Environment Variables

In this the latest episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by first time Environment Variables guest Tammy McClellan and regulars Anne Currie and Asim Hussain. They discuss the concept of greenwashing; what it is and how companies can avoid it, and why green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector. They cover various statistics about the environmental impact of data centers and cloud computing, the importance of optimizing code and algorithms to reduce emissions, and how developers can’t just rely on hardware to reduce emissions. The hosts also touch on some valuable resources to further your knowledge in the world of Green Software - links below!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterTammy McLellan: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Greenwashing: The Red Flag of Sustainability / Intel [4:01]Green IT Is No Longer An Option For The Tech Sector / Forbes [13:46]Everything is moving to the cloud. But how green is it, really? / ZDNET [22:01]The Oversight Committee has been launched! / GSF [28:21]Resources:The SBTI [11:24]ZeroTracker.Net [13:24]Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls in assessing the Internet’s energy and carbon impacts / John Koomey [17:21]New WC3 Database of References / WC3 Sustainability Group [32:02]The Transformation Impact of the Cloud (2016) / 451 Research [23:00]There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? / Journal of Science [26:43]Green Software Practitioner Course from Linux / GSF [31:13]Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification Guide / GSF [31:31]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Asim Hussain: 80% of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits, and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved tick!Okay, everyone trusts you now, rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and today we're discussing the growing issue of greenwashing in tech and the importance of reporting and communicating corporate sustainability accurately.Before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guests and colleagues with this episode of The Week in Green Software. Today we have Tammy. Hello, Tammy.Tammy McClellan: Hi there.Chris Adams: AsimAsim Hussain: Hi.Chris Adams: and Anne.Anne Currie: Hello.Chris Adams: And if you're not on first name terms, let's do proper introductions. First of all, I'll hand over to, um, Anne. You'll be the first person to introduce.Anne Currie: So my name's Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly three decades, which is quite depressing and good. And good, depressing, but but also good. And I am part of the Green Software Foundation along with everybody else here. So today I've been working on the introductory chapter of a new book on green software, which we can't yet talk about who the publisher is, but it's a good publisher.Next time I'll be able to tell you who it is.Chris Adams: thank you for that, Anne. All right. Next in the alphabetical order would be Asim Go for it.Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel. I'm excited to be here. I also do, I also, oh, I grow mushrooms, which is an active hobby at this time of the year, soTammy McClellan: No way!Asim Hussain: Growing. Oh yeah. Have we not told you about that, Tammy? Yeah. Spring time's coming. So we're getting, as you are, I imagine, Tammy getting ready for a growing season. But anyway, I'll let you introduce yourself now.Tammy McClellan: Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Tammy McClellan. I work for Microsoft. I'm a cloud solution architect, developer advocate. So along with Anne, I've been in the tech industry for a really long time. I think I probably just passed the 30 year mark. I'm also the co-chair of the community working group along with Anne here, and, uh, recently became the chair of the oversight committee.So I'm super excited about that. And I also, as Asim alluded to, I have a small sustainable farm here in Chelsea, Michigan, where I grow lots of veggies and flowers. So happy to be here.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you.Asim Hussain: What's the name of your farm? Tammy. What's the name of your farm?Tammy McClellan: It's called Wonderful Tiny Farm or WTF forChris Adams: SureAsim Hussain: wtfChris Adams: That's very good. That's a, I think that's an appropriate lead in for the stuff we'll be talking about actually. Alright. All right. Before we start, I'm just gonna share a reminder for anyone who's listening, everything we do talk about will be linked in the show notes. So there'll be a link for every single story we do cover, plus some supplementary links for the things that do come up as we scrabble around to try to find them as we discuss them.And with that, I think we'll start on the first story on our list, actually. So, What I have here is greenwashing, the red flag of sustainability. This is a piece from the Intel Podcast put together by Intel called the Intech Technology Podcast. They recently published an environmentally focused episode with I think Caryn Herder Fritz, one of the marketing initiatives sustainability initiative leads.Speaking about how companies can avoid some of this greenwashing explaining what greenwash actually is. So, I suppose now is a good time as any, to answer the question, what is greenwashing here? Anyone want to go forward or volunteer something here?Asim Hussain: So I actually work with Caryn. It was really exciting to hear her talk about this. It was interesting cuz I actually have a slightly different definition of greenwashing as well, personally, which is interesting. But she was describing greenwashing as a term to use to describe when companies make misleading or false claims about the environmental benefits of their products or activities in order to appeal to consumers who are concerned about sustainability.So that's the definition that she gave about greenwashing. I'm actually interested to hear what, how do other people feel about that definition? Is that aligned with your thinking?Anne Currie: That sounds pretty good, but Asim, you, you feel different, you say,Chris Adams: What's your,Asim Hussain: What a leading.Anne Currie: so we who we're agreeing, disagreeing.Chris Adams: what's your, areAsim Hussain: or incorrect? According to my. My definition of greenwashing? No. I would also, cause I like, I don't know, I think about it a lot. I actually think about it a lot. I think about, I'm in corporate industry, so I think about it very carefully. I think about the messaging that I'm we're giving out.What does it mean to be authentic? And one thing I haven't quite resolved in my head is the intention behind the work. And I think Anne, you've said something about this in the past, so if you did something without the intention of it being sustainable and then afterwards went, oh, actually, if we look at it through this lens, is it sustainable?Let's talk about it from a sustainability perspective. I dunno where that landsAnne Currie: I'm okay with that.Asim Hussain: ofAnne Currie: I'm more of a consequentialist . I'm fine with people saying, Ooh, it was good. I'll talk about it being good.Asim Hussain: Accident. Oh damn. I did something good by accident. Yeah.Chris Adams: There are two things which are really interesting at the podcast that caught my eye, so first of all, one of them was, so there was a stat shared from some UK surveys, I forget this particular poll came from, but they basically said 81% of comm's messages about environmental measures from tech firms are not trusted by their audiences at present.So this is one of the key things that she was saying was, This is a real problem that needs to be addressed right now. The other thing that came out of this, and I guess putting the question to Asim is quite an interesting one, is the genuine idea that using the word green itself is a bit of a red flag because it's so wooly and so kind of open.I think Asim, I think you are about to speak to this particular as the director of the Green Software Foundation.Asim Hussain: And what are you the director of again Chris?Chris Adams: I'm a member of the Green Web Foundation, so I may also have things to say here as well, but after you first.Asim Hussain: No, I think that was a really interesting insight. Now, the point she was saying was because greenwashing has the term green in it, and if you then just use the term green, it just reminds you instantly of the word greenwashing before you've said anything. So already frames. Like really pulls up that thing in their mind.I was like, damn. Where were you Caryn? Like, where were you like maybe four years ago when we were like coming up with the name for this thing. But I would also argue a different point because I tell you that when we were coming up with the name of this foundation, and I've apologized to Chris Adams like so many times for this because I knew Chris and he had the Green Web Foundation, and the very first name that came to my head was the Green Software Foundation.I always intended it to be like a pinhole name, and then we'd come back to it later and we never came back to it and they just ended up being the Green, Software, Foundation. But the other thing was, there was actually another organization called Sustainable Software or Sustainable Software Foundation. There's actually another organization out there, but they're much more focused around, can you, as a developer, can you, on a human level, sustain.Chris Adams: Yeah, the Software Sustainability Institute, can you keep things going? So it's nothing to do with climate at all, it's just am I able to keep working without code collapsing under its own weight from like bugs and issues and usability problems and stuff like that.Asim Hussain: So that's where the idea, it was like you either pick sustainable or you pick green. In my mind, I personally felt green was a bit more targeted than sustainable. That's why we went for the green in the first place. So that was my thinking on it.Chris Adams: Okay. That's fair.Anne Currie: Well, it's interesting, so the, the book that I'm currently working on, I originally pitched. Sustainable Software, but the publishers chose the name Building Green software and presumably that's because they're much better at marketing than I am . They obviously feel that green is the word that people want to be using or be interested in.So that is to a certain extent, then that becomes greenwashing. Cause everybody likes the phrase, but everything that's more specific, I really like 24 7 carbon free electricity, for example, but it's very boring and it's quite specific, and it does not really get to appeal to folk in the same way. SoChris Adams: Actually, I'm kind of glad you mentioned this Anne, cuz this was the other thing that Karen was saying. So she said there's green washing and there's gray washing where you go so far away from emotional and evocative images. The unit was something which is accurate, but basically impossible to get anyone to remember or respond to in any kind of meaningful fashion.So I think that's actually, I've never heard it come across the term graywashing before or anything like that, but that's caught my eye. The thing that it might be worth actually talking about in this context is that, and Asim, you touched on this idea of is it intentional or unintentional? You can see parallels right now with the basically misinformation and disinfo discussion online right now.Because one of the big problems about the internet, which is not necessarily being fixed by things like generative AI search engines, is that you have a real problem with it being very difficult to find reliable information online. All right, and in those circles, people call things misinformation, where you're unintentionally misleading people or disinformation if you are intentionally misleading people.And like the kind of mental model that I've been using for this is, it's a bit like murder and manslaughter. You know, manslaughters, I don't intend to cause harm, but it's happened. Whereas murder is very much like a degree of intentionality. This is actually part of it. You might wanna think about where in your organization,this kind of comms function might actually be alright if they're in finance compared to marketing, you're gonna have different drivers, but there's plenty we can refer to there. And I suspect the thing that might be worth looking at is that there are various kind of non-profit organizations who do try to keep track of all this stuff.And one of the things that, if we could talk a little about, say some of the things that companies have, but, so I work for a nonprofit called the Green Web Foundation. We did a whole thing about net zero targets and uh, you can. There are some ways to tell if you have a good net zero target or a bad net zero target based on the kind of organizational changes you might need to see happen.So if someone has a very far off net zero target, for example, where there's no meaningful action, the hat needs to happen in the next five, five yearsAsim Hussain: We'll get it done by 2050. We'll, 2050.Chris Adams: If you have that, then it suggests that maybe you're not prioritizing it. And the reports that from groups like say the corporate climate responsibility monitor and stuff like that, they basically say you need to have a net zero target by 2030, and sorry, you need to have something with interim actions in the next five years for this to seem meaningful.Asim Hussain: Did any of you read? I don't think, we didn't appear in the last news that I, it might been one of you that posted it on, on, so I can't remember, but it was something somebody shared about, oh, it was cdp. It was, it was a report they had done about, if you are an organization that has a climate target that is a, an SBTI what's the term?Chris Adams: Science based target? Is that what you're referring to here?Asim Hussain: Is it is if your climate targets have been vetted by the SBTI? I think that's a term you are far more likely to over overdeliver on your climate achievements than if you haven't. And I think I wondered, cause one of, one of the foundation was starting like one eighty percent of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved. Tick. Okay, everyone trusts you now.rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.Chris Adams: Brief sidebar for folks who might not be familiar with SBTI. The SBTI stands for the Science-Based Targets Institute. They're a group of peer-reviewed scientists and and experts who look at various sectors to figure out what kind of changes and reductions in carbon emissions you'd actually need to see on a year by year basis in order to actually be responding in line with the climate.They do work for various sectors, but specifically in 2020, they released information about the tech sector. So they basically said, you need to be hitting these targets for your actions to be considered credible. That's all. Sidebar over. That might be useful for folks who might not know what the SBTI is, cause we should have actually come in with that one.Okay. There's a bit more here we could talk about. And there's a link here to zerotracker.net, which does track some of these targets and some of these actions by organizations. And there's even one pointed to specific companies. So you can see are they recording and are they reporting against these kind of figures that you've listed here.But I suspect we might need to move on to some of the other stories we have if we wanna go on from here. So what's next on this list?Anne Currie: So this is an article from Forbes. Green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector, although I think I would've called it no longer optional for the tech sector, otherwise it feels a little bit like it's saying the very opposite of what I think it's trying to say. But anyway, yeah. So a few weeks ago we did talk about, uh, some interesting and quite terrifying statistics that the cloud considered over 7.2 million data centers across the world, which actually is, that suggests that there's about a data center per thousand people in the world, which seems like the, the hardware utilization on data centers must be really bad for that. That's quite scary, although not totally implausible. If you think there's maybe about 7 million businesses across the world and each one has a, at least a couple of servers in there,Chris Adams: I feel like you need a loose definition of data center here for that to be plausible, right?Anne Currie: Yeah. I think it would have to be. I think it'd have to be, but even with that, actually, that really suggests cuz a thousand users. And these are not simultaneous users, but as Asim pointed out last time, these days everybody's pretty much connected all the time. So fundamentally far, then talking about a thousand simultaneously connected users.But anyway, so we've got a cloud of 7.2 million data centers, one data center per thousand people, loads of energy and water and all that embodied carbon. Or embedded carbon, depending on how you like to say it's involved in the hardware and that cloud computing is responsible for broadly a percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which now says it is about twice as much as the whole aviation sector potentially.But broadly speaking, I always like to say it's about an aviation sector from the tech industry, which gives us some feeling and likely to surge, but might not surge because we get better at it. But fundamentally, we use computers for more and more. So those are the numbers that we're talking about.Asim Hussain: So I think this article in particular, I liked it cuz it also touched on software. It didn't just say, data center's bad, go fix it, data center people. It was like, no, no. The one statement that I really liked was organizations of risk developing software that will run hot unnecessarily for many years if they do not improve the sustainability of their software today.And for me, when I think about building inefficient applications, like I forget, like it's just gonna run like that forever. 10 years. Some of this stuff just runs forever, unnecessarily, and then just dies. I remember the, like, I won't name it the company I used to work at prior to working at Microsoft. It was a very small startup and the technology was so unbelievably inefficient.We needed to buy one server for every 10 users.Tammy McClellan: Oh my goodness,Asim Hussain: but well. It was high net worth lending to high net worth, and it was very high profit business. They didn't care. But the, the software was built 20 years ago, and so for 20 years they've been running this unbelievably unnecessarily complex software.And as far as I know, it's still running today. I haven't checked in on 'em for a while. I think that's really interesting, like when you write software. It will run unnecessarily hot for a long period of time, whereas a data center in harder will refresh. That was a really interesting insight for me. Yeah.Tammy McClellan: Oh, good point.Chris Adams: This provides a link to the next story, which is about moving things to the cloud. And there's points and counterpoints for that. Specifically. There's one thing I might share with everyone before we move on from this though. When you see numbers like say 1.5% moving to 15%, there's a really good paper by John Koomey, a well-known professor who basically has, there's a paper called Does Not Compute, avoiding Pitfalls in Assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts.This is the guy who's been studying this for 30 years and generally speaking, if you look at our sector, People saying, oh, it's 2% now, but it'd be 15% by this time in the future. Aviation says that shipping says that every single sector, which is 2%, says they're gonna be 15% in the future. This is a recurring thing and it's really worth reading that to be able to interrogate some of these claims, cuz they can't all be 15% for this to be happening.Anne Currie: There's a tacit assumption there that nobody else grows, as she said. But that's not a crazy tacit assumption that you are making your point that the point is gonna get bigger. It's already big and it's gonna get bigger. The fact that everybody else is getting bigger doesn't make your problem lesser.And Dr. Koomey there, he has picked me up on this stuff in the past and said, oh, you can't say that this is going to continue. But I think there is a point here, to be made that, that we don't want these things to go up. The relative count doesn't really matter. It's, and, and it makes it, it makes a good point that we get more efficient as time goes, but we don't actually always get more efficient as time goes on.Data centers get more efficient. Cloud data centers get more efficient. We use more of them. He has a platform which is all about, oh yeah, everything gets better and it'll all stay about the same, but it, you tends to use it to shut down people saying we should do better is my opinion.Chris Adams: And maybe we should come up with a law for you, whereas Koomey's Law, maybe we need a Currie's Law as a counterpoint for this actually.Asim Hussain: Everything will get worse all the time until the heat death of the universe.Anne Currie: Actually, the thing is we do have a tendency to, over my entire career, 30 year career that Tammy and I have had. Hardware's got tons better, but utilization has been sacrificed to developer productivity. So machine productivity, no one cares developer productivity. Everybody focuses entirely on that, so we tend to move in the wrong direction, which then takes you down back to Asim's point that you end up with very inefficient software that could be a lot more efficient.Asim Hussain: That's a really good point. Cause you're right and I have been using. I, I feel very much corrected cuz I have been using that percentage relativity. But that whole statement about relative increases is pointless because if everybody is saying it's going to increase by 15%, that also isn't a good thing.It just means that. Maybe we should be talking in absolute terms of increases. Maybe that's the kind of statement. But I would also state that I think a lot of these things assume, like currently we are pressing 10% down on the accelerator pedal, and the statement is, if you keep pressing on the accelerator pedal, 10% you'll end up at this point in the future.Doesn't mean you can take your foot off the pedal. If you take the foot off the pedal, then it just all just goes crazy. So I think it's important to note that doesn't just mean, even if, even with that statement of it's not going to be as bad in the future, I think that statement should be, it's not gonna be as bad in the future if we continue to put the pressure on that we're putting on.It may not be that bad in the future, but if we just sit back and relax and say, apparently somebody says it's all gonna be fire in the future, then it won't be fine. I think it's about forces. We have to make sure we keep the force pressed to make sure that good actions happen. That's just one of our points.Anne Currie: And so I remember when I see these statistics about the aviation industry, I remember about a talk I gave at a conference HashiCorp Europe in 2016, and I was the first talk I gave on green software. And I thought, oh, I need a really good statistic. I need a good statistic. So I had a look. And I would say it looked like the aviation industry.We used about twice as much as energy. Maybe a bit more, but I thought, oh, I'm just gonna say it's the same, cuz then that's fine. I'm sure it'll get there eventually. But now everybody's talking about it being twice as much as the aviation industry. Things do. THe tech industry has got worse over the past five years in terms of carbon emissions.No matter what Professor Koomey says.Tammy McClellan: I'm just surprised you remembered what you were doing in 2016, so I'm just impressed by that.Chris Adams: [laughing]Anne Currie: So I I always felt a bit guilty cause it was a bit of a lie at the time, but I thought it's a bit of a lie, but it's going to happen, I'm pretty sure. So, you know,Asim Hussain: At some point in the future or past it's true.Chris Adams: I guess the good news we can talk about is that the technology sector is probably easier to decarbonize than aviation because servers don't need to fly through the sky all that often, and that's a nice link to the next story we have. Everything is moving to the cloud, but how green is it really?Anne Currie: Yes, there were a couple of papers came out last week. One from Adrian Cockcroft, who is the member of the GSF, and there's a bit of an insider on this as well as a slightly more outside perspective saying that, and they made the interesting point, although the cloud is getting better from a very low bar, for some of them they have not been as good at helping their customers to become green as they said that they would be, or at least Amazon hasn't been. Google has been doing pretty well. Azure been doing okay, but AWS has really fallen behind and that is a, an opportunity for everybody because AWS. Amazon care what customers ask for.So if you ask for it, you might well get it. And if they're not doing it, that might be a sign that people aren't asking for it. We need all need to make sure that we ask our AWS reps all the time for cloud carbon footprint measurement.Chris Adams: So that was one of the papers. You mentioned there was another paper and so there's a piece in computing.com that I've shed a link to that pointed to basically some really detailed stats talking about the environmental impact of refresh rates on servers and stuff like that. This is actually worth being aware of because a significant amount of the environmental impact comes from actually making the servers in the first place and.Asim as the guy at Intel, you probably have some insight on this one now, like there's a significant amount to making them and that part isn't particularly easy to decarbonize compared to the actual running of those. And this is the first paper I've seen, which basically challenges some of this narrative cuz this the reports that you do see that talk about the cloud.Generally, like one of them is by 451 Research, which was commissioned by Amazon. So unsurprisingly, they say that Amazon's super efficient, but you'll see this are coming up quite a few times. It's quite hard to get some independently confirmed information from this, but this one seems to be more about where energy is coming from and how it's being sourced actually. That was my takeaway when I read through this actually.Asim Hussain: Speaking to the point you just mentioned. Chris, it does surface an interesting stat. We're just gonna be like, maybe this podcast will just turn into one of us mentioning a stat and everybody else disagreeing with it. a, a well-researched stat from a very famous researcher and we just like that doesn't sound right, but the research seems that, that they say, the research indicates the energy consumption from data centers grew just 6% between 2010 and 2018.well, its computing output increased 550%. And that I think speaks to what you were, you and Koomey was probably talking about, which is the computing industry is the efficiency has been increasing dramatically.Anne Currie: I agree with you, and there's absolutely tons of efficiency improvements to be wrought from software. The difficulty there is that this quite difficult, takes a lot of time to do it, and this is my total stab in the dark guess. I think the next massive efficiency improvement will come from the, ironically, the same efficiency improvement that delivered to the industrial revolution, which is a move from generalists to specialists.Has a tendency to deliver a thousand fold according to Adam Smith in the Industrial Revolution in his Wealth of Nations of 1775. moving to specialists. Is a thousand fold increase in productivity and performance, and I think that's where I have a dual hope for the cloud cuz that is specialists, that's people putting their homegrown software and saying, no, look, I'm not gonna write this.I'm just gonna use the cloud stuff where they were specialists doing it for me. And also open source where they say, I'm not gonna write this library. I'm gonna use an open source library where specialists will have tuned this for me. I'm hoping that will to a certain extent, offset the end of hardware in terms of improvement.But that might be my dream and an unrealistic one.Chris Adams: Not necessarily. I feel there's a really nice paper called Plenty of Room at the Top, which basically it's a paper from the Journal of Science talking about specifically where the next generation of improvements are gonna be coming from. It basically puts this argument that, yeah, Moore's Law has slowed down over the last decade, so you need to find other ways.And it says, yeah, the thing you need to be looking for is things like, Domain specific programming, matching the compute jobs or can matching the workloads too. The hardware much better. You can see examples of this right now. We'll share a link to some analysis. For example, Google using very specialized ASICS like application specific integrated circuits for video encoding or tools like that.These are the things that are being used in production, a number of places which can provide these hundred or sometimes thousand improvements that there is an issue though about where you do if you wanna do something else. Cause we've seen exactly the same thing happening with cryptocurrencies, right? Where you get to an ASIC designed specifically for the Char 256 protocol.So if you don't wanna do stuff for cryptocurrencies, I guess you might be to use it for your passwords on a website. But there aren't that many other things you can use it for. So there's a discussion there to be had. But no, you're absolutely right. We'll share a link to that cause it's a really interesting paper and it basically makes you an argument that you've described Anne but in lots of detail with those are really nice examples.So we've spoken about those different tools and there's different ways that you can achieve some of these savings, both in software design and hardware design. And the Green software Foundation is maintaining and running a couple of projects like the Carbon Awareness SDK, the Patterns Project, and so on.But recently, there've been some developments to how these project projects can be funded, or similar projects can be supported so people can organize and work on them a bit more. Tammy, I think this is something that you've. Been involved in, and I believe, yeah, congratulations in order for actually becoming part of the groups leading this now, maybe you could share a little bit more about the oversight committee for the Green Software Foundation.Tammy McClellan: Sure would love to. I am super excited about this opportunity when talking to Asim and he basically came up with the idea of this oversight committee and the ability for G S F to scale as we get new members and organizations that are joining and it became pretty apparent, I think, that everything was funneling through Asim.So this gives us an opportunity to scale at Asim's pace. And so I'm excited about that and being able to look at some of these technical experiments that we're doing and helping to drive some adoption in certain areas. But well, I'm just really excited about the possibility of advocating more in this space cuz I really feel that there's loads of opportunity here for us to make an impact in our overall carbon goals that we have.And it's emerging tech, so we're flushing it all out. We're figuring it all out, and we're having some great success. So the Oversight Committee will also provide recommendations to improve the foundation's charter to set community norms and workflows and deliver budget recommendations to the steering committee, so folks like myself and Chris Lloyd-Jones will serve as the chair and the vice chair of the Oversight Committee, and hopefully we can get more OC members on this podcast to introduce themselves to our wonderful listeners here.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Tammy.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Congratulations Tammy.Chris Adams: Okay. Yeah, that's it for our news wrap up for now. But before we leave, there's a new format for this final part of the show where we are gonna ask a closing question to our guests. It's gonna be different every week, but this one we're gonna try to see what kind of resources or recommendations you might actually point other people to.So the question is, if you could point one of our listeners to one resource about sustainability and green software. What would it be and why? Anne I'll start with you first if that's okay. Cuz it looks like a sea is holding a child now.Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Oh yeah. One resource. One resource. Actually. So I'm gonna cheat and easily provide the one that everyone will do, which is, that's on the GSF websites available. Now from the Linux Foundation, you can get for free a certification in being a green software engineer, and that's two hours to do.It's quite an easy read, and at the end you get a certificate of completion.Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks Anne. Anyone else got one?Tammy McClellan: I have one, although I'm cheating here as well, but it's the one I find myself going to all the time when I'm having internal discussions or discussions with customers. It's off the Green Software Foundation website, but it's the SCI guide. But it has just loads of guidance around applying the SCI some use cases, and it's just uh packed full of really good information.Chris Adams: Okay. And the same yourself.Asim Hussain: So yes, I had, I think I shared it on socials recently as well, so, Recently had a really great conversation with Lucas from the, from various things, but he is also involved in the W3C Sustainability group, and he shared with me just an amazing set of resources that they've been collecting over. I don't believe he was a particular person collecting, but he introduced me to it and will put them in the show notes as well.There's all sorts of things in there from books to magazines, courses, events, media websites, even stuff from the Green GSF is in there as well. So just a great source of material.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Asim. So for folks who are following along the W3C have a Sustainable Web Group and they maintain a Wiki now, and that's where all that stuff is listed. It's a really good resource and we only found out about it in the last two weeks, but it's a really useful thing to look at.So that's all for this episode are for The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below, and you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software. One word. DOT foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, leaving us a five star review.If you didn't enjoy the show and you hated it, please consider leaving a five star review and tell us why.Asim Hussain: We only listen, we only listen to five star reviews. That's the only ones we listen to.Chris Adams: Yeah, that's the way that, that, that's the . Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. Cheers, folks. Bye Cheers.Cheer.Anne Currie: Cheers. Bye-bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

TWiGS returns this week with host Asim Hussain being joined by (now guest) Chris Adams. They talk about the environmental impact of the cloud and while some of the big cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud, have introduced initiatives designed to increase the sustainability of individual data centres and reduce their overall carbon footprints, will it be enough to help reduce carbon emissions produced by cloud computing? They also cover Microsoft’s Surface Emissions Estimator and a recent paper surveying the factors that influence the emissions of machine learning.Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterChris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Microsoft launches its Surface Emissions Estimator / Microsoft [2:42]GreenOps Carbon Footprint Treads Closer To Cloud Developer Efficiency / Forbes [14:35]How green is your cloud? / TechMonitor [22:11]Counting Carbon: A Survey of Factors Influencing the Emissions of Machine Learning / Alexandra Sasha Luccioni & Alex Hernandez-Garcia [36:21]Ongoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:GSF Meetup Opportunities [46:24]GSF Speakers BureauOther resources mentioned:Ola Fagerström’s announcement about Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator [13:01]Cycloids.io [14:35]Net Zero Tracker [27:55]Chris Adams & Max Schulze talk Cloud Economics with a spreadsheet [31:02]WattTime.orgIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:GSF_Ep17_TWiGS5_TranscriptChris Adams:  The flip side of this, maybe the thing they're going for is saying if cloud carbon footprint is just ubiquitous like hoovering is, maybe that's the thing you would just say, well, you're just gonna ccf it, or cloud carbon footprint it.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Welcome to another episode of  The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I am your host, Asim Hussain. In this episode, we have some exciting announcements from various organizations, and we're going to cover some interesting articles about the environmental impact of cloud and machine learning.And finally, we're gonna share some opportunities for development for the world of Green software. But before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of Twigs. With us today, we have Chris Adams.Chris Adams: Hi Asim. My name is Chris. For folks who've never heard of me before, I work as the one of the chairs of the policy working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I also work as the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a small, non but fierce non-profit focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030.And I also work with the online community climateaction.tech, which is where I met Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh, the climateaction.tech days.Chris Adams: Yeah, that and OMG Climate as well actually.Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. OMG Climate. I remember the OMG climate. You should start those again. Oh, have you started those again? Actually, I have interest. For the listeners, OMG Climate was a A A A conference, an on a conference that Chris was running.Chris Adams: Yes, I can talk about this. We can segue into that gracefully in the podcast if you'd like. After we've covered some of the news. But this is something that we would like to do a bit more of, and I’ve got a fun story about why it's called OMG Climate and where some of that came from. So it's also open source.So if you like the idea of onConferences around climate, then maybe we should leave a bit of time for that actually seen, because there are some kind of green software and digital sustainability related events in the coming months that are probably worth pointing people to. So that was me introducedAsim Hussain:  And before we dive in, just a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So I think Chris to kick off uh, news from the world of Green Software, Microsoft Company I used to work for. Microsoft has launched a new tool called the Surface Emissions Estimator that helps customers understand the carbon footprint of the devices purchased.It is the surface device range of the purchases that are purchased. It uses a lifecycle assessment model to provide accurate estimates of carbon emissions, it also, I believe, helps you adjust those emissions based upon where you are, what you bought, where it's been delivered, and things like that.Chris Adams: I thought this was pretty cool actually. See, have you had a, have you had a go with it yet at all? Because I don't own a surface thing myself, but I'm happy to talk about it cuz I think this is actually a field that probably has some quite far reaching implications on how people like work within, with gadgets and things at all.So first of all, you, you shared this link before, so we've, you've seen how it. Basically, when you talk about talks about surface, it shows you like maybe a surface. Are they called laptops or tablets or is there another word for this kind of removable thing? They have?Asim Hussain: just called surfaces. I don't know. I just think they're Microsoft DevicesChris Adams: that's confusing.Asim Hussain: Yeah, but I believe the whole range. Everything is, the tablet and the laptop, they're all called surfaces. Funnily enough, I do have a Windows machine. Now I'm at Intel, but while I was at Microsoft, I had a MacBook my whole journey.So I, I missed out, I missed out on the whole, the . Yeah, I was almost called a heathen on my first day of, of, of my Microsoft training. But anyway, no, I actually haven't. Cause while I was there, Ola, who's the person behind? Ola Fagerstrom. Hope I pronounce it a second name. . I spoke to him about it and I think I saw early preview design sketches or what it looked like, but I actually haven't tried out the latest tool myself.Chris Adams: Okay. I could talk a little bit about it cuz I gave it a go before this. And there are some previous, there's like prior art that is actually quite useful to know about. So one of the things it does basically is, let's assume if you were to buy a laptop or a gadget or if you're gonna use the Microsoft parlance a surface, for one of these, it basically shows you.Where the emissions lie in the actual creation of this. Cause a lot of the time people might think about what bought a machine, but I now to be, need to be really careful about how I use it, for example, because I might assume that all the emissions are from this kind of use phase rather than the making phase.And the key thing that you learn from it when you were to choose something. See whereabouts you are in the world, how many you might use. If you are like, say, a medium to small, actually, if you basically have, you're working in an organization that's purchased a number of these, it'll tell you what the likely environmental footprint of those is over a particular time.And then if you held onto them for, say, six years, for example, or three years or four years, it'll show you. What the environmental footprint of that might be to own that and to have it for this time here. And this is quite useful because people didn't really think too much about the embedded emissions in electronics for quite a long time.It's only in the last year and a half that it's really become much more of a kind of thing that people focus on. People have typically been looking at, say, the energy more than the actual purchasing parts. And, and it's a French company called BOA Vista, which has created, has been collating lots and lots of data from lots of companies about this.It's a nonprofit. Yeah, and the thing that's interesting there is if you don't have a Microsoft Surface, but you think this is cool, they have similar tools so that you can basically. Pick maybe a Dell laptop or an Apple MacBook or something like that, and then it'll give you some numbers. But the thing that's been a problem has been that some companies have been somewhat reticent about sharing these numbers.So as a result, people have been either they have to like make guesses or they are do not have particularly  useful guidance. So if there's a company sharing this stuff upfront in a kind of structured data fashion, which is necessary for this. And I assume they are sharing it as open data for everyone else to be using, surely Right.Then that's, it's a good sign for you to see this and it helps you understand how useful it is to just hold onto a device for maybe a little bit longer and see how that might fit into some of your plans to basically reduce the emissions associated with the making part of running any kind of digital services.Asim Hussain: I love the work of Bovis on there, and the latest version of the API, I was taking a look at. A day they've done wonders, BA based off of the, as you say, like the incredibly limited amount of data there is out there, but there's a lot of extrapolationChris Adams: Hmm.Asim Hussain: the day, like some of the LCA work that they're using is like 10 years old.Chris Adams: Yes. L C A here stands for lifecycle analysis. Manasi mentioned these things like ISO 14040 and 14044. There's basically complicated methodologies which people use to talk about what the environmental impacts associated with any tools, with building and operating something over its lifecycle. Over its lifecycle.And LCA is the kind of short term for this.Asim Hussain: And actually I hadn't seen the parallels myself, but it seems really obvious right now what Microsoft Surface. Estimator Emissions Estimator is, is basically hopefully a more accurate version of what Bar Vista is giving you because it's providing you with that data. Remember the conversations around this originally, becuase it was based around the idea.If you're an organization with like 10,000 employees and you bought each of 'em a surface laptop, that's a lot of things to keep a track of. And also like those employers are gonna be based in different parts of the world. The laptop's got shipped over from different locations. Did you dive into the tool surface? Whether or not it took that kind of regional variability into account, I dunno where services, let's assume services all get shipped from the US. Would your US employees have less emissions than your European because you're just, the travel is less. Do does it take things of that into account?Chris Adams: So when I was looking at this, what you could see is you could actually, it does show some information about the carbon intensity of different grids, and it does talk about the end of life part of it, but it doesn't mess it by. I didn't see, I, I didn't see so much specifically about shipping. So if I'm in one part of the world, is there an environmental impact of getting it sent over here?For example, proportionally that's relatively small, meaning it's not being flown around, which