that we could least shine an idea or shine the light on some of the other ways of talking about this that weren't so focused on energy. Even though, like a lot of what we do as an organisation is focused around energy, we figured well, we should be shining a light on all the stuff that's happening that isn't necessarily happening in English. That could help move on this kind of discussion. So we hope that's the first of the reports and were planning to have some other ones around this idea of fossil free Internet and embedding climate justice into into work. But, yeah, Gautier was absolutely fantastic to work with. And if you're looking for a researcher, he's a really good person to follow the work of. And yeah, he's, uh if he's available and he's not already working with us, then I would I would absolutely recommend working with him. He was fantastic to work[00:34:10] Gaël: with his paper, absolutely flawless, I would say with this 3 60 vision, not focusing only on carbon emission but like this full lifecycle analysis and I would like to ask you to last questions because we are running out of time. I would love to keep the discussion on for two more hours, but that's not the idea of this podcast soap. Recently, I spotted a LinkedIn post where Adam Turner was puzzled by the amount of jobs being advertised in sustainability versus manpower shortage in this area. And this is exactly what you've been discussing for the last half an hour, and I think it really made a point. We need a lot of people to get knowledge even to specialist in this field, but it's still very hard when you don't have a diploma, digital sustainability diploma or not that many courses. So what advices would you would you give to someone willing to specialist in digital sustainably? What training should be followed? Books should be read. Which community should be joined? What are your top picks on this topic?[00:35:12] Chris: This is this isn't actually that different from when people ask like, say, five or 10 years ago in 2011, said Hi, we're looking for rails developers. Ruben Rolls, developers with 15 years experience. It's not a new thing for us. as an industry to be trying to higher things and without really that much of an understanding of where the skills shortages actually is. I think that when maybe 10 years ago there were people trying to get some of this stuff put together saying Hi, this is going to be a topic So the British Computer Society, they had some work like this before and they even had some training courses, I think and likewise other organisations did do this. But what they basically said was we tried doing this but we didn't see enough interest from member organisations, so we decided to discontinue these and stop running them. So you basically have this scenario where you've got this crunch in terms of skills again and I think that there is now a kind of uptick in interest in this. So I think the British Computer Society are doing something are now designing a new course specifically for this. I know that other bodies in other parts of the world are also trying to put this together. I do some work with the Green Software Foundation and there is a whole discussion around certification of training for this and other organisations like the S D. A. The Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. They're also doing work with other training and certification organisations to do this. So there is this kind of scramble right now to come up with syllabus is and naming of competency so people can use this stuff. So we do have this kind of massive crunch right now and I don't think there are enough digital sustainability experts right now to meet demand. Which means, I guess it's good news if you want to be learning this because it means your skills will be in demand and people have to pay probably pretty good rates for this. Like for context. Um, I saw Intel have hired a in the last six months. Intel set up an entirely new division for this for basically focusing in this particular field of, like, open source and sustainability and, uh, they were offering very, very healthy salaries for this kind of stuff. So there is a kind of uptick in this, But if you haven't got that, if you haven't developed those skills right now, I think there are groups like say, terror do who are developing this or the organisations have mentioned, but your question was about other books and other things that you would point to. I'd probably say there's like a small number of books which I think are useful. But there's probably a wider section of material which is not necessarily in tech but is actually very, very helpful for addressing some of the problems. We've said that we don't have answers for in the world of 10 energy right now. So the books that you're probably going to look for if you just Googled like sustainability and Web, you'd find a book designed for sustainability. From Tim Frick, you'd find sustainable Web design from Tom Whole Grain. These are two quite similar books that are both actually quite strong. Books. Tim Frick one is a bit older. Tom Tom, Tom Greenwood from Whole Grain Digital. Not Tom Whole Grain God. So Tom Greenwood's book came out last year, and that's probably the newest book that I'm aware of in this field. But there's also ones from I Think, Gerry McGovern Worldwide Waste, where he talks about some of this from a content design point of view, for example. But I would really recommend looking a little bit wider than that. So there is a really fantastic book by John Comey called Numbers to Knowledge where he talks about. And that's basically about how to apply critical thinking when you're thinking about data and numbers, particularly for informing very, very large policy decisions or informing decisions where people spent a bunch of money in a company. And he opens the chapter with his book about how we have this entire discussion in the early two thousands. Basically lots and lots of coal companies that made lots of money by mining and selling coal said the Internet needs Internet has massive energy usage requirements. So therefore we need to mind loads of coal because the Internet runs on coal, and those assumptions caused lots and lots of people to make very, very, very wasteful decisions in the early two thousands. And if you don't know how to avoid these kind of mistakes that we've done historically, you're going to struggle, and this kind of brings us to other people have been writing about this for a while. I really like the content of the work from Alice Bell. She's not a tech sustainability specialist. She talks about the history of climate change. But she's got a book called Our Biggest Experiment, where she talks all about these numbers and all about how we kind of make decisions on this. And I found another book, which I find really helpful again, isn't actually a tech focused book Professor Kimberly Nicholas. She has a book called Under the Sky We Make. I continually refer to her models for talking about some of the kind of emotional and intellectual issues around climate change. Not just how do I make the CO two number go up or down in my sprint cycle, for example? And then there is the stuff I'd really suggest reading from Amy Westfeldt. All of her podcasts are really, really good talking about, I guess, the political political economy that underpins some of the decisions that we might be working with and how a lot of the kind of numbers we end up being exposed to are being shown how they're created and what defaults have put into their and whose interests there have been designed from the very get go so that we focus on. Let's focus on the inefficiency of the computer cloud without thinking about the embodied energy in building all these data centres, for example, or things like that.[00:40:42] Gaël: It's very interesting because basically what you say 2 to 3 books or podcast to understand the topic of digital sustainability, then it's a lot of self training. Stay aware of what is going on regarding standards and frameworks, and you name quite a lot of them. And of course, we will put all these resources on the podcast. But your main advice is, once you've read Tom's book a masterpiece, I must admit, I really enjoyed reading it. It's super easy. Jerry's book. A Big Punch in the face. It's not that enjoyable, but it's very easy to read. And Tim, I must admit, it's on my to do, but I didn't read it. But once you've well, there's a few books. If you're lucky enough to be a French speaker, you've got a bunch of other books that are, unfortunately not translated yet. But when it's when it's done, do not stop here broader your vision read books on the wider topic of climate change. You didn't mention that much the mining operations and how polluting they are, etcetera. But of course, there are a lot of great resources as well. I hope I will be able to invite one of the French specialist on this one pretty soon, and that's that's that's your main advice. Once you've done your homework, we must read book. When it comes to digital sustainably, expand with books that will provide you a wider perspective.[00:41:57] Chris: Yeah, I'd say so. There's a few newsletters that I find helpful. Um, there's one newsletter called Green Rocks, which is all about the environmental aspects of mining. There's a woman called Ingrid Barrington who has also been writing quite detailed stuff about the kind of mining and hardware aspects of this. Those I think. I think Ingrid is based in New York. I've totally blank on the name of the gentleman who runs the Green Rocks newsletter. But there is a real focus in Indonesia and South East Asia, I think so. That's worth looking at as well. And I probably say that, yeah, that's I don't know any really, really new books specifically on the kind of mining aspects of this right now, you generally need to kind of trawl through reports right now from groups like, say, German watch or electronics watch or the war One wants, for example, who are touching on this. But these tend to not be. They're not aimed necessarily, a technology technology audience or coming from the point of technology is trying to engage with this issue. I suspect that, like you mentioned, there are probably going to be more stuff in the kind of Francophone world that you're going to find right now simply because it's a blind spot that we've had for the last, like 20 years, where people have paid attention, they have not received the attention that they really deserve. I would say[00:43:09] Gaël: talking about people. Do you believe that there are influences that need to be full or feel like people that you really enjoy talking to or listening to?[00:43:18] Chris: Yeah, So I mentioned people like, say, Alice Bell, Kimberly Nicholas. I found Maddie Stones work really, really, really helpful. She's basically a journalist who writes about this particular bit of tech and climate. I don't think anyone writes as clearly as she does so frequently as she does as well. Her stuff is absolutely, really, really, really top notch the other person who stuff. I've really liked this woman called Ann Curry. She's doing some work with the Green Software Foundation, and I worked with her when we were doing some kind of trademark work together. But she for the last few years she's been contributing to this white paper every year about kind of tech ethics specifically around climate. The white paper has some really good recommendations and good summaries of what you can do as a CEO or a CPO for this. So her stuff is really, really quite it's really, really good. And she's She also is speaks from quite a few podcasts about OK, these are the ways you might try to sell this. And on them there's a podcast called Environment Variables, where she wrote specifically about selling the idea of digital sustainability internally and what things work and what things do not work. I've heard I found her stuff good, and then finally there's a woman called Louise Crow who's the CEO of my society Now. She has been one of the technical leaders on their climate programme, and I found her stuff really, really systemically aware and really well thought through her background is basically democracy tech. The argument they make is basically the climate crisis is a crisis of democracy because we are essentially giving too much power to a very, very small group who do well out of keeping things as they are whilst ignoring all the needs from a much wider section of people. And I think that framing is really, really helpful when trying to engage in this subject and much more kind of systemic, aware, systemically aware way that you might not be able to if you're just focusing only internally inside your company, who basically are incentivised in many ways to act like essentially an undying sociopath because that's what we incentivise companies to act like. So, yeah,[00:45:15] Gaël: so true or not paying attention to the environment?[00:45:18] Chris: Well, yeah, exactly Exactly. If you incentivise companies not to care about the environment and you basically subsidise mining of virgin materials and everything like that, then of course, they're going to act the way they act like there is only so much you're going to able to do by getting all your people inside an organisation to spend a lot of political capital at that point, which is in many ways is going against a lot of the kind of incentives that are already in place for companies you're going to have, Uh, there's a really strong argument for talking about changing of regulation. So you end up with incentives that make it easier to make the case to do the right thing. Because right now, yeah, we If you look at how the lot of the regulations are structured, they do tend to incentivise some behaviour, which we generally would argue is extremely unsustainable and probably putting on putting us on this kind. Of course, we're basically accelerating into this iceberg, and I feel like, yeah, that needs to be addressed. We can't just only talk about, like, the internal facing things. You really do need a kind of systemic view on this, but that's okay. We're not. There are other people working on a systemic view as well, and I think it's really useful to engage with those people and realise there's a world outside of tech that we can benefit from. If we want to achieve any of the change that I guess were driven into, we want we want to see.[00:46:39] Gaël: I believe there is a word outside of tech that we could benefit from could be our closing word. Actually, that might be your closing words, because that is absolutely true. And that embedded pretty well the discussion we had for this second part of this episode. So thanks a lot, Chris, For being with us today.[00:46:57] Chris: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this scale. Thank you. And thank you again for putting on this podcast. It's really nice to have things like this that you can point people, too, who are trying to engage with this subject for the first time and find something actionable to, like, incorporate into their work. So, yeah, Thank you.❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

For this episode we went to South England, near Exmoor national park, to meet Hannah Smith aka hanopcan. She is one of the most vocal sustainability advocates in the WordPress community as as in many others from Climate Action Tech to the Green Web Foundation. She will blow your mind with her pragmatic and efficient approach and will help you make almost 40% of all the words websites greener.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Hannah's twitterHannah's LinkedInHannah’s websiteGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Hannah's links and other references mentioned in this episode The Green Web Foundation website Climate Action Tech websiteHannah being interviewed in "This is HCD" podcastWholeGrain scoring system explained by Tom Greenwood in episode #61 of the Techologie podcastGerry McGovern's book World Wide WasteJack Lennox’s talk at WordCamp Berlin (2019)Tom Greenwood's talk at WordCamp Bristol (2019)Branch magazine websiteDoughnuts economics websiteUncle Bob’s talk about the future of programming WordPress tools:SmushShort pixelStratticCabin analyticsTranscriptGaël: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO - the podcast for doers making our digital world greener one bite at a time. I'm your host Gaël Duez and I invite you to meet with me a wide range of guests working in the digital tech industry to better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration together for the next move to green the IT we use or the digital products we build. If you like the podcast, please rate it five stars on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show!  Hello, everyone. In this episode, we go through the Southwest of England in the beautiful Exmoor National park. We had the pleasure to meet Hannah. Well, this time it was a remote recording, so I didn't have the pleasure to experience the park. But Hannah told me it's a beautiful place and I trust her. Hannah Smith, better known as hanopcan, is one of the most vocal sustainability advocates in the WordPress community. Okay, okay, okay! I hear you. What? Wordpress? A CMS supporting the move toward a more sustainable web? Are you kidding? Just wait to listen to Hannah. She will blow your mind and help you make almost 40% of all the world's websites greener. And she knows what she talks about because she's a diehard developer, having started coding when she was still a teenager sneaking on her dad's PC at home, but also because of all the energy she puts in sustainable initiatives, from having launched the Green Tech Southwest Meet-up in Bristol to being a volunteer in the Climate Action Tech community as well as the Green Web Foundation. And I believe she will tell us more about her recent fellowship in this foundation soon. And there is also another topic Hannah is passionate about... and I have to stop here and let her tell us about it. Welcome, Hannah. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Hannah: Thank you Gaël. It’s lovely to be here with you and super fun to be talking about tech sustainability and Wordpress sustainability as well.Gaël: Great. So if I want to launch a podcast on snowboarding, you should be my first guest. Is this correct?Hannah: Hell, yes. Yeah, yeah. If I won the lottery and didn't have to like think too much about money and maybe like sustainability. I just want to snowboard. That would be my like, yes, my top thing to do. The mountains are such fun places.Gaël: Yeah, you speak from my heart when it comes to snow sliding sports. And you know, I'm using this weird wording to dodge the old debate between skiing, snowboarding, and…Hannah: I've actually been learning to do both. So snowboarding is where my passion lies, where my heart is but I have been learning to ski as well. And I'm also really good at tobogganing as well. I discovered I can do like proper Mario Car Superpower slides down toboggan tracks as well, which is super fun.Gaël: Do you throw the turtle?Hannah: Do I throw the turtle? Yeah, but my dog is normally roaming alongside me actually when I go tobogganing. It's a good way to exercise her. So I don't know. It might be a bit mean trying to throw turtles at her. I'm trying to maybe throw more like the mushroom power ups or something. Gaël: that works as well! That works as well! And beyond snowboarding, what else did I miss in your bio?Hannah: Probably one of the main things is the work I'm doing with the Green Web Foundation at the moment, and particularly the fellowship. I think you did mention a little bit the fellowship that I've just finished with them. We've been exploring the intersection of climate justice and digital technologies, which has been really, really interesting.Gaël: Could you elaborate a bit on it?Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. So I went into the fellowship having explored digital sustainability quite a bit. And I was very much focused on carbon emissions at the beginning of the fellowship. So very much looking at the energy uses of websites and thinking about optimisation and performance of websites. What the fellowship did for me is give me an opportunity to explore a much broader definition of sustainability and understand what climate justice is. It was an entirely new frame of thinking for me, not something I'd ever come across before. I'd seen it on placards, but I had not really understood what it was. And I think what I learnt really really deeply from that fellowship was that sustainability and climate justice are really complex topics. And within the digital tech sector, we have to be super careful not to try and boil these things down too simplistically because I think if we start doing that, we miss too much of the real depth within these topics. They're not black and white, they're not binary. And I think as engineers we get very used to thinking it's on or it's off. It's yes or it's no, it's black or it's white and it's not with sustainability and it's not with climate justice. It's very, very complex. You get something right on one side and you inadvertently make a problem somewhere else. I think that was one of my key takeaways and it's like, incredibly complex and that you have to be really comfortable with working in greys and you have to be really comfortable with not knowing the right answer. You can only go in a direction, take a journey and hope that that journey is going in the right way. I think that was one of my key takeaways actually. It just really shaped the way I think and feel about a lot of this stuff.Gaël: That's very interesting because engineers are not used to working in grey areas as you said, and I believe that one of the top challenges today, if we want to succeed in making the world fossil free, is to acknowledge that we need as much, if not more human engineering than purely technical ones. And this is where many people are uncomfortable, I think.Hannah: Oh, for sure. I mean, one of the things that I really explored through the fellowship was the doughnut economics model.Gaël: MmhHannah: And I've just come from the Pixel Pioneers conference last week where I presented that to a tech audience for the first time. It was really, really interesting. And one of the things that the doughnut economics model does is it puts humanity in the centre of the story of sustainability. It has a social foundation and that is the centre of the doughnut, and then the ecological considerations of the outer circle of doughnut. And my take away from, you know, the way I ended that talk was “sustainability is not a tool or a code problem. It's a human problem.” We have to human better if we're going to make a more sustainable world. And I mean, I'm definitely an engineer. I want clarity. I want yes - no answers. I want to know my code is working or my code isn't working. I'm uncomfortable knowing that there many different ways to do something or not do something. But as you rightly said, we have to get used to that. That is actually what sustainability is about. It's first and foremost human problems. Social problems over engineering problems.Gaël: How did you become interested in sustainability in the first place? Did the sight of shrinking glaciers in the Alps play a role?Hannah: Yeah. I mean, I've always, always been interested in the planet and the environment. I love plants and I love nature. And as a kid, I was always outside. I was always mucking around in the outdoors, building dens, whatever. So I've always had this innate interest in nature and the environment, and I'm a child of the eighties. We grew up at school. We were taught about global warming as it was called then. I remember the body shop talking about deforestation of the rainforest. So I've always had this acute awareness. In my twenties, I went off to work for the Environment Agency for seven years, so I started off doing a degree in computer science and then went off to work for the Environment Agency. It's always been there for me, but I think more recently in the last sort of six or seven years… I mean you're absolutely right about glaciers. I mean, as a keen snowboarder, the places that used to have reliable snow don't have it now. You go up to Mont Blanc and see the glacier up there, and they have these signs all the way up the mountain saying, Oh, in the last 20, 30 years, this is how much the glaciers shrunk. I mean, you can't kind of get away from that. But more recently, within the tech sector, I've started to see more people talking about sustainability. So my own journey really sort of kicked off, I don't know, four or five years ago where I really started to commit loads of my time to sustainability. And it was when I started to organise the Bristol WordPress Group and I wanted the Bristol WordPress meet up to be more sustainable, and I then organised the Bristol WordCamp, which was a WordPress conference in Bristol, and I was looking for ways to make that conference more sustainable. At that time, I hadn't really thought about talks so much to do with technical sustainability. I was like way more focused on the food, the travel, the swag - a real pet hate for the amount of plastic crap people get given at conferences. So I was far more thinking about sustainability there. But I put the word out asking for anyone who would be interested in coming to do some talks on sustainability. And we had Wholegrain Digital. They came along and did a talk for us. And that was in May 2019. And they talked about designing websites to be greener. That was one of the first times I really heard about this stuff. And then So that was in May. And then that June, I went to wordcamp Europe in… It must have been in Belgrade, I think. What was it? No, no. Sorry. It must have been in Berlin. I went to wordcamp Berlin, and Jack Lennox was on the main stage giving a big talk about digital sustainability. I think his talk was called “Is digital killing the planet” or “How to make websites that don't kill the planet”? That was my absolute Aha lightbulb moment that digital tech had a massive issue and has a massive call to action around sustainability.Gaël: And now you're the onge giving these talks.Hannah: Yeah, I guess I found my niche, my call to action. I've realised that there aren't enough voices in this space. I actually mentioned going to wordcamp Europe in Belgrade. So that was in 2018. That was the first time I've ever been to like a whopping great big conference. And I remember going to that conference and thinking not a single person is talking about sustainability at this conference.Gaël: It still happens a lot.Hannah: Oh, ma'am, it does, but it's better. It is better. But I thought, Hang on. How can the world's biggest tech community not have a single talk or workshop or mention of planetary sustainability issues? Remember thinking all right, back in 2018, I was like, OK, I want to do something about this. Hence the effort I was putting into my own conference that I was organising in Bristol and then, thankfully, Wholegrain Digital and Jack came along the year after and really kind of helped me realise what I could be talking about or should be talking about.Gaël: Let's talk about what you talk and especially, you know, Green IO is about sharing hands on experience on how to make the Web and take more sustainable. And I wanted to ask you a question. Could you pick one project which you did recently on WordPress, as a perfect blueprint for someone willing to build a low carbon website?Hannah: Mm. That is a really, really good question. I don't think I can give you a single project that is a perfect example of what you can achieve with digital sustainability. I don't think any client has ever come to me with the perfect amount of budget or the perfect amount of human resource to work on such a project with me. But what we can definitely talk through though, is some different scenarios in which I have done that work. But nothing to my mind has ever been perfect in that respect.Gaël: Nothing is fully black and white, I guess.Hannah: Beautifully done. Yes, absolutely. Coming back to that initial point. We don't live in a perfect world, and we're in shades of grey, but there's some interesting things we can definitely talk about.Gaël: So let's go for them.Hannah: Okay, so one project that we can definitely talk about is Branch magazine, which is a really interesting project run by the Green Web Foundation. And what that website does is it shows you a different view of the website, depending on the grids carbon intensity for that day. So it's a really interesting showcase of responsive, super responsive websites. The way it does that is it uses a data set from the national grid to the UK data set and if there's loads of solar and renewables on the grid that day, it shows you more images, more high definition images. And actually, do you know what? It was Jack Lennox that actually set up the foundation for that, and I was quite intimidated. I was like… Oh, my God!..like I'm never going to understand what Jack has done because Jack is a really great developer. This is going to be actually super complicated. It's really not. I was really surprised, like a lot of it was done with JavaScript, and the other thing that's built into that website as well is a really heavy use of caching using the redis object cache and the cool thing about that is it set up on the server and essentially, it's turning WordPress into a set of static HTML files. WordPress. That site is basically a simple blog. It's articles. There's nothing much interactive there. So it's a perfect example of what you can do with a WordPress site to make it more sustainable, to make it use a whole heap less energy per page load. Also, I should mention if you haven't seen Branch magazine, check it out because the content is super good and a big shout out to Michelle Thorne because she's brilliant. She's such a good curators of interesting content.Gaël: Yes, she is. Well, that's very interesting what you mentioned with WordPress and its static site, because that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you -That, okay, it seems that some WordPress projects can be sustainable at heart, and I wanted to ask you what's your position on the debate: SSG versus SSR like WordPress? And for the listeners not fully familiar with the topic, a static site is a website hosted fully on a content delivery network or CDN. That means that it does need a server to render the page. When people visit a static site, the closer CDN to the user responses with a basic HTML file. A static site generator is a tool that helps build such static site pages. And, on the other end, sever-side rendering solutions, which today power most of the web - they build a page on demand each time a user visits the site while SSG does it at build time. And the advantage, of course, is that the pages are always up-to-date. But every page view triggers a call to the APIs, hence a bigger environmental footprint. So what is your take on it? Is it a false debate? Is it a debate we need to have?Hannah: Oh, interesting. I mean, there's no denying that static sites are better. They are better for reducing the amount of energy use and they're quicker as well. So that's definitely a good thing. In my mind, there's kind of no debate to be had there. The facts on that are absolutely undeniable. But I think as I mentioned when I was talking through Branch magazine, static sites can start to become a little bit unstuck when you've got lots of content going up all the time where you've got dynamic interactions such as using forms or shopping online, they're not quite the right tool for the job in those sorts of situations. WordPress has a business within the ecosystem called Strattic, who have been developing ways of turning WordPress into a static site generator. And the issue is that when you edit stuff, what happens to the content? How often do you refresh the whole build of the site in order to create the static files? And I think that's been the big issue that Strattic have been grappling with - how does the site know when to refresh all the HTML files? Because if you make a typo on a page and you change that, you don't want your entire site to rebuild, which is what some static site generators do. So there's you know this idea of kind of how often and how do your files get re-cached essentially or recreated into static files? You know, if you make a change to the nav, top nav, all your files have got to update, and you know you maybe sort of get into a conversation about “Is that a good idea?” “How sustainable is that?” Especially if you've got a team of 10 people making changes all the time, then you're just constantly recreating all the files. I think for a site that is large and what I mean by large, I mean has a lot of visitors,  it's a really good option to look into. I really, really do think that static site generators and making WordPress do more of this stuff out of the box, it's got to be the future direction for us to go in. I really, really do. And I'd love to see us talking about that more within the WordPress community. At the moment, the conversation seems to be, well, you're not using WordPress well, you're stupid, you should be using static site generators instead. Here's a load of other CMSs that do that for you? And I kind of think again, you know folks, it's not black and white. It's not one or the other. We can kind of get WordPress to do some of this for us or start to move in that direction as well. We don't necessarily have to switch CMS in order to achieve that.Gaël: And I reckon this not black and white position of yours is kind of rooted in the way you work on a daily basis with small medium businesses. They don't have, like, the biggest budget possible that will enable them to do a big migration every two years to change the entire technology stack. So maybe this is also where you could provide us a bit of a feedback regarding how do you help these kinds of customers using WordPress becoming greener without having the means of, you know, multi-billion unicorns companies obviously?Hannah: Absolutely. And I think I mean most, a lot of people in the WordPress space are working with SMEs working with small to medium enterprises. So I mean, at the moment, I've got one client. We are still using the WordPress Classic editor. So, we haven't switched to the Gutenberg stuff. Their site theme is Oh, my gosh. We must be approaching eight or nine years old with that. Do you know what? Gaël, it still works. We can still deliver what we need to deliver. The developer in me is desperate to re-engineer it all but the sustainability advocate in me is quite happy to keep working with them on a step by step iterative basis to keep what we've got going. So one of the big things I've been doing with them is helping them get their heads around images. Small to medium businesses don't often - the people within those businesses perhaps don't often - have a dedicated content manager. It will be, you know, a number of different people from within the business adding content. So, getting the images, you know, media is one of the biggest causes of your file size to grow. And actually, what we want to be doing is keeping the file size of each page load as small as possible. And images are a fantastic focal point for making massive, massive reductions. So one of the things I've been doing is helping them learn how to optimize their images, helping them learn when a 2000 pixel wide image is appropriate and when it is not. And I've also done a few things on the back end to help change those images, say to Web P format. So, I love to use a plug in called Smush. I also like to use a plug in called short pixel in order to convert images automatically to smaller formats. You can't just upload Web P images directly to WordPress because if you do that, you've got backwards compatibility issues. Putting plugins in place helps do that on the fly.Gaël: And what about video?Hannah: So video is massive for file size, as I'm sure many people will be aware. So auto playing videos are just a no! no! Like please, can we just not have auto playing videos unless there's a really, really important reason for it? But auto playing videos people don't like them. You know you're on the train or you're at a cafe, and suddenly you've got a video playing. Nobody really likes that experience. And the other thing is, it just sucks up loads of bandwidth and therefore electricity almost straight away. So auto playing videos are a big red cross. Do you know what? I'm not generally binary about things. This is definitely a theme of our conversation. But you know what? When it comes to playing videos, I actually would just say that's a big red cross. Don't do it. Full stop. Find a better way. And otherwise animated gifs. So this client has got a very, very old website. I've been using a tool called Cabin Analytics and I've plugged cabin analytics into the site to help me see what are the biggest pages in terms of file size. I found this one page that was like eight megabytes. I was like, okay, wow, what's going on here? Like that's quite large, because everything else is generally 1.5 to 2 which is bigger than we'd like but, you know, we've got to be pragmatic about what we're doing. I was like: OK, this is a massive outlier - the eight meg. What's going on here? And basically I'd realised that they had embedded an animated GIF into the page and it was massive. It was like a 1200 pixel wide animated GIF. And it was nice but it wasn't really doing much. I kind of said to them: Hey folks! You know, if you realise this is basically six megabytes, that's loading every single time that someone views that page and they went on, we did wonder why it was slow we hadn't realised. And so all we did was swap that out for a static image. And now we've got that page back down to more like two again, which is, you know, better, definitely much better.Gaël: That's a very interesting point, because the last green IO episode with Chris Adams, you know, focused a lot on hosting and infrastructure etc. and green powering, the data centres etc. but everything starts with design. The greenest possible Watt is a negaWatt.Hannah: So I'm glad that Chris was on that previous episode. Because just before I sort of answer your question, one of the quick, quick and easy wins for any SME is switching from a hosting provider to a hosting provider that runs on green energy. And it sounds like you and Chris have had a really good conversation about that. So we can park that for now and direct everyone to listen to that episode with you and Chris. In terms of design, fonts is a really big one that people can think about. Custom fonts are very nice, very beautiful, but they do slow the performance of the site down and can add quite a bit of page weight in. So I would say to people, try and limit your use of fonts. If you can use the system font for the text, great! And maybe reserve the more beautiful artistic fonts, perhaps for your headings, where it will matter where it will really make a big difference. So fonts is definitely something useful to look at. We've talked about images. Big images that take up the whole of the screen are a real problem because we have screens these days that are huge, absolutely enormous. My screen, my main one that I use is 2400 pixels. So if you want to deliver a nice, full screen image to someone using a screen that big, you're going to have to put in a really massive image. And unfortunately, Gutenberg isn't really helping us at the moment with something called image source set. I won't get into it now because it's more of a developer question than a techy, than a design question. But it means we're in a slightly harder position for delivering more responsibly sized images. It's kind of one of my bugbears for Gutenberg and what WordPress has done with that. So we want to, you know, you might have a justification for a massive image across the screen somewhere. But if every single page has it and maybe several of them across a page, I think you're going to give yourself some sort of sustainability headaches basically. It's really cool seeing the recent trend with designers doing more with SVG and Vector based graphics and even drawing things with CSS as well. And that can be a really great way of creating interest across a wide part of the screen estate, but without having images. So that's definitely something worth looking into as well. And then I think the last thing is “Search”. Don't be afraid to incorporate search into the design of websites. Search is actually really good value in terms of the amount of energy it uses to conduct a search. If you think that somebody's coming on your site to look for a particular piece of content, if they have to load five or six pages in order to find what they're looking for, that's quite a lot of wasted data transfer. But actually, if you use a search filter, sorry, a search mechanism, someone can find what they're looking for a lot more quickly. And I think in design search is a real saviour actually. Yes, there's a back end implication for someone running that search on the service side. But again, such results don't use a huge amount of energy if you've got a well optimized search function in the site. WordPress search function is okay. You can definitely optimize it and make it better. So that would be my fourth pillar: stick search on your site. It doesn't cost as much as you might think it does and it will really help your users.Gaël: So in a nutshell, if I dare to wrap up what you've said, you will have four pillars which are images, video, font and search. And I would say more generally speaking the way we use CMS today are, most of the time, not sustainable but the tool itself remains very, very powerful, if used properly. With these changes you talked about in design, but also in hosting and even in deployment. Am I getting it right?Hannah: I think so. I think it's very hard to say WordPress is or isn't sustainable. As you know, it is about how someone uses the tool and how the tool is set up. I think another really important factor to consider with the choice of CMS is around how backwards compatible the software is. And I think that's something we haven't really touched on in this conversation. WordPress has been around for a long time. It's just had its… is it 15th or 16th birthday? And that in itself makes it a sustainable choice. The fact that it's been around for a long time, the fact that a website has been able to run on WordPress for 15 or 16 years and hasn't had to re platform, that's not just an energy cost to re platform. It's also a human cost. You've got to get your head around a new platform, you've got to rebuild all your content. So I think there is also an argument to say that, you know, if you look at it from that angle, WordPress is actually doing remarkably well for sustainability.Gaël: And the WordPress community has now a dedicated Slack channel on sustainability and it has already been joined by I guess almost 100 people. So thanks a lot to all of them.Hannah: Would you know the people that were behind it? So, it's Nora Ferreiros who is a Spanish wordpress designer. She came to one of those workshops that I run, Gaël, which is where I met you where we are exploring a wider view of sustainability.  