in some cases it actually, unfortunately can be basically. So it doesn't talk about that, but it does tell you what the environmental impact is from the grid itself. So if you are running something in. I don’t know, let's say Pennsylvania, where there's load of coal, it's gonna say that proportionally the use face is gonna be heavier than, say, France or Montreal.Where like more than 99%, this is Montreal, for example, or like, uh, Quebec. Most of the powers coming from the hydro or nukes. So therefore it's gonna be very relatively low carbon electricity. So it doesn't, does seem, does take that part into account.Asim Hussain: So there seems to be a very unusual correlation between. , low carbon electricity and speaking French. There must be some research there aboutChris Adams: Honestly, I, this is gonna sound a bit weird, but like a significant part of it is in my view, having a real interest in there being a very strong state. So the entire. Thing about, say France being full of nukes on France like using, is because historically they had massive investment in the seventies and eighties in into nuclear power through the state owned systems, which is not really what you saw in other parts of the world.And uh, also you've gotta remember that France didn't really have much of a kind of fossil fuel, didn't have much in the reserves, so they chose to have that as their way. Achieving some degree of energy independence. But the thing that when you see lots of people talk about nuclear these days is like they say, oh, we should be more like France.But that means you have an entirely state owned system where you have a very different structure to how any of this stuff works. And people who tend to be talking about that tend to be the people who prefer to have a smaller state for this stuff. So it's like, okay, do you really want that? Because everything else you're suggesting suggests you probably don't think the government should be involved in all this stuff.Asim Hussain: I think one thing I will state though is that I think it's interesting the way , because I think I will actually, I won't. I won't. Even though I'm very out. My debt, I'm going to carry in a little bit because, I dunno if you know this Chris, but the French energy firm actually owns, I believe half of British gas, which is really fascinating because the.Chris Adams: You're talking Centrica, right? So they own…Asim Hussain: Centrica? Yeah, it's a British castle, the energy, but they're in a significant part of the UK energy market, which is fascinating because you know, Britain privatized the energy market which was sold predominantly to a state owned energy firm in, in France. So  now with the energy challenges that happening across Europe, France is somewhat protected.Whereas anyway, we're all paying like double, triple our energy prices.Chris Adams: Actually, so France over in the last year, there was a big thing about the cost of power going super high in France because while there was historically lots and lots of investment in the previous nuclear stations and what you might refer to as thermal energy, where you basically heat water up to make steam, to turn a turbine, to make, to generate power, what you found was.The, you had all these kind of issues with corrosion and stuff, but also because you had all these heat waves reducing the amount of water available, that meant that it was really hard to keep things cool, which meant things were coming offline. So you end up losing lots and lots of what you would refer to as firm nuclear generation, which put the cost of power really high in France, except that.Yeah. Nuclear thermal. Yeah, basically it wasn't just nuclear, it was any form of thermal energy had this problem because it's all relying on water to keep things running. If you're gonna turn water into steam, the water has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so it didn't increase the prices by nuclear going down and having to burn more coal. More coal and gas. It was just everything increased.Chris Adams: There was just like, there was just a shortfall of power and as a result, the cost of electricity went through the roof really high in France as well. And you saw that manifesting and yeah, this is one thing that you saw a lot of, basically, so what you ended up happening was the French government ended up essentially bailing out the large countries, doing a massive investment at that point, which is somewhat different to how we did it over here, but.Now we can move on. Cause I think we've just gone on off on one actually.Asim Hussain:  There is, I do wanna say one thing. I think more about the, not about what Dallas, let's leave politics for, uh, for. No, we can talk politics, but the one thing I wanted to say that I think is quite interesting what the Microsoft Service Emissions Estimator project, and I think this is parks back also to what we spoke about last week, which is Will Buchanan and his work at Microsoft as well.Ola, I remember meeting Ola initially from this, you know what's called a green team. So this employee led grassroots, sustainably focused individuals inside Microsoft and that's. All I was and from my, where my memory serves. And Ola, please message out and reach. Now you're a correction. The Future podcast said if I'm wrong about this, but you, Ola wasn't in sustainability at the start.This was a personal project. Something that he personally felt was important. Push and push. Years later, it's now being released. And this is what one of my things, and I think actually one of the things that we were really talking about in climateaction.tech, which was employee driven. Work inside organizations is so important.I think probably a lot of what is eventually advertised as like a big corporate endeavor really starts off with a couple of passionate people or one passionate person inside an organization who pushes and pushes until the lever finally moves. And soChris Adams: This is true. The drawdown, you, if you've ever heard the term drawdown, they've got the nice kind of shiny coffee table books. One of the people leading Drawdown labs, I forget her name, damn it. But she, there's a really interesting interview with her on my climate journey and she basically talks about, yeah, I think that employees are one of the kind of untapped, unrealized groups that we need to rely on more to actually see achieve some of the.Asim Hussain: Yep. So next up, we have just a really interesting article that came to our attention on Forbes actually reporting on a. A company called Cycloid,  Green Ops. So Green Ops, we have the term Green Ops mentioned this week. Last week we had dev suss up. So the uh, decision is still not yet made as to which term will win out, but Cycloid Green Ops tool, and I find this Chris, a little bit fresh on, it's called Cloud Carbon Footprint.Chris Adams: Hmm.Asim Hussain: Which, so basically Cycloid have released a tool called the Cloud Carbon Footprint, which measures the cloud carbon footprint of cloud computing. Interestingly, there's a whole other open source project called the Cloud Carbon Footprint, which was exactly the same thing, and it's from ThoughtWorks. So there's a little bit of confusion there.I initially, when I saw that was like, what's going on? Have they bought an open source product? But they're just named it the same as an open sourceChris Adams: Was this the case? I couldn't tell because when I looked at this, I thought, oh, they. I was confused by this as well. Cause I thought, hang on, those, these numbers look somewhat similar. And when I look at the, when I look at this, the screenshots don't look exactly like cloud carbon footprint. But yeah, cloud carbon footprint is, is a term that.Is associated with a relatively well-known and probably like thee most well-known open source tool for this. So I am, I was surprised by this actually. And I'm actually meant to ask the ThoughtWorks I and say, hi, is this you guys? Or has someone actually just rebadged it and provided a hosted service?Because it may well be that, in fact, cuz I, I. We know that's the thing that ends up being used in lots of places. And there are various other providers, like one company is called Green Pixie. They use some of the underlying parts of cloud carbon footprint in the same, and I suspect that this might actually be a.it could plausibly be a kind of view on the existing version of this because if you don't want to run an some infrastructure to work out the footprint of your infrastructure, then I can see why you might wanna have someone else manage that. Because the cloud carbon footprint tool from ThoughtWorks is, it's got some stuff like how to set up with Terraform and stuff and how to run things in type script.And if your team isn't comfortable using type scripts or this stuff here, then maybe it does make sense to use. Uh, hosted service for this. So that's my guess , basically.Asim Hussain: While you were talking, I was double checking the blurb and that's, they actually specifically mentioned that it is based on that very same project, the cloud carbon footprint open source project, which makes me feel good. I was, I was confused a little bit, but that's, Very clearly mentioned in their marketing material.This is based upon the open source project that I was talking about, which is really exciting cuz you're right, it is quite complicated to to set up cloud carbon footprint. It's not for everybody. It is a cloud-based tool that you need it hosted somewhere in order to work. And I believe how it works.Remember how it works, Chris? I believe it works predominantly through billing data, at least the AWS component of it. I remember correctly.Chris Adams: Yeah, there are two ways it would use the information. So the first one was that you could query the billing APIs provided. Large cloud provi providers and that, and based on that, they would say, you spent in the last week, you spent maybe a hundred a thousand euros on Amazon EC two, or Microsoft's equivalent or Google's version of that.And then it would provide a conversion factor to say, for this many hours, it would likely be this. Based on the size of your machine and how long it's been running, and I'm not sure what time, but they might do that depending on if you have that kind of access, basically. So it'll give you some figures like that.And that is the main way that it used to work. I think there is actually an alternative way that you can get the data from the, the, for example, you can also use utilization based approach. So they would read from say, Amazon, CloudWatch, Google's something, stack Driver, all this stuff. Yeah. Whatever.Asim Hussain: The equivalent. The equivalent for Google and that,Chris Adams: Yeah, and I, I actually dived into this cause I opened a Pi, a pr, a pool request on the project because I wanna look through it.It's not actually that complicated to get this information for things which are not just the big three. So as long as you have an idea of how long something has been running and what the kind of utilization is like, how much of the CPU you're using for any of these things, which is exposed by lots of providers.Then you could do this. So Hetzer could do this, Scaleway could do this, Digital ocean could do this quite easily. It's just a case of people not doing that yet. But no, it's open. It'll be really cool to see that. And ThoughtWorks provides some on-prem a service where they'll basically plug this stuff in so that you can have numbers specific from non-cloud infrastructure to have a kind of consolidated view of your emissions from all this stuff.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's good. This is, it's making the technology available to a lot of other people, which is very useful. I think. It's interesting, and I can, I see there's another, there's another announcement in the newsletter. I think it's interesting because Cycloid is a devops organization, I'm, this is more and more in the cloud space.This is, these are the organizations that we're hearing more and more about if you are, or the, not organizations I should say, like providers and providers from DevOps. As Anne mentioned last week and she was quoting Adrian, it's a very much aligned, like carbon emissions reduction is aligned somewhat to the DevOps, to what's the cost reduction and all these other aspects that DevOpsChris Adams: It's also easy to measure, dude, it's also easy to. Numbers from here, apply a number, apply a conversion factor, and come up with another number that you're being told that you need to report against by the C-Suite or the CSR or investors and anything like that. So in many ways you can think of these as a kind of pain reliever, whereas before they were considered like a kind of vitamin, oh, isn't this great?Now you're like, oh. Can this help that person go away so I can focus on my existing work? That's how some of this is actually being presented to people because there are like regulatory drivers for this, for increasingly. One thing that's confusing with this esteem, cuz we were confused by cloud carbon footprint being the name of a well-known project and a commercial service from a totally separate, unrelated organization, and this kind of makes me glad.There is a trademark on some of the green software stuff because I feel that if I'm confused by this, then I suspect other folks would also be confused by this. And I think when you look at other projects like say Firefox for example, or Jango or WordPress, people are a little bit careful about how the name can be used because it might not be obvious to what you use.On the flip side with this, maybe the thing they're going for is saying if cloud carbon footprint is just ubiquitous, like hoovering is, maybe that's the thing you would just say, well, you're just gonna ccf it. Or cloud carbon footprint it. I dunno, but it's a, it let me realize that this conf confusion is only gonna happen more and more as people start thinking about this or have to be mindful of this.Asim Hussain: yeah. Thinking more generously, which is not a usual trait of mine, but just to give the opposite viewpoint. So it also could possibly be seen as a sign of respect. You're a commercial organization, you wanna use a product, and you just name it the same as the open source, so you're not. The fact that they mention it very explicitly in their marketing material also is they're not trying to hide it.But, uh, but yeah, I see your point. Cause this is the Kubernetes, I believe Kubernetes is trademarked, so you can fork it and call it Kubernetes, you can't call it Kubernetes. So Yeah, that's really, yeah. So that's, yeah, I think that's something pretty cool.Chris Adams: a minor segue into IP law. Spoke about the actual project itself. Spoke about the fact that it's open source and can be extended and tagged in various directions.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah,Chris Adams: Yeah, I'm happy.Asim Hussain: I'm happy with that, how we covered that. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah. What's next? How green is your cloud,Asim Hussain: Ah, yes. How green is your cloud? So this is an article on Tech Monitor, and so as you might guess, this article is about the environmental impact of the cloud and just highlights some interesting stats. I always wonder, whenever I read any of these articles, I wonder what stat they're gonna quote.the cloud's impact, cuz there's, it's a wide, the band of, as you could quote, is significantly wide, but they quote, the cloud computing contributes between 2.5 and 3.7% of global carbon emissions. And they are quoting a 2019 study from the shift project. I've seen other stats I've seen as low as 1%. 3.7 I think is one of the highest in terms of current stats.The stat I actually find quite interesting is the one from Eriksson, which is I think is. Interesting because it talks about the growth of orange. So if we do nothing else, I believe in what we're doing right now. By 2040 we'll be, I believe it's 14% of global emissions, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at it.Cuz it,Chris Adams: 14% of global emissions. That's like steel,Asim Hussain: Yeah. That's like all of, almost all of transport,Chris Adams: That's,Asim Hussain: it? Yeah.Chris Adams: I'm struggling with that,Asim Hussain: Are you struggling with that? OhChris Adams: struggling with that being 14%.Asim Hussain: and 14%. That's what we know. We, we are almost certain.Chris Adams: Yeah, that's a, so for context, like shipping, all of shipping, that's like between one and 2%. And so I think agriculture's right, 20 to 30% or so. It's like a, these numbers, they are, we're not very good at like measuring, like keeping an eye on this stuff. But 14% seems incredibly high for us, part of the existing technology sector, right?Not everything is gonna be.Asim Hussain: Just so we're clear, they're not saying it's 14% now it's, it'll be 14% by 2022.Chris Adams: Even then, and that would mean that cloud computing would have to overtake the manufacturing of steel or the manufacturing of concrete as a key emitter. And like you could possibly make the argument that in 40 years, like between now and 2040, that steel will become so clean. and people are gonna shift away from using all this kind of coke and stuff to make steel to go there.And likewise, it's the same with cement, even though cement's been like the significant driver. Yeah, you maybe have that, but I think between now and 2040, like technology is probably one of the easier of the sectors to decarbonize. This seems like someone's taking some numbers and just like basically pointing it.Yeah. Rather than actually thinking what's gonna.Asim Hussain: I can see your point. There's probably multiple Variables at. They're all moving independently, but if you froze some of those Variables and extrapolated out, there's probably an argument to say there's 14%, like for instance, like in the incredibly complicated and lab that exists in ASMs mind that just run an experiment with his thoughts like, I can't imagine the manufacturer of chips is going to.The major part of what that 14% is, it has to be energy consumption. That has to be that in in terms of what that model, it has to be the energy consumption. I cannot see 10% of all global emissions in the world making chips by 2040. And then if you maybe assume the current grid mix and all things out to 2040, and then maybe you can get that argument.If you then have something a bit more complicated, then assumes the grid mix is going to get cleaner by the time it gets 2040. And then things may be balancing themselves out and probably that. That stat probably comes, well anyway, multiple levels of guessing even on my sideChris Adams: All right. I, while you were saying that Asim, I looked up. AndAsim Hussain: looked it up.You looked itChris Adams: looked to a, yeah, I wanted to bring some light rather than just heat into this discussion. This is our Weldon data, which is generally pretty good. Iron and steel is around 7% of global emissions. What we, what we have right now, all right, so it wasn't 15 and agriculture is probably around 18 ish percent, so like I was at the wrong end of the 20 thing.So this still feels. So all of cloud computing being double the footprint of all the iron and all the steel being made, that seems very.Asim Hussain: Chris last week. This is quite interesting cuz. Last week you quoted a stat which Anne found challenging to accept, which is a 7.3 million data centers in the world. And now a stat's been quote. I think what's interesting is there's stats here that boggle the mind because the scale of what we're talking about is really hard for human beings to imagine.I've had colleagues of mine, one of my colleagues gave a, a presentation, which I thought was really fascinating. She took a picture of a rack, and then the, the picture of the room, a rack is a silver rack, a picture of the room. A picture of the building, a picture of the campus, A picture of campus is part of like multiple campuses, and you are already an enormous space, and that's just one of those 7.3 million data centers that exist in the world.So I think that could form part of the resistance that we're finding in our minds as to the scale of where we're in.Chris Adams: One thing that I saw from there, there's like another highlight in this piece that says, despite sustainability now appearing in the top 10 business priorities, only 9% of companies are allocating resources towards sustainability goals. And like I Canditt, thinking you can't have both. You can't say it's aAsim Hussain: course you can.Chris Adams: and then say you're not gonna be.Can you imagine if we said revenue is one of our top 10 business priorities, so we're not gonna allocate anyone's time to chasing revenue inside this organization. Do you see how it sounds? A little bit unconvincing here. Or like a, and then if you look at the companies, let's say Google, Amazon, Microsoft, large companies, then we say, okay, if it's a priority, then why are the emissions continuing to grow every single year?Right? At least between 15 to 20% each of these companies year on year. That suggests it's not as much of a priority as you might be thinking. If we know the science is saying we need to be reducing these year on. . So I've struggled with that part, but,Asim Hussain: I think it's, there's, my colleague of mine recently did some analysis on, you know, this website, net zero tracker. Have you seen Net zero tracker?Chris Adams: uh, I think so.Asim Hussain: They analyze not just net zero, but like other, the various kind of sustainability commitments of organizations around the world. They like score the commitment on a kind of red, green, blue basis and they then score them on, this is your commitment that you've made.Let's look at the plans that you've published for actually how you're gonna meet those commitments. And what's amazing is looking at it, it looks 58% of Fortune 500 companies have set very like green. targets and yet almost all of them, like any form of detail plan as to how to actually meet those targets.So I think like setting targets is, is like a very easy thing for an organization. And in fact I, no, just to, I feel like I might be the one, cause I work in enterprise organizations, so I feel like I have a little bit more, I just have an insight that might not be available outside. And I think that. At some level in an organization, the leadership has got to set the direction of a, of an, of a, of an organization.One of the ways, one, I think the very important first step for an organization is for the leadership to come out very publicly, not privately in an email, which then get ignored, but very publicly say, this is important to us. This is the commitment that we're going to make. So I think that is an important step.That next stuff. I think the money, I don't think people fully understand how money shapes everything. Absolutely everything, and it doesn't even have to be intentional. It's just this is how our company makes money, a, B, and C earns us money. The whole organization is just absolutely geared towards maximizing.That's what a for-profit company is these days. It's an engine to make money, and so all these promises are off to the side of. Rather than the primary thing, and I think this is why regulation is so important, some advice is given to me a while ago, which is that people that all they're focusing in is solving their pains, their pain points, and unless you're causing pain, you're not really going to be solve it.So regulation is a pain for an organization. So they, if there's regulation on sustainability, they will put effort into resourcing it.Chris Adams: Peyton really was a vitamin. Absolutely.Asim Hussain: forces. is a pain. So if your customers are demanding more sustainable features and there's a competitive nature to this or another organization saying we will do it, that's another pain that you, you do it.And I also argue that employee, internal employee forces are also pain cuz it's becoming increasingly the sustainability credential and organization is becoming increasingly important as one of the metrics talent is using to choose to whether or not to work in an organization.Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely.Asim Hussain: say.Yeah. Which counteracts the profit motive. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, actually, so here's how, here's one thing I see when, cuz there's an implication here that perhaps near liberal shareholder capitalism might not be the mis mechanism for us to actually get here. Right? And I won't di go down that particular rabbitAsim Hussain: keep on wanting to go into politics, likeChris Adams: But then, no, the reason I was saying this, cuz there's a good point.I'm assure you. So, for example, we spoke about in technology firms, there is a whole thing about being 24 7 clean energy by 2030, right? This sounds really like a big thing. Microsoft has this, what they call it, 10, 10, 100, I think, or 10, is it? What? Do you know what it is? Is it.Asim Hussain: yeah. It is. I think it is. It's a hundred hundred 24, a hundred percent renewable a hundred percent of the time. I don't, I can't remember.Chris Adams: Alright. I've actually, I did a talk about this, so I'm embarrassed that I don't actually have the particular thing at hand.Asim Hussain: don't think it's, I don't think it should be embarrassed. I think it's should be embarra. Like why is every organization choosing a different brand name for exactly the same?Chris Adams: I don't know. Google mentioned, Google spoke about 24 7 being the key thing that they have and like the key, let, if we just step away from the N, the words people use, it's basically every hour of every day. Being matched with renewable generation is the key idea. And Google was one of the leaders for this saying, yeah, we are gonna do it by 2030.We think it's hard, but we're just gonna manage it. All right. Then Microsoft came in. We are a trillion dollar company. It's gonna be hard. I think we're gonna get there. And then you look, and then earlier on this year, a small energy firm called Peninsula Clean Energy. Based in California, they were like, oh yeah, we're at 99% clean energy matched already, and we're on target to hit a hundred percent by 2025.And here's the model we've used to figure out how to procure this. So this makes me think that, okay, if one organization is able to move, literally doing half the time of these large companies, then it suggests that it could be more of a priority and they could move just as quickly as this other organization, which has far fewer.And I feel like this is why I, this is why like you said about the governing is so important. If it's a priority, you'll actually hit, you'll absolutely talk about this. And just like you said about like the pain thing, I'm really glad that there is now a really good example of a small, not particularly well resourced energy firm going so much faster than these trillion dollar companies, cuz I'm hoping it's gonna accelerate them to do this as well.To an extent, to be fair, some of the funding and some of the work is somewhat funded by some of these organizations, but it does show that if you make it a priority, then you will actually move that quickly, and we totally can do this. It's just a decision that people are choosing not to move as fast as they really need to right now.Asim Hussain: I, I, I agree. I, I've got two points to say. Here I was. One of them is I used to have a statement, which is, if you're working in sustainability inside a large organization, as as quickly as possible, you want to make sure that your work is not being supported through what I call grace in favor. So some executive leader, this is a priority for them, and they're pushing back the tide and pressure of all these other things saying, this is important to me.I'm making sure that Chris Adams has got the resources to focus on sustainability. That's great. And most things start off with somebody doing that. , but you won't get the significant investment unless you kind of align with the rest of the business of the organization. And if that exec leaves, your whole division has just gone.So I always say great. And I think that we should talk about it next week. I think. I wonder if some of the things are happening in Amazon are. Related to that kind of activity. But the thing I was saying, this is maybe like a call to the people who, who work in startups that are listening to this podcast, cuz quite a common piece of feedback I get when, and I talk to a lot of people who are in startups and I understand the pressure of a startup.You're in survival mode. I mean, this isn't, you're not just sitting back, you're like, you're wondering whether you've got enough money for the next six months or next year. And it's sustainability a priority for you. But I think, Chris, you had a really good point, which is, A smaller entity is far more capable of reaching these targets and these goals such as the 24 7 ALI matching target than the larger organizations.If your cloud businesses several hundred billion, it's much harder to reach like some sort of energy just because the market isn't there. You can't even just buy your weight out out of the solution. But imagine a very small cloud operator. It's much easier for them to achieve those kinds of targets. And I would just encourage you to explore that space a bit more because I believe if you were to achieve those targets, there is the market pressure there.There is the customers there who would then choose you over the larger organizations. I think that's a missed opportunity for a lot of startups. I see.Chris Adams: Yeah. I also, proportionally it's not that much, so if you, so I did a talk or I, me and Max Schultzer, he's another one of the members of the Green Software Foundation. We did a really nerdy recorded YouTube video. China basically deconstructing the cloud model to figure out, okay, how much profit is left over If you really were to step on the accelerator to try to actually achieve 24 7 by 2030 and like Amazon and Microsoft is 30% net profit for most of this stuff, there's plenty of cash left over to actually then like redeploy into this stuff and there's so much policy support both in.America now with the infrastructure, the I, the ira, the Inflation Reduction Act, and in the uk uh uh, uh, in Europe as well. Loads of this, like I really feel that this is something that you could, that people could move on and people who aren't, those companies could quite easily actually compete on this, in my view.Anyway, we're going way into something else cause we've got one story left.Asim Hussain: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally in in the news, I think there's a really interesting paper. It's called Counting Carbon, A Survey of Factors influencing the Emissions of machine learning, which is one of our favorite topics of this podcast.Chris Adams: This is cool. This paper, I'm really glad you mentioned it actually. Asim. Yeah. Okay. So Counting Carbon, the idea was there to this one woman, Alexandra, Sasha Luci. She works at Hugging Face in Montreal, Canada, and Alex Hernandez at the University of Montreal. They. Basically looked at something in the region of 500 papers where people were talking about the different machine learning models they've been creating.And they basically, they sent an email and contacted every single one of the 500 authors of all these papers and said, hi, can you share some information about where this was run, what you used and what and how long it was running for? And they basically came up with some figures saying, these are the key things which will affect the environmental impact of machine learning.And they talk about things like say the, the source of energy, the amount of training time that's being used, and a couple of other ones. It's a really nice piece and there are some really surprising things that came out of it. Basically, they broke this into five different tasks, kind of buckets of tasks that these machine learning models would do.So like image classification, so, which is object detection, so that's like picking out a face in a, in something like that. Or machine translation, which is. What is you imagined, like Google and all these tools use question answering and named entity recognition? I'll be honest, I don't work in AI and ml, so I don't, oh, hey.Your named entity recognition is basically through text, pulling out ideas and concepts, so that's what they were doing.Asim Hussain: Adams is the speaker of this podcast. ChrisChris Adams: So that's what they did. And the, there was one thing that surprised me was that of all of these ones, the only thing they saw was of all these ones here, only the image recognition one was the one that there was a strong correlation between the energy use and uh, the accuracy and effectiveness of the models, which was mind blowing for me.Asim Hussain: so what is a difference between those models? Logically, those models should function effectively. Similarly, they're just nodes that you pump numbers in and these weights and all this other stuff. It's just matrix multiplication. What's the difference in the matrix?Chris Adams: I don't know enough about it to really talk about it, but the quote, based on the comparison between carbon emissions and performance, we can observe that the only task in which better performance accuracy has systemically yielded more CO2 emissions was image classification. Really. So that was one of the key things that kind of blew my mind because you might naively assume that in order for you to have better models, you would need to just burn through huge amounts of energy.And it turns out no, that's not actually the case. It's much more about the actual design and how people have actually been putting some of this stuff together.Asim Hussain: Or it could just be those other types of models they could just plate. Plateau. Whereas image processing is like such a complicated thing. What's in an image is probably a lot harder to understand than what's in a body of text, which is a bit more structured. So what does that mean for chat G P T in large language learning models?Because those are more.Chris Adams: This is the thing that was surprising for me because you hear about chat, GBT four, chat, GBT three. You hear like, oh, it's used this much more compute time. Like it's now in the, it's now like maybe a hundred times. There's an implication. It's a hundred times more effective and like this paper is basically saying now that's probably not the case.It may be more effective, but the link isn't as strong as you might think. It's not like a one-to-one thing where. Doubling the amount of computing you throw at something, you increase it by twice as much.Asim Hussain: Oh, sorry. Is your argument is the argument. Models are not going to get much better the more we compute them. Right.Chris Adams: Yeah, the argument is that yes, throwing computing at something can increase it, but it doesn't hold true that it's a kind of one-to-one correlation, and that by doubling the amount of machines you throw at a problem, you double the effectiveness of it. In fact, that's actually the thing they say. That's probably not the case a lot of the time.Asim Hussain: Okay. But the one thing I did catch from reading the paper was they did discuss how, and I think this is interesting for this space as well. The energy source is a really big, the grid mix effectively is a really big cause of the emissions that they, they measured, which ODE 12 for the future.Chris Adams: Yeah, it's it. What this kind of implies is that for something like machine learning where you don't necessarily need, where you're not, it's not like you're not waiting on the other end, waiting for the stuff to come through. You're training something for a long period of time, and it's kind of. It's something that probably is more interruptible than other fields.Right. But that was one of the key things that led to the carbon footprint of the extremely heavy ones, is because not only were there was there lots of computing, but the actual fuel intensity, the carbon intensity of the fuel was actually a significant one as well. And weirdly, for like a significant number, like 12 of the papers, oil was listed as the primary source of power like burning oil, which is just, that blew my mind.I didn't know that was actually. I didn't, I, I don't know where in the world uses oil as their primary fuel for generating power for the grid, basically. But for these folks who are in Montreal, in Quebec where they have 99% plus renewable energy, that's basically a really good place to be running things and.For folks who might be using Amazon stuff, for example, Amazon have a, have a Montreal data center. So one of the most effective things you can do, probably run it somewhere where the energy is super clean. Even if you're not able to say, Hey boss, we don't necessarily need to be running loads and loads of machines.You can say if you're gonna run machines, then running them somewhere where the electricity is very clean. It's probably one of the most effective ways to reduce the environmental impact of this.Asim Hussain: That just made me realize cuz you know, a lot of a, some cloud provider. Do give you information about how much a renewable energy or whatever it is, different data centers use? I believe all of them, yes, I do believe. I think it's only Google, actually. Google provides that data with their market based measures included into it.I'd be very interested to get a list of all the cloud regions around the world with actual grid mixes or average grid mixes. Because to answer the questions like that, because I think one of the things we talk about in the SN and the things is you should be picking, preferably picking just based on the nature of the grid mix, not based on the nature of the offsets that you purchased to, to,Chris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: that'd be just a really simple thing.Chris Adams: Yeah. Okay, so last year we announced where I work an IP to CO2 intensity api specifically to do some of this stuff. Now the thing is the information that is available for free. As in as open data go works at the country level. And for someone like Canada, this is actually quite an interesting one because let's say that you were looking, I'm gonna run everything in Canada.So right next to Quebec is, it's the place where the tar sands, I've totally forgot the name of the province of Canada, basically two provinces right next to each other with radically different carbon intensities of power. So if you just say Canada, you could be running something in. Versus Quebec. So Alberta tar sands, super dirty, super carbon, uh, electricity.Yeah, that doesn't have very green does it. And right next to is Quebec, which is hydro and nukes, which is problematic in its own ways, but very low carbon.Asim Hussain: but are you saying, are you, because like surely what time and other providers, like they provide the carbon intensity data by grid level, not by country. When you mentioned that, what were youChris Adams: So for this one here, I actually think that what time does provide the figures at the kind of grid level. So I think the term is like either a balancing organization or a BA or balancing authority. So they will provide some of these numbers. I think those are the marginal numbers you would actually see, but.As far as I'm aware, I dunno, of any open data source that provides a higher resolution in that.Asim Hussain: source, right.Chris Adams: And that's the thing, like you could be using what time stuff for like e either to experiment with, but as soon as you wanna put them into production, you have to pay for, there's a fee for that. And I don't know where that data is at a kind of free level like that right now.And I think that's a thing that's really missing. Cuz in many cases you gotta ask yourself, how many times do you have to pay for this information? You pay once through the, your use of the energy bills, right? You're paying once there. In many case, you're paying through like taxation, so it to be generated and then to be like repackaged again so you can use it.It feels like surely this should just be a kind of universally open thing that people are able to use, especially if it's like the stakes are this high and it has this much of an impact.Asim Hussain: Yeah, something I think access to this and I, and I love what I think they do. These are great organizations and they have to keep the lights on one way or another, so I, I, I do understand it, but it would definitely benefit the world if a lot of this data was more readily available.Chris Adams: It might actually be with, with Canada, to be honest. I mean, I'm probably just being lazy. Yeah. They provide a usual useful service and there's an API and stuff for it, but this feels like stuff which I. I feel like every single government everywhere in the world should be publishing this stuff automatically as open data because it does, it makes it, cuz you can still provide value added services on top of that.You can still do stuff like that. But for it to be something which is so difficult and so not, not particularly open in lots of parts of the world, is a real problem for the policy discussion, cuz this is actually one thing that, going back to the paper, that the paper mentioned, this paper said, okay, all our models, all the kind of large learning models or machine learning models, There was zero representation from South America or Africa.All right, so that's lit. So all the models published, all the, that were shared in papers were from universities or from institutions in either North America E, either what you might refer to as, say, Western Europe or China, or, or. The kind of North America, more North American continent, and it's not like there's no one living in Africa and there's no one living in South America and they don't have opinions and they're not doing this kind of research.It just means that there's a whole sponge of things that we're missing out on because access to this stuff is not available.Asim Hussain: Okay. Thank you Chris. I think there's one other thing that I just wanna mention before we finish our podcast, which is the meetup program. That we're launching in the Green, Software, Foundation. So one of the things that we would really like for there to be is a global network of people who are just.Shared similar interests. We're meeting up on green software, different places all over the world, and we actually have a Meetup program, which means that we pay for, if you know what Meetup is, a meetup's, a platform which enables people to, to meet up and we pay for the costs of running a group on Meetup and we actually have about 25, 26, 27 meets up groups there.A bunch of 'em are looking for organizers. A bunch of those groups have now become the actively looking for organizers for them. We're actually willing to also, Launch a meetup group in your area and if this is something you are interested in and if you're interested in organizing a meetup group, if you're interested in helping out with a meetup group, if you are even just interested in joining a meetupChris Adams: Speaking for one of the meetup groups.Asim Hussain: for one of the meetup groups.Really anything. I personally have built and grown multiple meetup groups in London and it's incredibly rewarding. Meeting up with people with a shared similar interestChris Adams: realizing they have legs. Yeah. Mostly,Asim Hussain: Realizing they have legs. And especially in this space, I'd say cuz we're in a very challenging space and it can at times be quite hard to stay motivated even sometimes.But I think I find that meeting people with similar interests is a very empowering thing. So if this is something you're interested in, please visit meetup dot Green, Software, Foundation, and you'll find like a bunch of resource information about how to get involved. So that's just the call to action here.If you want to get involved in a meetup program, visit meetup.green software found.Chris Adams: Oh yeah. Cool. And I suppose. Realized with the meter thing you're doing, if you were to choose to run an event somewhere, you've probably got a list of people you could ask already with the Speakers Bureau. So that would make it a bit easier to find.Asim Hussain: Yeah, exactly. That's why we launched the Speakers Bureau because to help the Meetup program, that was one of the primary reasons cuz we, we have a speakers mentioned before, the Speakers Bureau works very closely with the meetup program.Chris Adams: And just as I understand it, the Speakers Bureau, you don't need to be a member of the Green Software Foundation to be part of it, do you? You can be, as long as you've been doing research or you are able to talk about this and confident talking about this field, you can get yourself listed.Asim Hussain: That's exactly right. And the same goes actually for the Meetup program. You do not need to be member of the GSF to be an organizer of a meetup group.Chris Adams: Oh, cool. That's handy. Okay. That's so nice. Everything to end this. So nice I up for that. And I, I think you're listed and I think I'm listed. I can't remember if I am.Asim Hussain: in the speaker's bureau. Yeah, you're listed. Yeah.Chris Adams: Oh, okay. In that case, I guess that's one way to ask if you want me to speak at one of the events you or seem to speak at one of the events or even Anne and.Oh, this is being recorded in February. If there's something happening in March, I might be around to actually be doing a talk in London about that stuff as well.Asim Hussain: So that's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below, or you can visit Green Software Foundation. That's green software. One word. Dot the Symbol Foundation in your browser.If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts,Chris Adams: Five stars. FiveAsim Hussain: star , leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.Bye-bye.Chris Adams: right. Take care everyone. Bye.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit Green Software Foundation. Thanks again and see you in the next.