So Nora came along to the third of my workshops and she was brave enough to stand up in front of everybody at WordCamp Europe which just happened in Porto and asked the directors, Matt and Josephina, questions about sustainability. And kudos to her because that could have been something quite a bit scary but she started something there. So, well done Nora! And I think it's been bubbling up for a while. That was going to happen. So, I'm really chaffed. Well done WordPress!Gaël: Indeed. Hannah, you are a pillar in both the Climate Action Tech and the Green Web Foundation communities. Hence, I would say, a privileged witness of the ongoing trends in digital sustainability. And I'd love to get your perspective on them and to start the discussion you mentioned in an episode of the podcast “This is Human Centred Design” that developers need to slow down to be less engineer and more craftsman. Could you elaborate?Hannah: Absolutely. I think that, so I've been teaching at a coding boot camp for a few years. Unfortunately, in the pandemic, the boot camp closed down. But what I observed in that boot camp was just how phenomenally hard it is for any new developer to get up to speed with all the tools and everything that we have available to us, as developers. It's kind of an impossible task if you're at ground zero and you're trying to learn it all. And I would also say, as a developer myself, trying to keep on top of all this change, all these new ideas, all these new tools that are coming out. I mean, it's a day job in itself, just keeping on top. Let alone, you know, actually learning how to use them and developing the skills. And I have to sort of take a step back and just ask myself: What are we doing here? Why are we creating so much new stuff but more specifically throwing away stuff that we've built new tools, new frameworks and things like that? Why? Why do we have this mentality within tech that we need to keep throwing stuff away and creating new stuff all the time? Can we not just, like, slow down a bit, and let people come on the journey with us and let people learn these things? Can we give tools a little bit more settling time to actually find their place? I think within the tech industry, we've just sort of forgotten how to slow down a bit, and I think there are so many negative impacts as a result of us moving too fast. I think it locks too many people out of joining in. So, it's essentially a form of gatekeeping. I think… this speed with which we move.Gaël: And it's funny because what you've just said really resonates with a very famous speech that Uncle Bob gave. It was already… several years ago about the fact that our industry was doomed to be a junior industry and that it was going to create a lot of issues, because when you've got too many junior people in a position, obviously the quality is not here, and you can have dire consequences. His reasoning was a bit different of yours, which was that we had such needs, increasing needs, in the number of developers across the globe that even if you train them, you always need to hire new ones and that will be only junior ones. And now it really resonates that actually this is still absolutely true, and a big kudos to him up to have dared saying something like that. But actually, if you add what you've just said with his opinion, it's kind of complementary in the wrong way that we have to hire a lot of junior people because the demand is just crazy for code everywhere, and on top of that, we don't help them to be productive super soon and to be efficient and to be able to keep up because we load them over and over with new technologies, etcetera, that we could really question sometimes, whether it's just pure hype or something very valuable.Hannah: Yeah, you said that so well. Did you say it was Uncle Bob?Gaël: Absolutely.Hannah: Thank you,Gaël. That is something for me to have a look at there. It's a people issue, and I do think this is why we have such issues with imposter syndrome in the industry as well. It's so hard to feel good at anything because the minute you get good at something, it's all changed again. And for what? I just… I don't know, is it? I think part of it is a bit of an ego thing, and part of it is a bit of a…I don't know, people don't like the way some things are done, so they're just going to go off and do it the way that they want to do it. And to some degree, that's good. That's innovation. That's to be celebrated. But in some other ways, if we all just slow down, we could spend more time learning what someone else has built and learn how to use that tool ourselves, rather than having to create another flavour of it or another version of it. And this comes back to my point about why I celebrate WordPress. Why I'm actually incredibly proud to tell people that I work in WordPress because WordPress has been around a long time. WordPress gets a bit of flack for being slow to change and slow to develop new features. It's not exciting. It's not seen as exciting because it's not constantly changing. I actually think that's something to really celebrate and to really treasure. I have a website that's been running on WordPress for eight years. It's the same thing that was built eight years ago and only with a few small modifications that still works today. There's not many frameworks that you can say that's the case for.Gaël: Thanks, Anna, for sharing your insights and, more generally, what are the latest evolution that you see in digital sustainability?Hannah: I think at the moment there's a really interesting school, a new discipline, I suppose, new school of thinking called sustainable software engineering. I think that's a really interesting trend. So you know, I was mentioning about Branch magazine how it actually uses the data from the grid as to how carbon intense electricity is at a given point of time. There's a really interesting field there. I'm looking at perhaps more service side, service side operations and shifting operations around different times of day, different times a week, different times of year, depending on how much energy is coming onto the grid at one time. I think that's absolutely fascinating and a really interesting trend, and I think another trend I would like to see, I'd like to see us connecting humanity with technology a lot, lot more. I think it's starting to happen. But I think in terms of the trend that we need to see within sustainability, that's what we need to see. This connection of human and tech and humans being at the centre of all the tech that we're building, not the engineering mentality. So it would be good to see that happening more.Gaël: And are you optimistic today about both of these trends happening?Hannah: True to false? I cannot answer yes or no because in some respects I am optimistic.Gaël: That's the entire idea of this episode. That… no black, no white, it's all grey.Hannah: No black. No white. Exactly, it's all grey. So I am really optimistic to see so much effort, so much willingness, go into developing sustainable software engineering and the Green Software Foundation are doing a fantastic job there. I'm optimistic about that. What I'm worried about, though, is that engineers are going to continue to try and optimize things that shouldn't exist and things that we don't actually need. e.g. There are a whole raft of digital text things that exist that I just think if we really care about sustainability, we'd just switch them off. I've got to say the Metaverse that Facebook are developing is one of those things for me. We can optimize that until we're blue in the face, but I'm actually not sure that that should exist at all.Gaël: That's a very interesting comment you just made, because I love to ask a question that I call the Beyond scope 3 question, which is always a bit hard to answer, which is what about the Why? And my point is, did you find yourself in situations where making tech greener was not enough? Where you had to question the purpose of some digital services to be built, if not, an entire company? Do you sometimes refuse to work for some company and you mention Wholegrain Digital? And that's very interesting because Tom Greenwood, in an episode of the “Techologie” podcast, one of the very first podcasts about Digital Sustainability, mostly in French but a great great podcast, he explained how Wholegrain Digital would actually score all of his potential customers to agree or not to work with them? So what about you? Did you find yourself in such a situation that you had to say no to a customer because of this “Why” question?Hannah: 100%. Absolutely. I think perhaps my process is not nearly as robust as Wholegrain Digital's because it's just me.Gaël: Well, that explains a lot, and you're one woman show so... You don't have please do not to create big processes.Hannah: No, that wouldn't be very sustainable at all. But no, I mean, that has always been central to my thinking ever since I started as a freelancer, you know, all these people that I want to work with. Do I care about their cause? Do I feel that I could be using my skills to further something that I don't believe in or don't think should exist? I mean, absolutely! I think that's really a really important thing to do. Digital tech people, we have skills to accelerate solutions. That's essentially what we're doing. We're accelerating processes and systems that could exist without our digital tech skills. So we have to think, what are we accelerating and why? So I think it's a really, really important question for us as techies to think about.Gaël: I do think so as well. Hannah being mindful of time I would like to close the podcast with one final question, which is - what will be your recommendations to learn more about Digital Sustainability and Green Tech? I know that we didn't speak that much about Green Tech, but that's a subject keen to your heart. It could be books, people to follow, videos, conferences, et cetera.Hannah: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think there's lots and lots of resources out there. I mean, one of the things that I run is Green Tech South West, which is a meet up specifically designed to grow people's awareness of what is possible out there and grow their awareness around what sustainability means. I'm obviously going to give a shout out for that.Gaël: And you should.Hannah: Yeah, we run our events online and so even if we have an in person event, we always have an online option for people to join in and listen to our awesome speakers that way. So I'd say there's Green Tech South West. I think a lot of the work that we're doing through the Green Web Foundation as well is super interesting. And I mean, I just have to give a massive show out to the ClimateAction.tech community. If you're really interested in kind of seeing what people are talking about, meeting people, finding out about what's going on within this sector, I think you can't do any better than joining the ClimateAction tech community and really getting involved. You know, there's a running Meetups. There's lots of great discussion on Slack, and there's lots of super interesting people you can meet as well. And Gaël, I think you and I met through Climate Action Tech.Gaël: Absolutely. That must be half of my podcast guests, so far.Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, I know on your show, you're also interviewing a lot of really interesting people. I think if you want a warts and all real stark view of what's happening within the digital tech sector, I don't think you can follow anyone better than Gerry McGovern. I think Gerry is absolutely brilliant. He just says it how it is. There's no sugar coating. Gerry is just an absolute fantastic mirror to reflect back what is going wrong within our sector. So I definitely say follow Gerry if you want to learn more about what's going wrong.Gaël: This is what Fershad said. I think. He opened his interview talking about Gerry’s book being an eye opener. Thanks a lot, Hannah. That was a great ride. Not a one on snow, but toward a greener digital world.Hannah: Oh sad... It's lovely to come and talk to you Gaël: Thanks a lot. I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration to green the web, starting with this very pragmatic and efficient way to use WordPress, but also the way you take a step back and look at the entire picture on how we do our job, what the tech does, should do and should not do anymore to our society. So that was very, very useful and thanks a lot for taking the time to be with us. That was great. Thanks a lot, Hannah.Hannah: Absolute pleasure, Gaël. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for everything that you're doing in this space as well. It's really great. I love your podcast.Gaël: Thanks. And for our next episode, we will go back to Berlin and meet Chris Adams again for the long overdue second part of his interview. The executive director of the Green Web Foundation will tell us more on the latest trends in digital sustainability and all the initiatives popping up around the world. And that's it. Thank you all for listening to Green IO. If you have liked this episode, please share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who would enjoy or learn from it. Green IO being a non-profit podcast, our dear listeners are true communication power, and you are a scout as well. So feel free to share with me your idea for new guests who want to make our digital world greener one byte at a time. ❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.  📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents. 

In our May’s episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! In this first part, after taking the time to know Chris a bit better and how he burnt 20M$ in VC, we discussed at length about Green Hosting and Cloud Sustainability. And we deep dived in a step by step approach to green ops. ❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Chris' twitterChris' LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Acknowledgement This episode has benefited from the support of cloud & infra experts across Europe. A warm thank you to all of them.  Acknowledgement are in this LinkedIn post. Chris' links and other references mentioned in this episode Chris' website “How to green your cloud” a 2009 talk by AMEE for archeologist ;)Naomi Klein's book "No logo"Chris' blog post: "3 levers you might have if you want to do something on climate"Electricity map blog: “What is additionality (and emissionality)?”Green Web Foundation Cloud Carbon FootprintNegaoctetBoaevistaGreen Software FoundationSustainable Digital Infrastructure AllianceEmber (delivering carbon intensity around the world)IT RenewScaphandre by Hubblo  TranscriptGaël: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO the podcast for doers making our digital world greener one bite at a time. I'm your host Gaël Duez and I invite you to meet with me a wide range of guests working in the digital tech industry to better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration together for the next move to green the IT we use or the digital products we build. If you like the podcast, please rate it five stars on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. And now enjoy the show! Hello everyone. In this episode we went to Berlin to meet Chris Adams. Where to start from with someone with a track record like Chris? Maybe with thanking him and the trailblazers at loco2, now rail europe, for enabling me to travel from Paris to Berlin by train which should be the norm in Europe and is still a pretty big challenge. So thanks a lot for that. After loco2 Chris helped   many digital companies and he founded Product Science in 2013 and managed it for six years, helping people build better digital products for solving environmental and social problems. Already! Chris is now the executive director of the Green Web Foundation which is the number one directory to check whether a host provider runs on low carbon energy and much more than he’ll tell us about. Since 2018, he has also been a pillar of Climate Action Tech nickname CAT A more than 6000 members community of tech workers taking climate action together.Welcome Chris! Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.Chris: Thank you for having me Gael.Gaël: And first of all I wanted to ask you, what did I forget to mention about you and your crazy life.Chris: I think the one, the one thing I might mention is that yes, we worked at loco two which is a low carbon CO2 locomotion and like like a triple layer pun company. But there was also another company I worked at called AMEE, which stands for avoid mass extinction engine. And around 2011, we basically burned through something in the region of $20 million of VC funding trying to figure out how to sell our carbon accounting or peer APIs on carbon calculation just like people are doing now and we pivoted lots and lots of times and learned lots of things and I, that was really, really helpful and formative for me for shaping my experiences about this. And if you look around, I'll add to the show notes, There was actually a talk all about how to grow in your cloud, by that company back in 2009 or something like that. So people, there have been people who've been working in this field for a very, very long time.Gaël: Yeah. And you're part of the trailblazer, I don't see any other word that would describe the work that you've been doing when most of the people were not aware of it at all. Which leads me to the question how did you become interested in sustainability, especially the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? Did you have like some kind of ha ha moment?Chris: I think it actually came from basically me looking at this stuff, I mean, I was more interested in like sustainability and I suppose like things like Fair trade and ethics in my mid teens when I first wrote a book called No logo by Naomi Klein, that kind of gave me, helped me kind of make sense of the whole kind of story of globalization and how things are changing on this. And then I kind of took some of those values with me, I think all through university and that, and I thought, well if I'm going to be doing anything with computers, it would make sense for me to think about where the energy is coming from. I mean, it's gotta come from somewhere, right? And from there, I end up basically getting more and more interested in this and it's just been a kind of recurring theme. So, when I did graduate from university, I mean, I was environment officer in my student union, and then when I graduated, I set up a company with a friend of mine and we said we're only going to work on sustainable related projects and they will have to all be open source and that kind of, that's been a kind of theme all the way through. And I'll be honest, when I I think I might have left university, I think I might have gone, maybe it was wiser to join a larger organization first, because we did a bunch of that, but we also learned a lot about making commitments like delivering on time, managing budgets, all this stuff like that, we learned that the hard way, but it's basically how I kind of got into it and I've ended up basically pursuing projects largely based on, I guess the direction or the problem they're looking to solve primarily and then secondarily the kind of skill sets or things that might be using. And this is partly why I think one thing we spoke about before was this idea of well and my product person, Am I a tech person, There's a whole bunch there that we could talk about.Gaël: So if I had to describe you, I would say like a self-trained, generalist technologist with a knack for sustainability. How does it work? Chris: Yeah. That's good enough, I think. Gaël: And so let's let's talk about green hosting first. Last month, I shared a little survey in my close network to get insights on which pain points they experience on the daily journey towards sustainability and the top pain points where the following: two of them were very, very similar to the ones we discussed with Elizabeth last month that were raised by product managers in CPO which are the C-level deadlock: How to convince my CTO, my CEO that green hosting matters?  How do I go beyond best Green IT is no more IT issue which is a bit of a struggle when you're a head of ops. And raising awareness is the number two, how do I raise awareness in my organization? When can I switch from being just an advocate to someone starting to take actions? Do you have any feedback or insight that you would like to share regarding these two pain points?Chris: Yeah. I think one thing that you can think about this, it would be that, let's say you're a technologist and I've written a blog post about this is like the three levers you might have if you want to do something on climate. Right? There's one thing that you might be familiar with which is basically consumption. So this is the idea that you might want to make things more efficient, right? But another option might be changing the intensity of the actual infrastructure you use. Right? So like the carbon intensity. So for it you might be able to reduce the number of compute cycles or the machines you're running, right? But another way to achieve some greater sustainability at the time will basically be to make sure those machines are running on much much greener energy. So that would be one of the arguments I would make and in many cases In the year 2022 because we have seen the cost of renewable energy fall so much, it's getting a lot easier to buy green hosting in many ways. It's a real kind of no brainer if you are going to look at a relatively no regrets option to do this kind of stuff. So I think that you can make an economic argument to basically say in the long run it will be cheaper. You can make an argument that it's going to be better for retaining staff or having people who actually feel good about what they're doing. And in many ways it's probably gonna be one of the most measurable changes you do have available to you now that we have increasing numbers of tools like say Amazon's dashboards or Cloud Carbon Footprint’s dashboards, showing you the carbon intensity of a particular computer job. So if you can see if you have control over where you might choose to run a computing job then. Then one option basically, you know, causes some avoidable harm. And the other option doesn't cause that avoidable harm, then it does feel like it would make sense to do too. I think most responsible engineers, if they knew that they had an option there, they would choose to go for the greener less harmful option if they had available to them. So I think that's one way that you can actually talk about it really. So it's like retention to kind of keep staff happy. And the other one is basically, It's in many cases there's a cost, there's a cost argument for this stuff and I think that we might be able to talk about later on that some organizations are actually taking advantage of how the cost of renewable energy has fallen by something like 90% over the last 10 years to come with entirely new business models and entirely new services to allow you to kind of essentially capture some of those savings that would otherwise not be passed on to you, to pay it from other cloud providers.Gaël: Just to sum it up. It will be, it's a no brainer when it comes to the financial perspective, it will help retain our talents in this tense job market where Tech people are in high demand and eventually this is good for the planet. But that would not be the number one argumentChris: because if you're a CTO or a CEO people haven't directly hired you to make the planet better. Right. And I feel like you could lead with that argument, but a lot of the time, if you can find a way to talk about how the benefits land somewhere inside your organizational boundary, then you're going to have a lot more success and there are ways to actually have that. And basically, if you think about how hard it is to find people, that's a really, really, if you're able to make it easier for you to retain some of your best people, that's a way of of a benefit staying within an organization or if you're able to get people to, to join your company because they see that you're already showing leadership in this, then again, that's the benefits landing inside your company. So I think it's important to know how to make this argument to people who are actually decision makers or budget holders a lot of time. And there's also, I forgot one other really, really crucial one. Now, basically, regulation is forcing this stuff now, like in the UK, for example, there are legal requirements for organizations to - just within public sector - to show their achieving reductions year on year in their emissions, right? And you see the same thing happening with investors now, who basically say, you need to show me that you are reducing your emissions across all of your,  across your entire organization. Otherwise I won't provide you with the same access to capital and I'm going to be less keen to invest in you because I see you as a risk compared to other other organizations. So there's actually a regulatory reason for this is that you might want to kind of be aware of or get ahead of, so that it doesn't come up come up as a nasty shock later on.Gaël: So regulation, external pressure, winning the talent war and a no brainer when it comes to the financial perspective. Makes a lot of sense. And some questions were more focused on the specific ops in infrastructure topics. The first one being what I would call the information maze, how do I get the right level of information? How can I have a hosting provider blasting that it runs on renewable energy when we know that the local grid is coal-powered, how would you deal with this lack of access to fully transparent information?Chris: So this is actually one thing that is a ongoing struggle and this is actually why I joined the Green Web Foundation in the first place because I was looking around to find some services that I both was comfortable using because they provided a good user experience or they were secure enough or they work quickly and had a convincing track record on sustainability. One of the reasons I joined the Green Web Foundation is because they were working to create some transparency around this stuff. And if you actually start looking into this, you'll realize that it's pretty much a fractal of complexity in that Yes, you might be say if a company is saying they're running on green Power then, is that because they're running say they're one on site solar or like or on site renewables because there are examples of companies that do do that, you can basically choose to run infrastructure in, say Switzerland, for example, in a disused factory that's been refitted with service that runs on a run of the river hydropower and with the other 1% that… with 99% power coming from hydro and 1% coming from say, solar, you can have those options. But if you do that, then you may be trading off the fact that you were used to having lots of convenient and mature services from other places who might be taking other approaches to say, well we've purchased offsets or we've purchased a set of green energy credits, for example, to basically say that what was kind of carbon fossil power grids is now considered green. And this is basically because in order to actually they'll, you know, plumb the depths of look into this, you need to start to understand quite a lot of energy policy and for most people it's they don't have the time to do something like an MSC in this stuff. And like when I was initially getting into this, when I spoke to some people who work for energy companies, I was like, wow, this is really complicated. Do I need to do an MSC? And they were like, yeah, that's what I did. And I feel like it's … this is because we don't really have this transparency right now, I think there are tools and their organizations making it easier to understand. So you do have some kind of metrics for this. So the Green Software Foundation is one example, but so is the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance I think they're doing some really, really good work to make it easier and provide guidance on what kind of metrics to track, so that you know that you're having some kind of impact. But it's an extremely complicated discussion basically. And it's really not helped by the fact that a lot of time the transparency is not there at multiple levels. So that as a responsible technologist, it can often be very difficult for you to have like… take a data informed decision basically.Gaël: And as someone calling the shots when it comes to infrastructure and hosting, whether I'm a CTO, a head of Ops or a devops why should I get interested in the Green Web Foundation tools? How could they help me navigate the informational maze?Chris: Okay, I would say. And this is one thing that we're working on doing is to make it easier to basically green your stack. Alright, so there will be theirs, you will be able to achieve some progress by thinking about, say, the efficiency of what you do and basically doing things like turn off computers or make architectural decisions so that you're not wasting as much compute, but you're never going to efficiency your way to zero. You will need to find another way to actually account for the unavoidable amounts of compute to meet the demands that you are not necessary for you to provide, whatever service you're running. And at that point, Yeah, you will need to be looking at say things like green hosting, but if you are looking for that, I think there are things you might want to look at are some tools which do make this easy to see and the thing and there are some metrics you can look for now. There are things like the carbon intensity of the electricity that various providers have or you might look at things like say the for want of a better word coverage, like how much of their energy that they're using each year is matched with renewable energy for example. So when most organizations say they're running on green energy, what they're basically saying is we can point to green generation over a year that matches the amount of energy that we've used for our service over that year. And that's not … there are various ways that you can achieve that for example. But there are some organizations now which are being quite a bit more aggressive on this, so Google and Microsoft, they're increasingly talking about how they match things on an hourly basis. So they'll basically say for every hour of power that we're using, we are matching that power with green energy and that might be from, say on site solar or on site wind or things like that, where it might be them being able to point to the fact that they have invested in green energy generation, which is generating power at the same time as they are using so that when they are so they can make a reasonable claim to say, for example, at night that the servers they're using that are running at night are being powered by wind power running at night. And like this is a difference from the annual approach because on an annual basis you're taking an average over the entire year. It may be that energy might have all come from, say solar during the day, for example. But if your servers are running at night, I think it's a much bigger claim to make to basically say, well because I've paid for a bunch of solar panels to be deployed over here, then my computer at night is being matched by that, that's a different thing. And that's something we might touch a little bit later because there are now increasingly standards and things to kind of track this will make it easier to be much clearer about where the energy is coming from.Gaël: And do you make this distinction in the repository maintained by the Green Web Foundation?Chris: This is the thing we're looking to move towards actually. So the way that we present it, we basically say that if you want to have a green service or a green site, we say you need to demonstrate steps you're taking to either avoid, reduce, or offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the electricity using to run that service. We asked that to be on a yearly basis right now because basically what I spoke to you about this kind of hourly example, right there are even Google even Microsoft with who are basically like trillion dollar companies with essentially infinite access to capital. They've said we're not, we reckon that we'll be able to match all of our electricity usage on an hourly basis by 2030. But for the most part, most organizations, they might be an annual basis and they are and when people are in our directory, we've basically asked them for to provide evidence that they've shown that they're matching this on a yearly basis. But the thing we would like to do and they want one thing we're really pushing for is people to show to move to showing evidence about how they, how much they match on an hourly basis because we feel that's actually a much more in line with what most people expect when they think about green energy. And there are ways that you can do that now by matching the amount of power you use based on the kind of amount of green energy that's on the grid or like in the case of say, folks in Switzerland, for example, literally running your infrastructure on things like run of the river hydro, which will run all the time. So that's the kind of stuff that we do. And it might be worth saying that different parts of the world have different ways of counting energy as green. And while in say europe for example, you may be able to choose a green provider, There are certain parts of the world where the energy market is structured so that you literally cannot choose a different energy provider you have, there is a monopoly and the best you can do is maybe purchase some green energy credit or agree to use some other financial instrument. It's really, really difficult and this is why we say we have this kind of relatively broad statement simply because the constructions of all these markets is such that you can't basically just say “we have to have well except one form of energy basically”,Gaël: which makes the work of the Green Web Foundation so important. Now, going back to the survey, another question was “what is really the true impact?” “Does this really matter compared to other areas where I could invest energy to make things greener and it kind of makes sense when you see the complexity of the energy market as you just described it. Don't you think so?Chris: I think it very much depends on …, just like you, like just like your previous guests have said, you need to establish a baseline to see what the changes would be. So France for example, France because it actually has a very, very low carbon grid. It may be that's really focusing on the greenest possible hosting is going to have a relatively small increase compared to say if you're hosting something in Poland, which has a very, very kind of cold heavy grid for example. So in those kind of scenarios you'd want to really see where you are now and then see what steps you might take. So there is actually a word for this and there's a really lovely blog post from the electricity map blog recently talking about this, which they refer to as like emissionality. It's basically “will this change result in lower emissions for my operations?” for example. And in many cases, that's one thing that you need to take into account here. So if you are running things in France already, the changes brought about - assuming you actually have all nuclear power working right now in France, for example, because that isn't always the case. Right. It may be the changes you make to kind of use a green provider within France won't be that large. If then if you were working with another provider for example. And it may be something like if you are running in say a significant chunk of your infrastructure in maybe the East data center - AWS East - in America, for example, that's quite a coal heavy grid. It may be that you might want to switch to the AWS West because it's going to be a lower carbon thing, a lower carbon set amount of compute there because the energy is green. It is largely because it's coming from things like hydroelectric electricity and stuff like that. So you need to know where you are first in order for you to know what your steps might be. But increasingly that's getting a lot easier because this data is increasingly available. There are companies like there are organizations like Ember which basically gives you the carbon intensity for various parts of the world. And there are tools which actually incorporate this so that you can track this like Cloud Carbon Footprint for example, if you're a CTOGaël: Is Cloud Carbon Footprint a tool which is provided by the Green Web foundation as well or is this a different initiative?Chris: So Cloud Carbon Footprint was a project that ThoughtWorks initially invested a bunch of time working in to build a open source tool because one thing they found was that - just like the discussions we're having here - people who are responsible for the infrastructure don't really have a kind of … don't know too much about what tools are on there and like we did a project back in 2018 which was called Amazon Green Cost Explorer, which basically told you which infrastructure, which were the green regions when you're in your cloud bill. So it would work by, you would kind of give it a token like an IAM set of credentials and it will basically say this much of your computer is running in green regions and this much is running in green regions which are where there is no evidence of action taking place and you can think of Cloud Carbon Footprint as basically taking this idea of “Well can I get information from my usage patterns and can I could come up with some action or benefits?” That's essentially what Cloud Carbon Footprint was and we've contributed some small bits of code to it. But the thing that we are probably most … the thing that I'm expecting us to be doing with Cloud Carbon Footprint this year is probably designed a … is contribute a way for people who are not currently the big three cloud providers to share this information. Because if you are using Microsoft's Azure, if you're using Google Cloud Platform or if you're using Amazon AWS, then you can get these numbers but there are groups who obviously are not just using this stuff. So if you might be using Digital Ocean or you might be using Scaleway or you might be using Webheads now, you might want to have these numbers too. And once you figure out what numbers are actually being exposed from the kind of metrics and the usage data or even like the billing APIs from these providers, it's totally possible to build that yourself so that you can get a kind of multi cloud view of all of the actual infrastructure you're running so you can then start optimizing for carbon.Gaël: So we talked a lot about energy consumption and the Holy Grail to have it on an hourly basis, if not real time. But what about the other environmental costs of running a datacenter? Do you believe that in the near future we will be able to incorporate the embedded carbon of a server for instance or its impact during the manufacturing phase on resource exhaustion? The idea being to measure all the savings made when we use our equipment longer and then to take action to actually make them last longer.Chris: I think we … the extent to which we can actually get there is very much governed by the extent pie which organizations are prepared to share this information about how long they hold on to servers, how long they're used or any of these things here because - like you are correctly identified - there is a huge amount of energy that does go into turning sand into silicon, into like silicon chips for example. And if you, once you've done that, the thing you probably want to do is amortize that embedded carbon cost over the lifetime of the server to make it last as long as possible. But a lot of the time, the assumptions we might make which say well a service obviously going to be around for maybe five years, that's not necessarily the case. So there'll be some very very large providers who might run things from much much shorter periods of time. And this is one thing that it's been really difficult to find numbers on and you can basically see … this is actually one of the things that we really struggle with and why I'm really glad that some tools like Boavizta works or - as I understand it - Negaoctet works as well is in there now so we can actually start getting an idea about this. But the thing to bear in mind is that once you have done this it's worth thinking about what the second life of some of these tools might actually be. So there's an example I quite like of a company called IT Renew. What they do is they take end of life service and they basically build new datacenters from these kinds of end of life ex-hyperscale service from the companies like say Facebook for example. Right. How do you account for the embedded carbon there for example, do you allocate all the actual emissions to Facebook? Do you allocate the emissions to the second life for it. There's a whole bunch of unanswered questions that we haven't really figured out yet. And I think this is one thing that we do need to get a handle on and I think that having some of the data really does help, but it's early days. We are starting to get some of this data together. And I suspect that what we might end up having to do is basically have models. But model data that can be updated to basically be explicit about our assumptions and see if those assumptions are really matching the reality really.Gaël: Absolutely. And these model data are badly needed to truly empower ops on their sustainability journey. Speaking about it as a journey, the most popular question in the survey was actually where do you start to analyze in today, concrete actions? What would be your advice on both?Chris: Where do you start right? So, well, I think the thing is: it's useful to bear in mind that most of the actions, if you're looking at the consumption of power, are going to be things you wouldn't do anyway. Right. So there are tools which have already been built which will track how much network your usage or how much or how big a page is or how much compute you've paid for. Right. And if we basically take into account the fact that yes, there's obviously a kind of - that the energy has to come from somewhere - just reducing the consumption will help and there are a bunch of tools that exist like right now there are kind of plugins for things like site speed if you do stuff on the web, there are plugins now, like some Scaphandre, which … Is it how you pronounce it? I've never spoken to a French person about it actuallyGaël: ScaphandreChris: Scaphandre. Yeah. Yeah. So that thing yeah. There are tools which now make it easy for you to understand how much energy is being used or where the energy hogs are in a given system. For example, I would actually start with stuff like that because if you're going to make the case for this, then if you're able to show that you've basically reduced the costs of something, you're immediately winning some social capital for example, and until people price carbon for example, they … - you might be rewarded for showing some measurable carbon reductions - but until people are pricing carbon or you've got any way of talking about that, I suspect that you're more likely to be rewarded in ways if they provide a kind of co benefit for some other thing that you already want anyway. So if you want to be reducing cloud bills, for example, then starting there is a nice way to do this. Or if you want to show that you're maybe making a website load faster or be more accessible, you might start there because that would actually have both sustainability benefits in terms of opening your devices and tools, I mean your services to a wider set of people, but it also has a sustainability benefit in that you are no longer inducing or requiring people to have the latest and greatest equipment to actually access any service. So I'd probably start with the consumption stuff first and then think about things like intensity, even though I'm running an organization where we track things like carbon intensity basically. So I would start there and then you can move to the other ones and then later on you can talk about things like say, well, now that we've got an idea of what our missions are and how we're actually able to manage that part, then you can have some of the longer the bigger discussions about, well, what product decisions do we want to focus on? Like what behavior do we want to enable for example? That stuff is totally relevant and probably higher leverage stuff, but you kind of need to build up some of the social capital elsewhere first, especially because if you've been hired as a developer to build good websites which are efficient, then demonstrating how you're making some websites efficient, which also happens to make them greener, it's probably quite a nice way to start introducing these ideas, especially if you don't have control over a budget for example, or you're not at kind of executive level.Gaël: So if I wrap up everything we said about green hosting, it would be and correct me if I'm wrong. Step number one: make your case pushing for the three big reasons being “this is an economic no brainer”, “this will boost our employer brand” and “at some point it will become a compliance issue”. Then step number two would be: start focusing on consuming less electricity, which is the easiest way to kickstart. Once you've done this, you will move to paying attention to the energy mix for the electricity you still consume and eventually step number three: now that you have matured in green hosting, welcome in a more complicated world where you would try to take into account the embedded carbon and even the e-waste. But knowing that the data and the resources you'll be using are more R&D than commonly agreed framework or referential.Chris: I think that would make sense. I mean the thing that's kind of interesting right now is that this is actually kind of early and there’s scope to have quite a lot of outside leverage in this early phase later on because people haven't figured out. They are very, very few places providing this kind of training right now and it's very much feels like maybe what accessibility was, say 10, 15 years ago, for example, or even just where similar fields were… like play blogging in the early 2000's like. Yes, this has been around for a while and people have been writing for ages for example, but right now there is this kind of uptick in interest in sustainability and digital sustainability and I feel that there's actually a chance to, yeah, kind of have quite outsized impact simply because we haven't figured out who that person should be reporting to or how to actually even define it really.Gaël: Yes, I agree. There is a boulevard for whoever wants to move things forward and that's very encouraging. So thanks a lot Chris for being with us today, awesome insights and feedback, especially on navigating the information maze in green hosting and how to start a more sustainable policy. Big kudos to the gold approach. I really love it,Chris: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this girl. Thank you.Gaël: You're welcome. Literally. Next month we will go to Bristol and meet another trailblazer in digital sustainability and a world renowned expert in Wordpress, Hannah Smith, aka haopcan but wait, that's actually not entirely true. We will meet Hannah next month but we had such a great chat with Chris on the latest trends in digital sustainability, all the initiatives popping up etcetera that we decided to give you a bonus episode. So let's meet in one week for the second part of this interview, make sure to subscribe to our mailing list or on your favorite podcast platform not to miss the release and that's it. Thank you all for listening to Green IO. If you have liked this episode, please share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who would enjoy it ,or learn from it. Green IO being a nonprofit podcast our dear listeners are our true communication power as well. 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In this episode, we went to Paris and met Elisabeth Mouchy. In 2013, Elisabeth co-founded Delighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. Now, she is now Product Director at Meetic, the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on Digital Sustainability, a topic she has helped ramp-up at Meetic. We will see how to make sustainable the move toward greener product management. And the way Meetic has tackled painpoints ranging from "Where do I start" to "How to avoid the end-of-the-world versus end-of-the-month dilemna?".❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Elisabeth's LinkedInGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Acknowledgement This episode has benefited from the support of a dozen of digital product experts across Europe. A warm thank you to them.  