The Week in Green Software (or TWiGS) is back with a new format! This time host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie and Asim Hussain to talk about news about AI and the environment (with a particular focus on Chat GPT and Bing), the environmental impact of the cloud, the Corporate Sustainable Software Market report, and some exciting opportunities to explore, learn, and contribute to green software. Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterEvents:LF seeking speakers for upcoming Energy Summit / Linux Foundation June 2023 ⋅ Seeking Speakers until Feb 17News:AI can help address climate change—as long as it doesn’t exacerbate it / Fast Company Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” / Simon WillisonThe Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret / WiredWhy we can no longer afford to overlook the environmental impact of the cloud / Computer WeeklyCorporate Sustainable Software Market report explores industry size, share, growth & forecast 2028 / WhaTechSustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps / InfoQHow a Hackathon Is Slowly Saving The World / Will BuchananCO2.js: An Open Library for Digital Carbon Reporting / ClimateAction.techBooks:Bulls*** Jobs by David GraeberPrevious Episodes Mentioned:How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? / Environment VariablesOngoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:Submit Call for Papers / GSF Speakers Bureau Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity SpecificationIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

For our first episode of 2023, we have an episode of The Week in Green Software where Ismael Velasco looks at the dense legislative landscape around green software and technology and energy regulations. Everything from France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation to the UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy; Ismael will help you make sense of it all! Learn more about our people:Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterLegislation & Reports:State of Green Software Report from The Green Software Foundation [3:16]France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation [9:22]The US' Executive Order 14067 Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets [11:33]AWS Environmental Sustainability Impact Report [23:13]ITU Activities & Sustainable Development Goals [30:14]Gartner Survey 2022 [34:14]2021 World Bank Study on Green Public Procurement [36:36]The UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy [38:31]Projects, Protocols & Tools:Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Tool [24:44]ISO 25010 [29:08]Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification [32:46]Talks & Events:2022 World Telecommunications Development Conference [5:04]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

We’ve moved from a more decentralised internet running on centralised power, to a more centralised internet running on more decentralised power. Is this the only computing model of the future? What would a decentralised internet running on decentralised power look like? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also the edge of the grid, and this is an area our two guests Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of the University of Edinburgh have spent quite a lot of time researching. They join host Chris Adams in this episode of Environment Variables as they explore community clouds, datacentres, energy regulation, projects on Islands of Orkney and the book that they’re working on together!Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteDawn Nafus: Website / LinkedInLaura Watts: Website / LinkedInEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterThe SDIAPeople:Rachel ColdicuttNoman Bashir - EcovisorsPhilipp WiesnerLorenzo KristovPapers:Paper: Carbon-Responsive Computing: Changing the Nexus between Energy and Computing by Dawn Nafus, Eve M. Schooler and Karly Ann Burch.Projects:Microsoft Underwater Data Centers in OrkneySolar ProtocolPodcasts:Environment Variables Episode on Carbon Aware ComputingScript Notes Podcast by John AugustBooks:The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley RobinsonLaura’s Book: Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands SagaDawn’s Book: Ethnography for a data-saturated world with Hannah KnoxIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:Dawn Nafus: The implication of green software is not just that it's efficient in the immediate savings, but that you're opening the door to this much bigger infrastructure change that is enormously important.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. On this episode, I am joined by Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of University of Edinburgh, and we'll be discussing community clouds and energy islands. We're shifting from an internet powered predominantly by burning fossil fuels 24 7 in large, centralized generation plants to one powered by a wider mix of decentralized forms of energy, generation.And yet over the last 10 years, we've seen a shift from a more distributed internet to one where computing is concentrated correspondingly into large centralized Hyperscale data centers running 24 7, much like the centralized power plants of before. So we've moved from a decentralized internet running on centralized power to a more centralized internet running on more decentralized power.Is this the only computing model of the future though? What would a decentralized internet running on decentralized power look like, though? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also at the edge of the grid. And this is an area two of our guests have spent quite a lot of time researching to share their insights, and that's what we're gonna dive into today.But before we dive in, let's do a quick round of intros in alphabetical order. My name's Chris Adams. I am the host of Environment Variables. I am the chair of the policy working group and the executive director of the Green Web foundation. I also help manage the community called climateaction.tech, and I'll hand over to the next person particularly, which I think is you Dawn, Nafus.Dawn Nafus: Yes, I am Dawn Nafus. I am an anthropologist over at Intel where I focus on AI governance and responsible ai, specifically with an emphasis on AI's role climate change. I'm also an editor with Hannah Knox of for a Data Saturated World, which looks at the surprising ways that ethnography and data science intersection.So I'll hand it over to Laura.Laura Watts: Chris, thanks so much for inviting us to be here. This is fantastic. I'm Laura Watts. I'm a consultant and an ethnographer of futures, which basically means that I collaborate with organizations, companies, and communities to explore there innovations and how they, and together we might make the future otherwise.And I have a background both in tech cuz a long time ago I used to work in the telecoms industry, particularly mobile telecoms. And I'm also a professor of Energy and Society at the University of Edinburgh. And as part of all that work, I've written a book called Energy at the End of the World an Orkney Island Saga, which is published by MIT press.And that's based on the work that I've been doing for, oh, over a decade in the islands of Orkney, which is islands off the far northeast coast of Scotland. And that's actually also where I live. And I've been talking a bit and working with them on their energy futures, which we'll be hearing more about soon, I think.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Okay, so for the uninitiated, we've used some words like the edge of the internet and the edge of the grid. Before we go any further, I just figured it might be worth just putting that out to see what that might mean in this context to basically anyone who's up for answering that.Dawn Nafus: The cloud is somebody else's computer. It raises interesting questions about what we mean by the edge. So if you think about this common distinction we make right now between, often when we say the word cloud, what we really mean is. The big Hyperscale, large infrastructural sort of entities where you can rent space, compute power, all the rest of it.But what we're seeing now actually is also some serious growth at, in what my colleagues and computer scientists call the edge, meaning computers that live outside of those large spaces. And there there's a continuum really between the large data center. Large-ish by normal people. Standards that might be at a hospital or a bank, right, all the way through to servers that might actually be in mobile phone towers all the way through to smaller and smaller servers to something smaller that might be in somebody's basement. But all of those things right now we can think about as an edge in computing.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. That's really helpful. And Laura,you mentioned about the edge of the grid.Laura Watts: Yes, so that's actually where I live. It's a geography, it's a place. So we talk about the edge of the grid, we talk about it, or at least I talk about it in two ways. The first way is the fact that at the edge of the grid, we're in places where the infrastructure, the electricity infrastructure, the grid is more precarious by then when you have storms coming in, or the cables say between islands, so undersea cables might break because they have a lot of tension on them.So places at the edge of bridge, you got precarious infrastructure. The lights go out occasionally. But unlike places in central areas, there's not this media panic or kind of social media meltdown. People just shrug and get on with. So what that means is you've got places where energy and electricity are visible, and people know where their energy and electricity comes from because they're either fixing it or they're maintaining it or they're thinking about it.Imagine if you're living in a very stormy environment. When I mean by storm, it's hard to stand upright because that's the kind of level of energy there is in the air. You tend to think about energy. It's something that is part and parcel of your everyday life. You feel it on your body. So when I think about places at the edge of the grid, I mean it in these sites and locations where energy is part of your everyday thinking.So of course, therefore you're gonna be thinking about. I've got visible infrastructure. I know where it is, but I'm also gonna think about how to generate it. So in places like Orkney, like I said, off the northeast coast, we've got 22,000 Islanders. Think a lot about energy. Very stormy. Long way away from London, closer to the Arctic Circle.So there they've been generating huge amounts of wind energy, cuz I talked about storms, but also we have wave and tide power and we also have been doing hydro storage to think about ways to store this enormous amounts of energy we're generating in the islands. So that's one effect of being at the edge. You think about the energy, you generate the energy.The second aspect of being at the edge is that the actual renewable energy resources. So environmental resources, how it's often talked about is at these geographic locations. So if you look on a map, where would you go for where it's windy? Where would you go for where the tidal resources or the wave resources you are going to the edge of the map.So there is a correlation between being at the edge of the infrastructure and the grid and where the environmental resources, where the waves are big, where the tides are strong, where the wind is very powerful or where there is a large amount of sunlight. So that's the other aspect of the grid. And those two things are what's really changing the shape of the grid as we go forward.Cuz you're shifting from this. As you talked about, Chris, we went from this centralized fossil fuel power structure. We've got big power station outside cities, and suddenly we're going, huh? Our grid is now the wrong shape because all our power's being generated a long way away from our cities, right? It's being generated in these wind turbines offshore.It's been generated by other locations, and that has huge implications because the grid is no longer the right shape because we're having to change it as we go into the future.Chris Adams: Interestingly, one thing you mentioned all the technology there, actually Laura was for the kind of like green software nerds; that's all energy tech that all that people are putting in data centers right now actually. And if I understand correctly, I think you had something you might want to come in on that actually, cuz I could see you nodding away there just then.Dawn Nafus: Yes. Yeah, no, I do wanna build on that in the sense that if you think about, there's two things to think about here. One is, if you look at the geography of Hyperscale data centers, you can start to see something of a movement, right? You can see, for example, data centers going in the Pacific Northwest where I live, which is really in part about hydropower.Some wind to a certain extent. You can start to see things starting to move, but it's also connected to. Other kinds of infrastructure, other kinds of considerations like latency, right? So we're not yet at the edges in the way that Laura describes it in, in her work on energy edges. But the other thing that also comes to mind is often when we're doing edge computing, it's true that energy becomes more about salient consideration, right? So you might actually be on battery and have to do a ton of tricks to get your compute down to something you can actually manage, right? You might be running a camera for whatever reason, and you might wanna actually do the computer vision at the camera and not move a bunch of data that you don't need to be moving around specifically either because there's an energy consideration or there's just, it just takes a ton of resources to be able to do that.So we are baby stepping into this new world where energy is distributed in ways that are different from what we're used to. But we're in no way there yet, right? We're not in those kinds of places where the wind really is serious, or where in the middle of the Australian desert where the sun is, no joke, right?So it's too slow for my liking in other words.Chris Adams: Okay, and if I understand it correctly, some of the work in the Orkney Islands is actually seeing how some of the communities are using some of this technology and seeing how they relate to some of this. Is that the case, Laura? This is what some of your research was were you were doing before with the Orkney Cloud. Is that about right? Or maybe you could come in here at this point there.Laura Watts: Yeah, though I think that picking up from what Dawn said, and this answer your question, we're in this really exciting and important moment where we've gone from cloud computation being about making infrastructure invisible. So if you're a developer, you don't have to think about it. But as we move to adjust energy transition, we're moving to thinking through, okay, we've gotta get, think about where our power comes from. Then suddenly we've gotta understand that question. Where does our power come from? Where does our energy come from? You know, the cloud can no longer be something that's untethered from the energy infrastructure beneath it. It's part of the protocol stack in some ways. So one thing we've been doing in Orkney, which has been quite fun, is asking this question of, and it goes back to your, what you were saying, Chris, but the data center industry is already thinking about where he gets its power from.That's absolutely central PUE is everything. So what's happening is this reflection on moving away from just power purchase agreements, which is, as I'm sure your listeners know, how data centers try and often power their data centers from renewable sources as they cut a deal to buy renewable energy or invest in renewable energy.But what's been going on in Orkney is to, rather than basically handing the problem off to a problem of the market. They've been thinking about different kinds of business models and that's where it's things, it starts getting really exciting because instead of it being about, okay, we're just gonna cut a deal and then some, again, distant unknown geography generating the electricity forest or an offshore or onshore wind farm or through wave or tide power, that's something I'm quite interested in - marine energy. But maybe there's things about where we could have a local community and cut a deal direct with them, and that money goes to a charity in the islands that support in the island community. So you can start thinking about fun ideas like fair trade energy or buying direct from wind farmers, literally.So all these ideas, which we know that we have, but suddenly they become relevant to the energy and data industry. So some of the things we've been doing at Orkney through various projects, We've run an Orkney Cloud project, which was a collaboration with Mozilla, which was great. We've also had a project called Reflex Orkney, which is a government funder project to demonstrate a flexible energy system, and you'll have to ask me to explain terms.If I get to geeky, it happens. But what we've been doing is saying, normally you manage a grid, so these power purchase agreements might go to renewable energy generation. And grid management at a grid scale. So you're looking at grid scale batteries or you're looking at something like switching turbines on and off what you might do through a smart grid.But in Orkney, we're going 22,000 people. We're looking much smaller. So we're thinking about managing things like home batteries or electric vehicle charges or micro wind turbines, much smaller community scale things, hydrogen electrolysis, which we have connected to some of our community wind turbines, managing all these things.To balance the grid. So it's a different kind of management and it enables the communities in Orkney to think about how they can take control of the grid and also to generate energy renewably. So Orkney generates 120% of its electricity needs from renewables. So it's got this amazing resource. And the first stage is doing that, doing like energy as a service type ideas, or think about community asset management.But then the question is, what if some of those assets weren't just energy assets like a home battery. Maybe it was a server or maybe it was a data center container sitting on a beach plugged into the community windturbine, and you're managing that as an energy asset. Suddenly things become really interesting. We haven't done it yet, but it's an exciting idea.Chris Adams: Okay, so as I understand it, there were some work with, say, Microsoft having some submerged data centers in various parts of Ireland. This is adjacent to some of that, perhaps. Is that the case?Laura Watts: Yeah, what you're talking about is something, again, listeners might have heard about. They might have heard about Orkney, because Microsoft who ran the project, Natic said that Orkney had just become one of the most exciting places in tech. And so it was an underwater data center filled with nitrogen, and it was plugged into the European Marine Energy Center test sites.So it's on. Planted on grid, running off the green electricity in Orkney, and it was underwater for, I'm not sure how many months, maybe a year. You know, listeners can look up project online. And that's about demonstrating the feasibility of underwater data centers for reliability purposes and obviously cooling.Cuz data centers get hot. That's why talking about them. Cuz it's all about energy and it's all about cooling in Orkney obviously that partly inspired us, but we were also thinking about you could just simply have a server or you could just again know data centers come in containers. What if we plugged them in to our grids and had a conversation about how we think about data processing and data storage in a much more tighter relationship with renewable energy generation. Because as we know, renewable energy only gets generated when the wind blows. We have to either store it in hydrogen or other forms of storage or we have to change the way and when we process, cuz renewable energy needs to be shifted in time and space.It needs to be moved on the grid over space and it needs to be moved in time to when you need it. And that's maybe something which you can start linking up with the data processing and storage.Dawn Nafus: One of the reasons why I wanted to think about this topic with Laura is I had separately started doing some work in carbon aware computing, which I understand you had a whole podcast on, on this very topic. And encourage folks to listen cause it really was wonderful. But if you haven't, the short version is that it's about finding techniques to run your workload when and where the renewable energy is available, right? So when the wind is blowing, where the sun is shining, all the rest of it. We've been exploring in inside our labs how to do this with AI training, which is a good thing to do in a carbon aware way because you can wait, right?The data scientist might be able to wait an hour, might be able to wait a couple days, cuz these things take sometimes weeks to train up. One of the things we quickly learned is carbon awareness is, yes, it's a scheduling problem, right? So there's some software that folks can build, folks have built about when and how to place your workload and all the rest of it.But it quickly becomes not just a scheduling problem, right? So all the sudden you start to see, oh geez, the grid in California, in fact does look really different from the grid in Oregon. Looks really different. From the grid in New Mexico. So all of a sudden you start to have a relationship to place that you wouldn't otherwise.Right? And you start to think in these terms that don't think folks tend to think in reading Laura's work, you can then ask the next question, right? Which is, maybe it's not just about the locality and the grid. There actually might be opportunities. To start to think more deeply about who's benefiting and who's actually running what and where workloads are actually going.Right? And we can start to make choices about that. So as another example, one of the things that's really been heating up right now on social media, you might imagine is with the recent changes, shall we say to Twitter, there are a lot of folks like myself who have moved over to Mastodon. And on Mastodon, we've been having a rip roaring conversation about what would it take to actually stand up a Mastodon server in a place like Orkney where stuff is in fact community run and where there actually is community benefit to how the energy actually works and how it's organized. And there are a million challenges to that that we can talk about, but that's that next step. Once, once you get beyond scheduling, right, you can start to think about all these other social implications that are far deeper than just, you know, writing some scheduling code.Chris Adams: So if I understand that correctly, Dawn, you're talking about like once you've solved some of the kinda scheduling problems, I suppose there's a chance to then layer over kind of higher level services, like some of the things you might associate with having to have in a more traditional kind of data center.Like for example, we were using Twitter and that's considered like one way that people actually use to communicate and coordinate with each other. And you're saying like once you've got that, It's plausible to think maybe there's other ways you could create other kind of, for want of a better word, that I'm borrowing from say, some work by Rachael Coldicutt, like community technology, like provision of other kind of services that you might otherwise be getting from very large companies, like say Google Drive and stuff like that.That's what you're alluding to there?Dawn Nafus: Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't have to be that way all the time, right? Certainly when my colleagues are training their ai, they're gonna very much want it on their own servers for very good sound reasons, right? But the world is not all that. And so we can start to think about, okay, where does stuff go? To whom does it go, and what are you actually doing on those servers?And that's when you can start to think about localities, communities, and ultimately who's benefit.Laura Watts: I thought it might be really helpful for listeners to understand that how this kind of like connects together and how the community might benefit from A to B. So if we're thinking about doing some kind of data processing on a server or in a data center, basically that requires energy, it requires electricity, right?It requires energy in terms of cooling. But it also requires electricity in terms of just powering the kits. So that's the first bit. If you're basically then putting a load on the electricity grid, so that's what your data process and does, it generates a load on the grid. That means a local community can sell electricity, either direct to the data center or server, or is gonna sell electricity to that distributed part of the grid.So the other thing to realize is grids are getting more decentralized in the way they're managed, but by creating a load on the datacentre, By doing your processing on a very particular data sense, you potentially allow a local community with a community owned or locally owned energy generator. As I said, like wind is obvious, but it might be solar, it might be other things, or it might be something that's more complex like a, a flexible managed system to sell electricity and to gain revenue.Because when a community or an individual sells electricity at a small scale. They generate money from what's called the feed in tariff. So you get money by selling electricity and therefore you can generate profit and revenue from the sale of electricity, and that money can be used to reinvest in local communities to support public services or to support local initiatives.There's lots of things that can do, so I just wanted to paint it out end to end so people can understand why there's this direct relationship between. Not community benefit in some random cash sense, but real organized, governed. Cuz often these organizations at a community level have very clear governance about what decisions they're gonna make, about what they're gonna invest in.So these are the things that make it a very powerful potential kind of business model. And Dawn talked about the Mastodon example because that's a really nice level to think about because most of the time, certainly in energy, it's about households in tech, it's often about users. Things are thought about as individuals.Or it's the Hyperscale, huge data centers, big stuff. But when we start thinking at community at, you know, the fediverse level, we're thinking about groups of people. And that's a really interesting place to think about.Chris Adams: I see. So what you've prescribed, Laura, there's actually another one of the Green Software Foundation members called the S D I A. They're the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. They've got this notion, which they refer to as digital power, which is, if you imagine there being like a feed in tariff for electricity, they basically conceive some of the kind of primitives of computing, say storage or compute or networkers, there'sanother kind of building block that they refer to as digital power that you put together to build other kind of applications on top of it. And what it sounds like you described there is if organizations are able to control if they're, instead of just actually like, say, generating their own power, it's plausible that they might be to do something like generate their own kind of digital power if you want, and provide something which is maybe slightly higher value that they could then use as a kind of basis for building services or things to meet some of their own community technology needs.Laura Watts: It's a really interesting idea, so I'm gonna look into that. Chris, that's awesome. I think one of the things is really interesting, something that Dawn and I have talked about is also the challenge of expertise. Cuz the place where I work in ney has this huge amount of electricity and energy grid expertise.What it doesn't have so much of is basically expertise in data processing infrastructures, you know, InfoSec. It just doesn't have as much expertise in that because Orkney has a history of North Sea oil and gas, so it's got its long energy history. So a lot of the things you are talking about I think are incredibly exciting, but the piece that's almost underneath that is how do we get the expertise or bring the expertise or bring training and understanding of those things to the right location?So that's one of the reasons that Dawn and I have had in having this conversation. It's a, okay, so we have all expertise in the energy industry. It's cultures of keeping the lights. And then there's other sets of expertise in tech, which is thinking through issues of carbon aware computing, but is often at a very different game as different kinds of expertise.So how do we bring these?Chris Adams: You shared this enticing term, a digital blacksmith with us before, is this for some of the references or something else? Cause I heard that before and I, or just this idea of it. Addressing some of these skill gaps of people who might maybe know their way around energy but not computing or vice versa. We still have this kind of gap to create some of this.Dawn Nafus: Yeah, Yeah and I think not everybody needs to be a software person necessarily to bring it back to the Macon example. And we might be able in a one off sort of a way, actually find the right people, right? Our networks are pretty big. Your listeners might in fact want to jump in and say, Hey, I'll stand something up over on Orkney.But then it raises this question of, okay, what about these other corners? Other places where people might have onsite renewable energy of a kind and say, yep, I'm very happy to have some sort of server equipment in here. But what next? And so they're having some sort of abstraction layer or something where in a sense you're abstracting enough away so that folks need to know just enough to get done what they want done.So you don't wanna abstract away the location in the way that Hyperscale currently does, right? You want some of that visible. But you know enough, we are actually getting into somebody's server in a safe and secure way, and doing that kind of orchestration with the energy that's important, and that's something that is easy and available off the shelf.Chris Adams: So there's two projects which spring to mind when you talk about it. Actually. One of them is the solar protocol, which I'm getting lots of nods here on the podcast. It's a project which is a kind of collaborative project of various Raspberry Pi's with batteries and solar panels distributed all around the globe with the idea being that the website that has the most sun and the highest amount of charge and a battery will be the website that serves whatever website is actually hosted with the solar protocol. And for a while, that's literally just been one website, but they had a hack day a few months back where they actually started talking about the underlying technology. And basically the underlying technology is a raspberry pi with an Apache server, really reassuringly boring technology that you can run WordPress on.And they now have an open project to start, hosting new projects on this distributed like a, you can, like super green CDN, I suppose is what you might refer to the solar cdn. That's one, one project they have. There's another thing that I've come across in the uk, which may be of interest. There's a company called Green Cloud, and I've taken advantage of the fact that, yeah, most computers have quite a lot of excess power now, excess computing power.So the idea would be that if you have a machine with spare computing capacity and you have say like rooftop solar or stuff like that, you can add your computer as a node to a, basically a set of serverless style tools. So the, you have something which feels a lot like the kind of serverless tools that you do have, but you know for sure that you're running it on entirely with green power or basically a kind of mini rooftop, solar powered data center inside someone's home.So this idea of distributed computing, there's a few interesting examples in the uk, but I would love to hear from more, because that's solar protocol is actually more like American and globally, but these are two ones which I immediately start thinking about when you mentioned actually Dawn.Dawn Nafus: Yeah, I think they speak to two things. One is, you know when the necessary thing just becomes so evident, right? You, you tend to see it cropping up. Here and there and everywhere. But I think it also speaks to, you mentioned boring servers, . But I think it, it speaks to the need and the importance of doing the boring parts of green software development to making sure that your code is what it needs to be, right. That it's not collecting excess data that you actually don't really need, or that you've architected it in a way that you know makes sense for the infrastructure that you've got, because that infrastructure is changing, right? And so the software that's gonna run really well on a solar protocol or the other infrastructures that you mentioned, right?Those things have to be developed for and kept in mind as you're building stuff. So the, you know, the implication of green software is not just that, it's efficient in the immediate savings. But that you're opening the door to this much bigger infrastructure change that is enormously important.Chris Adams: So it's not just efficiency. There's a piece of about resiliency related to that as well.Dawn Nafus: Absolutely. Absolutely. You're making it possible to be resilient, right?Chris Adams: Okay. This brings us to a nice question about, okay, what this actually means for a natural developer and how this might be different to developing for, say, the cloud like you might have had before. I know that there is one paper that was released recently. Uh, Oh, God, I totally forgot the name. It's, I think it's, Nolan Bashir.I'll need to check. It's this notion of an ecovisor. Basically, we have hypervisors, which basically take a resource, like a large computer with a certain amount of hard drives and stuff like that, and split that up into a set of virtualized resources. The concept behind an ecovisor is to do the same thing, but with power.So rather than just having a steady supply of power that you come in that you just don't really have any real understanding of. It's instead, you have power split into kind of three kinds of forms of power. You'd have grid power where the carbon intensity might change over time. There's a renewable onsite power, which is very low carbon, but it's somewhat variable.And then there's this notion of like battery power, which is coming from something local that you might be able to design with. And this idea is that if you have an idea of what capacity and what quantity you have of each of these going forward. Then you can design with this in mind to make the best use, reduce the carbon intensity of the software that you're using by either using a certain amount of battery over a certain amount of time, or if there's the cases where you have an abundance of power, you might say.Just shell out like a set of extra subprocesses to use that kind of resources. That's the only example I've seen so far. But I would love to know if there are any other ones that you folks have come across, cuz that was a really cool idea and I've only found out about it from one of the previous guests, Philipp Wiesner actually, when he, he shared a link like Chris, check out this cool paper. It's awesome.Laura Watts: It sounds really cool. I think for me what it highlights is this kind of coming together are two very different sets of expertise and development of different systems. So you've got the kind of like the eco advisor concept, and I'd be really interested, I haven't read the paper to see how much that's in conversation with people who are doing grid transmission and things like active network management systems, and flexible management systems. So people are working inside DSOs and DNOs, you know, on grid who are struggling at the moment to figure out these really important questions of how you manage your grid assets cuz you've gotta switch stuff on and off and you've gotta be able to balance it and you've gotta know as much as you possibly can about your wind turbine and how it's operating and about your kind of various different, I'm talk, I talk about it as assets, but essentially load or whether it's batteries and you talk to a really nice categorization there.So the question for me is like, how do we bring these two together? Because there is enormous expertise that goes back decades that's trying to address some of these issues. And then if you look at, say, the UK government's white paper, it reads on energy grid transmission and the kind of like energy future.It's talking a lot about data. It was like, we need to think about open data. There's the open data task force that's trying to think about this because all the things that are raised in that paper only work if you can get the data from the asset, you need to know about the battery, somebody else, they need to manage that.And some of that exists. I mean, we've been trying to do this in Orkney with the Reflex Orkney project. Because we're trying to take the data from the home batteries, the micro wind turbines, all these things have apps. They will have APIs. We can get that data, and then we need to basically be able to manage those things on the grid.So the first piece is, can you get the data you need? And that's not straightforward or trivial. And the second thing is also regulation. And Dawn, you just talked about really dull things like the dull side of green computation. I wanna talk about regulations. So before your listeners feel like I'm about to give a snoozefest, regulation is one of the biggest challenges to what we're talking about for energy and data and thinking about how we do things like the ecovisor, and that is manage assets because you need to be able to have permission from the regulator to basically switch these things on and off or be able to have any impact on the grid, because keeping the lights on is an absolute commitment. So if you're going to start changing the load, if data's gonna get into this space and thinking, how do we write code for using different amounts of energy sources, that's gonna change the load on the grid. And that starts getting into regulatory issues.And it seems like a dull thing, but actually it's a really important space to start talking about because we can have huge impacts on what the grid looks like. What does a data electricity grid combined look like in the future? That's a regulatory and governance question as much as it is a technical; how do we shove the data about and change what the software looks like?Dawn Nafus: Yeah, and just to highlight here, in a sense, data figures at two levels. One is. The data that you need to pull this off at all. Right? The instrumented assets that allow you to put stuff where it needs to go and what granularity that has, how that's governed, right? All the rest of it. But then also there's the data that you're shipping around and a straightforward example of how somebody developing software might develop differently if we did have something like, uh, This eco advisor thing or whatever it is, just in the face of changing energy situations.One of the things we're starting to learn with our carbon aware AI training project is even just how you develop your training experiment. It makes certain amount of assumptions, right? If you assume that energy is just on and you just run the thing, you build it one way, right? You don't really care too much about pausing, right?For example, which you might, if your energy is intermittent, right? As another example, you might not care too much about where the data is in relation to the compute, unless you're really pressed for time, in which case you really would. But if you're architecting the training code such that you actually know where the data is in relation to where the best place for compute is, well, You've gotta take this into account in your model, right?Like how it's gonna train, right? So once you all those options open up, then there are implications for how you're developing machine learning models, right? And those are just the simple ones, right? And we're learning what those are as we go along, but I suspect it'll get more interesting as time goes on.Chris Adams: That's really interesting what you just said because that's the first time I've heard people talking about fighting data gravity. The idea that everything is up, just being in one gigantic big box out of town data center. Like if you design it differently, then you need and have that, there's a way you can basically design away from that. The gravity issue essentially, right?Dawn Nafus: Right. Exactly. Yeah. And there might be dynamic choices, right? There might be a time and a place where you look, the data gravity is just so big. It's not worth me messing around with the grids greener over there. Right. It's just not right. You know? You know you're gonna have to do. Training 10 times over , right?You might want to move stuff wholesale. You might wanna know actually what the networking costs are in between in case you have to shuttle, right? There might be a moment where the grids are running renewable energy in such a way that actually it's worth your while to shuttle. Again, these are things that we're just exploring, but yeah, it, it might not be the same type of training, you know, everywhere for everyone.Chris Adams: This is really interesting when you talk about this cuz this, this keeps coming back to some work by Lorenzo Kristov. About basically taking the lessons learned about computer science, like Law of Demeter and not having to see every single thing or basically applying lots of the ideas from computer science to grid design.This sounds like really interesting. I wanna just check, uh, Laura and Dawn, you folks have been working on a book. Okay. You've been thinking about this for a while and I understand that you've been putting together a book or something around this. Is there a chance you might be to talk a little bit about that?Then maybe we'll wrap up for the last few things cuz there's a few questions about what, what you're listening to and looking at right now. And I'm curious about this book now that sounds like there's some work going into this.Laura Watts: Yeah, definitely. I think the first thing to say is that all the things we're talking about are the things that we've been thinking through because there is this extraordinary. I wanna say most like it. It's not so much a collision, but there's this entanglement of really important between energy and data.Particularly important when we go through to this change to renewable energy. It's having an impact on data, and we can think about what the future looks like for this combined energy and data industry. Dawn, you were just talking about ai. One of the things that you and I have also talked about is an author respect for computing as a whole.You know, data is, So I formally have a physics degree way back when, and that, and it leads me with a permanent understanding of the fact that when you talk about data, it's basically just an energy, it's an energy difference between a one and a zero, right? That's all it is. So, you know, whate, whatever you're storing any data, whenever you are doing any processing, you are always using energy and that has huge implications for whether you decide to make an AI at all, whether you decide to store data at all that we have, terms like data lake and all these kinds of things, right?That seems to give the implication that data is some kind of inert object or it's just sitting there and of course, no. Every data that you store costs energy, and that has an implication to the environment. We can sit here and we can say that's bad, but the conversation we're having today is exciting because we go, actually, we've got lots of really smart ideas about what we might do about that.We don't have to just shrug. That's really where the book came from, this sense of we've got this interesting combination of industries. That are coming together because there was a shared issue about the fact we know we need to use energy much more smartly and that requires data and energy together.And so we've got these kind of closed loop issue. And that's really where we started off having the conversation and it led us through things like you heard at the beginning we're ethnographers, which means that we think about issues like culture because that informs the way you think you can imagine a future and build a future based on your experiences of where you come from.Well, originally you might think there's a big difference between tech and energy because energy is about keeping the lights on. It's very conservative, it's very risk averse. And you know, the traditional idea of the tech industry, it's move fast and break things. It's alpha, beta, ship that really doesn't work in the energy industry.And then Dawn, you and I started talking about that. They're actually much close than that. Yeah, I just Dawn, you were talking about data centers in particular, being much closer to the energy.Dawn Nafus: Yeah. As computing has become more and more an important infrastructure in our everyday life, in the same way that energy is right, things have started to go in that direction, right? We really care if you're running a data center, you really care about keeping uptime, keeping your service level agreements, all the rest of it.If you're in networking, which is computing, right? Same principle holds, right? You don't want packets dropped and things going down. So things are running a lot more like an infrastructure and not just bits of code here and there. And that's important. So there is a sudden point of convergence and that's also interesting.So again, what we're trying to do in this book is to really think about, okay, what are the best of both worlds that are really gonna help us get through this energy transition?Laura Watts: Just an example of things that the data industry knows about data privacy. We've had years of worth of thinking about this. We just talked about ai. We knows about this stuff that's really new to the energy industry. Energy industry's got smart meters, it's got home batteries. It's working with personal data, but there's not a lot of experience of thinking about these issues.We can start realizing actually there's a lot of benefit to bring them together and sharing the expertise across them. And then in the energy industry, certainly in Europe, there's a commitment to making sure you keep the lights onto vulnerable customers and knowing who the most vulnerable people are and making sure they aren't without electricity.So that ethical attention. Is something we can bring to potentially the data industry, for example. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things that you might be able to do. And all the things we talked about in this podcast were these different kind of business models, different ways of thinking about meso levels of scale ways of thinking through energy and data together, and the flexible management of assets and data.These are all the kind of things we're thinking through and the kinds of scenarios for, for what a future might look like. That isn't where renew. Can run the grid and can run data and are an energy mix. I've talked about lots of different energy sources already, but there's a huge number of different ways you can generate energy around the world and that you know is enormous potential that data can really thrive from.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Before we go, let's get the name of that book. Before we go so we know what, what to be looking for. Is there a working title or is it Or, or something to look out for?Laura Watts: We do not have a working title at the This is the most exciting thing because of the fact that the, your listeners are getting literally hot off the press ideas, but what you can do is actually you can get the precursors. So I have a book, which I mentioned, energy at the End of the World, an Orkney Island Saga, which is published by MIT Press, and that is available, it's published in 2019 won various awards.It's written for a broad audience. It's intended to explain what's been happening so innovatively in Orkney, how and why, and gets into some of these issues. And Dawn, you also have a book out as well.Dawn Nafus: I do, I have a couple, so there's one. On the relationship between ethnography and data science called ethnography for a Data Saturated World with Hannah Knox. There's also some earlier work on the quantified self movement and self tracking and all things to do with keeping track of both your body and the environment that it lives in.This will be a new adventure for me, certainly, but I'm looking forward.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Dawn. So I'm just gonna wrap up now. So I'm gonna ask you with one question. Is there a book or a podcast that you're listening to or reading right now that you'd like to share with people?Dawn Nafus: I'm certainly hugely inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, which I think really does a beautiful job of articulating what it might look like to take climate seriously and all of the social repercussions of doing so.Laura Watts: And I think that for me, one of the podcasts I've been listening to recently is actually about the kind of practicalities of writing. So it's called Script Notes. It's a podcast which is for screenwriters and, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So you seem might seem quite distant. It's a podcast by John August who's a film script writer and also Craig Mason, who is known for Chernobyl, who was the showrunner and and script writer for Chernobyl.But the thing that, the reason why I find that so helpful and inspiring as myself as an author and writer is that many of us are actually writers. So all academics are professional writers. Many people are writing reports and words have enormous power. I mean, obviously words take power to transmit them.Literally they cost energy to transmit, but also the style of writing we choose changes. How effective what we say can be. And I think a lot as an author about choosing the right words, about making sure the words are most effective they can be. Because whenever we're choosing to write, even if you're writing kind of a technical manual, it sounds an odd thing to say, but I think our words can really change the world.Even when we're writing something quite simple, we, we transmit a lot of knowledge to the things that we say, whether it's here through podcasting, but also the actual written word itself. So I find that as script notes is yeah, really helpful for kind of reminding people for paying attention to the editorial process and thinking about the power of words.Chris Adams: Wise words to end the podcast with then actually, Laura, thank you. Okay, we've come up to the hour and folks, I've really enjoyed this. So thank you very much for beaming in from the various parts of the world, from the Orkneys to California, and folks, I'll probably see you again on a future Green Software Environment Variables podcast.Thanks folks. Take care ourselves. Bye.Dawn Nafus: Thanks for having us on. Bye-bye.Laura Watts: Appreciate it. Bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get to your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation In any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Welcome to Fact Check on the Environment Variables podcast! Fact Check is a new segment where we take a deeper dive into the bigger questions in a one-to-one discussion with a special guest. Host Ismael Velasco, is joined by EV regular Sara Bergman, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, and an individual contributor to the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity project. They discuss Sara’s green software journey, the Software Carbon Intensity ISO standard, why it excludes carbon offsets, and fact checking what that tells us about offset-based green software claims, from Google to Blockchain.Learn more about our people:Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / TwitterIsmael Velasco: LinkedIn / TwitterEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterThe GSF’s Software Carbon Intensity Specification Microsoft’s Green Design PrinciplesMicrosoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11)Microsoft’s Sleeping Tabs for EdgeBrowser Plugin: Tab SuspenderTim Frick’s MightyBytesIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Sara Bergman: It gives us the software practitioner a way of evaluating if a future change will be good or bad. If an older implemented change was good or bad, it allows us to find the biggest culprit. Sets us up for success in terms of being able to change our software. And I think that's what makes it important because it, it gives us leverage.It gives us opportunity for room to move, I guess, to do something, to not just stand there and be like, okay, now what?Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.Ismael Velasco: Hello and welcome to the first episode of Fact, check a new segment in Environment Variables. I am your host Ismael Velasco, and I am thrilled and inspired to be welcoming Sara Bergman to our home.Sara Bergman: Thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here and I'm very honored to be on this this first episode. So thank you so much for having me.Ismael Velasco: It's great. And for our listeners, the format that we've had in the past for Environment Variables is where you have a host and several panelists, and you've been a regular. But this will be the first time that you're interviewed one on one as part of fact check. The goal of fact check is to do that, to dive more deeply into a subject with a wonderful expert and just have a good conversation and see where it takes us.So I am excited to, to start, and before starting, I just wanted to ask a bit. About yourself. I understand that you sort of got into green software in university and just kind of never let it go, but I wanted to know why that happened. You must have chosen to study it. So how did you end up in, in software engineering and how didn't you end up in green software engineering?Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really impressed by, by the, by the homework you've made here , so thanks for that. Yeah. So I. Usually say I slipped into software on like a banana peel in the school system in Sweden is such that after 10 years of school you get to select program for your upper, upper secondary diploma.So you have three years where you can. Go a bit deeper into something. So you have the university preparational programs where you have the more geared towards profession such as carpent tea or hairdressing or, or things like that. And I wanted to do something that was preparatory for university, that was close to science and technology, and that was a special program that they had.Like a third was computer science. And at the time I knew how to start a computer and I could play the. . That was about the extent of my knowledge. But I thought, and to this day, I can't explain this reasoning, but I was like, yeah, computers would probably be important. At some point I better learn. So that was my sole reason for choosing that program.And then in the first class, I had to sort of raise my hand and ask, sorry, but what's a CPU? Because I've never heard a term and. Of course were a lot of men in this class, they all turned around like, who is this chick? What she like, does she know what she's done? I did not know what, what I had done at all.But then this was a great program. The teachers was really great, and after that it was sort of love at first sight once I got into programming and started taking more of those courses and I, I really loved the mindset of how you think about building software and. It's so creative. People don't think it's creative.It's like the best kept secret of our industry is the creativity. So then after that I chose a, an engineering programming in university, which was geared towards engineering. And yeah, that's where, where, where it led to green software engineering, because we actually. In order to be allowed to graduate with this specific title, you had to take at least one course, which involved sustainable practices.So I was forced to do something at least. And then I wanted, I took a course called Green itm.Ismael Velasco: And did you have a previous connection to nature? I heard in one of your talks when you were giving examples and you were making a really great point, you were saying how we make all these efforts to green our domestic lives? And then we get to work and kind of lose our sense of control and forget all about it.And you said, you know, we'll walk instead of take the car and I can't remember what other thing you mentioned, but then you said, you know, we will reuse the skis we give children instead of using new skis. And I just thought that is a Swedish vignette. I certainly didn't have to make those choices in Mexico growing up, and I just wondered whether that from the sounds.You were exposed to nature you did grow up with presumably Skiing would be my guess.Sara Bergman: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I was very much raised into sort of nature close living. My parents competed in orienteering, which is where you run in Themeforest with a map and you find checkpoints. My dad was really successful when I was born, so I think I was at my first orienteering competition at three months of age.So I've beenIsmael Velasco: Did you find your parents at the end?Sara Bergman: I'm told my mom held onto me, but . But yes, no, I think that's fairly common for people both in, in Sweden where I'm from, and Norway where I live now, it's integrated into our culture in many ways. Same with skiing. You know, I live in Oslo now. I take my cross country skis on the subway, take the subway directly to the tracks, like with a bunch of other people, which.When you tell people outside of nowhere, they are like amazed. But to me it's just very, very normal. And aside from that, my mom or we have a family farm. It's a very small scale, mostly forest farming. So yeah, it's, it's always felt like a responsibility to care for our planet and the legacy that we live behind to our children.Cuz I am glad for the legacy that my great, great parents left me, which is divorced, which is now a big part of my heart.Ismael Velasco: And I guess sort of that meant that you were predisposed that when you did that compulsory class. It, it made sense to you in not just in an intellectual way, but in a kind of spiritual, existential way. And the other thing that struck me is that I think. You mentioned how the creativity is the great secret of software engineering, and I was thinking when you were talking about your parents doing orienter, that actually software engineering and seeking green software paths is like orienteering, isn't it?You have a few set of signposts here. You get recognize the landscape, but it's not a direct route. You don't have, you know, you know where you want to get. Roughly, it might not look anything like what you had on the map to start with. So, and you have to sort of be very agile and observant, et cetera. So I can see how growing up in all of those mindsets would have meant that when you landed in engineering, in software engineering and in green self, it particular, you would have resonatedSara Bergman: And so that's a great comparison. I haven't thought about it. I will definitely steal it. That was great. Yeah. But I think I was also very naive, right? I, I imagine that if you wanna work in sustainability or make an effort, you need to like go into something that was very hands on, like you needed to be working directly with animal conservation.Like that was my idea. So when I was. Taking this course, it was like, oh, I don't have to go outside my area or my expertise to do this. I can fight climate change in my own arena. And that was like eye opening and something that I'm very happy that I'm able to do because software is something I'm very passionate about.So I'm glad I can combine those two passions.Ismael Velasco: And at the same time, I heard your word fight for climate change in your arena and your career, and I think that's really interesting as well because it, it makes me think of you. A young girl asking what is a CPU? And not only had you chosen to go there, which is you know, pretty reckless to start with, but in an old male environment where asking a que a technical question as a girl positions you in a very gendered way, you were fearless and just went, sorry, what's a CPU?And I get the feeling that then you got a job and you ended up working Microsoft and. You put your hand up again and it was like, yes, but what about the environment? How did that happen? Did you arrive sort of into your professional career and people were already talking about it and that space existed or did you arrive with that kind of passion, awaken you and thought it's nowhere here.What do I do?Sara Bergman: I think it was a combination for sure. One of the reasons I chose Microsoft is because they had at the time, and even more so now, a very clear position when it comes to climate. It's always been a pillar of Microsoft to first Carbon neutral and now this increased focus of being carbon negative, so, so that was definitely one of the reasons.But I think also coming directly from university into a big corporation, there is a certain amount of time needed to find your feet navigating. A professional, what does it mean to go to work? You know, all those things. So it took a while before I figured out how I could marry the two. I used hackathons a lot in the start, which is something, uh, we have internally, which was great to sort of investigate this passion.I've been so, so lucky to have the support of my managers and the mentors and other peers around me on this journey. And then I think it really took off after I saw Asim speak at March, build in 2020. It was like super early in the pandemic sitting at home and I was like, whoa, I wanna be like him. So again, I guess pretty fiercely.I set up a one-to-one and was like, teach me your ways And uh, he was kind enough to accept and yeah, opened a lot of doors for me. So I do believe in maybe being a bit troublesome in like a good way. Make good trouble you. . I think that's, uh, that's I.Ismael Velasco: Two interesting points there for me. One is the role of the hackathons and obviously the Green Silver Foundation just finished. Fantastically successful hackathon. We had such brilliant solutions that came up and 400 technologies mobilized into sometimes for the first time, thinking about carbon aware computing, which we will dive into very soon.And I've often thought that part of the win, as it were, are the winners, right? You win your money, hopefully you take off with your idea a bit more. And then there's the next layer of winning, which is all of the projects that don't win the money but actually advance in some way. Their idea and some of those ideas are likely to go much further than the winners.And vice versa. You just, you Canditt tell. And then there's a next layer, which is the judges and the companies and the observers being able to go, ha, I hadn't thought of that. We could do something like that, or, that's a good approach, or we should, instead of investigate this further. But finally, I. It's the live altering trajectories that there are people there who will have come to the hackathon.You know, if you move forward 15 years, it might be a different life just because they went there. And so the fact that you had the initiative to go and the support to be able to do it as part of your work seems like a really powerful factor in your trajectory.Sara Bergman: Yeah, indeed. They were truly a cataclyst and I also just wanna echo the sentiments you said about the, the hackathon, the gsf just closed. If people listening in haven't watched the recording or didn't attend the event. Please do the, the winners, like all the projects that were presented were, or the hacks that were presented were amazing.I was blown away. So yeah, just do yourself a favor and go listen, go listening, cuz it's definitely a learning opportunity.Ismael Velasco: Absolutely. Then the second element was this being troublesome in a good way at work and in. My last podcast actually, I reflected that people often think about big corporations as these monolithic things. They're good, they're bad, they're doing this, they're doing that. But really they're microsystems.They're so big that they have all of us, and they have all of our motivations. And I will be very green in somewhere else of my life and then not green in others. And my weaknesses and my strengths will vary, as it were. And there's those set of competing interests inside myself that learn in the planet, that I learn in those organizations.Microsoft recently released this sustainable design manifesto that I also highlighted in the last episode, and in it they speak about it only takes 3% of people to protest in order to achieve systemic change. And likewise, they say that it only takes a few troublemakers, as it were in tech, in your in a company to create systemic change.And I wanted to ask you about those dynamics. So on the one hand, you have these positive tendencies in m. That are moving towards sustainability. And on the other hand you have, you know, tendencies that are perhaps not so, sort of mutually supportive of that and you're in the middle of, of this sort of navigating and you're one of that 3%.How do you feel those two forces, as you were, the forces that drive sustainability and the forces that drive non-sustainable patterns of profit? How do they interact? As a whole and in your job as it were for yourself as a, as a technologist.Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely, and and I agree with what you say. I firmly believe in those grassroot movements. If you have grassroot movement and leadership support, I think everything is possible. So if you have both that that is great. I think also what's been important to me is really try to understand people's motivation.Like obviously I am very interested in sustainability to me, , that's gonna be the most important thing. It is not for everyone. Some people, they will care more about cost. Other people will care more about PR or security, or they have something else that's their cornerstone or corner value, which they will prioritize higher.That doesn't make them bad people. So you have to think if you're one of those people who. Are emotionally invested in sustainability. For example, if you're gonna argue with everyone to disagree with you, your, your energy's gonna run out really quickly. So my personal mindset is to try and think that everyone is on a different place in their journey, and what I can do is give information based on which level they are right now.Maybe they're not at all open to this idea. Maybe I can sell them on energy efficiency instead because they are also interested.Ismael Velasco: Performance.Sara Bergman: electricity bill. Exactly. Performance. Or I can talk about hardware efficiency because they work in asset management and they don't wanna throw out working hardware either, because that's their core motivation.So I think that's a cornerstone. Trying to not think of people as your opponent, but you are not yet allies and you know, put on the charm or whatever it is you need to, even if they're never gonna align fully on. your vision. Maybe you can find areas where you overlap and you can be analyzed there and, and that can be super valuable.So that's something that I try to, to work with a lot. I think also being here in Norway, we are have a more, it's not a flat organizational structure. It's still very. Hierarchical, but socially it's flatter. It's the threshold for interacting with someone who's my managers, manager, managers, whatever, is pretty low for me.Whereas in other countries and other cultures, that can be quite a big step. I also think I have a benefit just based on the culture I live in. I'm working.Ismael Velasco: That's really, really interesting and, and I guess one of the reflections I've had in the past is that change scales. When you can align altruism and self-interest, if, if you can put those things together, you can make them coincide. If something that you are motivated by also makes a difference to the world, then the chances of adoption and behavior change are much greater and you've.Some of those patterns, for example. And in that sense, I've been in sustainability since I was a young man, so for, you know, 30 years, I'm now, you know, 20 years old. So time is, doesn't op operate the way it should, obviously. But having experienced this sort of, The work on sustainability in very different domains.I find that in software, we are in a very unique place, in a unique position in almost every other arena. Advocating for sustainability is. Implies painful change. It's advocating against self-interest in some area or other, whereas in technology, mostly what makes software sustainable and green also makes it sellable and and cheap.It's not universal, but it is mostly the case and if you create a piece of software that is sustainable, it's gonna be a piece of software that is fast, that is very well designed for usability that doesn't have a lot of data transmissions, that that is cheaper to run. So in terms of that alignment that you were saying, it is much easier in our industry than it is in most other industries.And the other element is that that makes our, our industry unique in our ability to make a difference, is that everything we do is designed for scale. It is very, very, very rare that you. Somebody will hire you to build a piece of software that five people will use, right. It has to be at least a few hundred, generally a few thousand, and in your case, billions every month. our ability to have an outsize impact with a small tweak is, is gigantic. And I wanted to ask you about your experience of that trajectory. Where have you. What interventions have you made in your software that you are proud of, that you feel this, you know, took out a 10th of a gram of CO2 every hour for a billion people, or, you know, anything like that?Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And then here I have to thread carefully, uh, because of NDAs, but, but something that I'm also passionate about is performance. So whatever I can align those things, whatever I can find an efficiency improvement that doesn't impact user experience maybe at all, or maybe even to the better.That's gonna dry down CPU and also emissions. Like that's where I feel truly, truly happy and having those opportunities are, depending on where you are in your software life cycle, they will be more rare or there will be more frequent. If you have a piece of software that's very new, you have a lot of opportunity to to decide how things do.And if you come in with this mindset from the. You can already set up your, your products for a more sustainable way of operating. Now, on the other hand, if you have a very mature software or legacy software, then you get to think about the problem in a whole different type of way. And I had the opportunity to work on both.And I think they both come with interesting challenges. And for the more mature software, then you might also have to start working with partners and look outside the scope of your own little bubble and see how do. Interact with these piece of software, how can we change that? How can we, maybe there's a software that we know is going to go away, how can we speed that up or, or work with those kind of changes?So yeah, there's definitely been opportunities, I'm afraid, I can't say specific things I've done.Ismael Velasco: I think those design principles as it were, Sharing are are very important and they remind me of a specific example that Microsoft has shared widely very recently, which was that it made PC upgrades. Carbon aware and that's amazing. They, and it was announced. I love the fact, it's like I have mixed feelings about it, but at the same time, overall I love it.I think the fact that the announcement was not tagged sustainability, it was mainstream. It was, this is what we've done in Windows 11, this is our new functionalities. And then at the end they said, and now whenever you charge your. Computer and where it goes to sleep. We've made some tweaks that will make it more carbon efficient and we will now schedule the upgrades for the times where your electricity is green if we've got information that we need from your device.And that means is an example I imagine of those kinds of very mature technologies that involved a huge amount of partnership discussion and then that landed subtly, but hugely.Sara Bergman: Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a great example. Another favorite of mine is the sleeping tabs and Edge, where I guess I'm like mo most, um, people in software. I keep way too many tabs. I don't know why. I am a hoarder. I collect tabs. So I'm very happy that the ones I don't use are put to sleep, so they don't have to waste CPU.And I can still, you know, feel good about my 80 tabsIsmael Velasco: Yes, I, that mean it has been a game changer to me. I, I use an extension called Tap Suspender because it's sort of more granular, but the idea, my CPU, the fact that my computer runs when I have literally. 500 tabs open. is remarkable. And I know that I'm not killing the planet and I still have my 500 tabs open.So yeah. And also there's energy saver mode as well. I think that's come out recently in edge. So there's some really good work. And this leads me to another question. So what I see is that we are. That Microsoft is implementing the kind of carbon aware approaches that the Hackathon was all about, and it is seeking to improve efficiency but also diminish its CO2 emissions.And I suppose a question for me is, where do these metrics live? How could we mainstream, I suppose those metrics. At a granular level where all of the software that we develop comes with a CO2 measure, and I know that in this context you have been really doing pioneering work with the Green Software Foundation around the software carbon intensity specification.So I wanted to ask you a bit more about how that came about and how you came to be involved in.Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. So the SCI specification is by the. Working group in the gsf. We started meeting really early after the foundation was started. I'm not sure it's the first, but it was, it was up and running those weekly meetings really early since it aligned with things that I had been doing in my work.I was asked if I wanted to join, and of course I did, and that's was sort of the start of it. Those weekly meetings have. So much fun, like getting to learn from people who are also software practitioner, but at other companies have other types of experiences. They have other length of experiences come from different backgrounds.It's been, it's been so great to have those perspective and to learn from those people and to be able to hopefully give something back to this group as well. And I am so incredibly. Of the work that we did both with the, with the Alpha version, which I was very much involved in the now the Viv one version where I had to step away for little bit cuz of other work things.But that we released now before COP 27. So yeah, I think, I think that was sort of how I ended up.Ismael Velasco: And what is it? What is this specification and why does it?Sara Bergman: The SCI is a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon emissions for a software system, and the goal is that you as a software practitioner, no matter, your role, should be able to take informed choices to improve your software so that you reduce or avoid the creation of emissions. So it's a score.It's not really like a total, it's more a score where a lower number is better and a higher number is worse. But reaching zero is impossible, and it is important because it is biased towards action. It gives us a software practitioner, a way of evaluating if a future change will be good or bad. If an over implemented change was good or.It allows us to find the biggest culprits. It sets us up for success in terms of being able to change our software, and I think that's what makes it important because it, it gives us leverage. It gives us opportunity for room to move, I guess, to do something, to not just stand there and like, okay, now what?Ismael Velasco: And do I understand correctly that the way the silver carbon intensity specification measures or gets that. Is three kind of main components. One being how much electricity your software is consuming, so how many kilowatts per hour, and then how that electricity translates into carbon emissions. So that could vary if the grid is dirty or clean at a particular time.But in general, it would be if one kilo. Our sort of produces 10 grams of co2, then your score would be that plus an estimate for the kind of the carbon that goes from your machine, the embodied carbon. And that would be everything from when it was manufactured to when it's been used to, when it's being disposed of or other, just when it's been manufactured and when it's been disposed of.Right. Not necessarily the usage time.Sara Bergman: Unless the usage time includes hardware updates, I suppose then, then you could consider including those as well. But yes. Yeah, you got it completely right. Those are the the three main components that we depend on, and I think when people hear this, they're like, oh, I thought of. It be much harder. , and people expect this to be like a magic formula, which will solve our problem, but really, it, it's quite logical when you start thinking about it.And of course there are more nuances to it if you, if you read a full specification, you can get into all those details. But yeah, in essence, it's those three core components.Ismael Velasco: So I want to get into some more of those details, partly because my thought is the opposite. Like, that sounds really complicated. it like I agree. The very, the concept is very simple and that's powerful, right? It's you use electricity, the electricity produces co2. And you have information on the, on what it goes to create the device you're using.So you add it all up. There you go. So I have a number of questions around that. There are kind of two approaches that I can see that I've seen being used. One is a kind of proxy approach, life cycle inventory. So you may not be able to know exactly, I don't know right now how much electricity. My computer is consuming.I generally don't know because I don't have a smart meter telling me. So I would probably guess by looking at how much a model of computer like mine consumes electricity using software like this for the hour that we're talking. And that would be my estimate for the electricity. Is that how you see it being used, or do you see it being used by an actual measurement of electricity?Sara Bergman: So the specification can be useful in two broad. We have to remember that the. Is meant to be used for all software. I think sometimes we can tend to think that software is only something that runs in the cloud in a cloud provider, but that's really not all the software that we have in the world, and we want the s e to be for any software, no matter if you run on an FPGA in like an embedded system or you run on an end user device or you.are the load balancer inside the cloud provider. We want this to be able to be used for, for every scenario, and thus it's gonna be slightly different and it's gonna be very context specific. So maybe that's where the, the slightly complicated part comes in. But for the two different ways you can, you can either measure it directly and that's very accessible to some, especially if you have a cloud provider that measures it's for you.Or if you have your own data center and you run everything on premise. you, then it can be fairly easy. The other example is if you calculate it and you use kind of a benchmark, if you, for example, have an application that's, you have a very small service side, the majority of everything is done client side.It's not really realistic for you to send back energy metrics for every single app on every single device at all time, just so that you can know. Will likely be a lot less green than just doing some experimentation on your side than try to find some kind of average behavior or usual or typical behavior and measure that.So you can either measure directly or you can do a calculation and both are fine. It, it comes down to what kind of actions you wanna take and where your biggest culprits are. The most important thing is to look system-wide though, and not try to optimize a micro component that potentially have negative.System wide consequences.Ismael Velasco: In a sense that brings us to the why. There are two kinds of measurement and one. You measure for, as it were, the truth of the thing. So if you're an academic, you want to get as precise, accurate measurements because that's what you actually care of. And then there is measurement that you use for evaluation that you use for decision making guidance.And the SCI is primarily focused on the later. And so the idea is not so much Did you catch the exact microgram? Correct. And is, if I run the exercise again, will the curve be identical? But it's more a question, if I understand you correctly of is the curve going up or is it going down? And if it's going up, is it coming from this area of my system or that area of my system?And if it's coming from that area of my system has take making this decision, brought the curve. That's what really matters rather than, yes, but did it br bring it down by two or by five grams, for example? Would that be fair?Sara Bergman: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think once again, it's those, those actions that we really want to help enable, of course. And get down to the absolute gram that's good for you. But in the end, the important thing is that you find this to be a tool that is useful for your scenario. And of course if you compare, if you compares to evaluate some kind of change, it's of course important to keep the baseline the same drug just for otherwise it's not very scientifically stable, I guess you could say.Ismael Velasco: One more question around this is how flexible, I guess, is the framework? So this makes me think of some other metrics that are out there and they actually follow the same approach. So when I think of in the Web space, the. Great Tim Frick multi bytes sort of created together with other really key players.The Green, Web Foundation does whole grain digital and methodology for measuring the carbon impact of websites in particular. And this has gained traction and it's been used by libraries and bys, sort of browser extensions. And they too work through electricity, co2, and embodied carbon. They create a kind of proxy for their use case where they use data as the proxy for electricity.So they go, if we've had this many gigabytes of data downloaded, this probably equates to this much electricity. And that's how we get that first part of the se. And then the co2, and this was the question, I guess the calculation of how a set number of electricity translates into CO2 or how, for example, what percentage to add to calculate for embodied emissions does the s e prescribe specific calculations?Or is it flexible enough for you to say, as long as you are doing this three steps in an evidence based way, we are not too bothered as to whether you are using gigabytes or uh, gigabytes or not, or whether you're using one inventory or another for your emissions.Sara Bergman: It is quite flexible in that sense. It comes down to the reporting. And how you do that. You may also choose not to report on it and solely use it for your own sake as a, as a tool in your own team or your own business group. I think what's important to know is that if you just take data transfer, for example, it only gives you one lever.That means the only thing I can do. Is to decrease the amount of data sent over the network. That is not a bad thing, that is a good thing, but it doesn't really give you a full detailed picture. So if you also have the exact grid data, so the exact carbon intensity consumed at the exact point. When you wanna use your software, which you, there are several APIs which provide this data.If you have this data, then you can also consider other levers such as, maybe I can time shift, potentially I can location shift. I can take other carbon aware actions that not only make my software greener, but through the use of renewable and green energy sources Over time, I'm also helping to shift the energy providers to incentivize greener and renewable energy producing.That gives me two levers. Two levers is objectively better than one, I would suppose. And same with the embedded carbon. You can use a static number, which I understand that this methodology does more or less, or like a, a percentage based, which is a simplification, right? It gives you one less lever that you can.Use. So the c I really want to encourage granular data use because it gives you more option, it gives you more insights, it paints the full picture. So really the more granular data you can get, the better. But sometimes you do have to make scientific guesses or reasonable estimations, and yeah, then maybe that's what you have to do in this situation.But really the more granular you can get, the better.Ismael Velasco: Would I be correct that all of those approaches would be still consistent with the SCI language? So to be fair, by the way, to the, to the Mighty Methodology, they do add different formulas. For specific emissions. So they do sort of take into account carbon intensity and they say, when you don't know it, use this.But if you know it, actually use the precise one. But that's a good example. You might not know it. So in a situation where you don't have all that information, would you still be able to call your metric software Carbon intensity? So in the case of someone using. Not the great data they're using. This is the average global grid.This is a time, this is theater. So you've got all the same components as INS E, but you have a thin surface layer with very few levers because of necessity. In that situation, would the final score be ans e score, or does it require a minimum amount of layers before it can be called?Sara Bergman: It's a good question. We want this to be easy to use and to inspire action if it does. We are very happy. If you read the full specification, there are some data considerations, some fallbacks, for example, I do believe we recommend hourly or minute granularity on the carbon intensity, but if you can't get that, we suggest annual at the annual basis instead.Most countries, it doesn't change super fast. Of course, with energy crisis in Europe here, it's been changing very rapidly in the past few months. That isn't the normal scenario though, so, so yes, I do think. To the full specification to get maybe some tips and tricks, how you can do this in the best way, but again, more in any insight is better than no insights.Ismael Velasco: So that's fantastic because it seems to me from hearing you that really what the software Carbon Intensity Specification is doing is creating a common language. It's a statement of faith. It's like, if we do this, we can talk about it together. Let's talk about it together. The ISO is a kind of stamp of approval that says, when we talk about this, let's talk about it this way.Is that correct? Can you tell us a bit more about the, the why you sought iso that and, and sort of where we are in that, in that process, and why does it.Sara Bergman: Yeah, sure. So if we remember the, the mission of the Green Software Foundation, it is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for creating and building green software. And I think trust is such a key word here, especially when you think about standards and certifications and iso.It is a very trusted way across many industries for sharing methodologies, for sharing standards, and I think it's a quite natural step that if trust is something that is a core value to us, then not only do we want people to not trust us, but also use ISO as a vehicle for. Conveying this trust and for, for conveying this to a broader set of the industry.But really to my knowledge, we are just in the, the beginning of the ISO journey and we have every ambition to, to do it. We are not there just yet. So yeah, I'm not sure how much else I can say on this topic that would be interesting and useful to people, but personally I'm very excited for it. I think it would really lend that broad.Industry wide awareness, hopefully at least to, to the standard.Ismael Velasco: And one of the things you mentioned was the aspiration to make. A trusted standard and how that is, that word trust is so key in the Green, Software, Foundation mission, isn't it? It all, particularly in this arena, and particularly when it comes to metrics, the sci is very clear in that it is focusing on elimination of emissions, not offsetting of emissions.And obviously this really matters because if you're eliminating them, you are actually greening the planet. There is no ambiguity, right? It's gone if you are offsetting them. There are, there may be more questions, so I wanted to ask you, first of all, what is the difference between elimination and offset, and why did the s e standard choose to go with.Sara Bergman: Yes. So in an ideal world, elimination and offsetting would be the same. We are not in an ideal world wherein we don't have perfect technology, so they are not the same. If you eliminate something, it means you never emitted it. It stays in the ground, doesn't. Go up in the atmosphere. However, if you offset, there are several different ways of doing that.The ones most talked about is forestation. So you plant trees, which in itself is great. It's good for biodiversity as well. It's good for oxygen that we breed, but are a number of problems around this. There has been reports of projects where treats were planted, for example, and then later they were deforested anyway.There are also other studies that should suggest that there isn't enough space to plant the amount of trees we would need to offset all of the emissions considering the rate emissions are growing at. So there are. Bunch of questions there. Same with something that more talked about recently as the carbon captures.It's like a giant vacuum that sort of sucks carbon directly outta the atmosphere. There are very few functioning examples of this and they are extremely costly and it is betting our future on a technology which isn't really mature enough to hold up to this promise. I mean, hopefully it will be, but I think it's a dangerous bet.So why is it, why have we excluded it in the sci? Well, firstly, because of there are some controversy. See, and secondly, if you include offset, it doesn't help you or inspire you to take actions to reduce your impact. It just tells you how much you should pay, and that's not really what we are trying to do.We're trying to help you reduce your impact and then offset to sort of complicates the pictures. It doesn't help you to change your software.Ismael Velasco: So that's exciting because it basically adds trust, right? It makes me trust the E more because I know that it is doing what it says it's doing, and it's measuring what it says it's measuring. One of the other problems with offsetting is that where the offsetting happens is not where the pollution happens most often.Sometimes it is, but generally speaking, you may be greening in Kenya and polluting in tanza. And that's great for Kenya and it's great for the planet, but it's not great for Tanzania. And whatever impacts that you're having are are not just global, but they're also local, et cetera. And of course there's a lot of criticism around greenwashing and around claiming of sets that aren't happening or verification and quality.Sometimes if you plant the wrong trees, you are actually damaging rather. Healing the atmosphere, et cetera. But I suppose that the question that arises, so that's the bit that excites me about it. The bit that arises for me is that the way the planet is currently measuring its progress toward environmental survival, at least, is net zero.And