Acknowledgement are in this LinkedIn post. Elisabeth's links and other references mentioned in this episode Elisabeth’s article in Medium about the Meetic team achievements at the API Days Sustainable Digital Challenge Elisabeth’s talk about Daylighted Meetic websiteAPI Days 2021 Sustainable Digital ChallengeClimate Action TechHubblo/ScaphandreJoin Maestro masterclass on Sustainable Product (in Paris and in FR) ISO 14001David Attenborough's a Life on our planet (available on Netflix) Cyril Dion's book Petit manuel de résistance moderne (FR) TranscriptGaël Hello, everyone. Welcome to green IO, the podcast for doers, making our digital word greener one byte at a time. Whether you work in tech, product, data, design, marketing, you name it. You will find inspiration with us for your next actions in digital sustainability. And IT. In this third episode, we went to Paris where we had the pleasure to meet Elizabeth Mouchy. And before we start, I would like to thank all the product experts across Europe who have kindly answered my survey, helping me to prepare for this great interview with Elizabeth. Because Elizabeth has had so many lives and such a track record in digital sustainability that I needed a Joe Cocker's moment: a little help for my friends. So let's start! Elizabeth! Elizabeth owns a master degree in IT engineering with a specialization in electronics, and a management degree in international business. In 2013, she co-founded Daylighted, the Spotify for art in San Francisco. And the Dayglighted technology has enabled viewers and artists to interact on more than 100,000 artworks. Now, she is one of the top product leaders at Meetic the multi-awarded dating service. She is super open to provide feedback and insights on digital sustainability. Like she recently did in a Join Maestro Masterclass for instance, and she is dedicated to this. I must tell you that she blew my mind with the amount of preparation work she did for this interview. Welcome Elizabeth. Thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. ElisabethThanks Gaël. So happy to be here. GaëlThanks! First of all, what did I forget to mention about you? ElisabethNothing at all. Perfect. Thank you so much. One thing that I'd like to highlight is maybe that I'm very interested in the digital sustainability subject and overall the social sustainability in general, but I want to say that, and I know that it's gonna make you laugh, but I'm not an activist. I'm just another normal person who want to do a part in this fight against climate change. So trying to do it with a very hands on approach in my company Meetic. GaëlWow, that's great because we interview both activists and just people wanting to be great doers. [laugh] This is a tagline of the podcast indeed. ElisabethNothing against activists. Of course. GaëlNo, but you need both, both profiles for people to get a connection with the hosts. The guests - sorry. but okay, so you're not an activist, but how did you become interested in the sustainability in the first place and the sustainability of our digital sector in that case? ElisabethYes, of course. So it's obvious to me that we all have to do a part in this fight against climate change and for sustainability. And so everybody usually like me starts small with recycling or eating local organic foods, trying to avoid eating meats, you know, things like this in your personal life. But I think like everybody come at a point where they would wonder “how can I have a bigger impact”?. And for me, as I got more and more interested in the topic I learned that digital is actually a pretty dirty field. [laugh] I know, you know this, but it's typical to present between three and 4% of all greenhouse gas emission in the world. And just a quick data, but and again, I know that most of you listening might know this, but it's already more than a travel industry and it's about to go over road transportation soon as well. And it's growing an incredible speed. So if you're a bit sensitive to sustainability and you work in digital and you know that you have to do something about it, right? GaëlYeah, absolutely. [laugh] Sounds very familiar to me [laugh] ElisabethSo that's it, that's basically how I came to it, very interested and “what can I do around me to make it bigger?” GaëlBut that's interesting because you say, okay, I want to do something. And which is great is that green IO is about sharing hands on experience on how we start ; how to make digital services and Tech more sustainable. And I know that you're part of the productmanagement at meeting. So could you tell us a bit more about the journey that Meetic started toward a lighter environmental footprint? How did it all start? ElisabethYes, of course. So for Meetic, it's very interesting. Also a few employees were already involved in separate sustainable actions. It really started a few years back when our new CEO Mathieu Jacquier took his office in 2019. Since his first day it made it really clear that we – Meetic - as a whole, as a company could have a bigger impact on sustainability if we put all our effort together. So not only did he stated clear business objective toward a better Meetic, better that's greener, but also a clear message that Meetic is going to try to be sustainable from now on, and not only carbon neutral, but also carbon free. GaëlWow. That, that was a pretty big objective, but how does it all start? ElisabethYeah, so you have to start somewhere. The best to start is to start with studies to know where you are right now. And for Meetic, the question was “what really was Meetic carbon footprint”? And that was the first thing that we got after our first audit. We were spending 750 tons of equivalent CO2 as a whole company. And while we were measuring that in the meantime, there were also a lot of practical initiative come up, such as incentive to recycle list of restaurants, where you can bring your own boxes. Of course, reminder to turn off the light or the screen if it was not done automatically. So that was really the tip of the iceberg, because it's really like the classical things you see about sustainability. But because Meetic wanted to have an impact, of course it was not only what … we didn't want to stop there! It was really the tip of the iceberg. GaëlYeah, because it was mostly scope ... I mean, it was a scope one audited obviously. Just a side note for the listeners, not yet familiar with the three scopes in a carbon footprint assessment. Scope one is a greenhouse gas emission that a company emits directly while operating. The scope two is the indirect GSG emitted related to the purchasing of electricity and heat or steam. And scope three relates to pretty much everything else must notably all the indirect green house gaz emissions made along the supply chain. And what is important here is that for tech companies, scope three usually accounts for more than 80, if not 90% of the total emissions. And you can easily optimize from scope one to scope three. And for instance, a company can shift from direct car ownership to leasing the car and “poof”, that's magic, suddenly the cars are not in scope one anymore. In IT, of course you can not use your own servers, but the ones of a public cloud provider like AWS. And this leads to another very interesting discussion on how to assess the carbon footprint of your cloud provider. And I'll stop here not to spoil you because we will have a fully dedicated episode on this topic very, very soon. So 750 tons is an interesting figure, which tools and frameworks were used to assess Meetic carbon footprint for the scope one and maybe more later [laugh]. ElisabethYeah, exactly. So for this audit - specific audit - it was done internally with whatever we can find to create it. But then in 2020 we hired an external company called Inside App to help us measure the impact of our services so together - And it's a kind of a process, you know, because it's pretty new - So together we decided on three interesting user flows to be measure on different steps. So for example, the download of the apps or the pages, the usage generated by each scenario and for each one, we then created the carbon footprint impact of data center usage, the user terminals and the network. And so that made up a total of 1,300 tons of equivalent CO2. So about twice what we calculated for office and company alone. So of course you have to realize that this is just a number and this was all quite new, kind of, at the time and really experimental. So when you do that, you have to take a lot of hypothesis and everything in the calculation is of course questionable. But the idea is really to arrive at a numberh so you can improve things from there. GaëlYeah. But I think that's really the idea the life cycle and analysis is still an it's infant phase, but it's way more efficient than just measuring the electricity consumption and that's it and as you said measuring is the first step to improve things. So how did you start improving things? ElisabethSo, yes. So in the meantime, during those audits I was actually contacted by the team behind APIdays. I was a speaker at APIdays in the end of 2019, I think, no 2020 sorry. And they asked me if Meetic wanted to participate in their yearly digital sustainable challenge. And as I knew that this was a challenge, very interesting challenge, and it was a great objective for Meetic together. So I've contacted collaborators inside Meetic to try to put together a team for the challenge. So we succeeded in that, we were six persons participating to the challenge. It was really interesting focusing on IT sustainability and really a good level of expertise in the field. We learn tons of good practices and what's interesting too, is to actually talk and meet with like-minded people that want also to have an impact in their company and for the company and also production partners of course. So that was a challenge. And at the end of the challenge you have to put together a pitch to communicate about what you have done during the challenge and what you plan to do after that for your company and to improve sustainability. And so for our pitch, we had practical recommendation around optimizing our apps and website because of course it was not really done before. Also, it was not terrible. The performances were good, but you can always do better, especially when you start to measure, but we'll come back on this point later. We had recommendation around optimizing our data centers. That's also an easy one, and I know you talk about this, so I won't spoil the next podcast. But one thing that was very specific to what we wanted to do, was to evangelize the subject internally, because if everybody at Meetic, knew, or kind of knew how to correctly recycle, the knowledge on sustainable product development and good practices was close to zero also, it seemed and so that was something that we really wanted to do, like the evangelization of good practices to develop according to sustainable best practice. And so the challenge jury really liked our 360 recommendation. And so we were really happy to win the silver medal but we didn't stop there of course. GaëlOh, congratulations for the award. ElisabethThank you. GaëlOkay. So after this silver medal, what happened? Like was everybody at Meetic already fully evangelized through the participation to APIdays, or it was not the case yet? ElisabethIt was a start. But we knew that something else had to be done to improve internal knowledge about this. So at Meetic, we generally organize yearly hackathons and employees always love to participate. So the idea suddently popped up, like to have both together, why not organize a hackathon on IT sustainability with the challenge of making Meetic apps greener. And so that's what we did. And it had a great participation. About 45 people participated from all departments in Meetic with a total of eight presented projects ranging from optimizing our customer care answer flows and to integrating new cache tools or optimizing caching protocols, et cetera. And the winning project was a project to make an homemade tool to measure different sustainable indicators called green tool. GaëlYou're gonna have to tell us something about this green tool, but first, just a quick question. So 45 people that seems a lot, but how many people are working in Tech in the Meetic company? ElisabethI think it's about 150, something like that around this. GaëlSo you're telling me that almost one third of all the product and tech teams wanted to participate to this hackathon. ElisabethYeah, exactly. And also, also we are joined also by other teams. They're always like marketing which participate GaëlYes Marketing. ElisabethBut yeah, it was a really like a high attendency. GaëlWell, yeah, pretty impressive. Congratulations that's say something about the interest of the sustainably topic in industry I believe. Could you tell us a bit more about this green tool? Sounds very interesting. ElisabethYeah. So green tool is an internal dashboard used to evaluate the performance and impact of our features. We've developed it for different parts of our services, apps, and web apps but also emails, for example that we send like customer management. The idea is that when a developer puts a new feature live, they can check many indicators about it and see if it had an impact. And we have indicated such as data transferred, page weight, loading speed, download speed, but also just straight equivalent CO2 calculated from the usage, actually it's from a scenario usage. That's important because for example, they took different scenario, but one of the sample scenario is a user recently arrived on meeting and visited 50 profiles. And so if you, if you took this sample scenario and through automatic test, they can simulate the impact on the scenario, get the data on the performances, and then you can see what was entitled the scenario before and after the feature. That's very interesting. And so one of the, of green tool impact for example, is that after an update, they realize that with the same scenario of visiting 50 people that on the mobile web app, the weight of the overall flow would increase and would be 66 megabytes. And the story was quite big. And the notice that the image size was the same than the desktop web up, meaning way too large, you didn't need like the same size on mobile app, than desktop app. So they optimize it and now the overall weight of this scenario is just eight megabytes. So that's an amount of 90%. GaëlWow ElisabethYeah that's pretty good. Pretty amazing actually. And when you start to measure the data around sustainability and around performance, and you start to measure like frequently, there's lots of hanging fruits to get, you know. Another example that we had is that … Sorry, I'm talking a lot, let me know if you want to [laugh] GaëlI think the audience wants to hear you, not me. So please [laugh], you're the one having very concrete hands-on feedback to provide, so go for it. ElisabethAnother examples that I found interesting is that we had this assumption that photos are the first thing to optimize because you know, like it's visual, you know, it's heavy and when we launched green tool, we saw that we look into it, you know, like we look into the different categories that are loaded on the page, and we were expecting photos to be like super big. Right. And but what you look at the number from green tool you notice is that it's nothing, nothing, compared to the Javascript code which was actually way bigger, way much bigger. And so that thing like this, that you get surprised because you actually don't know until you look into it. And so green tool was really like a really useful tool for us. Today it's mostly monitored by QA manager and it's included in the auto generated test process, but the idea is that it's so easy to use and so user friendly. - that's why we made it - that it could be used by any engineering managers and product owners as part of their monitoring routine. For example, after whole launch. One thing that's important to realize with those measures and tool to measure is that, you know, we talk about an audit at the beginning and that's also good to really know where you are. But then, with Meetic, you know, we deploy updates almost every day on our apps. So there is no way that this audit is true tomorrow. So the nice thing with green tool is that we have the autonomy to check every time we update something on our app, that it's correct, that the performance are the same, and that it's always at the top level and we can always try to improve. GaëlIs it fully automated? Like you don't have manual interventions to update the data? ElisabethIt's fully automated it's based on auto-generated tests that run automatically every, I would say something stupid, so maybe every five minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour I dunno. But it runs automatically. And then you check the data if you want to see the graph, but you also receive alerts if something's wrong, something had changed. GaëlWow. That's a very powerful tool. And that's a super insightful feedback. You give us about all this Meetic journey towards sustainability. Thanks a lot. And you know, in the survey I mentioned earlier, the top four challenges listed by participants where “top level involvement”, “company-wide awareness”, “how to start measuring, doing things, et cetera” and “prioritization in making sustainable the commitment towards sustainability”. And if you don't mind, I'd like to start with this last point: “how to organize?” To avoid the “end of the word versus end of the month” dilemma. How did you entrench the sustainability criteria in your day to day product operation? Beyond the use of green tool, which is obviously a very massive first step. ElisabethYes. all of those are very interesting questions. To answer this specific question about how to avoid end of the world vs end of the month dilemma. It had to track back of where we started to put the sustainability in our day to day operation. But one thing that I mentioned is when, like Meetic this is a companywide objective and on top of it that socially engage the company, initiative can come from many places and it all come together at some point to create a big impact. So it's hard to notice where it really started. But if I answer your question a bit more precisely, from my point of view, once the topic is really pushed forward by top executives, it has to quickly move down to the employees so they get familiar with it. That's why the hackathon was a superb opportunity to help employees learn more about the sustainable practices, what can be done and join in with their own expertise, try things, show that we can do things and create a sort of emulation so that everybody wants to do it too, and wants to do their part GaëlSo once the ball has started rolling, everything gets smoother. If I understand you. Right. ElisabethExactly. Yeah. GaëlWhat advice would you give to someone willing to kick starts? Because as I said, something like 90% of the respondents in my little survey, not a scientific one [laugh] but have no action planned except for starting to measure and almost all asked for “what are the first steps?” ElisabethYeah. So the, the measurement is really the first step because when you start to measure, you'll see where you have to start, you know what I mean? It really linked one to another. So, if you really want to be hands-on, there are many tools out there that can help you measure your apps, your site performance, such as lighthouse or Hublot's open source tool which is called scaphandre but some tools even provide guidance into what to improve to be sustainable. And at higher level, there also a few consultancy companies that can run a carbon emission audit for you. You should really start there, you know, like it looks like it's easy, but actually it's not. Even if a consultancy company helps you, it's not easy. You really had to go through it and make lot of hypothesis. And it's really a process and you'll improve it every year. But this is really the first step that you have to take. I'm sorry, it's maybe an obvious answer but... GaëlNo, no, it's not. And this feedback is super important. I think the example you provided regarding the image size is a very interesting one. Of course, if you are a developer with the right level of awareness, when it comes to a digital sustainability, as the good craftmanship, you will pay attention to the size of the images, but you might miss this Javascript. ElisabethThere's another thing that said like “you can change what you can measure”. Something like this. [laugh] GaëlExactly. Yeah, exactly. [laugh] but it has been used some time to postpone change. Like “start measuring, come back two years later and we will see you can do”. And I think what is very interesting with what you shared with us is that you start measuring and you knew that it was not the right measure, but it's still the right things to do. Start measuring, start testing, correcting it. And this is ... it's obvious that in 10 years time, I mean, we will have international standards in digital sustainability, in IT, everything will be way smoother. I bet pretty much that we will have carbon accounting assessor as we have today for financial accounting. And that, you know, actually that will be a huge pressure from pretty much everyone to be sustainable. But do we really have 10 years to wait that everything is set up? No. So starting to measure and knowing that maybe it's between one, two, threefold [laugh] the size doesn't really matter because the direction is way more important than the absolute number. ElisabethYeah. Absolutely. It's about having the right direction. Yeah. GaëlGoing back to, to another pain point that was raised, what about company-wide awareness? I mean, you choose a hackathon at Meetic, but would you give other advice on how to turn goodwill into action within teams? ElisabethYeah, very interesting question. And very applicable to Meetic because we have a lot of initiatives implying our teams. So at Meetic, it also started a few years back with brown bag lunch meetings, BBL. And during those BBL, we used to discuss everything from our product to the obvious administrative subject that I mentioned before, recycling, et cetera. Also we have a slack channel about sustainability where we share from time to time what is done around the world and also what we do in our personal life. So everybody can advance also in their personal life if they want. But I think the first step here, and this is what I mentioned just now is really to create a strong community of people. We really want to push a topic forward. And for example, also around green tool use, we have set up performance committees attended by most tech leads and engineering managers. This is a meeting that happens monthly and it is used to prioritize a backlog of ideas to improve the overall performances of services. And during each committee, they go over the best ideas and try to think of ways to measure them - again the measure - and to prioritize them depending on the impact and the effort, et cetera. And green tool is really key again in that - sorry, I'm talking lot of green tool - because as it's an homemade tool, we can make it evolve at the same time that indicators we need to measure the new ideas that we have. It's really like a good circle in like a positive circle of evolution. GaëlAnd what about top level involvement? Obviously the sponsorship of your CEO is super strong, but was he the only one? In your opinion, is it the best sponsor? The only one possible? ElisabethTwo things on the subject. One thing, I think the top level involvement worked at Meetic because it was really genuine, meaning it's never been about external communication or green washing, you know. We were doing things only internally, so it was not for external communication at all but really a better impact on society and on the world. And I think that's why it's taken off in Meetic. Because it was really a... it was really driven by genuine will of changing the world. And second thing is that even before the hackathon, the executive wanted to make this objective a long term objective for Meetic. So let's say that tomorrow, all the executives from the executive committee change. So CEO, CFO, everybody leave whatever. They wanted to make sure that the objective will stay within Meetic. And so that's why they decided to apply for a European standard norm, the norm ISO 14001 that set up an objective of improving every year your process of making the company more sustainable. And we set up high objectives of improving the impact that Meetic has by 10% every year. And so we know that we are in a long run with this. We're not gonna stop tomorrow. GaëlWow. That's very interesting to connect with the overall objectives. 