the concept of net versus growth is precisely the difference, right? Between direct emissions and emissions that you're offsetting. So the growth emissions would be how much pollution my software is creating, and the net ones would be how much emissions my software is creating after I paid other people to green some part of the world.And if I've paid enough people to green enough that it's the same as what I've produced. Then I've arrived at net zero, even if my growth is a lot bigger. So I suppose my question here is how visible will s c I be if what people are looking at is the net zero effect? If people are not considering gross emissions particularly, you're able to go, my company is now net serious carbon neutral.Yes. What incentive? I said, where will there be, or how do you see a measure of gross emissions like the se, making it onto the commitments, making it on the frameworks, making it onto the goals and measurements, for example, in Microsoft as an example, but the same for everyone else.Sara Bergman: This is a very deep issue, I think, and it points to something that's. Way deeper than just the Green, Software, Foundation and us. And I think there's a, a lack of what really Net zero means. It means reducing as much as possible and only offset the rest. But some say the rest is like 10%. Others say it's like as close to zero as possible.It's not really. A clear global consensus on the exact amount of CO2 we would not have to admit. So that is, I think, a global problem. Same that my understanding is that carbon neutral isn't necessarily the same. You could essentially pay to be carbon neutral because you could then offset everything where it's necessary.It's really about reducing the majority in almost all and only offsetting the rest. The s e can really be a good tool here because we're all about reductions, so if you wanna reduce, which you will need to reach net zero, then the s e I is hopefully a great tool that will help you get there, or at least get you a lot closer.Ismael Velasco: And that's a really powerful point. It reminds me of all of your discussion about working in Microsoft and my discussion of Microsoft being a microcosm of the world, that actually there is no technical solution to climate change. That it begins with values that people have to actually care. That if people don't care, it doesn't matter how you paint it, what you measure, what you call it, things are just gonna keep getting worse until people care.And that in that sense, the sci is one more tool in that conversation, one more tool in sort of helping the people who care have an argument and have a vehicle. For expressing that institutionally. So you may have executives who care, but they don't have the vehicle to put that metric there. And if they say, okay, I am going to, I really do care.And many and many more people are caring because the world is getting harder and harder. So in that respect, it sounds to me like the scis both, it's a tool for change in the present and potentially it's betting on a future that. He's betting in a future that says, what we actually want to do is these submissions, and now we're ready for this.So if people are principled about this and not just expedient, it's not just about getting as far as you can to hit your targets and move on, then the SE puts on the map something potentially really impactful at that level. And I suppose along those lines, how do you see the. Of the SE standard happening?Has it started? Are people using it? I've seen a paper on academia, on machine learning and se, I've seen a few bits and bolts, but what is the state of play now? I know it's only just been formally launched, like at the Carbonized software. One incredible event. Just that, I don't know, was it a week ago? But yes.Where do you see adoption going? How do you see this taking?Sara Bergman: It is definitely people using it, people implementing it. We have seen several case studies in the standards working group, so yeah, it is definitely starting and, and I think it will be sort of an avalanche situation. I think, again, going back to something that we talked about earlier is a. Think we're likely to see a grassroot adoption and leadership adoption, and then they will sort of meet in the middle.I think there are teams who, for or, or business groups or startups or whatever, it's like small groups who can use this and are probably using it right now. Maybe they're not reporting on it, maybe they're not publishing work about it, but they use it as a tool for them internally because it helps them, they don't feel the need to, to write research about it or to publish anything.they just needed us another tool. And then I hope that we will see more companies being really proudly using it than really using it as a PR metric, I guess, and to, to sort of marry the grassroot movement with the, with the leadership movement. So I don't know when that would happen. I am hoping. It will be soon-ish, but I think it's also, it's gonna be very different for different types of companies.I think cloud providers, Microsoft and other cloud providers are in a, in a bit of a special situation because our business is software, but other also run software in our data centers and that makes it a bit special from other types of software companies. So I'm not sure cloud providers, if that be Azure, if that be Google will be the first.I think they were the first, like Microsoft. Closely followed by Google and Amazon or AWS to have really bold strategies that they communicate broadly in terms of who will first publish their sci. I'm not sure the cloud writers will be first. I think they might be smaller. I think there's a huge movement in the open source community.Maybe they will be first to sort of really go big on this. I don't know. I'm, I'm excited to see regard.Ismael Velasco: And do you see the E being something that is usable? At the national and global level. So what I'm thinking is that people are measuring how much CO2 emissions is Norway meeting in Sweden and Mexico and Britain, and at the moment they just count electricity, I guess, and I C T, and they don't count any anything else.They don't have the embodied carbon or stuff like that. Generally speaking, could you see regulators, governments being able to. Use the SCI in environmental indicators at scale in that sense. Is that something that you could see being possible or useful or not really? It's more at the business level, at the operational.Sara Bergman: It is a very interesting question and it also points to the fact that software is kind of a global citizen. We shift our workloads, well, there are some regulations of course, but otherwise people shift workloads kind of freely, and I think if, I think that's also the crux of it then like why the European Union are.Typically a front runner in these kinds of questions because they have a broad set of countries behind them where I think if one country said we're gonna start reporting on any software that's run in our company or in our country, would that then incentivize people to shift workloads to their country or incentivize them to shift out that country and would that mean something positive for opportunities for labor, et cetera, et cetera.I don't know. I don't think it's impossible, but I'm not sure it's the primary use case. At least in the near future.Ismael Velasco: That makes sense and it's a very great insight how it has to happen at sort of in. Rather than individual. I suspect it's gonna be the same with the bigger companies. It has to. Once you've got a few, then there is an incentive. If you are the first, it might not be, et cetera. You need the pioneers, don't you, at all of theSara Bergman: It's always scary to be the first. Yeah.Ismael Velasco: and thinking along those lines.I want to finish by asking you to imagine Sara Bergman in 2042. She's such a fantastic engineer that she has cracked time travel. You've been working on all of this now for all of these years. You are your wiser self. You've seen it all. You've been there, and now you've cracked carbon efficient time travel, but it only lasts one or two minutes, and then you transported back and it's anchored to you.You can't just go anywhere, so you basically get a one minute chat with yourself. So you come back from 2042 and you talk to yourself, what did you think you'd be saying to yourself?Sara Bergman: Well, an excellent question. I really hope I will be saying you did the right thing at the right time. I'm really hoping I won't say it was too little too. That would just break my heart. So I hope that, I hope there is some encouraging words. Yeah, I hope that's it. And just probably there will be some comment about work life balance up in there if I know my future self, you know?But I don't think, I'm not the kind of person who would give spoilers away. I wouldn't say like, go do this. No. It's the journey to figuring out that's important thing. So just probably something like, go in this direction, talk to these people. You're on the right path, I think.Ismael Velasco: Honestly, I find it so beautiful. It just hit my heart. I said, I hope. I hope I would say to myself, you did the right thing at the right time and not it was too little, too late. That is profound and beautiful, and I think it's a question we can leave our listeners with. Are you doing the right thing at the right time or too little, too late?And what a way to live your life. So thank you so much, Sara, for a beautiful, insightful, deep and fun conversation. I wanted to ask if people want to follow you, and they will after hearing this, where should they find you?Sara Bergman: You can, at least for now, still find me on Twitter. Not sure how that would be possible. I dunno if that's some dark foreshadowing, but so far I'm still on Twitter. Come find me.Ismael Velasco: Thank you so much for helping us launch our first episode of Fact Check and helping us fact checking software, carbon intensity, helping us fact check offsets versus real emission cuts, and helping us fact check the future. So thank you very, very much and good luck in your adventure.Sara Bergman: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit Green Software Foundation. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈This Week in Green Software Episode, host Ismael Velasco takes you through the recent key events and happenings in the world of green software. He outlines a range of reports coming out from The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, IPCC, UNEP, UNFCCC, IEA and many other acronyms to boot! He also highlights huge positive (and negative) changes in Big Tech and how you can be part of the crest of the wave of change in green software.Timings of mentions of links below are listed next to them for your reference!Learn more about our people:Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / TwitterEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Microsoft’s Green Design Principles [25:52]Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11) [28:52]AWS: Well Architected Updates [31:20]Google Cloud: Cloud Aware Computing Dashboard [33:56]Meta: AI Powered Audio Compression [38:09]Talks & Events:Event: Decarbonize Software by The Green Software Foundation [39:13]Reports & Articles:Bulletin: The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin [01:55]Report: IPCC Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [04:27]Report: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [14:02]Report: UNFCCC Reports [15:00]Report: IEA World Energy Outlook 2022 Report [16:25]Article: Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality is Coming into View by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times [19:24]Article: Carbon-aware laptop charging by Andy Stanford-Clark in Hackernoon [23:00]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most up-to-date news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focused climate action.I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. In this episode, I will look at the raft of worrying reports released one after another by all the top international climate agencies. So recently I will explain why the news is dire, yet find the nevertheless significant milestones of hope buried in their reports.Whereas last episode, I focused on the power of individual initiatives. This episode, I look at the complex role of big tech and highlight hot off the press green software developments in Microsoft, aws, Google, and Meta. Finally, I take the opportunity to trail the milestone represented by the forthcoming the Carbonized software event on November the 10th.Check the episode notes for all the. So this week the planet received difficult news from a series of devastating reports, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the I P C C, the World Meteorological Organization, the wmo, the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, the United Nation's Framework, Conventional Climate Change, the U N F C C C, and the International Energy Agency.The I. All released one after another. A series of scary reports. The World Meteorological Organization released its greenhouse gas bulletin, which found the highest ever CO2 emissions showing that we are back to pre covid levels and beyond. It also saw the biggest year on year jump in methane concentrations in 2021.Since systematic measurements begun nearly 40 years ago, what does this. We hear a lot of the term CO2 emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, but I think it's become so prevalent that many of us don't really understand what it actually refers to. We talk about carbon. And CO2 emissions as a shorthand for all greenhouse gases, because other gases like methane stay in the atmosphere less so you're able to kind of do more about it.Whereas CO2 stays for a very, very long time and removing it is a huge challenge. People sometimes think also that if we manage to remove all the excess co. Life returns to where it was before industrial times, but that is not the case. Whatever happens, the atmosphere has changed, the weather patterns have changed.So although we desperately need to reduce and remove that excess co2, no one really knows quite what the world will look like even after we've cleared it all back to preindustrial. All we know is that it will be better, but not necessarily where it would have been at the beginning, and in fact, definitely not where it would have been at the beginning.Now, why does this matter? Well, As I said, this growing heat in the atmosphere creates extreme weather events, and, and recently in a, in an earlier report, the wmo calculated that under current policies and trajectories by 2050, every single child in the world will be exposed to severe heat event. My son will be in his thirties, possibly about to start a family every single child in the planet, which also means every adult really will be exposed to severe heat events by 2050 at this rate.What about the other reports? The I P C, UNEP, U N F C C, iea, they all release reports that coincide on certain finding. So back in 2015 there was a massive conference, COP 21. I was there and it was a real battle to arrive at unity of thought and. What we agreed as a trade-off between the economic needs of society, the speed of change, and the demands of survival, was that we would aim to control global warming so that it would not rise above one and a half degrees centi.And certainly keep below the absolute scary maximum of two degrees. So again, these are figures we hear a lot. What does that mean? Well, Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018, calculated that 37% of all the deaths from heat in that period were directly attributed to human cost warming.Which means that our global emissions were directly responsible for nearly 10,000 people a year dying in just those cities. Of course, the numbers are dramatically higher because there are a lot more people in the planet than just in those 732 cities. So every day our choices. Responsible, not just our own, but also historic choices are responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 people a year, and that was in 2018.The number will surely be significantly higher now. Now if you think about that, an extreme heat event, That occurred once per decade in a climate without human influence, would happen four times per decade at 1.5 degrees of warming, but it would happen 5.6 times per decade at two degrees. The difference between a massive deadly heat event happening four times and happening six times.In terms of the damage, the deaths, the illnesses, the weather events is huge. If global warming spirals to four degrees, then such events could occur nearly 10 times per decade once a year. So again, if you think about that trend, that by 2050, every child will be exposed to a heat. If you think about the fact that 10,000 people have been dying at much lower temperatures from these heat events each year, not in total, but simply proportional to our human pollution, then the idea of this multiplying and multiplying is clearly.So what do these reports that have just come out? Tell us about where we are in relation to those goals of 1.5 degrees and two degrees, and this broader situation of the consequences of global warming and climate change. Well, what all of these reports agree is that global surface temperature will continue to increase under all emissions scenarios considered.They consider best case scenarios, worst case scenarios, the status quo, a whole range of scenarios, and under all scenarios, surface temperature will continue to increase. That also means that under all scenario, There will be increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes. So these heat waves will happen not just more often, but they will be more intense.Likewise, more often and more intense will be the marine heat waves, the heavy rains, precipitation and floods, and in some regions agricultural and ecological drought. And there will be also an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones that are devastating continents and reductions in the Arctic, cis snow cover and permafrost.All of the reports agree that the updated national pledges since Cop 26 make a negligible difference. To predict the 2030 implementation of the current pledges at the moment, those pledges, if we were to implement implement them, we would have a 66% chance of reducing where we're headed to 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.So in the best case scenario of implementing our best commitments, That were not currently implemented, just our pledges. If we were to implement everything we've pledged, we would overshoot the maximum that we agreed in COP 21 and hit not just 1.5 degrees, not just two degrees, but 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.This is if we actually do what we say we. If we do what we are actually doing with our current policies in place and don't change them, we are on track for reaching 2.8 degrees in temperature rise by the end of the century to stay within the 1.5 that we consider vaguely safe, which means still harmful but not extreme by comparison.We would need to cut four and a half times. 450% are emissions every year more than we are doing now, and three times more emissions per year to just keep to the two degree maximum that we'd agree and reduce global catastrophe. And at the moment there is no clear path to. What they all agree is that if we are going to reduce this growing severity, massive societal transformation is required at speed.If China is excluded, the amount being invested in clean energy in emerging and developing economies has remained flat since the Paris Agreement 2015, The cost of capital for a solar plant in 2021 in key emerging economies was between two and three times higher. Advanced economies and China. So the countries that most suffer and the countries that have the most solar energy available have to pay two to three times more to create a solar plant.That's crazy. And a prime example of climate injustice. And if clean energy investment does not accelerate, then there would. A need for higher investment in oil and gas to avoid further fuel price volatility. Clearly, when you take stock of these findings, we are in the midst of a disintegrating world.Our decision making systems, our leadership, our lifestyle choices are leading us toward a break. At so many levels. However, this narrative of this integration, which is how the UK Guardian, for example, in an article that gained a lot of traction, chose to cover these reports is justified, but. There is another narrative that is also true.There is also a process of integration going on in the planet. There is an integration of people thinking together, visioning together, agreeing on the reading of reality. We have agreed that climate change is real. We are putting in place policies, we are changing our lifestyles, we are changing our consumer choices, and we are building new institutions, new models, new technologies.So actually inside these reports that were so terrifying, there were also some incredibly positive milestones. So in the unit report, we find that compared to our policy trajectory in 2010, we have cut our gap in emissions toward two degrees by a third. This doesn't mean that if we improve as much in the next two decades as we have done in the last decade, we catch up, we would need to change by 300% to do so.Our change is dismally behind the. But it's not nothing and it counts. Whereas the worst apocalyptic scenarios looked likely even at the start of the Paris CO 21 Summit in 2015. If we look at the data in the UN report, we are currently in the intermediate scenario, and this is outta five or six I think it is.So again, it is harmful. But it is dramatic progress. Another milestone, the UNF CCCs report identified that last year's analysis showed projected emissions would continue to increase beyond 2030. This year's analysis shows that emissions are, for the first time ever, no longer increasing after 2030. Again, the decrease is not fast enough to keep us on target.But it is hugely significant. Think about this current long-term strategies representing 62 parties to the Paris Agreement account for 83% of the world's gdp, 47% of global population in 2019, and around 70% of total energy consumption in 2019. This is to say that most of the world is trying. Half of the population, but 83% of the economic engine and 69% of the energy vacuum is moving in a progressive direction.This is a strong signal that the world is starting to aim for net zero emissions. Way too slow, but it ain't. Finally, the most exciting news in these reports comes from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report. For the first time, a scenario based on the status quo on current prevailing policy settings has global demand for each of the fossil fuel.Exhibiting a peak or plateau, cold use falls back within the next few years. Natural gas demand reaches a plateau by the end of the decade. And rising sales of electric vehicles mean that oil demand levels off in the mid 2030s before ebbing slightly to mid-century. Total demand for fossil fuels declines steadily from the mid 2020s by around two exes per year on average to 2050, an annual reduction, roughly equivalent to the lifetime output of a large oil field.Again, this is massive. Our demand for fossil fuels is the single biggest driver of climate change, and for the first time in. We can see it peak or plateau, starting this very decade. Similarly, they predict that annual clean energy investment rises to more than 2 trillion US dollars by 2030, more than 50% from today, clean energy becomes a huge opportunity for growth and jobs and a major arena for international economic competition by 2030, thanks in large part of the US inflation reduction.And so learned when capacity additions in the United States grow two and a half times over today's levels, while electric car sales are seven times greater. New targets continue to spur the massive build out of clean energy in China, meaning that its coal and oil consumption both peak before the end of this decade.That would have been unthinkable at CO 20. Faster deployment of renewables and efficiency improvements in the European Union, bring down EU natural gas and all demand by 20% this decade and coal demand by 50%. Japan's green transformation program provides a major funding boost for technologies including nuclear low emissions, hydrogen, and am.And India makes further progress toward its domestic renewable capacity target of 500 kts in 2030, and renewables meet nearly two thirds of the country's rapidly rising demand for electricity. When you really take stock of this, you realize that these two processes of this integration and integration are equally powerful and they are recipro.Integration drives disintegration. Disintegration drives integration, but there is motion in both directions. Perhaps the most balanced treatment I have come across this week of our current moment is this recent article by the New York Times. In it, there is a quote from Kate Marvel, and as a scientist and lead chapter author of an I P C C assessment.She said, We live in a terrible world and we live in a wonderful world. It is a terrible world that's more than a degree Celsius warmer, but also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost effective and easier to deploy. And I would've ever imagined.People are writing incredible papers in scientific journals. Making the case at switching rapidly to renewable energy isn't a net cost. It will be a net financial benefit, she says, with a head shake of near disbelief. If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would've thought, Wow, that's a miracle.So back to. We can be part of the integrative or the disintegrative process. Our industry is part of both trends. A really great example is aws. In their recent report and sustainability, they disclosed that they had achieved extraordinary. Advances in energy efficiency, that means that every process that they do consumes dramatically, exponentially less energy than it did some years ago.At the same time, their net emissions keep growing because their business keeps growing. So even though they are generating less emissions, In every activity, they are having to generate a lot more activity every year because they keep growing. And this is really not particular to aws. We are all part of this.Every technologist is helping technology grow. It's helping products grow and. Data consumption and our electricity consumption are going up even as other sectors are going down, so we can be part of that disintegration process. We can just keep adding to the electricity drain, to the carbon emissions, to the greenhouse gas effects, by the way, we build our software or we can be part of.Integrative process and focus on patterns, methods, values, choices and designs that make us green,and as we speak of greening our software and following where energy leads, then clearly carbon aware computing is a core part of our future as a. We discussed the CarbonHack 22 last week and the fantastic individual initiatives that it sparked around carbon aware computing. And one of the really exciting developments this week for me was that the Green Software Foundation published an article in Hacker None, and that article is called Our Code is Harming the Planet.We Need Carbon Aware Design Patent. And the article trended number one in Hacker, which is an incredible thing. 50,000 people, nearly 50,000 people read that article and counting. It was such a privilege to be part of writing that article in a collaborative manner with a team because the resulting article, I think is the best introduction I've seen to carbon over computing.Whether you are. More or less experienced in this field or completely new to it. So highly recommended as a guide. And along those lines, the CarbonHack has now resulted in. Over 70 teams and over 50 completed project submissions, and the ideas are incredible. They cover the full span from hardware to software to vr, to domestic appliances, to infrastructure as code.I encourage you to visit simply to get a sense of what's possible and what's out there, because I think this is truly the beginning of something exciting, but really all of these individual initiatives that I discussed last week and that I'm mentioning now, are a very critical part of the roadmap to change.But that roadmap cannot avoid big tech. And we discuss this massive companies, Microsoft, Googles, Apple Meta as if they were monoliths, just this one body thinking together. But the reality is that they are a microcosm of all of our society and just. Society has constructive and destructive forces integrity and disintegrity process.So do these behemoths with tens and tens of thousands of people exist within each of these companies. And so we find that each of these companies has areas where it is contributing fantastic, groundbreaking, good things to the planet. And also has things that are massive blockages in the road to positive transformation, and both of these things are happening at once.So I'd like to begin by highlighting Microsoft's recently released green design principles document. Now this is coming from their sustainable design. And this is an example of the part of Microsoft that is working to harness the power of this massive global corporation for the good of the planet.Their initial principles, or manifest to, as it were for their getting started backpack on digital sustainability, is that. Climate crisis doesn't happen in a vacuum, that it is not just about carbon, but it is about ethics and relationships and inclusion and social justice, and all of these things come together.That big change starts small. I'll come back to that in a second. That talking about climate can be hard and that digital is physical. These are the organizing principles of their green design principles manifesto, and they. Work on the idea that you should think bigger before you start, which means to challenge the status quo and to put care first, and that you should build better by default, meaning optimized, transparent, and adaptable.Without going into detail into all these things, I do want to highlight that their principle of big change starts small, says. Start seeing yourself as a change maker. It takes only 3.5% of the population actively participating in nonviolent protests to ensure serious political change. Similarly, in companies and the tech industry, forming groups that can push change, can have lasting.When they say, talking about climate can be hard, they say develop a willingness to meet coworkers, clients, stakeholders, or customers where they're at. Grow your ability to frame a conversation in a way that focuses on benefits, incentives, other than sustainability, just being something that is the right thing to.It can be helpful to learn about climate commitments your workplace already has. You can use this to highlight how your sustainability work fits into these goals. So again, I find it very interesting that their design manifesto begins with designing for organizational change and effective communication.And one of the recent examples of this in m. Is that they recently announced their latest version of Windows 11, and if you go to the announcement, you will see all kinds of features and they are all functional features, wonderful, good functional features, and then towards the end, without any sustainability heading whatsoever, but as part of the main core announcement, they also announce.They have now made. Uh, change to their windows update experience. Windows update they say is now carbon aware, making it easier for your devices to reduce carbon emissions. When devices are plugged in, turned on, connected to the internet and regional carbon intensity data is available. Windows update will schedule installations at specific times of the day.When doing so may result in lower carbon emissions because the higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower carbon sources on the electricity grid. And this is under the heading, Delivering Continuous Windows innovation and value. We've also made some changes they say to the default power setting for sleep and screen off to help reduce carbon emissions when PCs are idle.And it's a wonderful example of those conversations. But it is also an example of the power of individual initiative outside of Big Tech because the director of sustainability for Microsoft made a post on LinkedIn about this and mentioned how they had built on the work of electricity maps. Electricity maps is not remotely big tech rather, it is one of a few innovations.What time being the other big one of. Teams of individuals who came together to create an API that tells you what the carbon emissions are or other, what is the carbon intensity for the grid in any given time and place where that information is easily available, and their initiative, this API that they created has been used now to change the entire PC l.Another development recently in Big Tech is that AWS announced updates to the AWS well-architected framework. And it's very interesting when you see, again, the trend, the movement, the I integrative process. The well-architected framework was born in 2012, and it had four pillars in 2015 when it was fully published for the first time released out.But sustainability, again, has made it into the mainstream of their standards for good cloud computing. So what's new? The updates have done a couple of things. They have updated the prescriptive guidance of on best practices. To reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence pillars.Performance efficiency in particular is close to sustainable design and greening emissions, but in addition, they have consolidated, including for the sixth pillar, for sustainability, they have consolidated. White papers and their best practice descriptions, which means that this is now the best tool you could look for if you wanted to understand how to build on the cloud in a sustainable way.And to give you a sense of what this looks like, the sustainability pillar has six design principles. Understand your. Establish sustainability goals, maximize utilization, anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings. Use managed services and reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads.And there are six best practice areas. For sustainability in the cloud, namely region selection, how you select a region is clearly very significant to your sustainability practices, user patterns, software and architecture patterns, data patterns, hardware patterns, and development and deployment process.So this is a collection of patterns, very practical. Guides that apply to all clouds, not just to aws, and then that drill down into AWS tooling as well. What about Google? Well, they're the smallest of the players in the cloud space and very early on they seem to have chosen to differentiate themselves.By really committing to green software to sustainable computing. And so I think it is fair to say that out of the big three, Google is the one that has advanced the most in terms of its own footprint and also in terms of its transparency and tooling, and it's moving forward with it at pace. Quite recently, they rolled out a ui, a dashboard that allows users of Google Cloud to see which zones or which regions are currently running on clean electricity at any one time.So, They tell you, for example, right now Europe, North Europe, Southwest and Europe West are on low CO2 with a nice little logo and a highlight that is clickable and takes you to the actual region cardboard footprint. In detail, it tells you that Europe West 1, 2, 3, 4 are not running on low co2, but West Six is and so on for the entire.World and they tell you what their methodology is for calculating that, et cetera. So they moved from what was an internal benefit to an external benefit. And then again, this year they. Identified another tool. So they did a really interesting research project. They analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across across Google Cloud and found over 600 tons of CO2 emissions in seemingly idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed.These are your proof of concepts, your experiments, your tutorials. Moth bolt projects, the projects that were created by somebody 10 years ago or five years ago, and that have just, nobody's touching them either way, because nobody knows what they do. If those could be cleaned up, it would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees.So Google's response was to create an active assist recommender that alerts. To your seemingly idle projects and tells you how many emissions they are consuming, how much you are producing waste in the world. This is exciting because the amount of dead data in the planet is huge. And finally this week they announced that they were launching their carbon footprint.Product. A product that provides customers with across carbon emissions, associated with a Google platform usage. There are a number of dimensions here. They collaborated with atos, Etsy, hsbc, L'Oreal, Salesforce, ThoughtWorks, and Twitter. And if you know what's been going on behind the scenes, you recognize that ThoughtWorks have been the pioneers in the cloud carbon footprint.org tool, which pioneered the measurement.Emissions across all the clouds. Instead of competing with them, they've learned from them. Likewise, you will know that Etsy was one of the pioneers in measuring CO2 emissions. Google have also announced that very soon they will be displaying for users of Google Workspace. We will be getting the carbon emissions of our usage.So this is all extremely powerful and, and hugely scalable. As a very quick parenthesis, I think I want to make an honorable mention of an innovation that matter. AI has come up with recently that they announced the 25th of October and. It's not yet out. Out as in available to consumers. But using ai, they have managed to achieve a dramatic improvement in audio compression.They have managed to make the equivalent of a CD quality mp3. Be stored in a 10th of the data. So where an MP3 compresses at 64 kilobytes per second. Their new process compresses at six kilobytes per second, and they are now hoping to take this approach and the techniques they developed with their AI algorithms and see if they can achieve similar gains for video compress.Lastly, I want to finish by previewing the upcoming Green Software Foundation Cop 27 Showcase the event, the carbonized software in November the 10th. And this really brings together all the threads that I have been discussing because it involves many of the big tech actors. And it involves constituencies within those big tech companies that are moving to drive the progressive integrity process within the massive companies.But it also includes some of the thought leaders, some of the key innovators that have already nudged and shaped and made possible. Some of the changes in big tech that I've. And finally, it also brings together and celebrates and highlights the individual innovators who are drawing the new frontiers of green software action.And it brings those three constituencies right at the top, showcasing a raft of initiatives that will be crucial for all of us interested in this. At this showcase, there will be a number of high level panels discussing the state of the art in thinking about green software. In addition, there will be a launch of a new ISO standard, the software carbon intensity specification, a standardized way accepted by ISO to measure.The carbon footprint of all software, and this is a standard that integrates both direct emissions and embodied emissions to take account of the manufacturing and disposal of the devices that consume the software. It will also be. Launching the training program I highlighted last week. Fantastic training program, which is now going to be owned by the Linux Foundation, so it will be a Linux Foundation course in green software practice.It will also be launching a Patterns catalog. I mentioned the Well-Architected framework as a collection of patterns. The Green Software Foundation Patterns Catalog is an ambitious. Project to bring together. The green software patterns in Web, in cloud, and in ai, and this is not just a collection, but a vetting and curation.Every pattern goes through a rigorous vetting process before. Being published and mainstream. So this will become a fantastic reference point and entry point to good practices. And we will have a preview of the State of green software report that I am working on for the Green, Software Foundation, and it will share.The state of progress. What we will be doing with the survey, with the high level interviews and with the desk research and how we will be covering the, the level of awareness and adoption, the enablers and the points of friction in the expansion of the green software ecosystem. It will further highlight the launch of a green software speaker bureau where.Anyone organizing a tech conference will be able to source an authoritative voice in green software. And finally, and very dear to my heart, it will be showcasing the most impressive carbon aware proof of concepts. It will be announcing the winners of the Carbon 22 Hackathon out of the Fantastic 50 something.Solutions that have been completed and submitted and that you can go and visit and see and watch their videos and see their code and potentially work with them. We will be highlighting the absolute best of the best. So these are the initiatives that might be quoted. In one, two years time by big tech, by government, by regulators when they are scaling up new paradigms of green computing.To finish today, I want to reflect on the nature of change. I believe that the movement toward a green energy sustainable just society. Is not only possible, but inevitable because the alternative is self destruction and human history is chaotic. It's violent, it is destructive, but ultimately it tells us two things.The two things that human beings have. No matter what, and through all the pain and all the disruption and all the chaos, one is survive. Whenever we've been confronted with a choice of changing or surviving, we have changed. Not easily, not smoothly, not pretty, but we have survived by adapting. And the second thing that human history tells us is that we have.Grown in our capacity for complex cohesion where we were able to collaborate only at the level of families or clans. After lots of bloodshed, we learned to collaborate at the levels of cities after even more. Trauma and destruction. We learn to collaborate at the level of nations, and right now, in the midst of all the chaos and Confucian, we are learning to collaborate at the level of the entire planet.And we're not being driven there by Kumbaya songs. We are driven there by pain, and so I. Whether we are going to reach a sustainable, peaceful, just society by an act of collective will and consultation, or only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by our stubborn, clinging to old patterns of behavior that is the choice before all on earth.That is our choice. And at the moment, let's face it, we are going for the slightly more painful option. And by slightly I mean. But significantly, as I said, the data suggests we are no longer going for the worst case option. We are in the middle in the really painful option as opposed to the catastrophic touch and go survival option.We are adapting because we are wanting to survive, and I think this process of change is non-linear. It's like the waves of the sea and the rising of the tide in the. The tide does not rise in one go. The water doesn't just keep going up. It goes forward and it retreats. It goes forward and it retreat.And when it retreats, it leaves dry land and foam and dirt, and then it comes back up in waves. And I think this is what this process is like. We have these retreats and we have these advances, but overall, the nature of survival means that we will have to advance and I believe we will. So we are part of these waves of change.And I think as individual technologists, we can be in the back of the sea, completely unaware of the waves themselves right at the front, and be working as though the world was not burning. more likely. More and more and more of us, and very soon, perhaps already, most of us are somewhere in the wave of change.We are at the base, we are at the middle. We are at the top of that wave and at the base. All that may mean is that we're hosted in the cloud and the cloud is already doing something to become greener. And so we're part of that change simply by being in the cloud, But we're not consciously making any decision.Or we can be in the middle of the cloud. We are aware that this matters. We want to make a difference, and as far as we can fit it into our schedule, we do. But mostly our lives, our schedules are driven by motivations of a very different nature. Or we can be at the crest of the wave. And the crest of the wave is the thinnest part of the.We are not with the majority of people, and it's the most turbulent part of the wave. It is full of foam and dirt and lack of clarity in that spot. It's the first bit that meets the sand and the resistance and the wind, but it also has a unique privilege. It has advantage point. It's the only point on the wave from which you can.The other side where you can see the shore and what lies beyond it. And so I'd like to invite you, and I'm sure if you are listening, you are already near that crest. If you are, keep swimming, swim up, get to the cutting edge. Of that wave and it won't be comfortable and it won't be easy, and it might affect your career choices and might lead to awkward conversations with your colleagues and your friends and your family.But it will give you the incredible gift of seeing past the despair and past the complacence and putting you in a position to be. The first to touch the New Shores. Thank you for joining me on another episode. And good luck with your adventures. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, visit Green Software Foundation, and please, if you liked what you heard, do leave a rating and review. It helps other people discover the show and join in the conversation. The more of us are exploring these issues at home, at work, in our free time and in our projects, the greater chances of taking effective action and making a difference in our own corner of the world.Good luck in your green software journeys and see you in the next episode.

Welcome to our first episode of The Week in Green Software hosted by Ismael Velasco. This new segment on The Environment Variables Podcast will be a bite size smorgasbord of news, events, resources and tools that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software-focused climate action.  Check out the links below for all the resources mentioned in this podcast! Learn more about our people:Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / TwitterEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Course: Green Software Practitioner Training Course by the Green Software Foundation Company: GreenspectorWebsite: climateaction.tech Talks & Events:Event: CarbonHack22 by The Green Software FoundationPapers, Books, Articles & Blogs:Paper: The Sustainability Chapter of the Web Almanac by HTTP ArchiveBook: World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovernBook: Designing for Sustainability by Tim FrickArticle: Greta Thunberg on the Climate Delusion in The GuardianIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcription below:Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green. Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most UpToDate news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focus, climate action.I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.Hello. I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. Each episode I will visit the cutting edge of software focused climate action and give you a whistlestop tool of the latest research and solutions standards and tools. A Bitesize smorgasbord of News and Resources. If you're just starting your journey as a responsible technologist, The Week in Green Software will give you the signpost you need to navigate this fast changing landscape.And the first signpost I'll give you is the Green Software Practitioner Training course created by the Green Software Foundation. If you have found your way to this podcast, you probably already know that. Digital creations of our hands as we type on keyboards and build software have very real material impacts on the environment that aggregate into a massive driver of climate change.And you want to do something about it, and this is why you're here, but perhaps a lot of the vocabulary terminology techniques. Are still fuzzy to you. We speak about CO2 emissions of software. What does that mean? We speak about carbon efficiency versus energy efficiency, and we also speak of carbon awareness and we talk about hardware efficiency and how that interacts with software.When we talk about all kinds of metrics around all this, and finally we discuss all of these things. Very frequently in the context of climate commitments, whether it be the planetary commitment toward net zero or specific targets in particular companies or nations, and just like a junior developer, junior green software developer.Can also feel somewhat lost in the massive vocabulary and of new concepts that are not part of the day to day of our practice to this day. So this course creates a very. Easy to consume, clear and evidence-based structure that breaks down the concepts of carbon efficiency, of energy, efficiency, of carbon awareness, hardware efficiency measurement, and of climate commitments, including each core component, each core terminology, and in very brief units.Allows you to understand the landscape and gives you healthfully some good multiple choice questions at the end to consolidate your learning. By the time you finish this very brief course, you will be equipped to. Dive into the nitty gritty of making your software green, not just at the level of technique, but at the level of understanding why those techniques are having an impact and how they fit as a whole with the various other elements of creating green software.In short, the Green Software Foundation training course will prepare you to consume. This podcast and others from a position of awareness. But the weaken green software is not only aimed at those starting their journey, if you are a pioneer already greening the material impact of our digital lives, this podcast will keep you updated on the latest advances and how they might enhance your own efforts.And speaking of pioneers, Second resource I'd like to bring to your attention is the sustainability chapter of a hot of the Press Web Almanac Report by HTTP Archive. HTTP Archive are the creators of the Wayback Machine, and they. Are the foremost collection of copies of snapshots of the worldwide Web in the world, and that results in a massive data set that is indicative of the practices of Web developers.This chapter was authored by real pioneers, Lauren De Verne Gerry McGovern and Tim Frick, who have helped define and continue to shape discourse and practice in green software on a global scale. Many of the green software practitioners that I know. Began their journey and trace it back to the incredible book, Indispensable book, Worldwide Waste by Gerry McGovern, and many of the people who started trying to respond to the moral imperative and call to action of that powerful occur, that powerful voice from the heart turned to Tim freak's groundbreaking textbook.Sustainable Web design and he was one of the first people really together. A lot of the practices that today we are working on across the field. And Lo de Verne works with a company called Greenspector who have been really. Forefront of new techniques and new approaches to understanding in a very rigorous and actionable way, the environmental impact not just of websites, but of Web applications and of software in general.And this chapter that they have written as a dream team together, I would say is probably the single best resource on green website development practices available right now in the world. I would recommend it as both an introductory guide once you've done that first training course to get you up to speed with vocabulary, but also as a truly powerful expert.It summarizes the state of the art in Web related environmental metrics, methodologists and design patterns, and uniquely, in many ways, it takes an intersectional approach that engages not just with. What is called sometimes carbon tunnel vision, CO2 emissions only, and not even more broadly with environmental degradation around water consumption or other chemicals or energy.But it also engages with the issues of climate justice and accessibility and says that actually building. Sustainable software is about more than just reducing CO2 emissions. It's also about engaging with the whole planet in a sustainable way. In addition to this already groundbreaking contribution of getting us all up to speed and summarizing in a very accessible but truly, Learn it and evidence based way, the cutting edge of thinking in this area.It also breaks new ground in that it brings together a really vast. Data set that is open source and accessible to others with very user friendly and powerful diagrams that allow you to just go through that report and get a very granular sense of how the Web ecosystem is actually constituted today from an environmental perspective instead of an average.Or a projection, which is what we mostly use when identifying the carbon footprint of the worldwide Web. We now have, uh, an empirically backed distribution. The authors tested 8 million websites and mapped in every single one of those 8 million websites, the presence or absence. Of all the good practices that we know make for green Web design, and they now allow us as a result to benchmark all of our websites in a multidimensional and rigorous way.Your site, for example, might be in the 25th percentile for total size. It's beautifully small. It might be in the 90th percentile for number of requests. Every time that somebody lands on your tiny page, a hundred requests go off to trackers, to analytics, to libraries, to logs, and actually the net result is your very otherwise optimized website is actually a net polluter.Not only does it give us this kind of data for our own individual practice, but for those of us who are active in. Shaping or advocating for policy agendas or in education for sustainable development in reaching our peers and fellow technologists. The data set provided also allows us to prioritize policy agendas.For example, one. Impactful takeaway for me from this report was that only 10% of sites in the 8 million sample were hosted on green hosting providers. And that is both surprising in some ways and inexcusable in the sense that. There are so many options today, so many options for green hosting from going directly to the big three, which are probably the greenest of options to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud in reverse order of greenness.So Google is the greenest followed by a zero, followed by aws, but also a lot of the even hosted providers. At the back of the trail are actually hosted in CloudFlare or in other providers that are green, but 90% of sites are not taking advantage of this, and this is significant because. Servers where our information is hosted and from which it is transmitted are the probably the biggest direct contributors of emissions in the software life cycle.So the manufacturer of the devices that. Use is much bigger. I believe that the aggregated usage of all of the devices is probably greater, but in terms of the direct footprint of your piece of software, where you host it is hugely significant and it's one of the greatest. Biggest and easiest low hanging fruit.If you were to shift your. Website from a bare metal or a dirty host and put it into a nice green cloud, you would dramatically improve the footprint, the optimization, the water usage, the electricity consumption of your website. So this kind of data point is a useful. Strategic guide for those of us who have to prioritize between all the various good patterns and messages.Clearly the battle is not even begun, let alone won. We have to get the message out there that we need to be on green hosts, and perhaps even more significantly, we should be working with regulators, with producers, with industry bodies. To require green standards from all hosting providers so that we're not just having to leave it to the consumer to discover which host is green or not.Although it's very easy and there are fantastic extensions to it, or you can go to eco greater. Put Globe Mellow on your browser or simply go to the Green Web Foundation, which has an eye wateringly large data set of billions of hosting providers of whom, significant proportion that they have identified our Green Web hosts.It doesn't mean they're actually green, it just means that they are much greener than any alternative and so worth Priorit. Which brings me to a question that has come up again and again in my conversations this week. Why bother? And I mean, you're listening to this podcast so clearly you care, but in the secret recesses of your soul, or in the late night conversations, do you not ask yourself the question, Can I as an individual technologist, Really have a meaningful impact on this train wreck that is accelerating climate change.This week, Greta Thunberg wrote of the climate crisis. It will take many things for us to start facing this emergency, but above all, it will take honesty, integrity, and courage. So honestly speaking, do we really believe that by turning off autoplay on a video on our webpage, we can actually change the world?Is the focus on green software not a distraction? Placing the burden of change on individual technologists while the only people who can make a real difference operate on a much grander. What's the point of debating which bit of dust to clean in the middle of a mudslide? It is easy to be discouraged when faced with systemic societal problems, not just environmental, but across the board.But it is a dangerous fallacy, I think, to think that the only form of power is authority resources. And coercion. Yes, governments could have a massive impact by regulating and enforcing greener ways of living. And yes, multinationals are in the privileged position to make changes that affect the entire planet in one go, but there are other forms of power.The power to envision, the power to choose. The power to collaborate and evolve, perhaps the power to become. It is a tiny infinitesimal proportion of humanity who have envisioned tools, systems, and approaches that have allowed entire nations to change their energy con. The crisis of our times, I would argue is not least a crisis of hope and imagination.For instance, if the extent of my hope is that I will be able to move in this room in which I am recording this podcast, but I have no. Ever opening the door that leads to the rest of my home. Then all of my planning, all of my solutions, all of my initiatives will be confined to these four walls. The. If my hope stretches further, if I believe that it is actually possible for me to roam the confines of my entire house, well that will be very good from the point of view of going to the toilet and having a shower, it will be fantastic from the point of view of feeding myself in a healthy way.Above all, it will open up a huge range of options for interacting with my space. I can sit in the sofa, I can put some music, I can watch tv, et cetera, etc. I can even perhaps order food brought home and then my possibilities really expand. But if my level of hope only stretches as far as this house, I will never again place my bare feet on the grass.I will not lie down at night and count the stars. I will not go and visit my children or my friends because all of my planning, all of my choices, all of my actions will be confined to this house. The extent of our ability to act is closely inseparable, in fact, from our ability to hope and to imagine, because if I can imagine not just leaving the house and I cannot just imagine.But actually hope it, I can believe in its possibility even if at this particular moment I don't really know how to unlock that door because I lost the keys. But if I believe that I can actually get out one way or another, my initiatives, my problem solving will not be focused on which room I will sleep or eat in.It will be focused in how to open the window or the door or find a way through to the vast landscape and the entire planet that awaits me. Similarly, those few people who have been able to see further, who have been able to imagine to conceive of possibility have allowed us all to. Beyond the confines of our immediate situation between the four enclosing walls, and gradually step into that space because in contrast to the very small number of visionaries creating collective planetary possibilities, it is in fact the aggregated choices.Of millions of consumers to give their belief, their hope, their commitment, their effort to those ideas, which has been the engine of massive societal transformations. It is individual, often on coordinated, but values driven choices that have led companies and governments to adopt net zero target. And they may be moving too slowly and there may be a lot of green washing.But the fact is that as a planet, we have agreed on a direction of travel and we are moving in that direction. It is those myriad of tiny individual choices that have aggregated to make esg. A corporate requirement, environmental, social, and governance indicators that have changed regulations, supply chains, manufacturing standards, and have made renewable energies power a growing proportion on an industrial scale at a time when, at the beginning, the very idea that solar could be.Practicable, let alone scalable was elusive. But those few people there to hope and were able to imagine, and they gave us all the possibility to choose between those visionaries and that growing mass ethical consumers, the visionaries with the power to imagine and us with the power to. It's a dense network of networks of powerful collaborations, mobilizing to educate one another, to persuade one another, to track and implement and verify.The civil society sector has been growing and growing and growing, not just in numbers, but in influence, in sophistication, in capacity to mobilize. To account for change and obstacles and to make that vision that the innovators and the dreamers and the spiritual and ethical leaders in the real sense of the world have seen for us and make it, reach us, make it, reach the.And what all of these things have in common is that they allow us to be, not just to run an auto pilot, but to be true to our own best selves, our highest values, and thus not just exist, but really live in the end. The power to hope and to dream, the power to mobilize and collaborate and the power to. All adopt the power to become who we can fully be individually and ultimately as societies and.The whole human race, which brings me to the Green Software Foundation CarbonHack 22, which is another thing that's coming to my radar this week, which I think is significant and of wider interest even for those listening who will not participate. I have been around the hackathon scene for a few years as a software engineer and as an I.And this event is, in my view, a truly exceptional opportunity to envision, to collaborate, to choose, and to become. It is an inspiring confirmation of these other forms of less formal, but no less significant forms of power On the one hand. You have participating in this hackathon, the massive corporations with the power to have large scale impacts very quickly.Intel, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Accenture Globe, and UBS ThoughtWorks. Together, they have made this a hundred thousand dollars challenge, which let me tell you is a lot more than is usual in Hackathons. With a $40,000 first price, this is a great motivator that amounts to more than just encouragement. It becomes a form of seed funding.Any idea that really, really captures the imagination of the judges from these massive planetary organizations will receive. Money to be able to liberate time or bring in talent or buy equipment that allows their proof of concept, their dream, their vision, that hope beyond the borders of the four walls of our present to embody itself in action.But perhaps more significant than that price, than that seed funding is the fact that these judges, that these big companies will be genuinely paying attention. I have had people reach out to me from some of these companies. Just wanting to participate as engineers in the hackathon, not for the money because they would not be eligible as sponsors, but simply from the enthusiasm to make a difference and others who are really paying attention, who want to see.New approaches and solutions that they might support, incorporate scale, that would allow us as a planet and their mass companies to be more responsible, impactful citizens. A single idea that grabs their imagination could be the beginning of massively impactful change. And you also have the collaborative networks of change makers that can socialize, not just the tools that come.This visioning process, this imagination, this hope in action. We have Code for All, which is the largest civic tech network in the world who are helping disseminate this happening across their amazing network of technologists trying to improve the world beyond just the environment. We have the Green, Web, Foundation, who are.One of the greatest hubs. Proof of concept innovation. They themselves, just, if you go to the Green Foundation, GitHub re repository, you will see a whole range of things that all amount to windows into the future, to exits into hope threads that you can pull to advance closer toward a greener. And of course, the Green, Software Foundation itself, which is mobilizing to help reach those individuals across all three populations in whose power lies to imagine, to initiate, to sow seeds.And then you have the innovators, hundreds of volunteers from both the global north and the global south with decades of experience or just starting. Finding one another and exploring what would be relatively simple ideas with the potential to really change the world or one corner of it in a significant and environmentally healthier way.And already there are ideas, which, when or not I can see have huge potential. The purpose of this hackathon is to promote carbon aware computing. What does that? Well, what we really, really need in the planet is to drastically reduce our energy consumption and our consumption in general, which is. Really driving our planet to multiple cliffs, not just around climate change, but around the exhaustion of valuable resources and the degradation of societies, the exploitation of people, all of the very unhealthy patterns that create a system that is no longer functional for us, if it ever.But to get to that point where we have achieved equilibrium in our consumption and production patterns is not gonna be like pressing a button. Even if we wanted to, even if we convinced absolutely everyone, there would still be a period of transition of experimentation, of learning, and in this transitional period.We are all children of the half light with one foot in the sun and the wind and the water, and one foot in the shadow of a coal mine. Indeed, our energy mix is and will remain for a good while mixed. Some of it will be clean. Brought to us from by nature's hand, and some of it will remain dirty in the legacies of a dying world, so we cannot control.When the sun shines, we cannot say to the wind, to Blauer right now or make the tides rise at will to power our washing machines and our computers and whatever you are using to consume this podcast, we have to follow nature. We are partnering with nature. We are not controlling it. Therefore, carbon awareness means that we ensure that the electricity that we will consume no matter what is sensitive to the flows and ebbs of renewable energy in the electricity grid.So, for example, you could make sure that that washing machine only runs. When the electricity grid in your area is being powered by the sun or by the wind, And stops when it is powered by burning fossil fuels. Or you might have a massive computing job, which is happening in the cloud. And if you know a little about cloud computing, you know that there are multiple geographic zones where that job could take place.So carbon where computing would allow you to say, I will run this computing job, not here where I am at this moment when the electricity is dirty. Instead, I'm gonna run this computing job in Sao Paolo or in Sweden where the electricity happens to be green at this particular. So this is carbon aware computing is the idea that we still use energy.We haven't yet reduced our energy footprint in that sense, but we ensure that the energy we use is as clean as possible and that we avoid as far as possible the peak moments where the electricity is most polluting. The Green Software Foundation created this fantastic API that allows you to know when and where the electricity is being powered by renewable energy and when and where in the planet the electricity is.Highly polluting and this hackathon is all about hooking to this API and coming up with solutions that allow you to apply this carbon aware computing. Now the solutions that people are working on are super exciting. Some of them are really quite small. For example, a plugin for the serverless framework.So this is an infrastructure as code framework where you basically write a few lines and say, I want you to create, to provision a computing environment for me in. AWS or in Azure or in Google Cloud particularly, at least I am aware of it being used in AWS for what are called Lambda functions, serverless functions that only are activated when activities happening and then go back to sleep.So they're very environmentally friendly and very efficient and powerful and composable. The research shows that something like 80 or 90% of all serverless functions, Lambda functions are deployed via serverless. So just a little plugin in this very, very niche area that allows you to ensure that those Lambda functions, those serverless functions only run in the greenest electricity zones around the world.Could have a massive, massive impact because a lot of computing is being run through lambdas. Other ideas, for example, are around completely different part of the computing stack. So someone is creating green mold UI components. So the idea is that you create websites by composing various pattern. So you use a library like Tailwind or like Bootstrap or like Material ui, which already has pre-built styled components like forms, like buttons, like headers, et, cetera etc.And those can be very attractive and very beautiful, but also potentially a little heavy. If you could have versions of the very same components of the forms or of the buttons or the nav bars that became simpler and lighter when the electricity was dirty, you would shave a tiny bit of electricity and of CO2 emissions.And we're back to that idea and why do we care? Why would taking one gram of CO2 out of a webpage make a difference? Well, if that webpage is visited a hundred thousand times each day, then over a year, that is three and a half million tons of CO2 that your one gram reduction has achieved. There are so many other ideas.There are some very, very simple ideas which are nevertheless really powerful. So simple schedulers, simple alarm belts as it were, that tell you when the electricity is optimal or so suboptimal. So for instance, in my example, you could get a scheduler that allows you to choose when. Put on the washing machine, but also when to game, and when to watch videos and when to engage in the most fun yet most intensive activities in your digital life.So you can be a responsible gamer or for electrical equipment or for crypto mining if you're going to be mining crypto coins. Consuming a lot of energy and that's not a good thing to do. At the best of times, but if you are gonna do it and people are doing it at scale, wouldn't it be amazing if you could ensure that that mining happens at a time when the grid locally is running on renewables or stops.You stop your mining when the grid is particularly dirty or when your emissions budget has gone past a certain level. All of these are little glimpses of hope. There are little windows of imagination. There are possibilities where, where a million collective individual choices might eventually lead us.If those of us now engaging you, listening, the organizations that are participating, mobilized to let, to empower people to be able to make those choices. Maybe one of these ideas really takes off in a huge way. Maybe 10, maybe five of these ideas take off in a small. But still aggregate, not just in making a direct impact and difference, but in stretching our capacity to envision and to dream.And the result is that a new solution comes on the back of these proof of concepts that actually scales. I want to finish by telling you a story and it's a real story. It took place in Geneva in the year 2000. I was there for a United Nations summit, and this was the Geneva 2000 Millennium Summit, which was five year son for the very first social summit that looked at social develop.And it was taking forward this, and there were so many thousands of non-governmental organizations. I was representing the International Association for Community Development, and it was a fantastic space to meet incredible change makers. And there's. That stays with me. Out of everyone, there are hundreds of people I met there.There is one person that I saw that I didn't even speak to properly. I had, you know, 10 seconds of conversation with. Mostly I just saw her walk against the flow of people to get to a meeting. She was from Somalia, and Somalia in 2000 was on fire. There was a terrible, bloody civil war and a mass immigration of war refugees.This woman, too, had left Somalia, but she hadn't left Somalia to escape. She had left Soma. To launch an incredible vision. Think if you can, if you are old enough or if you've watched on series and movies where the world was technologically in the year 2000. Our phones, I think were barely Nokia, and the most that you could play was snake.You probably could do a little more by 2000, but you were a far cry from smartphones and they were all in rich countries. What this Somali woman entrepreneur. Came to say in that conference, and I don't even know her name was, invest in mobile technology in Africa, come to Somalia and put in the infrastructure and bring in mobile phones.At that point, that was sheer fantasy. Imagine starting a business in our war. Imagine bringing mobile phones to a continent that mostly struggled to have electricity and running water, and certainly no fixed phone, which in the year 2000 was still by far the primary way of phone communication. So people said, You haven't even got to the stage of fixed landlines.You're convincing us that there is a business to be made installing mobile infrastructure and selling mobile phones to the poorest areas of the world. It really seemed ridiculous, and I don't know who listened. The vast majority did not. I was hugely inspired by her, but I have to confess, I was also hugely skeptical.Fast forward 2022, and Africa is the pioneer in the application of mobile technology to social innovation. They are the. In mobile wallets with 60% of all mobile wallets in Africa, the incredible innovations, the interventions, the way mobile phones were used to save. The entire populations from starvation by, um, a version of universal basic income by sending to all these subsistence traders who were hawking wars and who suddenly could not survive cuz they could not sell and they could not go out because a pandemic was killing people.They used phones to put money into all of those pockets and lifted an enormous number, enormous proportion of the country. I believe it was in Togo, from starvation and from poverty. Mobile phones are everywhere. I lived for three months in a very remote Maasai village in Tanzania. There were. The only technology that existed in that village was one very old cassette tape running on batteries.A car that visited once a week or so, maybe three or four. Collective electric torches, battery run, and a few mobile phones. Everything else. Was built from nature and you follow the stars and you follow the seasons and you cope with a drought and you lived entirely by the flows of the natural world, except for mobile phones.Those Maasai tribes were so entrepreneurial and globally aware and savvy, and they harnessed that technology in incredibly powerful ways that Somali woman was a visionary. If you listening to this podcast, if you got to this moment in this podcast, I know one thing about you. You care about our. You are not just passively despairing, but actively taking action, big or small to make a difference.And I know you're not alone. That woman was a single undefeatable voice in a conference that wasn't listening. You are part of an incredible community of change makers, whether you've already found each other or you haven't met a single person who is thinking about digital. But you are not alone. Every single person listening to this podcast is another voice in the planetary conference room advocating with you, experimenting beside you, adding their impact to yours.So I will lend by highlighting the most wonderful space I found to connect with others who are walking the very same path in very different shoes. It is called climateaction.tech, and it's Epicenter is a community on Slack comprising thousands of technologies from. Programmers to product owners, to designers, to investors, students innovators, exploring how to green existing tech across any and all domains.This includes people who have just begun to think about these issues and also world authorities in this space. In an atmosphere of mutual encouragement, support, humility, and dynamism. That amazing Somali woman accurately envisioned the future. She was alone, but you could tell she knew she wasn't. We are not either.And armed with this knowledge, we can share in her certainty of impact. How much more when we have so many more channels to find and collaborate with one. Not least The. Week in Green. Software spread the word. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, visit Green Software Foundation, and please, if you liked what you. Do leave a rating and review. It helps other people discover the show and joining the conversation. The more of us are exploring these issues at home, at work, in our free time and in our projects, the greater chances of taking effective action and making a difference in our own corner of the world.Good luck in your green software journeys and see you in the next episode.

👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈Environment Variables is back! Chris Adams hosts our Green Networks focused episode and he is joined by Eve Schooler, Principal Engineer and Director of Emerging IoT Networks at Intel and Romain Jacob of ETH Zurich. They discuss how can we reduce the energy produced by networks? How could we leverage current research to make the internet more energy efficient?Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteRomain Jacob: Website / TwitterEve Schooler: Website / LinkedInEpisode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Talks & Events:Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.Event: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Hackathon and Codesprint London (IETF 115)Papers:Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.Paper: ITU GHG Recommendations for the ICT SectorPaper: Toward Carbon-Aware Networking by Noa Zilberman, Eve M. Schooler, Uri Cummings, Rajit Manohar, Dawn Nafus, Robert Soulé and Rick Taylor.Paper: Greening of the Internet by Maruti Gupta and Suresh Singh.Paper: Approaches to calculating network / website energy and carbon by David Mytton.Open Source Projects:The Watttime APIElectricity Map APIThe Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.CO2.jsThe Green Web Foundation IP-2-carbon-intensity APIIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Romain Jacob: In many internet service provider networks. So kind of the edge of the internet, where we have strong, seasonal patterns into traffic, they are allowing fruits. There are many of those small networks. So the benefit you can get there actually add up pretty quickly. And if they, if they don't seem.Interesting. If you look at a single network, if you apply those principles everywhere, you can achieve very large effect. And that's something, every network operator should, should have a look at if only to reduce their energy.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables. The podcast about green software. I'm Chris Adams, your host today, I'm filling in for Asim Hussain. And on this episode, I am joined by Eve schooler of Intel. HiEve Schooler: Hi.Chris Adams: Eve and Hama, Jacob of et Zurich in Switzerland.Romain Jacob: Hello, everybody.Chris Adams: And today we're gonna discuss the levers available to us for greener networking.Now, if we go by the figures from the international energy agency, data networks used around 250 terror hours of electricity in 2019. And while we don't have the figures yet for 2022. This same agency is projecting a estimate of around 270 terawatts to be used by the end of this year, which for context is more than the entire electricity usage of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, this results in a significant environmental impact.And thankfully, we'll be talking with some people who've been spending a lot of time thinking about where the biggest levers are to do something about this in the context of the climate crisis. And they'll be sharing their research on how we can end up with greener more sustainable networking. But before, before we dive into the specifics, let's do a quick round of intros.So maybe you can introduce yourself and your work at Intel.Eve Schooler: Hi, thank you for inviting me. I am a principal engineer and I'm a director of emerging IOT networks at Intel. And my current work focuses on evolving the internet toward a sustainable edge to cloud infrastructure. My background in expertise is primarily in networking and distributed systems. And although I've spent much of my career in industrial research, I currently straddle a business unit at Intel called the network and edge business unit.And as well as the corporate strategy office, where I'm responsible for sustainability, innovation and standard. And I'd say that something that's really colored my experiences that I've spent much of my career heavily involved in internet standards and standards bodies, such as N and the I E TF, which is the internet engineering task force.Where earlier in my career, I developed control protocols for internet telephony and multimedia teleconferencing, but at present I'm heavily involved in and leaving a working group focused on deterministic networks and their extension to operate in. Networks. I'm also actively involved in the open group's open footprint forum, and that aims to standardize the carbon footprint data model.So you can hear sort of my internet hat as well as the sort of sustainability hat, both coming to the, for.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Eve. And thank you once again for getting up at the crack of Dawn to join us from California today. Okay. I know it's somewhat more sociable time, so maybe I'll just give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll dive into some of this.Romain Jacob: Sure. So. I've been studying at et Switzerland since seven years for now, the first five I spent during my PhD on lo wireless communications for embedded systems. So the, the question of how to save the energy was, was kind of core to everything I was doing there. And after I graduated in 2019, I moved on to more internet.And most recently I've been interested into how can we reduce the, the energy consumed by networks in general, with a focus on wired networks. And I'm trying to see to which extent the concept of low power wireless networking could be translated into wire networks and how we could leverage that to make the internet more energy efficient.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. And for context, I found about raw math through the conference called hot carbon, which is a kind of energy and carbon nerd conference online where his paper. The internet of the future, that should, what was it? The internet of future will grow old and sleep more. Was, was that something like that?That tickled me. I should introduce myself. My name is Chris Adams. I am the, uh, I am the, the head of the policy group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the executive director for the. Green Web Foundation, an NGO based in the Netherlands campaigning for a fossil free internet by 2030. And now, you know, all our names.Maybe we should jump into the actual topic of greener networkings. So Eve I, I first came across your work with, uh, one of the, with a recent paper called towards carbon away networking. And in that paper, There was actually some useful information about setting the scene in terms of how much of the internet, or how much of the tech industry, what, what, how much network makes up of this compared to say data, data centers, and computing.I wondered if you might be able to just expand on some of that, because this is a useful piece of context. And previously we've spoken primarily about data centers rather than the kind of aggregate impact.Eve Schooler: Absolutely. I mean, in the press, we hear a lot about how data centers are consuming the world in terms of their energy usage. And it's, it's interesting because there's studies that suggest that networking is as large or larger. Than the data center in, in terms of its consumption. And there, even when you look at, when you dig into the numbers, a little further networks have been estimated to consume as much as one and a half times as much as data centers and, and even within data centers, networks already account for between 10 and 20% of the energy there.So those numbers set the context, which is why it feels like networking deserves some further investigation. And solutions.Chris Adams: So, this is one thing that I might, I might ask you a romantic come into, come into on this, because previously we've heard while there are tools, like say CO2 JS or websites like website carbon, which will give you an idea of the environmental impact from say, What looking at a website or you'll see stories about things like say the environmental impact of watching say Netflix, for example.But as far as I'm aware, the actual energy usage used by networks tends to be relatively, uh, has historically been run something which has relatively stable compared to the other usages from that. And I wondered if you might be able to expand a little bit on that part there, like, is there scope for a change or is it just a static figure that we have, no matter how much we use the internet.Romain Jacob: Yeah. So there is two, two points to this. What, what, one thing, which is very true, that relates to what you were saying is that the, the energy consumed by networks at any point in time. Say in a time span of a year or months then to be fairly constant. So there have been a number of studies that shows this, that the energy consumed by the network is essentially independent of the load.So if you are using 10% of the capacity or a hundred percent, essentially the same thing, the, the reason for this, so. The stable number, um, has increased over time as we've scaled up the networking infrastructure, but for the, for giving infrastructure, the energy you consume. So the power you draw at any point in time tends to be fairly constant.That's, that's kind of worrying because we are typically operating very far from the hundred percent point. So we tend to over provision our networks, meaning we want to make sure there. Much they are capable of much more than what we typically ask, which means that we essentially use a lot of energy all the time.Whereas we are using the infrastructure fairly little.Chris Adams: So if I follow what you're saying, this is a little bit like maybe 10 or 20 years ago before kind of pre-cloud where you might have. A big fat, chunky server that you have and you plan for the maximum capacity. And as a result, it may be that if you look at say the usage you have there, because you can't really scale that server down, you've got that same.You've got that kind of relatively core grained amount of energy usage. Is that the model that is actually helpful to think about when we are looking at the net network usage.Romain Jacob: Kind of, yes. So when you talk about compute and you kind about what servers are doing a lot of, depending on the workload you're, you're actually working with, but. You can scale up and down the power, depending on how much computer you're producing. Whereas when you're looking at networking, it doesn't really work like this because you have very little compute that actually happens in the network.What, what the network consumes energy for is to powering the memory on which you read the, the routing information, for example, in the optics. So reading packets in and out and all those things. Have are essentially dominated by idle power, which is the power you draw, just to turn things on.Eve Schooler: I wanted to make a big distinction, which is that much of the core network has this property that whether or not you've got high usage, you know, lots of packets flowing across it or not. It is gonna have this constant amount of, uh, draw energy draw. But the wireless network. Inherently has was taught from the beginnings of its design to be fairly adaptive.So I think that's the distinction. One of the distinctions being made here is that wireless and wired networks behave quite differently in the face of congestion or, or even just traffic on the network.Romain Jacob: Yes, it's very true. Very true.Chris Adams: Okay. So if I, if I'm were to apply some kind of mental model for this, you might think about kind of like backbone networks as almost like kind of current Deion, current, constant the entire time. And then as the closer you get to the surface or to. End users. You might have a bit more kind of spiciness going up and down.And that's like a way to think about where some of the levers for reducing. Impact might be. So if we're speaking about consumption and that gives us some way to think about the energy used, there is another kind of source of leverage, which is the carbon intensity of the energy itself. And as I understand it, Eve, this was some of the work that was presented at hot carbon.And some of the work that the paper that you've been con contributing to towards carbon away, networking, maybe you might expand on some of that because there are some really fascinating ideas I found in that.Eve Schooler: Sure. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, there's been at least in the data center community, an awareness of what is the quality, if you will, of the. That is being drawn from the socket. Uh, and what I mean by that is what is the carbon intensity? How low a carbon intensity can we get towards using clean energy or renewable energy?So the lower, the number, the better and data centers in recent years have begun to experiment with. And now are operationalize the idea of time and space shifting workload. To align with the availability of clean energy. That's interesting for a, a bunch of reasons, the most important of which is that as Roma was saying earlier, the, the footprint for data centers and I C T you know, information, communication technology continues to grow.And especially in the face of all the increased amount of data that we're sending across networks. And so pairing a data center with renewable energy. Enables us to reduce the carbon footprint of those data centers as they consume more energy. But similarly, in the electrical grid domain, we also have more and more integration of renewables and in places like California, which is where I'm based and in Germany and other parts of the world where that integration is happening quite rapidly.There are parts of the day where there's way more renewable energy than we can possibly consume. And so it just gets dropped on the floor. It gets wasted. And so there's been this lovely pairing of, you know, we've got an entity that's consuming a lot of energy going to renewables and the renewables, creating excess and looking to somewhere to consume that.So if you can think of compute as load balancing or as being virtual batteries for the data centers and it begs the question that if network. Are using one and a half times as much electricity. Why aren't we using those same techniques in networks? And so there is this growing awareness of where are the places where we can put renewables in order that networks are consuming cleaner energy as well as can we, and is it worthwhile to time and space shift the transmission of our network loads in order that they have a smaller carbon.Chris Adams: Okay. So this is actually quite interesting to me for a number of reasons, because if I understand the most common tools we might use for. Hacks of data around the world. We don't have that much control ourselves directly. So I might send something to the next hop, but there's something like the border gateway protocol that decides where the next hop is and so on and so on and so on.So I might have some indirect control there. And there are say, clean slate attempts to redesign parts of the network, or even introduce a notion of kind of path awareness from connecting. Say something you have now here to maybe a website. So you could take a kind of greener route like you have here would either of you have anything you might could so share there because.As I'm aware things like the border gateway protocol, BD BGP has maybe one main criteria that you have here. And it sounds like we might want to be able to use multiple criteria. Like I care about latency, but I also want to balance that with carbon intensity, for example, or even cost I'll open it up to see if anyone has anything they might wanna share here that might.Romain Jacob: Yeah. So, as you mentioned, the GP is kind of like the glue that, that connects the internet together, and it is been suited how to extend it, improve it and change it. Over the past, I don't know, 30 years or so various directions for various objectives. Usually security is the main concern that people have with BGP.But most recently there have been some different additive different approach to go away from BGP. One example of that is the Zion network or networking principle that is also coming for me. That that is trying to let the end. Pick which route the, the traffic should go through in the internet. So it's an idea that is generally known as source routing.So like the, the source of the traffic should say, I want my traffic to go through this network. Then this network, this network in until I reach my end point. And once you have this tool, so this is good for security purposes, but if you have this, you can also use it for carbon awareness. You could also say, I prefer to go through California because they have a lot more renewable energy rather.I dunno, some other state in the us, they may not have as much,Eve Schooler: Like Virginia.Romain Jacob: for example.Eve Schooler: West Virginia.Chris Adams: Yeah.Romain Jacob: it empowers you to do this. If you want to do that, it is possible.Eve Schooler: Another way to have a mental model about this is network performance has often been categorized or has attributes like latency, like packet loss, like jitter the variance in the latency. As metrics for the success of transmissions across the network. And so the idea is how to teach things, teach protocols, whether it's BGP or other parts of the network fabric, and even other parts of the network stock about carbon intensity.So that there's this so that it is carbon intensity is another metric. That is a first class metric. In the selection of these routes, whether it's routes or whether it's software usage or whether it's scheduling. And so in some ways we need to teach many of the protocols that we know and love in the internet about these additional options so that we can do joint optimizations, or we can create source routes as a Rama was suggesting.But it, it is really a very simpatico with this idea. Deterministic networks in the small, some of the work that is being done around time sensitive networks, for example, is all around selecting paths or subnets that have the lowest latency and even creating multiple paths in order to ensure that packets get delivered in time.But what if the constraint that we really wanted to optimize for in certain circumstances was the carbon intensity and it really. Also leads us to ask, you know, how do we educate all of this software? That's out there to not only carbon intensity information about the loca, you know, carbon intensity is very location, time and space specific, but how do we also enable our applications to say how time elastic they are in order to be shifted around or delayed?So they're both issues to.Chris Adams: All right. So if so, what it's, what this seems to be speaking to is this idea of moving from maybe just one set of criteria to why this set. So for example, If I cared about latency more than cost, I might care about things like say, if I'm doing a video call in Australia, I might be prepared to care more about latency than the cost of say for carbon.And if I cared about say, making, doing a download of Netflix for, for a video, I might, if I'm not gonna watch it right now, I might say, well, I care more about the cost and the throughput, not, not latency and making it go through a kind of green route. So I would rather have some. Low carbon internet trick shot bouncing through the greenest possible places to end up on my computer for when I come home tonight, for example, or something like that, that seems to be some of the directions and this might be heading towards.Okay. Wow. That's quite exciting actually. So this also speaks to these ideas of. Maybe changing how we might design software in the first place and having different tolerances. Maybe if you might be to speak to some speak to this bit, cuz you, you mentioned this phrase, I haven't come across before time sensitive networks.So maybe you could expand on some of that and some of the delay on, on the flip side of that, which presumably will be delay tolerant networks for this.Eve Schooler: Yes, time sensitive networking community is for example, some of the work that I've been involved in in recent years comes out of the internet of things group at Intel and in particular, the industrial internet of things. Context where you've got control systems that have very, very low latencies, less than a millisecond, for example.And so you're talking about subnets, very small networks, but some of the work in the IATF is about, well, how do you across factory floors? How do you enable them to be time sensitive across subnets, which may have different underlying technologies. And so all of them need to be taught sort of how to do this now in the time sensitive networking world, often one of the strategies, in addition to, as I mentioned earlier, multi-path.Having multiple paths by which packets can go between sources and destinations. So there's redundancy for reliability, but there's also the reservation of resources along the path. And for that, it starts to look a little bit like what we were talking about when Roman was referencing the cion work. What if you knew how much time it took you along each.And you had a certain budget. Well, you could send out a query message between a source and a destination to understand along the way, cumulatively, how much latency am I going to encounter? Reserve enough buffers in those queue. And eliminate congestion along that path. And that's sort of what time sensitive networking in the small has been doing.Now, the kinship that it has with delay tolerant networks is that we wanna expand these time sensitive networks. We wanna teach them about energy usage and energy awareness, carbon awareness, but these delay tolerant networks. Back to the data center analogy, data centers are shifting their workloads to align with when the sun's shining or the wind is blowing.And, and so they're holding onto their workloads. There's been a longstanding project in the networking community around delay tolerant networks that have been designed primarily for deep space. And because, because you, you know, routers come and go because planets align in certain ways or satellites align in certain ways and they're not always there.And so that's why they have to be delayed tolerate. They have to there's this. Dynamic of the availability of the resources. And so the question is, could we be using delay tolerant, networking in context for more than just satellites, uh, in this context where we wanna align with, with the availability of clean energy.Romain Jacob: Yeah, no, I. I totally agree with what Evo was saying and this, this idea of data or more de tolerance, more tolerance in general in networking is necessary to progress towards more energy efficiency or carbon efficiency. This is essentially what wireless networks have ever was saying have been doing forever in wireless.How do you save energy while you keep things off for as long as possible, right? You, you just, you make, try to make sure that when you turn on your radio, it's. Achieve something useful and then packets, well go through and as efficiently as possible. And if you think of it, it's extremely easy to push the energy efficiency, right?What do you do? What you, you turn off for 90% of the time, and then you schedule very tightly the time where you stay on the problem is that that induces delay, right. And your application is to be able to tolerate that delay. And embedded systems IOT, all this work, this, this field has been working in different tradeoffs to play with this so that the, the application performance does not take great too much due to thes by the networking part.And that's like the story of what I've been doing during my PhD. The, the problem is that the internet networks, the wire networks, they've been building a different paradigm. It was. All about reliability. It's, it's, it's been designed to be as reliable as possible. Like if we have a nuclear war, the internet should still work.Like that was the initial idea, right? So we need to make sure to provide all level of reliability possible to sustain anything, but we need to get away from this now because the cost of this is that we over provision everything. We have a lot of redundancy and we use very little of that. So some of the things that I'm, I'm thinking about together with several colleagues now, is that okay?What if we were to redesign indeed those wired networks, so that reliability. It's not something we, we get rid of, but we modulate the requirements we set there and say require reliability is just one objective. How much performance degradation are we willing to tolerate in order to save an energy, to give a very concrete and simple example, most traffic on the internet is driven by.Human activity. Right. And human activity has a very clear seasonal pattern. We, we use the networks more a certain time of the days and not at others. It's very easy to, to think that we could turn off part of this networks for certain part of the day, because we don't need that much bandwidth. And if we do, we might be able to tolerate a bit more delay than, than at peak hours.It's very similar to turning off the public lights on the streets, you know, at night when nobody's driving, right. It's the same principle.Eve Schooler: Or even in your home, right? The analogy of one's parents growing up, don't forget to turn off the lights. It's exactly the same analogy.Romain Jacob: Yeah, it it's, it's the same idea. Right? And there is no reason this gonna be done. I we know we can do it. The question is, how far can we push it? And, and one, one limit limitations factor. One blocking factor at the moment is how quickly we can turn things on and off, uh, because turning, switching on a router or switch.Takes as of today in the orders of several minutes. Right? So it's not something that you can just do multiple times per, per, per hours or so, because essentially your network will be completely unor. It can be changed if we were to change the hardware. If, when to change the operating system, we run on those machines.We could improve on that. How far can we go? This is kind of an open research question at the.Chris Adams: That's really, really helpful. And thank you for explaining it in that way. I presume this is the, the, the internet must sleep more part of your paper where the internet must sleep more and grow old. Right? What you're talking about here is actually the idea of things. Not necessarily being away there all the time, or the idea of liability, moving to different parts of the system is actually quite an interesting one.And one we've seen with the cloud.Eve Schooler: And actually there are a couple of seminal pieces of work that I think we can look back on as really setting us down this path. So for example, you know, Mati Gupta's work in 2009 from SICOM was all about, you know, energy efficiency and, and beginning to examine. How much could we save if we began to turn things off, another interesting paper that's been influential is Dina, Papa Gino's work, access points.And whether parts of the wireless edge network could be, you know, in internal to buildings be turned on, on demand. So it's sort of the opposite idea of like turning things off, but it's like you turn things on, on demand. And as romance suggested, we understand the patterns. Usability of those things. We know when people come into buildings, whether they're in their homes or whether they're in their offices.And so an on demand infrastructure at the very edges of the network makes a lot of sense. So those are two pieces of work that certainly have influenced my views on, um, teaching devices, how to sleep.Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. And this idea of matching demand to supply Eve, you mentioned about kind of speaking in California. I mean, just this week we saw a really good example. Demand response where you saw like a Kaiso the grid operators basically say, Hey folks, we're about to kind of hit a blackout. Can everyone please just turn things down a little bit.And if I understand it correctly, we were able to see basically one of the largest grids not fall over. And this is like an example. Yeah. The, you don't only just have to think about supply by the sounds of things.Eve Schooler: And it raises an interesting question because how much of the network involves the user? How actively attentive are users when they route across the network. Right now there's very little engagement. So one of the issues that we probably need to solve is creating as you were referring to them, levers at different points in the architectural software stack, and even in the hardware.That allows different levels of involve. For users that have different capabilities or interests in enacting those levers all week, we have been receiving warnings about the, the coming temperature. You know, it was 109 unheard of here. It broke all records the other day, but that was through constant messaging that we were asked to please be considerate during the.In particular between four and 9:00 PM, I guess that's when people begin to come home and turn on their air conditioners, the network doesn't do that. it. Doesn't ask you to be thoughtful, but maybe our software and our software development practices need to incorporate this.Chris Adams: Thank you for that. So for other listeners, we did cover some of this in episode nine, where we speak about carbon aware computing and the idea of annotating say jobs for Kubernetes or other schedulers to basically say, yeah, I can wait a little while I, you know, I'm important, but not urgent, but it sounds like a well there's.This reminds me of a blog post by a guy called Ismail Philco he's in the climate action dot slack. And he's been speaking about the idea of, is there a chance to extend some existing protocols, like say we have open API for describing how APIs work on the Web. And there is an ay API, which is another way to say that, which is, as far as I'm aware, is used for lots of kind of programming tools these days, as a way of saying.To do the same thing, very synchronously. And there he's, there's some work there to basically extend this with this notion of delay tolerance or location tolerance, so that you can basically say this thing is important, but it's not so urgent in the same way that with an operating system, with apples, for example, you can annotate particular tasks to either be returned very quickly for high latency when there's users or something, which might be better suited to a low, a low power core in a computer.So maybe this is actually thing I wanna ask is right now we spoke about some kind of cool future things. If I could bring this to some of the stuff that's happening right now, these days, if people are listening to this and they want to do something or start playing around with some of these ideas, where should people be looking?What kind of software is out there? What kind of tools, uh, exist for people to kind of experiment with some of these ideas to play it with their own time, or even possibly build some cool new services on top of, for example,Eve Schooler: A couple of thoughts, at least one is that at Intel, there is a power, a dynamic power management. Solution that exists called speed select technology. And it does allow you to dynamically adjust the frequency of cores. And there's some interesting description of that technology at the most recent I C N.Conference in 2022 in a joint paper with British telecom, there was a paper on NFV and energy efficiency describing that service. But for developers, I would say some of the most interesting APIs I've come across are from there. There are quite a few offerings to get carbon intensity information from the electrical grid, but use it in computing systems.And some of the interesting, uh, APIs are from Watttime. And electricity map. And so I would say you could play with those to see, you know, whether you want to incorporate your both carbon intensity and understand what the patterns are of the carbon intensity, where you reside or where you want your workloads to reside.I also wanted to put in a plug for a workshop that's coming up. That's being hosted by the internet engineering task force on environmental impact of internet, applications, and systems and the deadline for putting in publications, romance.Romain Jacob: I'm aware.Eve Schooler: It's the end of October and with the conference, with the workshop happening in December.And then finally, one of the things that's been, I wouldn't say bothering me so much as frustrating me, is the long lag time between. Our assessment of the overall internet footprint and the time that goes to publication, there's a small group of people who diligently publish these assessments, but it's really backbreaking work to understand where are the pain points in the infrastructure and topology.So I would provide a call to action if you will, for networking researchers involved in the internet to help speed. Accurate and timely assessment of the networking and, and overall ICT energy usage by participating in and contributing to these it documents. It's called L dot four seven, but it it's its name.Human readable name is the G HG for greenhouse gas. Trajectories for the I C T sector. So if you have some insights into the pain points of the Internet's energy usage, where we could be more efficient, turn things off, age things longer, be aware of carbon intensity. We'd like to hear from you.Chris Adams: When you spoke about that, that does remind me that. So this is the Green Software Foundation podcast, and it's worth, I would be remiss to not mention that there is a green software carbon aware SDK, specifically that. Apps, some of these APIs that you're able to use. I think it's primarily written in.net, but I believe there might be some a go build of somewhere this as well, independently of this, the organization I work for the Green Web Foundation, we've built a CO2 JS, which basically has, uh, a lot of the kind of carbon intensity figures inside it now.And also grid intends to go, which is a Golan library specifically designed to allow you to essentially, again, wrap these APIs and use them in scheduling tools. The other work that might be worth being aware of is that there's some work with ripe, which is the people who issue IP addresses in Europe.They've been funding us. Our NGO to basically annotate every single public IP address on earth with carbon intensity information. So if there's a chance to build some of the green routing stuff, yeah. You, we have an API which is API to carbon intensity from our organization that will give you some figures for free, but these are annual.These are not gonna be fluctuating or updating the way that, what time and some of the other providers do. There's also some work from singularity. Who've also, who've recently. Started sharing some information and hourly resolution all across America for people to be looking at this.Romain Jacob: One point I wanted to make is that I do agree that this, this question of carbon intensity and carbon awareness is important. For sure. We need to be able to improve on that metric, but we should not forget that at the end of the day, the best energy is the one we do not consume. And so we should also keep investing efforts into being more energy efficient.While keeping in mind that consuming less energy, if it's energy has to be more carbon heavy is not necessarily the best tradeoff still. We should. We should not. We, we should look at the low hanging fruits in, in reducing the energy we consume for the current service the networks are providing. And I mentioned earlier already today, this, this studio of seasonality, the analyzing the level of redundancy that are existing in network.I think in many internet service provider networks. So kind of the edge of the internet, where we have strong, seasonal patterns into traffic, they are doing fruits and as F paper of hot carbon was mentioning, there are many of those small networks. So the benefit you, you, you can get there actually add up pretty quickly.And if they, if they don't seem. Interesting. If you look at a single network, if you apply those principles everywhere, you can achieve very large effect and that's something, every network operator should, should have a look at if only to reduce their energy bill.Eve Schooler: I think you're absolutely right. Roman, I think there are three things to consider. Actually, when we think about green networks, one is first and foremost, this energy efficiency use less. If you're gonna use energy, ensure that it's decarbonized, but then there's this third facet, which we haven't even touched on, which.The other environmental impacts, whether that's water or toxicity or air pollution, whatever it is that also need to be somehow captured in metrics as well. And ultimately comprehended.Chris Adams: We're running short on time. So I'm gonna ask one question just because it's very rare. People who understand the network to help answer this question. So for people who might know people who feel bad about say watching Netflix or feeling guilty about being on video calls would either you have something to say to people who might be struggling with this to maybe put their mind at ease or help kind of come up with a mental model.Like, should they be feeling bad about the environmental impact or the video calls they make, or the videos they're watching after.Romain Jacob: Uh, I don't think, uh, trying to make feel people guilty will change anything. People don't have the levers to change anything like most, most individuals like you and me. I mean, you're you open your laptop, you have a service provider and you don't have any control. I mean, you can choose provider a or provider B, and they may sell you some broad characteristic of the internet connection they provide you with.But I mean, you. Monitor this, if you're an internet geek and you care about these sorts of things, but you cannot truly influence where it goes. It's not exactly true, but in practice, the individual has very limited control. The network providers do that's that at this level, then that things need to be, need to be changed.Now that being said, you can still do so. Right. You can, for example, just be considerate before consistently streaming and uploading to clouds, gigabytes, and terabytes of, of pictures and multiple the providers, because you care that if Google goes down, then Facebook is not and you get to access your things, you know?Yes. But how many people are actually doing this? I don't think so. I don't think so many.Chris Adams: Okay. So there we have from someone who's on the far stages of their PhD and Eve, is there anything you might add for people who are wrestling with this particular issue themselves? When they open up zoom to speak to a loved one or anything like that themselves?Eve Schooler: I think it's like anything else in our lives, we need to be ACC acculturated to thinking about this as an issue. I don't think we should have that much guilt about it, but we should be thoughtful. And so if it doesn't make a difference in the, in the communication to have the video, when you're just a participant versus a speaker, or if you can do low Def versus high Def, those are really easy decisions.And I think there will come a time when. People will be asked to fit within budgets of carbon footprints and companies and so forth. And so we'll have to do our part. So we should be getting in the habit of at least thinking about these things. But I, as others have said, we don't have that many choices except on or off, it's sort of a bullying choice.Maybe, you know, one, one resolution or not. And, and something about teleconferences is we save a tremendous. Using teleconferencing technology over air travel and, and other forms of travel. So it's, you know, incrementally, we're getting more and more efficient as to all those Netflix that we're watching.that's, that's another concern again, maybe we're, we'll be given a budget in time.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. Thank you for that. From what I'm, from what I'm hearing, it might not be the case case that streaming is indeed in you flying. So that's one thing that we could take into account. All right. We're just gonna wrap up now for people who have enjoyed this and want to learn more, where can people find you online or where should they be going to learn more about the works that we've discussed here?Romain Jacob: Yeah, so you can find, find me on my website, homo.net. This is where you will find most work related updates. Otherwise, with my name will be easy to find on Twitter. I will not read my handle because it's unreadable , but uh, my name works fine. I tried it before.Chris Adams: Okay. Excellent. All right. We'll be adding your, the links in there. And Eve, if people have been interested in some of the stuff you've been talking about, where should they be looking?Eve Schooler: Similarly, you can find me@eveschuler.com and linked LinkedIn as.Chris Adams: Okay. I'm really glad folks. I've really enjoyed this session. And I think there we've covered a lot of really quite helpful ground for other people who are wrestling with this. And I'm just like curious about this for the listeners. Thank you very much for listening to Environment Variables. All the resources for the podcast will be available at podcast dot Green Software Foundation.Along with copious show notes, with all our links for this. If you did enjoy this, please do write a review on wherever you've hear in your podcast. It really does help us find new audiences and yeah, that's us. Cheers folks.Romain Jacob: Bye. Bye.Eve Schooler: ByeChris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. 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In this episode of Environment Variables Chris Adams is joined by Colleen Josephson of VMWare, Philipp Wiesner of TU Berlin and Sara Bergman of Microsoft as they discuss the opportunities with making first carbon aware and then carbon intelligent computing. Variability, curtailment, disaggregation, 5G, 6G (!), delay-tolerant networks, intermittent computing, IoT and even a short segue about Raspberry Pi’s all make an appearance in this action-packed episode!Learn more about our guests:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteSara Bergman: LinkedIn / TwitterColleen Josephson: Twitter / WebsitePhilipp Wiesner: Twitter If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Episode resources:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter Talks & Events:Talk:  Breaking the Barriers of Stranded Energy through Multi-cloud and Federated Data Centers by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.Talk: Towards a Fossil Free Internet by Chris Adams.Talk: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.Event: Hot Carbon at UC San Diego 2022.Event: Solar Protocol Hackathon - August 14 2022.Papers:Paper: The Sky is not the limit: untapped opportunities for Green Computing for Hot Carbon by Colleen Josephson, Zhelong Pan, Ben Pfaff and Victor Firoiu.Paper: Architecture of a Junkyard Datacenter by Jennifer Switzer, Ryan Kastner and Pat Pannuto.Paper: Cucumber: Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads by Philipp Wiesner, Dominik Scheinert, Thorsten Wittkopp, Lauritz Thamsen and Odej Kao.Paper: Let's Wait Awhile: How Temporal Workload Shifting Can Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Cloud by Philipp Wiesner, Ilja Behnke, Dominik Scheinert, Kordian Gontarska and Lauritz Thamsen.Paper: The Internet of tomorrow must sleep more and grow old for Hot Carbon by Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever.Paper: Internet Backbones in Space by Giacomo Giullari, Tobias Klenze, Markus Legner, David Basin, Adrian Perrig and Ankit Singla.Open Source Projects:The Green Software Foundation Carbon Aware SDK - the SDK offered by the Green Software Foundation.Grid Intensity Go - a Golang CLI and library, for use in projects to extend them for carbon awareness.The carbon aware branch of Nomad - Nomad, the popular scheduler by Hashicorp has an experimental carbon aware branch.Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes. Blog Posts & Articles: Blog: Carbon aware autoscaler in KEDA for Kubernetes - The issue mentioned in the podcast for extending Kubernetes by Bill Johnson (Azure SRE).Blog: Annotating jobs with AsyncAPI to be more amenable to carbon intelligent architecture patterns by Ismael Velasco.Article: The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives | Discover Magazine Article: Intermittent Computing in Satellites: Satellite Designed at CMU Launches into Low-Earth Orbit by SpaceRef magazine.Article: A carbon aware internet by Chris Adams for Branch Magazine.Blog: Nasa’s work on Delay Tolerant NetworksBlog: SCION and carbon aware networking the World Economic Forum.Blog: Sustainable 6G Efforts by Colleen Josephson.Blog: VMware sustainable digital infrastructure collaborations by VMWare.  Transcript Below:Philipp Wiesner: So I think we're only touching on the actual potential of how much flexibility there is in many workloads. And I think this is also one of the biggest challenges in the entire field, how to identify opportunities for flexibility, and then especially how to make schedulers aware of these opportunities.