10% is quite ambitious and, actually, it connects super well with another question which is highly related, which is kind of my challenging question: “Beyond beautiful low carbon scope 3, what about the impact on business?” And let me clarify. Several people in the survey clearly stated that sustainability and profit were tradeoff in their company. Thus, nobody at the top level takes it seriously beyond greenwashing. And is it for you a misconception? How come it was different at Meetic, which is certainly not a nonprofit NGO. How was the ROI calculated? Because you mentioned greenwashing earlier and obviously you were not afraid of greenwashing labeling because you didn't communicate that much about what you were doing. So do you think it's a misconception? ElisabethIt's a topic that come back often around sustainability and digital sustainability. It's an interesting thing at Meetic because on top of the CEO - and of course the CTO who also run the subject, you know, for tools extra and for development optimization - it is now the CFO who's responsible for running the sustainability topic. GaëlInteresting. Elisabeth[laugh] yeah. So I know it's always a concern in the field that you have to choose between profit and sustainability, but actually sustainability is often improving your performances. If you take IT sustainability for example - but it works also with recycling or anything - by optimizing your websites or apps for low carbon impact, you often notice that your apps will also be quicker to load, lighter for your users and even often simpler in the product flow, because if you want to improve also the product sustainability, you have to optimize the product flow, maybe remove some features, something like this. And so it's really a win-win for everybody. But at Meetic we don't capture any direct ROI. We know we have to do this and I believe that everybody will do it at some point anyway, so better be the first one. Gaël[laugh] Being pionners once again. ElisabethExactly. GaëlI think you answered beautifully the top four challenges that my former colleagues and other experts shared with me. So I'd like to end up now with two more general question. First one being what makes you optimistic about our path toward a greener digital word? Elisabeth[laugh] interesting. So to be honest, I'm not really optimistic. You know this, I know this the stats are worse every year and every year scientists, researchers, people who know things give new objectives to limit greenhouse gas emission, and the overall temperature raise but year after year, it's higher and we're further away. So it's pretty pessimistic, sorry. But as there is no way out we don't have a choice, I guess. So we still have to try our best, to do our part and try to optimize and be the cleaner we can, I think, personally and professionally of course. But what we can be optimistic about - because there always something we can be optimistic - is that even if it's still not a main topic in the political world, which it should be of course, there's more and more people, especially in IT sustainability who are interesting in this. And that's of course a good thing because more people means more effort and more impact. So that's what I'm optimistic about. GaëlYeah. The ratio of almost one third of tech and product people wanting to participate to the hackathon at Meetic is clearly a very positive signal as well. And one last question that I asked to every guest, what would be your recommendations to learn more about digital sustainability and green IT, some thought leaders you could recommend to follow, some books, et cetera, et cetera. ElisabethIt's a really hard question because it's not a main topic yet. I guess I would recommend warmly APIdays sustainable challenge. But also following the mentor there, because it's really like you ask for where to start. And I think it's a good place to start actually for people who can participate. Otherwise I mostly get information from my peer network, you know. IT sustainability is not yet a major subject. There is no major leader in the field that you have to follow absolutely. So like there's not John Cuttler in the product management field of Paul Graham for entrepreneurship. You know. There is nobody like this for IT sustainability yet. And so I see it as an emerging, almost underground topic. And so my main advice would be to build your peer network to get updating for about it and to know what's being done in the world. GaëlThat's a good advice. This is where I started when I joined the - not that underground – Climate Action Tech community. But you are right. It is still quite under the radar at the moment. ElisabethYes, exactly. GaëlWell, Elizabeth, that was awesome. Super, super hands on [laugh] . Thanks a lot for being with us today. ElisabethThank you GaëlReally. Your insights and feedback, they were just great. Especially on how you run a sustainable product management on a daily basis and all the concrete actions you took. So I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration in it to kickstart or ramp up their journey to greener digital services. So thanks again. And next month we will go to Berlin … by train! And meet onsite - it will be my first recording onsite - Chris Adams the green web foundation director and a pillar of the climate action tech community I mentioned earlier. We will talk about green hosting cloud sustainability, and how to reduce carbon emissions associated with digital services in general. I must admit I'm looking forward to meeting such a giant in the sustainability field and that's it for this month … or not yet :) Just a few words about your beloved podcast. In two months time with zero marketing budget, green I/O already has hundreds of listeners. It's a great news. It means that you are not alone trying to build and run Greener digital services and Tech stack. Now my dear listener, I need you to boost it further. Just after you're done listening to this episode, please rate it five stars on Spotify, apple podcast, or any other podcast platform you use. On some of them a nice review would also help. It will make a huge difference in the search results. And together we will reach new people eager to make our digital world greener one by at a time. ❤️ Never miss an episode! 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For the second episode of Green I/O, I met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural-born European: borned French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost 10 years.Sandra has an impeccable track record at PHD as a Managing Partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. 2 years ago, she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the climate pitch and became a Board member at the Digital Collage.In this  episode, we did not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI but we focused on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! And the challenges we face when it comes to raising awareness about the increasing ecological footprint of our digital world. And transform it into concrete actions.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect:  Sandra's LinkedIn Gaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   Sandra's links and other references mentioned in this episode The Digital CollageThe Climate Pitch Institute for Sustainable IT (INR in French) MOOC on Sustainable IT The Decathlon's use case presented by Julien Gontier Jane McGonigal's wikipedia page and her initiative Urgent Optimists Christiana Figueres's book "The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimists' Guide to the Climate Crisis" and the initiative she co-founded Global Optimism Corentin de Chatelperron's TED talk on "Nomade des mers" and the Low Tech Lab he co-founded  Solitaire Townsend's TED Talk on the creative industry destroying the climate  Ollie Burch's CAT Talk on how to communicate about sustainability  Timothy Morton's book "Being ecological" on how to communicate about ecology TranscriptGaëlHello everyone. Welcome to Green I O, the podcast for doers making our Digital World greener one byte at a time. Whether you work in Tech, Product, Data, Design, Marketing, you name it, you will find inspiration with us for your next actions in Digital Sustainability and Green IT. In the second episode, we will not deep dive into a specific area like Green Hosting or Green AI, but focus on the most important asset in any Digital Tech company: humans! From Ops to Design, from SEO to Data science, from UX Research to Webdev, we are all facing the same challenges when it comes to raising awareness on the increasing ecological footprint of our digital words and transforming it into concrete actions. And to get meaningful insights, we went to London and met Sandra Sydow. She is a natural born European, I would say. Born French, having studied in Sweden, worked in Germany where she married and now living in the UK for almost ten years. And yes, my British friends - disregarding any political agenda - you are still European to my heart. Sandra has an impeccable track record at PhD as a managing partner where she thrived making complicated things easy to understand in digital marketing and working for global brands like Airbus, HP or Expedia. Two years ago she decided to dedicate her communication and pedagogical skills to fight climate change. She co-founded the Climate Pitch and became a board member at the Digital Collage. Welcome Sandra. Thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. SandraThank you again. I'm really pleased to be here. GaëlThanks. And first of all, what did I forget to mention about you? SandraI would say maybe you have forgotten to mention that I'm doing musical Theater too, in my leisure time. And I just want to specify this because this is something I changed in my life when I decided to quit my old life to my new life. And it's about the importance of getting creative and reminding ourselves that we are creative every day in a world that is highly automatized. And I think it's super important to reconnect with our true values. GaëlThat's amazing. How did you become interested in the sustainability and especially the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? SandraWell, it's a bit of a story here again and I'm okay to share it with you. It's a bit of a personal one. But five years ago I was really thinking heavily of what I should do. Is my carrier the right one? Should I continue? And I had a little bit of an increasing dissonance with what I was doing, the aim of what I was doing. I was in advertising to remind, so pushing for consumption. And then at the same time, my son, who was teenager back then, was asking himself a lot of questions about his own future. And he asked us as well a lot of questions. And one day at dinner time, he looked at me in the eyes and said, Mom, I don't understand what you're doing. This job, I never do it. And that was the first lap in the face I had. The second was when I went with him to the Greta Thunberg demonstrations. And I swore to myself that day that I would be the one wearing, carrying those posters and not him in the future. So that was a big point in my life where I decided I need to change something. I need to put my skills to the benefit of positive missions. And this is when I decided to quit my job, my comfortable seat, and then dedicate all my time to positive missions. So at that point I was still completely lost and it was a complete blank sheet of paper. And I decided then to go back to study and understand better the sustainability world, which I did. And then step by step, you explore and you explore and touch what you maybe you want to do and you're good at. And then I discovered that it could be awareness, it could be communicating. I mean, I was 20 years in communication, so it's not a surprise. And then I always dedicated, I was always passionate about digital. And on my way, I had the luck to meet wonderful people working on the digital sector sustainability. I discovered their tool we talked about after and I thought, it's brilliant, I can do that. I can be an ambassador of this. I'm pushing for more questionable and more frugal ways of doing digital. GaëlThat's a very impressive story. The wake up call coming from the children. Not the first time I heard it. I think it's quite interesting in our generation that it's our children pushing us to our limits and making us realize that we might have some stuff to change for the second half of our professional career. But you also became an entrepreneur? SandraYes, Totally. You know you would have told me five years ago, you will become an entrepreneur one day I would say no. I would laugh at their face and say, no, I'm not an entrepreneur. And then I realized during that whole change of life that you need to explore and you need to be open to everything. And I realized that actually stone after stone, I met brilliant people, really inspiring people. And I discovered that I could also create things myself. And in the awareness space, I thought, there is so much to do because we are facing a world where scientists have tried to tell us that it's urgent, that the world is burning, that we need to do something but without having a real impact. So how do you do that? And I thought, there is a big space here also with scientific matters to simplify it and to make it so accessible to the people that they actually recognize has a space, especially a space within the business environment. And this is when I met someone great, Frederic. And we created a tool we were absolutely convinced of, because it was missing for businesses to address climate change. So we developed a conference format, and this is where it all started. And I said, okay, now I need to build my company and set up my own company then. Yeah. GaëlIt's very interesting because I remember Ollie Burch giving a lecture at the climate action tech community and enlisted the three main issues when you talk about sustainability and the very first one was like humans are super good at solving simple problem and they're super bad at solving big complex problem and they need to split it into smaller pieces to make them actionable. So I guess when you face something as big as okay climate change, how you split it into smaller pieces of chunk, how you make it understandable without SandraBeing two scientist. Yeah. Well, we developed we have few ingredients in our format or conference format, and one is the visual storytelling. So visualization, first of all, we work together with a creative director who's highly involved into sustainability topics. He lives actually in Vancouver, he's brilliant and he's doing a lot already in this. And we love the way he drew. So it's a big drawing that we've got. And then we use storytelling to go through this drawing. This big drawing with our audience and the other ingredients is about interactivity. It can't be anymore a descending lecture to get people close to the knowledge and also let them recognize that they actually know already something and be part of this learning path together. So the format we've developed is actually interactive, so interactive that people can't really relax and they always need to be with us and respond to questions. So they are simulated every two to three minutes roughly. GaëlWhoo SandraAnd it's very important. And also the subject is very serious. So it's very important to tackle the right tonality. We don't want them to have a slap in their face. We want them to have a click and then to enclench an action, to have a motivation to go after that. The main aim of the conference is that they go out and they're totally and fully motivated. So we include our client in this and we say, okay, once we have described what is the context, what is exactly the problem or the challenge we've got with climate change, then the client can expose where they are at in their strategy of transformation, in their low carbon strategy, to their employees in a very macro level. But still explaining, we're en marche, we may be not there and we're maybe not perfect and that's important to say, but we are en marche and you can be part of this. So we are action this during the conference. So at the end, people feel empower. They feel allowed actually to be part of this story and of this fantastic transformation ahead of them. So that's the aim. GaëlBecoming actors. SandraBecoming actors yes. GaëlYou know, Green I/O is about sharing hands on experience and how to make our digital world more sustainable. And of course, for this to happen, we need teams to be aware of our ecological footprint and then ready to take actions which lead me to this very simple and hard questions. Which means do you use to achieve this outcome, how do you concretely tackle raising awareness regarding the footprint of our digital your word? SandraWell, coming to digital in particular, I think, first of all, it's important to know the macro picture. So it's important to understand the problem around climate change. That's the first thing. And we say to our participants, but then go into the sector, in the digital sector. And what I say always is the first step to change his awareness. We are here at the very first funnel of a path and we also encounter lots of people who think they know about the matter because we hear so much about it around us. But we never grasp exactly the details of it, the interconnectivities, the overall big topics that are running in the background. And there is a reason as well why we're talking about a digital rucksack, for example, it's because we usually like to see the top of the iceberg, but we don't see what's behind, what's in the water. And I think it's very important. So awareness is the very first step. And get to know what's the problem makes you understand why and how you can act. That's the very first step. GaëlCould you maybe explain to the audience what is the rucksack of a digital device? SandraYes, of course. So we tend to think about digital as the solution. We tend to think about digital that it's great, it's cool, and it will give us a lot of possibilities in the future. And that's true. As I said, I'm a passionate of digital. I was part of digital transformation. I helped clients to set up whole bunch of teams around digital and help them being more efficient. However, there is a lack of understanding of what is the reverse side of it if we're not questioning what we're doing. So the rucksack is also there to represent that. It might be positive, but actually the negative impacts might overweight, outweigh, the positive impacts. And that's what the people are not aware of. And therefore in the workshop we're proposing - this Digital Collage workshop, - is really to understand it themselves and discover that oh yes, I love digital, but actually, if I don't question what I'm doing, we're going to the wall. I mean, it's just you talk about exponential growth. Well, it's great and always being faster. And this is the fastest growing sector as we know. However, if you narrow this to the emissions, carbon emissions, then this is exactly the same and it goes exactly on the same trend. We are not in a decelerating trend here in this sector. We're accelerating and this is where we need to question what we're doing, how we're doing things, and how we're using digital. GaëlYou mentioned the Digital Collage workshop. Is it one of the tools you use the most? SandraYes. So I use the Digital Collage a lot for specific requests. When people want to know more about the digital impact on the environment. Digital Collage is part of an organization. This organization is between a social enterprise and a charity. I think there isn't a real word in English, it's a French organization. And the mission of this organization is to raise awareness around the digital impact of their environment as quickly as possible. And this is based on a very interesting system actually because as I said, descending lecture is over and now it's really about tackling this with a more fun way and collaborative way. So it's based this workshop on collaboration first and on collective intelligence. This is very interesting because people realize during the workshop that they know something and when they put all this knowledge together as a team, they can actually crack the clues of what we're giving them as a game. So it's a set of cards they need to put in a certain order and they discover themselves then the knowledge. And that's really helpful. So yes, in this context it can be team building. It can be perfect as well for IT Departments looking to set up a green IT strategy and they don't know where to start. That could be the first step, for example, to understand all the different bits of digital impacts on the environment. What does it mean when people are coming to us? They are a bit lost and confused because you hear a lot about different things. You can hear about the mental health elements of digital, but you can hear also about the emissions and then you hear less about the materiality of the digital impact. And this is where it hurts actually. This is this materiality that hurts our planet right now. GaëlThanks a lot. And full disclosure for my audience, I am also a Digital Collage facilitator, but I was not part almost from day one of this beautiful adventure like Santra was with Aurelianiva. So that's why I'm very happy that she will explain all of this in detail. And I was wondering, how do we avoid the information dump as a coin by Timothy Morton in “Being Ecological” that we tend to push a lot of scientific facts, mostly anxiogenic and with a short lifespan into people's minds, then we push for technical remediations. But there are not that many true aspirational triggers like I have to do it to solve a problem rather than I have to do it because that will make my life better or life of everyone better. How