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Okay. Welcome to Environment Variables. On this episode, I'm joined by Colleen Josephson of VMware, Sara Bergman of Microsoft and Philipp, Wiesner of TU Berlin. Today we'll be discussing the opportunities and the challenges associated with making software first carbon aware and then carbon intelligence.So before we dive in, though, let's have a quick round of introductions.Colleen Josephson: My name is Colleen Josephson, and I am a research scientist at VMware. And a lot of what I've been doing at VMware has been focusing on sustainability for the past couple of years. The core of it has been in the telecommunication space, actually, which a lot of people don't know that VMware has a business unit dedicated to that, but I switched teams in the past couple of years.So teams have been moving around and now we're underneath the office of the CTO. So I've been doing much more broad and general sustainability work throughout the company. And as part of that, I'm actually the org representative for. VMware in the Green Software Foundation, we are members.Philipp Wiesner: Yeah. Hey, I'm Philipp. Thanks for having me here. I'm currently doing my PhD in computer science at the technical university of Berlin. And my research is on ware and renewable Web computing in the cloud, but especially also in novel computing environment, such as fork and edge computing.Sara Bergman: Hello. My name is Sara Bama. I am a software engineer at Microsoft where I work with Microsoft 365. I am also the chair of writers project in the Green Software Foundation.Chris Adams: Okay. So every episode we talk about green software and today we're talking about carbon aware and carbon intelligence software, and, well, we all know that electricity has to come from somewhere, but not everyone, not. We don't always think about how it's generated. So I'm just gonna open this up to, uh, for someone who's done a bit of work in this for the uninitiated, what is carbon awareness in the context of computing?Philipp Wiesner: So the idea behind carbon Web computing is not to save energy, but to use the, the right energy. So that's green or renewable energy. And this has to do with that. The carbon intensity, which is the, how basically how dirty the, the energy in the public grid is this varies over time. And of course it.Different and different. And in ware computing, we're basically trying to exploit that. So we are trying to shift computational load towards times and towards places where we have green energy or at least where we expect green energy.Chris Adams: And if I understand it, you've done some work in this field specifically. And there was a, there's a paper. I think that I saw from you. Let's wait a while. Maybe you could just briefly touch on this and then we can open the floor up to some of the other people here.Philipp Wiesner: yeah. Sure. So in let's wait a while, this is basically an analysis of the potential of temporal workload shifting. So I just touched on it usually. Does come where computing there's two dimensions to it. You can either shift workloads on geo distributed data, data centers, like on a location scale, and you can also defer workloads on a time scale.And this paper addresses the time scale. So we're basically looking at single data center and within the data center, we have certain workloads that are maybe not urgent. So it doesn't really matter if we compute 'em right now or in four hours or maybe in 10. And on top of that, there might also be scheduled jobs that are always scheduled.For example, nightly, like nightly builds database backups, and so on. There's plenty of jobs that are scheduled nightly basically to not disturb anyone. But it doesn't really matter if we compute these jobs at one in the morning, two in the morning, five in the morning, as long as they're outside of business hours, but per scheduler for carbon Web scheduler, this makes a big difference because if it has 12 hours of flexibility, Using forecasts for renewable energy or for carbon intensity, it can decide on when to run this workload.And that can make a very, very big difference. And in this paper, we basically analyze the carbon intensity for different regions and try to identify time windows where shifting is very promising.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And Colleen, the reason I, I came across your work initially, when I saw the, I think it was ACM energy. You did a talk specifically about this in the, in the context of your work with VMware as well. Is. Case.Colleen Josephson: Yes. Yeah, it is Victor and I, Victor is over in the VMware research arm. We. That talk together. It's been a kind of a growing area of interest for VMware. When I arrived, it was just after we had partnered with the NSF, the national science foundation in the United States. And we actually specifically set aside some funds for a call on sustainable digital infrastructure.And we funded, I believe. Three different projects from that area. And we've been working with those academics on the different aspects of overlapping a lot, actually of what Philipp was just talking about. How do you take data centers and make them more carbon aware through, you know, one aspect we discussed a lot is shifting through time and space and we we've done some, you know, early investigations and.Crunched some numbers. And we've also been working with in particular, Andrew Chen at the university of Chicago. He has been working with Lena rad at the university of Wisconsin, and she has great expertise in kind of the power distribution. Side of things, which has been a really interesting consideration as we've talked with them.Cuz when you start to think about, you know, beyond a single data center, you know, multi-cloud large customers, people who have workloads and data centers across countries or regions, when you're shifting things and in space, you can actually have a significant impact on the grid. The, these big data center providers, you know, customers that use VMware software M.Amazon so on. If they are shifting their workloads around, you have the carbon intensity benefit. But one thing that, you know, our academic collaborators made aware to us is this very interesting fact that we will in turn be modifying kind of the, the economic dynamics of the grid have. You know, potentially the actual operating capacity of, you know, how power is distributed.So that's been a really interesting angle to think about from kind of a major provider point of view. And how do we take these really interesting and promising ideas and begin to scale them up from, you know, a grid provider scale point and another thing that customers have brought up to us. Data borders, you know, if moving things from within, you know, one corner of the United States to the other corner of the United States is typically not a problem, at least legally.And you might have latency trade offs, which need to be part of the equation. But when we went and kind of pitched our ideas, To people over in the EU, a lot of people were, you know, pretty concerned about the fact that the, the borders are a lot closer. So , you have customer data and it can get a little bit trickier moving it from one region to another.Sara Bergman: As someone working for a major cloud provider and based in Europe, this is of course something that, that touches in my interest or peaks my interest because I think this is really interesting, at least for Microsoft, we have this Microsoft runs on. We have the cute running t-shirts and everything. Like it's a core part of our business.And I know that is the case for a lot of customers, only Microsoft. So this is an important part of the equation, um, to make this. not only theoretically possible, but actually possible at scales for where we can solve this for the large business customers. But I think I watched one of your talks as well.Colleen, I think it was, we can, you also talked about the, the difference throughout the day, because even if one country, which is in Europe quite small, doesn't have a lot of different energy providers. Not only can the. Type of energy that's generated change throughout the day, but also what is competing for that energy will change throughout the day.Like when we're all standing up in the morning and everyone's taking a shower before work and, you know, it's, I live in Norway where everyone charges their electric car. Of course there's gonna be higher load on the grid versus in the night, there is a lot less, for example. So I think that's an interesting aspect as.Philipp Wiesner: Yeah, I think directly to add on that this variability can be quite dramatic. So in France, for example, they have clean, not clean maybe, but like, oh, carbon energy, because of all the nuclear power they are deploying throughout the day. So there you have barely any potential. But then there's regions like Germany, for example, which are very interesting because they're super variable, like Germany employs comparably, much wind power as well as solar power.So at many times of the day, they manage to have large fractions of the grid provided by green energy. But if neither sand nor wind available, we burn brown cold, which is pretty much the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. And this is why variability is really crazy. Like within a normal day, you can expect twice or like 50% fluctuations.Like could be that one kilowatt hour that you consume now is twice as dirty. If you consume the same kilowatt hour, few hours later. And within a few days, you can even see like the difference between the min and the max can be factor four or something. So one kilowatt hour can really vary from 100 grams co.Up to 400 grams or more 500 grams.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this variability, you know, particularly with wind and solar and renewables like that, that touches on something that we covered in our talk, which is the, the idea of curtailment, which is a really interesting opportunity. I, before I started in this area as an energy consumer, I had no idea about this concept, but.Basically it's this, it gets into this supply and demand relationship that I was talking about where energy providers, they. Want to match the energy available to the energy being consumed. And if the demand is low, uh, as Sara was talking about there's times where people that you wake up, you take a shower, you know, or you get home and you, you start cooking or watching TV.There's an ebb and flow of power, power. Is consumed. And that admin flow does not necessarily match with how nature is behaving. So if people aren't using a lot of power, the grid can't accept it. We, we not yet. Anyway. So what we have to do is actually burn it off, which I thought that was pretty shocking.When I learned about it is we have all these renewables and we're just letting it go to waste at the moment. So there's this. Untapped potential as we start thinking about these workloads that can be deferred or moved in time or space. Well, when these curtailment conditions occur, can we pull from our back pocket, some of these compute workloads and start basically increased demand.So we don't let this clean energy go to waste.Chris Adams: Okay. If I'm bring spring it down for a second, just to make sure I understand the idea that you have here is that you, without making any changes to code itself, you're not changing the code. Really. You're just deciding to run the same code either at different places. In a kind of sci-fi move it through space or through time.And this is going to have this, this is basically a way that you can essentially reduce the environmental impact of something without necessarily having to redesign it or from, from scratch. That's what it sounds like you're saying in this case. Yeah.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that that's, that's one way to put it. And of course, you know, the very process of taking a workload and moving it in itself has kind of, maybe you can think of it as meta code and it can be enormously complex to get all of that. Correct. But let's say maybe, you know, the core of what you wanna do is some training for a artificial intelligence model.That same exact training is happening. You're just picking it up and plopping it in a new place or a new time.Chris Adams: And when you spoke about curtailment, just then there was this idea that essentially because you can't get the energy, that's generated to someone who's able to consume it, it is essentially wasted and you're not able to make some kind of. Effective or economically useful use of it. That's the, that, that, that I'm sharing this largely for folks who might not have heard some of these terms, because if you're a software engineer, you might not have heard of curtailment or any of this stuff here, actually, we've spoken bit about carbon aware.So we have this notion of you can be carbon aware in that, knowing that there are natural cycles on the grid that you can respond to. And Colleen, I think you mentioned this idea of, is it carbon inte. Was in one of the papers that you spoke about recently? I think I, I, I'm not sure. I think it was in your most recent paper.It was actually kind of exciting for me, cause I haven't, I hadn't heard this term before and it feels like one of the next steps from this notion of carbon oil, perhaps it was among, I heard at hot carbon, which is basically a conference specifically for folks doing this kind of work.Colleen Josephson: I think that actually was not our paper looking through it. Maybe. Carbon my colleague that one of the other authors spoke about it and that could be something he said, but we definitely talk about carbon aware computing in our paper. But I think that that in itself is kind of an interesting point to bring up is these terms are.New. And they're very new because the conversations and I mean, there are some people who have been working in this area for a long time, but in the past couple of years, I think that. Interest in work in this space is really accelerated in pick up and I'm seeing more venues than ever in which to present this work.So I think carbon aware versus carbon intelligence is, you know, kind of an, an artifact of the fact that we're still pretty early on in the. The conversations that we're having and standardizing on our terminology , which is, you know, Green Software Foundation itself has a standards group. So I guess this is a case in point why standardization is so important.Philipp Wiesner: I think Google is using the term car intelligence across their papers, but I think it's just terminology. I think they all mean the same.Chris Adams: Okay. Alright, we'll go with carbon aware for the time being in that case until we hear otherwise. So essentially when someone says carbon intelligent and carbon aware, it's more or less the same idea of essentially. Making your work or the workloads are making them kind of sympathetic to the natural cycles that I guess surround us really.Colleen Josephson: Yeah. And I think to add to kind of this hierarchy, what we think about in VMware is kind of a few different levels. One of the most important things that a lot of companies are still struggling with right now, Is just how much carbon are we consuming through our operations and all the different scopes.It's really hard to answer that question right now. How much does this application does this container? What, what, however I choose to slice it. What, what is the consumption of, you know, carbon and other re resources and then. From there, you know, that that's the classic. You have to know, you know, be able to measure the problem in order to solve it.And then the next step is once you have this really good visibility into what you're consuming, you can then start to optimize for it. And that's where we get into kind of this awareness, uh, intelligence managing your carbon.Sara Bergman: Yes. And, and I think that. Visibility is so important. And I think it's important to get the right visibility to the right people. I think scheduling of, of some sort isn't really new. I mean, we've had the supercomputers scheduled the work for them for quite a long time, but this type of scheduling is of, of course new.But if you, if you get these concepts to people who have domain knowledge, then that's a concept they know, and they can say, oh, you know, This job can wait a while because they have the domain knowledge to make use of this technology. And, and that's where it becomes really powerful when we have the, the visibility to allow everyone to participate in it.Because yeah, also, like we said, I think more people want to contribute and want to do something. And if you make it really easy, well then all the better.Chris Adams: Okay. So I have to ask, are there any, so let's say you can tune things to basically. Take advantage of electricity when it's cheap and green and, and abundant. Are there any kind of measurable savings that are actually published or out there? Because this sounds great, but surely it does. Are there any early results to at least give us some idea of what kind of savings could be gleaned from this before you think you start thinking about redesigning?Like, let's say you right to do you, you've got an app and you are trying to reduce the impact. Is there any kind of measurable reduction in carbon on this kind of work? For example, what, what kind of figure. Have been sh have been coming up so far from.Colleen Josephson: I think what Philipp was saying earlier, really lines up what we've been finding these swings of 50%, depending on your region. You know, that can be that the high end, we saw a carbon savings of 50%. If you're in a highly volatile region and then even in places where it's less volatile, there's still.This cycle and, you know, that tends to be more like 10%. And I think it's really hard to say right now, because a lot of the experiments as we talked about are not yet taking into consideration, which workloads are good candidates to move, you know, which workloads, you know, these data boards, you know, part of how we evaluated is we were just like, okay, let's take it from Germany to somewhere else and not think about these, you know, Policy issues that might make it so that we can only go from Germany to Poland, for example.Philipp Wiesner: Yeah, I, I fully agree on that. I think the thing is that currently many results are still simulation based also our results. So you can easily craft scenarios where you can under certain conditions get 50% carbon savings by moving workloads from the night to the day or something. The only research that I'm aware of where like this was actually deployed somewhere, it was a Google paper that was publish.last year or this year where they really have something running on their infrastructure. And then they report, like, I think it's 1% or something that they actually cut out. But this is then not only about jobs that were actually shifted. It's about like their entire workload of the entire data center.And that's then already quite impressive because I think we're only touching on the actual potential of how much flexibility there is in many workloads. And I think this is also one of the biggest challenges in the entire field and how to identify how. Yeah, identified as flexibility opportunities for flexibility, and then especially how to make schedulers aware of these opportunities.So most workloads are still black boxes in many, in many regards, you maybe have a deadline, but that's it. But there's a lot more information about workloads that would be good to have for cloud providers if they want to schedule them. For example, whether workloads are interruptable and what's the cost, the overhead of interrupting and resuming a work.So for example, many machine learning trainings can take days. It's absolutely not uncommon. So if you know that interrupting these jobs is cheap and it often is because they do already do checkpointing. They write immediate results to the disc all the time. So if you can interrupt and resume these workloads, then you can really exploit it.Short-term fluctuations in, in the grid. And.Colleen Josephson: Yeah. I just wanna say that Philipp. I absolutely agree everything. You're saying really lines up with what we find. Really critical part of going from simulation to reality is this concept of how do you identify these candidate workloads? How do you do this? You know, figuring out what is good to move and, you know, maybe start off doing that by hand.But in the long term, we need this to be automatic, you know? No. Human in the loop. So our systems need to be adapted so that we create a workload and it has some sort of metric for, you know, whether or not it's moveable at that time, how flexible it is. And so on.Chris Adams: Okay. Now, if I, if we could maybe unpack some of this for the case of like these, these examples that you folks have just described, Colleen, you are, you're working at VMware. So. Whereabouts is this happening in the stack? Is it a product from VMware that is doing this stuff or is it somewhere higher up?Would like, say Kubernetes, for example, is this happening at a hypervisor level or is there somewhere else in this? Cuz I know there are various parts of the stack that you could make an intervention. And I know there are examples of things like a carbon away, Kubernetes scheduler and where we work.We've been doing some, we've got some P press open to Keta, which is an autoscaler specifically for Kubernetes to use some of this information so far. But I would love to hear cuz yeah, I didn't really know that much about VMware and it seems like there's a whole fascinating paper on this actually.Colleen Josephson: Yeah. So I. We can't. I can't say this is like home to a specific product. I think one of the things that's things that's actually really nice about VMware is we have something called our 2030 agenda where we have 30 goals that we want to achieve before 20, 30 and sustainability. It's an ESG driven agenda and we have a whole bunch of goals related to sustainability.So we've really taken the past couple of years since we announced the agenda to make sustainability kind of. In the core of what we do. So rather than having a sustainability office at the top, we wanna embed it and empower every single individual. Engineer. So we have these types of projects for moving workloads, measuring things they're kind of going on in a few different places.So, and all I can really say for sure. You know, every company is a little hesitant to promise. Features for a specific project. we are very actively working on, we have engineers and project managers and researchers it's to be determined, kind of where it will emerge. But, you know, we've been talking with partners and stakeholders, and I think that it's been a very active space in a number of places in the company.Chris Adams: Cool. Cool. Thank you for that. Okay, Sara did, there was something you would've come in on.Sara Bergman: No, I would just say noting vigorously on, on a few things. So yeah, no, no. Additional to ask, add. Yeah.Chris Adams: all right. So one of the things that came out of that was this idea of being able to, when you have a piece of work to be computed, it's either providing some kind of annotation or some, um, way of expressing that. Yes. It's okay. To pause me for example, or, yes, my I'm not I'm I'm not so urgent, but I'm, but as long as I'm done by this time, for example, So maybe have a few folks come across any kind of patterns that have actually that we might be seeing us wear, cuz based on what you folks tell me, it makes me think of the, the fact that I know when some of say Apple's work because they're now switching to a different kind of architecture that there is this notion of like annotating particular work that needs to be interactive to a user.Something that might be a background thread. Do we have anything in the region of like a convention fr annotating stuff so that it's easy to. Especially. Yeah, go Colleen.Colleen Josephson: I can't name any specific patents, but what this is reminding me of is telecommunications and I telecommunications as a deep. Degree of work in prioritizing data streams. And that's been a really active area for a couple of decades, you know, whether it's cellular or more traditional, just internet, there is this idea of delay in tolerant traffic versus more delayed tolerant traffic.And there's a really rich body of research that we can look at and maybe borrow.Philipp Wiesner: Yeah. Just one thing to add on that. I think what's special in particular about this scheduling problem in comparison to like scheduling problems that we had before is the, the time scale as well. Because like, if you talk about delay tolerance and telecommunications, And if we have like scheduling on a CPU level, that's really milliseconds or less or whatsoever, while in, if we talk about carbon awareness, like actually optimizing for the carbon grid, it rarely goes below 15 minutes that we have as a forecast and frequency, basically.And if you optimize for, let's say your own solar panels, then you can maybe use satellite. in like the five, 10 minute scale, you can use like weather data for like a few hours or like, but if you want to go below five minutes, then you already need sky cameras. You already need like video information of where clouds move and stuff.So when we talk about scheduling and delay tolerance here, then we do not really mean that we start a job and 30 seconds later we resume it. It's like bigger jobs that run for at least 15 minutes. And then we stop them for a few hours and then we resume them. So this makes it a bit different to, to what we have.So.Sara Bergman: Yes. I, I think this is super interesting because it's, if you start optimizing for perfect scheduling, it's easy to fall into the trap or you're investing more or spending more into actually. The savings. It, it, you need to think of it as economics. So yeah, you can maybe schedule it down to every five minutes, which may be great for your application.But if you then, like you said, Philipp need to buy a sky camera, need to invest in like your own satellite network. I'm exaggerating now, but you understand the, the scenario. Well then the actual car saving is at the end of it might be like net positive, uh, in which is a negative in this disregard. So any, any sort of carbon project that would.Whatever, wherever it is, need to take in the totality, because we are just one, one planet. And I see the same similar discourse in machine learning a lot where people are very eager to use machine learning for solving climate problem, which I think is great. And I'm not saying we should stop doing that, but sometimes we're spending massive resources training those models to then save the world where we actually polluted the world more while doing.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that we actually made that exact point in a recent white paper. One of the other organizations that VMware is involved with is the next G Alliance, which focuses on telecommunications in north America is looking at, we're talking a lot about 5g. We've already got our site set on 60 and Microsoft is actually also a member with.And I co-lead something called the green G working group, looking at how, how we can make our next generation telecommunications networks intrinsically sustainable. And there, there is a lot of excitement, like you said, Sara, about. You applying machine learning, but you have to remember this caveat that right now, training these models is really carbon intensive.So you have to remember the resources you consume to, to get the job done. and kind of the same thing comes in with upgrades. So if you look at upgrading hardware and data centers or telecommunications hardware, so 5g, I think got some bad press for how much power the base stations consumed, but what's actually true about it is that the power consumed per bit transmitted has gone.Significantly. So there's a good advantage to upgrading your hardware, but then, you know, what about this hardware? You're getting rid of everything that we produce has this concept of embodied emissions. It takes resources and carbon to produce this hardware. So you have. Really carefully look at that sort of trade off.It turns out that keeping our devices, especially smaller devices in use for as long as possible is one of the greenest things that we can do.Sara Bergman: Exactly because it's very tempting to look at only your share and try to slim it down as much as possible. But if that means you're just overflowing into other carbon budgets, you, well, the net effect. What you want anyway. And that might be a leap from how a lot of us are used to thinking about software, but I also think it, it like triggers that natural engineering curiosity in us all.So it's not necessarily a bad thing.Chris Adams: So we're talking about the embodied emissions for this, and I'm, I'm glad you actually spoke about the network part, cuz this is one thing that. , I don't have that much access to experts when looking at this. But, uh, as I understand it, for example, with 5g, there was an, there's a significant amount of embodied energy in making each of these towers, but would it be the case that you would have more towers which are more efficient, but have higher embodied emissions compared to what you had before?Like maybe it'd be really cur I'm curious about what the kind of trade offs you actually might have to make there because as I understood it, 5g. Tends to have a lower range. Is that the case compared to say 4g, for example, or is it able to fill in some of those.Colleen Josephson: There's different types of cellular infrastructure for different types of transmissions. So I think what you're touching on is this idea of these micro cells, which are, you know, you have millimeter wave, they have short range they're deployed in dense, urban environ. But that doesn't mean that cellular providers have stopped having these longer range communications it's, you know, kinda like how your cell phone has different types of communication for different scopes.You have Bluetooth for short range, you have NFC for ultra short range, and then you have your cellular and wifi for longer range. The same is true of cellular networks for really dense urban environments. You're gonna have these smaller. Micro cells trying to give high speed coverage in these urban areas, but you still are gonna have these larger cells deployed across the United States so that you still have, you know, a good range in coverage everywhere.But when we talk about savings in telecommunications, I think one of the really big opportunities that's getting, you know, off the ground rate now has to do. Software defined networking and virtualization. So historically in telecommunications, everything you needed was kind of in the tower and there's this massive movement for disaggregation going on.So you can begin to pick and choose providers and move different parts of the cellular network around. So, you know, one of the things that we've talked about is, you know, there's the telecommunications industry and then there's I C T and. The line between the two is beginning to blur because a lot of what used to maybe happen only on a tower or in specialized hardware can now be done in general data centers.So the two industries are really kind of solving the same sorts of problems , which is really interest.Chris Adams: So, if I understand that correctly, you are saying that some of the. Hardware that was all bundled or some of the functionality that might have been bundled into a single piece of hardware is somewhat being kind of unbundled. So that maybe a cloud computing thing might be happening. And this is things like, would this be stuff like open ran or like the open radio network kind of stuff?Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that's definitely getting into that area, openness so that you can have different modules communicating with each other. And there's a lot of really interesting opportunities there. So one fact for example, is incumbent like really kind of older and existing cellular networks. You don't have the ability to easily turn off a base station when it's not in use.So these base stations are what are consuming the overwhelming amount. Of power in the network and kind of this really low hanging fruit is, well, when there's nobody around turn down the volume and the ability to have it more software defined means that we can try out these algorithms to dynamically do that.Right now it's a lot of, if people have to turn things down by hand, do a lot of really onerous changes to implement this, but as we start to move to a more nimble infrastructure for 5g, And beyond, we really have this interesting opportunity to rapidly prototype these power savings algorithms and see what we can do.Philipp Wiesner: So I see that in networking, we have plenty of opportunities for energy saving. But do you see any opportunities for carbon awareness? Because from my experience, there's not so much, you either have like edge infrastructure that is wireless and really energy intensive, but it's by design critical it's by design has to be fast.Otherwise it wouldn't be at the edge like, well, on the other hand, you have the big data centers that have like a lot of patch jobs that are like very flexible and defer. But they are connected via fiber, which is super energy efficient and there's barely any, any consumption on that. So do you see any opportunities in that regard or is it mainly computing that we can make car aware?Colleen Josephson: Huge opportunities. And that's one of the reasons I'm glad that we're thinking about six G right now is we have. This major to reuse the word opportunity to design this next generation network to be carbon aware from the beginning. One thing we noticed when we started this work is right now, we're historically figuring out how much power 3g, 4g 5g network consumes has been very much a cyclical thing.You build the network and then you look back in time and then you make measurements. So you. When we were working on our first white paper, we actually couldn't even answer the question. How much energy does 5g consume there? There's just the work on that is ongoing right now where, you know, kind of, we realized as we were doing this, it's like, why.And we, we have infrastructure to measure uptime, to measure latency. We already measure these things across basically every facet of computing. So why are we not measuring energy consumption and figuring out the carbon footprint? So we really need to design in this ability to measure how much power.Part of the network is consuming and report it with really fine grain in a really fine grained way in a real time way so that we know as we're starting to prototype six G exactly how much power it's consuming. And as we deploy different pieces of hardware or different algorithms, did this change actually work?Chris Adams: All right. So this is actually something that we're probably gonna cover on our future episode. In more detail, there is some really fascinating work going on from an organization, working on a protocol called the cion. Just like a clean slate implementation of their staff, where we work. We've been doing a bit, bit of work with them and we have an ongoing project.So basically annotate every single public IP address on earth with carbon intensity information such that you can start creating some of these paths. But one of the problems you have with the existing internet is that. You BGP doesn't necessarily account for these different criteria that you might want to have.So if you go back to this notion of saying, I have a job where I need to move something, you only have one dimension right now with BGP, whereas you can't really talk about saying, I care about latency more than I do about cost. For example, if I'm on a really important video call, whereas if I'm not doing a big backup or shitting a bunch of data, I might care about cost more than latency.So there is some work had to taking place in here and. The only example I've come across so far and it is, it's totally worth a look. I look up, I think actually, cuz it's kind of interesting, but I hadn't actually thought about this in the context of six G actually to be before this phone call. I hadn't even heard of six G so I guess there's a whole, whole little bit to actually add.So if I may, I'm just gonna touch on this notion of. delay tolerant networks. Cause we spoke about the idea of having different criteria for jobs and stuff. Now, my understanding of, of this is that there is a decent body of work already. You used for interplanetary networks. That's where some of this initially came from is that I think cuz if you, when I did, when I was doing some research before this, for this podcast, I found out that the, the NASA actually has a whole bunch of really fascinating research on delay tolerant networks and it looks.The actual timeframes for what they look at in terms of delay, aren't that different from the time scales we've been talking about, like in terms of 15 minutes to an hour, for example, I'd be curious if any of you folks have come across any kind of overlapping research here, because the idea of using technology from space sounds kind of cool and it kind of worked for Velcro.So I figured maybe, maybe there's some stuff that we could actually take use, make use of.Colleen Josephson: Well, I don't know a whole lot about delay tolerant, networking in specific, but this is reminding me of another. Area called intermittent computing, which has also ended up in space. Uh, and this is basically taking inspiration from the really small and embedded side of things, which is, I think a theme in general of green software embedded devices.Historically they have a much, much lower power budget than something that's in a data center. And as we look at these. Networks of, you know, kind of internet of things. We wanna put them in more, in more inhospitable places, outer space, farm fields, et cetera. And these places have no fixed power or communication in infrastructure.So it becomes really challenging to figure out how do you budget? When, you know, you're, you're not sure how long you might have to run. So there's researchers, I think at the university of Massachusetts and Carnegie Mellon who have done some really interesting work in how you. Have this architecture that deals with the fact that you could suddenly, and gracelessly lose your operating power.So how do you, you know, checkpoint things so that when for example, the sun comes back out, you can pick up where you left off and make progress and continue to do compute or fire out a packet. and some of this intermittent computing has ended up in outer space. I think there's a, a satellite that was created that takes advantage of some of these concepts.Chris Adams: Okay, this is something that is totally new to me. I'd never heard. If someone did wanna find out about how to apply space technology to these kind of problems, where should they be looking? This sounds really, really fascinating. I did not expect us to go in down this direction, but it, it sounds lots of fun to.Colleen Josephson: Well, the, the researcher who did these space, toasters is Brandon Lucia. I think also, I mean, looking straight at NASA and , they, they do a lot of research in this area and they have funding and I was talking to somebody who works there and they actually have a lot of work. That's not directly tied to space.So that they do stuff on, you know, underwater networking, for example, is one thing I was surprised to hear that they work on. So I wouldn't be too surprised if there are researchers already there starting to think about some of these issues and how you can apply what they've learned from delay tolerant networks or intermittent computing to some of these challenge.Chris Adams: I've just realized that if anyone who is interested in the context on the concept of intermittent computing, there is really fascinating art project called the solar protocol. And it's a really run wacky project, which is essentially it's a website, which is. Really a cluster of Raspberry, Pi's all around the world in different parts of the world.And basically there is a DNS server, which basically roots requests to whichever Raspberry Pi has battery. And when the batteries are run out, the Raspberry Pi stops serving websites, but because it's always sunny somewhere, there's always the steady supply of this stuff. And the thing that's really interesting is that they have a hack day coming up on the 15th of August.So if anyone does wanna play with this stuff, you can actually do it. It's entirely open. There is a whole set of really fascinating stuff. And at a recent conference called limits 2022 computing within limits. I believe they've actually, there's a paper for this as well. It's a really fun project. And we've written about it on a magazine that we publish called branch.And if anyone has a cur has some curiosity in intermittent computing, this is probably the kind of most iconic and wacky idea I've seen so far. And it should, I imagine it might be a lot of fun for the people who listen to this kind of podcast.Sara Bergman: I love it when it feels like my work is becoming sci-fi, but that's the bestChris Adams: Well, this is like part of the idea, the idea that you can move work through time and space. When you actually talk about that, that sounds extremely science fictionally. And this is partly why we wanted to speak about this in addition to just the conversations about efficiency, because in many ways it does feel like it's sympathetic to a lot of the kind of patterns we might normally have.You can think of. Say seasonal food is a bit like kind of seasonal electricity or something like that. Just on a much, much more compressed time scale.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this is starting to remind. Of some recent work that a friend and colleague did pat Canuto at the university of California, San Diego, he, and one of his students, they started, they started working on this concept of something called a junkyard data center where they're using old phones, nexus four and nexus five phones to kind of serve this Raspberry Pi role that you're, you're talking about.And they found that they were able to kind of match and occasionally exceed, you know, modern cloud compute offerings. And this is kind of like, I thought this was neat because it's the intersection of what we were talking about earlier. If you've got this kind of low, low, high power computing, but then you also introduce at the, the junkyard part is getting to this, what we were talking about earlier with embodied emissions, these phones people don't use nexus four and.Phones very much anymore because they're a number of years old, but they still can do really useful and powerful computing. So, you know, this is the reuse part of reduced reuse, recycle, where we still have these very good, relatively speaking sources of compute power. So how can we extend their useful life?So that is a pretty cool piece of ongoing work also.Chris Adams: Colleen, the stuff you mentioned there reminds me. A service from a company called Lanum, who basically use XX Hyperscale data center. And they put them into shipping containers right next to all kinds of solar farms and wind turbine places to essentially do this kind of interruptable, low carbon computing.And in many cases, when the cost of electricity is say negative, for example, or when you are paid to kind of scale back your power, they've essentially got another way to. These kind of services. I think this is really fascinating when you're able to DEC decouple a bunch of these open source pro uh, ideas from necessarily a gigantic data center.You, they, you don't necessarily need to have a massive out of town, big box Walmart data center to take advantage of these techniques.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, this idea of kind of sustainable. Computing has really also gotten a lot of attention. VMware has its own project where in that's reminding me a lot of this in collaboration with vapor IO, where we kind of have a container data center and we're looking at these sorts of savings. So I think there's a few instances of this sort of work starting to happen.Chris Adams: all right. Sounds like lots of stuff for us to add to the show notes that we have here. If there's any kind of links or podcasts or projects that you'd like to draw people's attention to. Yeah. What's caught your eye recently that you'd say in the context of the podcast, that you'd suggest people look.Philipp Wiesner: What I personally found quite interesting is recent work from. Monica vital from the poly technical to Milano in Italy, who looks at this entire topic of sustainable computing very much from an application side. So basically looking at, we have a certain business process, for example, where different components in our microservice architecture have a certain purpose.And for example, like Sheena papers talks about flight booking process, and then maybe certain aspects like certain components of this pipeline may not really be necessary. They might add revenue. To the operator, they might add quality of service or quality of experience, but under certain times or conditions, we could trade this quality of experience or quality of service.to consume less energy, or maybe we have different implementations of certain aspects of a system. I mean, I think this is really, really interesting work to think that maybe we can, if we like go deeper in the applications of how applications should be designed. So actually changing the code of software, like to refer back to what is at, in the beginning, we can actually trade some qualities of software for energy reductions during certain times to be to better align with the actual availability of renewable energy.And I think that's really interesting.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Philipp. I definitely need to get that as a, as a link for the show notes. Sara. You've got something here to add as well. Right?Sara Bergman: Yes. I've been reading a blog post called the dirty carbon secret behind solid state memory drives, which is a very enticing title, but it's about it ties into this episode because it talks. The trade offs between the embodied carbon and the lifetime emissions from using energy. So I'll link it. I, I thought it was insight.Chris Adams: Okay. Colleen, what's showing up on your radar these days.Colleen Josephson: I think I already mentioned it, the junkyard data center. So I'll find a link for that, cuz I thought that was pretty neat work. And then I'll also try to find the piece on the, the intermittent satellites.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Okay. In that case, I'm gonna share a couple, couple of mind, and then I think we're gonna wrap up the thing that I'm really interested right now in this particular context is a carbon aware branch of nomad, which is the alternative scheduler from Hashi called. It's very, very similar to Kubernetes, but somewhat simpler.There is now a carbon away branch that actually does include some of this for its scheduling decisions. And that's something that I'm really excited about at the moment. And there's also a bunch of jokes around low carbon etes. Instead of Kubernetes, these days, we've been doing a bit work to build a specific CLI go based CLI to plug into tools like this so that we can.A carbon aware, any version, any, any carbon aware cluster, any, any cluster you run should be able to be doing this kind of stuff. That's the thing I'm, I'm gonna be adding to the links here. All right, folks, I've really enjoyed this. This has been super nerdy, but that's basically why people sign up and listen to this podcast.And I really appreciate you sharing your time with us. So folks, thank you very much for this. Just before I go. If people wanna hear more about your research or your work, where would they be looking.Philipp Wiesner: Probably just Twitter. So just first name, last name without any just Philipp, Wiesner without any thoughts or anything.Chris Adams: Cool. And SaraSara Bergman: Same, you can find me on Twitter. It's my name with an E in the middle.Chris Adams: and ColleenColleen Josephson: Yeah. I post a lot on my website, see ColleenJosephson dot net. And I also share some on Twitter, which is see Josephson full because see Josephson was takenChris Adams: I could definitely identify with that. And my name is Chris Adams. Chris Adams was taken. So I am Mr. Chris Adams, which is @mrchrisadams. All right, folks. Thank you very much for talking to us about green software and carbon aware and carbon intelligence software, and hopefully we'll see you on future episodes.Thanks folks. Bye.Philipp Wiesner: Thanks a lot.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review. If you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show. And of course we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit Green Software Foundation that's Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.