do you see the digital collage working on this issue? SandraWell, what's great, I think in the Digital Collage developed by Aurélien Déragne and Yvain Mouneu and that they have dedicated a whole part on actions. So the first part of the workshop is about understanding by playing. So that's the set of cards where you discover those eventually disturbing big key facts. But they are needed. They are needed for a wake up call. They are needed as well to understand - because there are a lot of myths that we need to break during a digital workshop. There are a lot of false thoughts around data centers, for example, or the impact of the Cloud. And there are things that are not really known about recycling and the low level of recycling in this sector or the resource intensive part. So you really need to make that clear so that at the end, when you come into the action part, at the end you have 20 or so cards that have been detailed to give you ideas on how does that connect to what you've just seen and how simple it can be sometimes? You know, there are some actions, it just tells you to keep your devices longer, try to take care of it. You know, it's not the world, what we're asking. The actions are very pragmatic and very close to the people and very easy to implement and it might make your life better. That's what we call the co-benefits of having a more frugal way of running digital GaëlIt's not asking for life changing decisions, but more a step by step approach into being more eco-conscious. SandraExactly. GaëlAnd you also mentioned that the digital collage can be used to embark people when you start a green It strategy or sustainability strategy. What are the specificities in that case? Because some people might have to join the workshop rather than volunteering to join the workshop. How do you deal with that? SandraYes. Well, you just have to be warned that when people are coming to a workshop on a mandatory basis, it's a very different situation in spirit and that's why you're asking the question. So they're not necessarily from their own wish there and they're very reluctant from the beginning. So you see, they're not necessarily very open, but then that's a workshop which is based on collaboration and they need to work out with their team, the set of cards and the interconnections. We as facilitators, we are there to help them understand the game, but we're not the one really or necessarily giving a lecture because we're not there to give lessons and it would be a wrong signal too. We're not the one knowing everything by heart either, or the absolute most expert. And it allows therefore the team to understand that here we are all together in this and we are not lecturing anyone. You are actually discovering something that exists and then you take it with you and you express it as you want. So there is a lot of freedom on how to discover this knowledge. And because of the dynamic of the group, we talk about groups of six to eight people per team and you can have multiple teams in a room (it's better to do it in person), you see that evolves and where people with their body language are outside of the table. So we put the chair out so nobody can sit really, and they really need to be active around the table with the cards and really exchang together. So we as a facilitator, we're not part of their discussion. We are coming back in each set, but we're not involved completely. They have to crack it themselves and they have a certain amount of time. And during the development of this first phase, you see that through set by set, arrives set three of cards, people are much more involved and engaged and they realize they understand the game, how it’s played. There are only bits of knowledge written on each of the cards that they can discover. It's not overwhelming, but then in the discussion with their colleagues, it makes the whole much more interesting because they all have their own opinion on their own part of the knowledge. And at the end of that understanding part, you see that people are much more open and then, at the end, they're really engaged and they really want to action and they really want to take action themselves. GaëlBecause it's a peer to peer communication process rather than a top down. SandraYes. Yes, absolutely. GaëlSo tomorrow let's say I'm product manager, tech leader, head of design, and I want to start a discussion within my team or with my hierarchy. I'm aware of the situation, but I'm also aware that my colleagues or my hierarchy are not that much aware beyond the usual let's green the data center. What advice would you give to her or him? SandraYes. I think what's really important is what is the level of understanding of the problem altogether around you, how the people are interacting with topics like climate change, for example. How are they interacting with sustainability, what are the levels of knowledge and that's the very first audit I would do around me. Another thing is that to find your allies within your company. If it's a company. Find people that are like minded things like you and want to push further that topic. The third advice I would say is that you need to embark as soon as possible your leadership. The best results we've seen so far is when leadership is on board, they understand the matter. When I say on board, then at least they are addressing as well. When the workshop is proposed to the employees to frame it, to introduce why do they do this and put credibility on this step that is important to their company, to them and to their company, and to the transformation and the future of their company. So if I have advice to give, it's really those ones: don't be on your own, find the allies internally, it's much easier then try to embark your leadership. There is also another thing. Digital workshop is great and the digital impact on the environment is one part of the big picture. And if you don't understand the big picture first, then you might have some problems to grasp also the part of digital in there. So always my first recommendation would be, well, let's understand first, what do we talk about here and it's climate change. And then why is digital taking such a big part in this? Because it's part of the whole. So that's another thing. I hope it answers your question. GaëlYeah, that's super interesting. And that leads me to two other questions. The first one being we tend to see the ecological impact as equal to carbon emission and of course climate change it creates. But we also are facing other planet boundaries today, especially the biodiversity crisis, the resources exhaustion. So in your mind, would you say that we should have workshops about, of course, first and foremost, climate change, but also biodiversity crises and maybe some other crisis before starting any awareness program specifically dedicated to digital? Or is there any shortcut? Sandra Well, it would be “crème de la crème” to be able to acknowledge the people around the climate change crisis so that they really understand what it is about. Biodiversity can be addressed within the climate change topic too. So we are addressing it in our climate pitch, in our conferences, because it's equally urgent and important to understand now. It's the ideal picture. If you don't have the time, you can of course go short and do the Digital Collage workshop. That's absolutely fine. And then during the workshop there is a possibility to discover also the link to climate change and how is actually digital part of the climate change. So that's fine too. GaëlThanks. And my second question was, so, how do you pitch your boss? SandraHow do you pitch your boss? Well, as I said before, I think first you need to know from what you're talking about. So you have to have a certain level of understanding even if you know about the urgency. And it's great. I think it always helps to be backed up of things that you've done or you know already. So that's one thing. Don't be on your own with that. I think it's always great to go not on your own and not addressing this on your own, but already know and point people around that think like you; have lots of key facts and boss rely on facts and what your advancing needs to be backed up. And also I think, and this is from my 20 years working in business, you need to make the math in terms of what does this mean for the company? What does this mean in terms of finance and actually digital and applying a green IT strategy might help financially, will help financially because you will make some savings. So maybe go that door and show that actually if you reduce your IT park and you use longer every device, for example, then you will not have to renew every other year your devices. It will make a huge benefit or saving to the company. And if you think like this and if you draw actually all the benefits that are connected to this type of step, then it's much easier. GaëlAbsolutely. There are huge savings to be made. And I think another point might also be that especially for pure players like digital, pure players having the first mover advantage. SandraAbsolutely. GaëlWe know that at some point some regulations will come. We know that at some point some awareness will happen to very critical segments within the entire customer. And that also might be a trigger, don't you think? SandraYes. So we talked about the risk/opportunities because it can be a risk, but you can change it to an opportunity as a company. And this is where we talk about talents for example. If you have the right … - You know the new generation is looking for purpose and they're looking for missions where they understand that the values of the company are what they embrace and are within our planetary limitations. So there is a challenge as well here to retain and to attract talent. And this is one part of the risk/opportunity you can have. The other part is your client, your client base. Clients are more and more now aware of what's happening and they want and are looking more and more for sustainable solutions. If you're able as a company to make it credible and to embrace this transformation towards your clients, then you will win. So it's what you said as well, having this competitive advantage, if it's about competitive advantage here and it's the same when you want to work with great suppliers, for example, that are thinking alike. And then you enter a kind of ecosystem, which is the good type of ecosystem that pushes you into the right direction GaëlA virtuous loop rather than a vicious cycle... SandraExactly. GaëlGoing back to my product manager or tech leader or anyone working in the digital industry. What will be your recommendations? To learn more about digital sustainability and all that is really. SandraI think the most difficult thing to grasp at the moment is that this rucksack, this digital rucksack ,is not really known. And also it's bits and bobs. So you will read something about mining and extraction, you will read something about recycling, you will read something about the cloud, the data centers. But there isn't a proper source where it encompasses everything. And this is what the French have done so far. And after working now almost two years on the Digital Collage workshop and also contributing to the international expansion and looking for sources outside of France, it has been a challenge. So it means that really talking and understanding the span of green IT, sustainable IT is hard or you have to read different things. So what I can actually suggest to the people here on this podcast, if you have 30 minutes to spend, then there is a great mooc which has been done by the Institute of Sustainable IT, INR in France. And we're lucky it has been translated in English and it goes over all the key topics that you need to know when you start your journey on digital sustainability. And if you have more time, then you can dedicate 4 hours to it. There is the longer program on this and you can go back to it whenever you want because it's a mooc so it's available to everyone and it gives you a really good idea on all the topics that are linked to this responsible practices to apply in digital from every single aspect. So I think that could be a good start to it if I may. And then this is about more looking into diverse projects. I have a great case studies. I can advise you to our audience. Decathlon has done this. Decathlon I follow closely as well. I think they're really smart in the way they approach the sustainability topic. And when it comes to digital, they have actually applied the green IT strategy. And I can give you the link, but there was an article written by the head of IT back then to explain the six steps all companies should follow to decrease their digital impact. And also at the end you discover that they have developed their own measurement tool on their carbon footprint and they opened source it so everyone can have access to it. And this is really the end here. So reading case studies also helps, I think. GaëlAnd just for my dear listeners. As you know, all the links, all the reference to everything we spoke about will be put in the landing page. So don't worry. Thanks a lot for these two very valuable pieces of information. Would you advise some influencers, some leaders, to be followed? Because that's how the game is also played today. So if you got two or three names, SandraDefinitely. I think there is a young engineer called Corentin de Chatelperron. I'm not sure you heard of him. “Nomade des mers”. He created this “Nomade des mers” initiative. He went on to a trip to Bangladesh and he decided to sail there and he did his sailing with minimalistic entrepreneurship. He had the ambition to be on his own and to be completely autonomous. And then he decided to build the “low tech lab”. And the low tech lab is great because it's a mission to share solutions in the spirit of low tech with as many people as possible. And the last one I could advise as well. And actually this is a Lady I've met in my earlier life, Jane McGonigal. Jane McGonigal was actually a fan of gamification, so she actually researched gamification as a positive way to develop projects. And actually she showed by research that it can help tremendously to solve complex problems. In the medical research, for example, they have been able to develop new vaccines within only a couple of weeks instead of ten years, for example. And you go on. And this lady has now published a new book and has also initiated a new movement called Urgent Optimist. I love this idea of optimism because we really need optimism to go on. The gloom of the situation doesn't help every day. But what helps me is this type of organization. There is another one from Christiana Figueres called a Stubborn Optimist, or she's called a stubborn optimist. And she has created the global optimism movement as well. And it helps because sometimes it's daunting to be faced every day with this picture of the world and you still need to carry on. GaëlThat's so true and that's great sources to share because I didn't know about Jane McGonigal so I think I'm going to jump on her books. That was awesome. Thanks a lot Sandra for being with us today. SandraI was very pleased to be invited. Thank you very much, Gael, for inviting me. Gaël You're more than welcome. Your insights and feedback were just great, especially on the Digital Collage but also on how to pitch your boss and your colleagues. SandraOur main motto should be never give up right now. And you're not on your own so be in community really. I think you had this in your first podcast, but the Climate Action Tech group is really great for that, too. GaëlAbsolutely. So thanks again. And next month we will go either to Seattle, to Berlin or to Paris depending on the agenda of my three next guests. I'm so sorry to tease you. It was not intended but great doers tend to be busy people so subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode and that's it for this month. Thank you all for listening to Green I/O. As you surely have noticed in this episode, Green I/O is a nonprofit podcast so we rely on you to share it and rate it five stars on your favorite platform. My dear listeners, you are our true communication power and you are our scouts as well, so feel free to share with me your ideas for new guests who want to make our digital world greener one buy at a time. ❤️ Never miss an episode! 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For the first episode of Green I/O, I interviewed Fershad Irani a web performance expert and restless advocate for a low carbon web in his newsletter "Optimized".He helps environmentally conscious companies ensure their websites are fast, optimised for performance, and have a low carbon impact. Based in Taipei after graduating in Sydney, Fershad also contributes to open-source projects like OpenSpaceData and is an active member of the climateaction.tech community, where I discovered his work. He has recently launched 'Are my third parties green?' a much-needed tool to give some visibility to the sustainability of third-party requests on the web.❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode! Learn more about our guest and connect: Fershad' s twitterFershad' s LinkedInFershad's websiteGaël's LinkedIn Gaël's website Green I/O website 📧 You can also send us an email at greenio@duez.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.    Fershad's links and other references mentioned in this episode Fershad's newsletter Optimized on "Are My Third Parties Green?" Fershad's news initiative Are my third parties green? ClimateAction.tech and especially their tutorial videos on YoutubeThe Green Web FoundationWebsite carbon calculatorHTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2021 EditionMy Climate Journey podcast Gerry McGovern's book World Wide Waste Bjarne Oldrup's article Is MP3, AAC or Opus best for speech? Michelle Barker's article Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds The Branch Magazine website and the article explaining their Sustainable Interaction Design Principles Organic Basics low impact websiteOpen Space DataTranscriptGaëlHello everyone. Welcome to Green I/O, a podcast for doers making our digital word greener one bite at a time. Whether you work in Tech, Product, Data, Design, Marketing, you name it :), you will find inspiration with us for your next actions in Web Sustainability and Green IT. In this first episode, I had the pleasure to speak with Fershad Irani, the web performance expert who audited the Cop 26 website. He is a restless advocate for low carbon web in his newsletter Optimized. He helps environmentally conscious companies ensure their websites are fast and have a low carbon impact. Based in Taipei after graduating in Sydney, Fershad also contributes to open source projects like Open Space Data, and he is an active member of the ClimateAction.tech community where I discovered his work. Welcome Fershad, thanks a lot for joining Green I/O today. FershadHi Gaël. Thanks for the intro, mate. GaëlFirst of all, talking about the intro, what did I forget to mention about you? FershadYou covered most of it I think. On the personal side of things, I enjoy rugby, so you'll probably find me on the weekends and nights watching a bit of rugby League or rugby Union on a live stream. I also play touch football so I represented Taiwan at the Touch World Cup a couple of years ago and I helped organize a bit of touch football over here. And just a recent thing that I've been getting into more and more, kind of work side project, has been looking at the environmental impact of third parties as well. So I recently launched a project around that which has been quite interesting. Learn quite a bit in that process as well. GaëlAre you talking about "Are my third parties Green"? FershadYeah, I'm talking about that one, mate. GaëlOkay, great. I think we will come back to this later. First, how did you become interested in the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? FershadI think like a lot of people, a lot of people that have picked up, especially in the last few years, it kind of goes back to Jerry McGovern and his book Worldwide Waste. I can't remember, time is a blur now these last few years…. I can't remember where I became aware of that book and I don't know how it ended up on my radar, but I started reading it and just going through it chapter by chapter. He starts with the topic and you find yourself thinking, yeah, I kind of understand. I kind of know a bit about whatever. And then by the end of the chapter you find that your mind has just been completely blown by the environmental impact of whatever it's been talking about. And so definitely it started there. You knew about it but you didn't realize it. And then suddenly you're like, you've got this kind of wow effect. GaëlI think pretty much everyone who read it had it. FershadYeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people would share that feeling about this book. And for me personally, as someone that works in the web, I kind of found myself for a little while afterwards thinking like, okay, he's talked a lot about the impact of the internet and the impact of video and media and different parts of the ecosystem, but what can I do? And I was wrestling with that for a short while after that. And then I think I heard something from Tom Greenwood when he was talking about how Wholegrain Digital approaches projects with clients and how they kind of just build websites. And those websites that they build just happen to be green. Some of their clients don't even come to them asking for green websites, but they just built them that way. And that kind of clicked with me that I enjoy web performance and I enjoy making websites fast. And then a lot of the stuff that we do to make websites faster would also make websites greener just by default. So that was kind of the whole starting process for me down this journey. And it's one where you're always learning. Web performance on its own is like a field that's just constantly developing. There's so much to learn in that area just alone, and then web sustainability on top of that. It's a young area of study, and new research is coming out every month about it. So there's always a lot to learn there as well. GaëlAbsolutely. That makes it absolutely fascinating I guess. Talking about performance and web sustainability Green I/O is about sharing hands-on experiences on how to make the Web and Tech more sustainable. And you mentioned your mission at Readle, and the founder himself seemed very happy about the outcome. Could you tell us a bit more about it? FershadYeah, sure. So just before we dive into a full disclosure, the founder and myself, Christian and I, we worked together in a previous company, so we have some history going back. It wasn't like a fresh project that someone I don't know just came to me with. But yeah, he was working on Readle, which is a language learning app for folks that want to learn German. The approach with the app is a bit different from other language apps, where it's very story focused, and you get a story to read, which is in German, and you also get the audio for that story, which you can then listen along as you're reading. So that helps you kind of with a bit of the learning there. When Christian first approached me for some performance work on Readle, it was based around a desire to be faster as an app in some key markets that they were targeting. There was no real talk of sustainability in the initial project scope, and so we just set about doing what we needed to do to make the app faster in the areas where they wanted it to be. A few of the things we did. Again, this goes back to how we do in web performance. Kind of flows through to making the web more sustainable. As a result, a lot of the stuff we did was just reducing data that was being requested when the app was launched. So we managed to save around 200 KB off the initial app launch. So when you look at that from a sustainability perspective, if you want it's slightly under or around, sorry, 0.1 gram of CO2 at scale, the more users that are launching the app, obviously that impact becomes larger. But from a pure performance point of view, we were able to get back around 1.5 seconds off the app load time, which was fantastic considering that we didn't actually do anything overly complicated. It's just a bit more critical about what data we're sending over the wire. And then from there, that was like a combination of removing some json requests or trimming down a few json requests and also image optimization. And again, this is like all stuff that if you start poking around with, how can I optimize my website? You'll find all that type of stuff coming up as well. And in doing that, we were able to kind of get the app to where they were happy with it in the regions that they needed it to be performing well in. And then subsequently, as it happens with businesses and stuff, they had other priorities which they had to focus on. But we've been in touch during that period. And I think later this year we do have plans to do a bit of work around their website and other online assets and hopefully we can touch on the app again as well. And I think that's the evolution for a lot of businesses or that will be the evolution for a lot of businesses in that, Unfortunately, I don't have people coming to me knocking down my door saying, please, we want our website to be greener. I got people coming to me saying I want my website to be faster, but I just want it to be green no. But I think once we show the performance results and once we start a conversation around, hey, by the way, did you know that we've also just reduced CO2 emissions by this much or we've had this positive impact on the environmental performance of the app? Once we start those conversations, it kind of triggers a curiosity in people and they can start to see results from it. So the next load of work that we plan to do around Readle that does have a sustainability aspect to it, and they have actually asked for that, which is positive. GaëlThat's now an expected benefit from your second mission, which was absolutely not the case for the first one. FershadAbsolutely. And to see that from the customer side, rather than being like, hey, by the way, did you know we did this to hear the customer coming saying, I want my web assets to be faster, but I also want them to look at what I can do to make them greener. That's fantastic. And I think a lot of businesses will have that two step kind of evolution as they look at how they can green their digital assets. GaëlAnd during this first mission, how did you manage the human side of the project? Because I guess not everyone was fully aligned on the need for more performance, et cetera. You sometimes get some tension regarding the arbitrage. You mentioned JavaScript and image size, and they are, I would say, pretty emotional topics for designers and developers. So what did you do to bring all these people together and did it work? FershadI think it did work. As I mentioned, Christian and I, we've known each other prior to the project, so he knows how I am and I know how he is. But then he did have a developer who I was meeting for the first time on that project, and it was not just around kind of educating, like not saying hey, this is wrong, this is garbage, whatever, like not being dogmatic about things but just educating that if we can make these reductions in the amount of data being transferred when the app loads, we will see performance gains regardless, and then just taking it out a step further and using a CDN for cashing some resources or optimizing some resources even that'll give us an even bigger gain. And in terms of communicating with Christian, I think it's just at a human level communicating the value of having a greener product, having a greener app and app that is more low carbon and as a result is faster as well. GaëlWhat tools did you use to achieve those results? FershadI'll mention one thing that we didn't implement in that project, but I think we might look to implement coming up this year, which is around the audio improvements. So I was recently made aware of a post from Bjarne Oldrup and he wrote a post about reducing I think it was reducing the bit rate of audio files and seeing the same quality audio, but at a much smaller file size. And that's something that we didn't really look at in the first project. But now that I'm aware of that, I think it's something that I will bring up with those guys for future work because not only will it help with audio playback time, so that's a big part of the app is the user engaging with the audio to learn words and stuff, but also it will help them in terms of their operating costs. I think where smaller file sizes mean reduced cost of storage, reduced cost of accessing the data and downloading it, I think there's overall benefits that can be gained by that. And I think it's a long winded way of saying the community is the resource, like Bjarne someone that I have never met in my life, but I connected with him on Twitter and LinkedIn, I think, around the COP26 article that you mentioned in the intro. And I've learned so much from just his post. I've learned so much from other people in the community. And then you can take those things and apply them to your own use cases in their own projects that you're working on. And that's where I get a lot of my information and learning from, because it is really impossible to keep up with everything that's going on just by yourself. GaëlYeah, that's the very purpose of this podcast as well, which is why we will put in the description, all the links to these very valuable resources. Thanks a lot. Now you mention it. Yes, of course, another use case made some noise last year when you decided to audit the Cop 26 website. Why did you do that? FershadI don't know. I was bored. Just a crazy idea on Saturday night. I was just bored and curious, I think, and I get myself into a bit of trouble like that sometimes. It was just like I had to start with COP was coming up and it was everywhere like “COP26 this”, “COP26 that” on the news, on Twitter and everything. And I just thought, what does their website look like? Because that's what I do. I'm not a climate scientist, I'm not an engineer. I don't have a SaaS product around solving climate change, but I do stuff on the web. So I wondered what does their website look like in terms of its sustainability and its environmental footprint? And digging through that, I learnt a lot personally about the web and I think sharing that with the broader community also kind of just gave visibility at a time when it was a hot topic. It gave visibility to digital sustainability and web sustainability as well. And it was really good to see through the reaction from the Gov.uk folks when the article was published. It did take a while because governments and bureaucracy and which team owns what. But we did get there in the end in terms of reducing the size of at least the biggest culprit at the time of my audit, that was a large image in the photo. It was almost like a three megabyte graphic in the footer and we managed to get the size of that down quite considerably and they managed to push that change I think in the first week of COP. Since then they did have like a lot of social media embeds and stuff on their site as well. And since then there's been an article by Michelle Barker on Smashing Magazine's website about that and reducing the impact of social media embeds because it's something I noticed when I looked at their site. But COP’s Twitter feed and everything wasn't as active as it was. It wasn't as active as it was later on in the event so it was still not that big of a contributor. But once you start having videos coming in from social media and stuff, you can really blow out the size of your website. So when I did the audit, I think it was a week before COP26 that I had to look at it. I'm kind of wishing I did it earlier because some of those things that I highlighted in that article could have been fixed, but they needed a redesign of the overall site. Like the social media element of it could have been addressed, but they would have needed to redesign how the home page looks. GaëlVery valuable insights and links and documents being shared here. What advice would you give to someone willing to do the same kind of audit as you did for a pro bono or a professional mission? FershadThis is not just for audits. I think this is just in general with how we talk about digital sustainability, performance and all those types of things where you're looking at someone's work and giving a bit of a critique. Don't be dogmatic about it, saying in black and white, this is right, this is wrong. That's a surefire way to turn someone off and not get your message across. There's a lot of Gray, there's a lot of edge cases, there's a lot of situations which you might not be aware of that people are dealing with when they're making websites, when they're making apps, especially time pressure is probably the biggest of them. So rather than going at it with a black and white, this is right, this is wrong. What you've done here is so bad, it's heinous. It's a crime against the environment. Go at it with a bit of empathy, go at it with an open mind, and don't be afraid to ask the question of like “why did you do this”? GaëlAnd is measuring helpful as well? I’m thinking about page speed insight, for instance, from Google or other solutions as well. Does put hard numbers on the table, actually helps or scares people? FershadI think it can help, but there can sometimes be too many numbers. And I say this is someone who's really started looking at performance, like in the last couple of years. There are so many acronyms and even in the sustainability space, there's just so much you need to be aware of and you need to understand in order to be able to digest the numbers you're looking at. So I think measuring does help. And something like Website Carbon does this really nicely. The way they present the results, it's not overpowering. It's almost playful. Even when your site is very polluting, it's almost playful the way that they present that to you. GaëlAnd it's just a call for action rather than a judgment. FershadYes, and I think that's helpful. Like presenting a whole bunch of numbers to a group of marketing executives. You're probably not going to get too much buying from that. But if you're able to pick out selective metrics and measure them against their business impacts, that's where you start to really reaching and be able to communicate better with non-technical folks in companies. It's a bit harder in the sustainability space, though, because the greener website doesn't equate to anything other than if your company is tracking maybe scope three emissions and you're tracking your website as part of that, then okay, it does kind of correlate. But if you can tie performance to sustainability, you can then take that back a step and go, well, for every 100 milliseconds, we improve our performance. We are reducing our carbon footprint by this much. We're also increasing our revenue by this much. I think being able to communicate things in that manner is very impactful and helps you communicate the importance of these things more easily with folks in other business departments. GaëlWhich brings me maybe to the challenging question, I would say. Which is beyond the beautiful scope three world, what about the why? My point is, did you find yourself in situations where making tech greener was not enough? Where you had to question the purpose of some digital services, if not entire companies? FershadI've never found myself in that situation in the work that I've done, but just in everyday life. I mean, you have companies like Facebook, Meta, that have a positive social impact. They've also got quite a substantial negative social impact. And you start to wonder, is digital really being put to its best use in these cases? I find myself a lot of the time more ever increasingly, I find myself feeling like digital is not the only solution. There are times when digital is one of the options, but that sometimes people view it as “we need to digitize this and it's only going to be available 100% through an app”, whereas actually to make it more accessible for everyone, elderly people that don't have a phone, people that have limited access to data or whatever. To make that more accessible, you need to consider other options besides just digital. So I think it's looking at digital as one of the options, one of the solutions for any given problem, but not discounting others, even more traditional ones like a pencil or a paper. Just a recent example here in Taiwan, when Covid was picking up and the government really jumped into the QR code, check in. So when you go to a restaurant or a shop, you check in with your phone, scan a QR code, and your details are captured. But what that did - and beyond that they also made vaccine bookings and everything like that accessible through an online system, and you would get notifications by SMS and whatnot - that excluded a large chunk of the elderly population who then had to rely on relatives or local community members to kind of help them. GaëlAnd they were the more concerned about the epidemic… FershadYeah. And just like something like that thinking, okay, we got to digitize this. It's going to be more efficient if we do. But let's not forget that we need to keep this as something that should be accessible to everyone. GaëlAnd going back to something you mentioned, one of your most recent nonprofit work, you started to investigate how green are third parties. Could you elaborate a bit more? FershadYeah. Again, this is one of those kind of I was bored and I was curious kind of situations. So I don't know if your listeners would be familiar with the Web Almanac. It's a set of articles that's put out every year. So it's a part of the http archive and it's been going for three years. It's kind of tracking how the Web is evolving and changing over time. And one of those chapters in that Almanac is about third parties. And I was just as you do on a week night, I was giving that a read and I came across a couple of stats that were mentioned in that, which just blew my mind. Somewhere in the vicinity of 94% of websites load at least one third party script. And third party requests account for 45% of website traffic. So when I read that, my mind straight away went to “I wonder how much of this is actually coming from green service?”. Like, what's the impact? Here are these third party scripts, all of them hosted on green web host, in which case that would be fantastic. GaëlIt would be. FershadSo I tried to figure out how I would be able to understand that a bit better. And that's where “Are my third parties green” was born. So I also kind of wanted to play with some technology, so I wanted to try out StealthKick, which is a framework for building web apps and websites. So I got to do that also scratching my curiosity as well. GaëlYeah. Killing two birds with one stone, which is a terrible expression in regard of the biodiversity crisis that we are in. And today, this third party's audit website, is it focusing only on energy or did you manage to go beyond? Study potentially the Scop three? Do they advertise their carbon footprint, and beyond scope one and scope two? FershadNo, not really. Right now, it's still very much a side project that I'm slowly updating with different things that people have kind of requested when I can. The main focus is around green hosting. So I'm looking to see other third party requests hosted on green web hosts. I use the Green Web Foundation API as the source of truth for that. And I do put in a carbon score just as like a rough estimate of the first time this request is made, what would be the carbon impact of it? Because some of them - it's hard with third parties, some of them are really well cached and they have a long life on the browser; others the cache expires within a minute. So if a user comes back to your site two minutes later, they will have to download the fresh one again. So it makes it a bit trickier to give a real accurate carbon estimate. But I do have another project in my head about that, but I'll leave that for another day. So I do have a couple of plans to make some of this data more accessible and visible to people that might be deciding to use third parties on their website. I've got a branch and the code at the moment to create a directory, at least of the known third party. So if you're looking for an advertising provider, you could kind of look through that list and see which ones are hosted on green web hosts. And what would be the CO2 emissions related to that request? It just makes it an easier way for people to kind of compare because at the end of the day, for us to make a difference as individuals, we can speak through our actions. And the more of us that go to third party providers that are hosted on green web hosts, and the more of us that make that known, that was part of our decision. The more we'll see these providers shifting to more sustainable web hosting, optimizing their scripts so that they're lighter and better cached and all that stuff. So, yeah, I do have plans to add to the website with the directory, maybe with a bit of a comparison even inside of the test results. So, yeah, it's definitely a work in progress, but I'm not sure about getting into something more complicated like scope three, scope two emissions. GaëlThat's a hell of a job to start auditing and just collecting the information when it is made available, which is pretty rare these days. FershadYeah. If any of the listeners do want to help with that, they can go over to aremythirdpartiesgreen.com and run their website through the tool to see how their website looks. And I've got some ideas about how I might be able to use this data to also contribute back to some of the data sources that I'm using. So I use a library called Third Party Web, which kind of categorizes the third party request. I would love to use data from this tool to then feedback into that library to help make it more complete so that the other people that use that tool as well can benefit from that. GaëlTwo last questions. The more general question I would say: “Today, what makes you optimistic about a path toward a greener digital world?” Fershad… blank …GaëlLaughing Spontaneously, not that much. A bit scary. FershadLaughing No, I was just thinking. I think my answer is not just for digital. My answer goes for our path towards a greener, more sustainable world as a whole. The thing that makes me the most positive is just a number of incredibly smart people that are working on the science behind changes that we need, that are working on the engineering, that are working on products to help us get there, that are lobbying for changes to be made at the government level. Just a number of people that are out there helping us move in the right direction. That's what gives me a great sense of optimism. I mean, going beyond the digital space. Another podcast I listen to is called “My Climate Journey” by Jason Jacobs. And he interviews people from all kinds of different industries and like some of them you wouldn't even think of, but you can just see that the scope of not only what's required, but the spaces in which people are operating across a gamut of industries. And that's what we need in the end to move things on a sustainable path. And that trickles down to digital mate. I mean, there are people out there way smarter than I am. Tackling the problem of sustainability across the digital sector and knowing that they're working on it and knowing that they're open to assistance from the community, that kind of gives me hope. Gaël Yeah, me too. It's pretty crazy when you start to investigate the level of knowledge. But still - that will be my last question - we still have a lot of newbies when it comes to Web Sustainability. People with great aspiration, willingness to change, but not that much knowledge yet. What would be your recommendations to learn more about Web Sustainability and Web Performance to this audience? Fershad I think just read or consume as much as you can. You know, there's a lot of content out there on YouTube. ClimateAction.tgech has got their YouTube channel, which is a lot of videos across a lot of different aspects of technology. So maybe you're not a web developer, but you work in machine learning. They've definitely got videos up there about machine learning, AI, cloud computing, data centers. So just consume. There's so much information out there. There's so much knowledge. Obviously subscribe to this podcast because it's going to be a good one. Gaël Thanks. Fershad Also, I think getting involved in the community is quite important. Like the amount that I've learned since being a member of the ClimateAction.tech community online. Like the people you meet, the things they share, that helps you kind of stay aware of what's going on as well. Because things do change pretty quickly. And having a community around you to kind of help you keep an eye on things that you might not be able to otherwise. That helps you ensure that you're always learning something. Gaël Yeah you definitely need those. I remember when I joined the Slack workspace, it can be pretty intimidating. That's just so much information. But at the same time, suddenly you don't feel alone. Like, you feel ten times stronger than you were just a second before because you realized, as you said, that so many great people are contributing. I really do love ClimateAction.tech; not the least because this is where I met you. But thanks a lot for all these very valuable insights. That was awesome. So thanks a lot Fershad for being with us today. Your insights and feedback were just great. I'm sure many of our listeners will find inspiration in it to help green the web and IT. So thanks again and next month we will go to London and meet Sandra Sydow, the founder of “Why Not Now?” and cofounder of the “Climate Pitch”. She is also an active member of the Digital Collage association and she will tell us everything about this great tool to raise awareness about the ecological footprint of the digital sector and … that's it! Thank you all for listening to Green I/O. 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