Accenture expert Navveen Balani joins host Anne Currie to discuss the intersections of GreenOps, DevOps, and FinOps, emphasizing the role of Infrastructure as Code in cloud efficiency. They explore the importance of green coding for a net-zero future, cybersecurity in AI system development, and the synergy between security and green software. The conversation also touches on Mexico's first female president and the Green Software Foundation's initiatives in promoting sustainability in software development.

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain the executive director of the GSF to talk about the recent hackathon hosted by the GSF : Carbon Hack 24. Asim goes through some of his favourite projects that featured work with the Impact Framework including some surprising choices! They also cover some interesting news from the world of cloud service providers and the new CSDDD developments. Asim also talks about how mushrooms are out and bread is in!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteTom Greenwood: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews & Topics:GreenOps, FinOps, and the Sustainable Cloud | Forrester [6:03]EU: New CSDDD compromise finally accepted by Member States | Linklaters [30:02] Carbon Hack 24 Recap: Asim’s Favourites: [50:12]Facebook Open Sourcing the code behind its Power and Water Efficiency Dashboards [51:40]Grasp [52:22]Amazon Packages for Delivery [56:08]Kubernetes Focused Project [56:40]GreenerMeet: Assessing Energy Usage & Carbon Emissions in Zoom Conferences [57:04]Resources:The Baking Forecast | ShouldIbake.com [2:57]Hetzner [17:09]DigitalOcean [17:32]BackMarket [18:04]Sesame Open Hardware [20:32]DjangoCon [23:18]Green Metrics Tool [23:57]How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? | Environment Variables Ep 4 [36:49]Green Digital Coalition [44:15]In-depth Q&A: How does climate change drive human migration? [54:32] All the winners of Carbon Hack 24 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:Asim Hussain: And I'm just sitting there thinking, we are old. These are the kids of the future, you know, maybe gave me so much hope, like these are 16 year old kids, and they were doing some incredibly advanced green software measurement, reporting, zoom, understanding curtailment, understanding like how to measure this stuff.And I was like, ooh, we've got a, we've got a good future ahead of us.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, the podcast where we talk about sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. This week, our format is This Week in Green Software, where rather than doing a deep dive into some of the specifics of green software, we're going to look at some of the news stories that have been making the rounds and provide a bit of commentary and analysis on this. And joining me today is my good friend Asim Hussain, the executive director of the Green Software Foundation. Asim, I'll hand over to you to introduce yourself a bit more than what I've just shared so far, if that's okay with you.Asim Hussain: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Thanks. I really love these, having these podcast episodes with you and talking through this material. Asim Hussain, Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation and been, you know, lucky enough to be at the intersection of sustainability and software for quite a few years. So based in the UK and excited to be on the podcast again.Chris Adams: Thank you, Asim. And when I last spoke to you on the podcast, the recurring thing is your history of growing all kinds of delicious mushrooms. How are the myco friends doing?Asim Hussain: Not good, not good. I've lost, my green thumb or my blue thumb. Maybe if that's how you would, talk about it. But yeah, no, I've lost my, I've lost the thumb. I now bake bread is, the thing that I do, which is equally disappointing, to be honest with you. I just love doing stuff, which is like very, the people, you put a lot of effort in and then you get kind of like middling results is kind of my, seems to be my hobbies of, the day, hobbies du jour.Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay, so you've been culturing um, what's it, butter, sourdough and things like that?Asim Hussain: Yeah, sourdough right now, yeah. I do have a sourdough starter that I, was gonna say keep refreshed, but I probably should say like, keep on the verge of starvation all the time. But yeah, no, it's actually quite fun. I make, I bake bread every weekend and I give it a go. Yeah.Chris Adams: you for sharing that. Presumably, this is going to be carbon aware bread that you're using, that you're baking when the energy is green, because in the UK, you have the baking forecast. Are you familiar with the baking forecast?Asim Hussain: I am not aware of the baking forecast.Chris Adams: Ah, dude, this is so cool.Asim Hussain: Now that you've said it, I can't believe I'm not using the baking forecast. Because it is, a lot of, that's the thing my wife questions me on. She's like, does the financials of this work out? And I'm like, I don't know, but there's healthier bread than the stuff you get in the supermarket.Chris Adams: So for those who are curious, and I promise we will talk about green software, this is a kind of segue towards some of the ideas we might talk about later. In the UK, there is a website called the Baking Forecast, named after the shipping forecast, and the idea behind it is to look at the carbon intensity of the electricity that might be going into the oven when you're doing any kind of heating.And this means that you can then decide to time your baking to be zero or very low carbon bread by making sure you bake when there's lots of renewable energies on the grid. Or, alternatively, if you are not paying attention, you can end up with very, high carbon bread by baking when there's lots of fossil fuels on the grid.Now fortunately, sunnier, we've got some more solar and wind coming in, it's not like the depths of winter, so it's probably greener breaking today than it was in November or December. But yeah, this is one thing that we should, that I think is, only the UK has this right now. And we'll have to share a link in the show notes because it's a really, cool project.Asim Hussain: That's cool. You could also end up with really high carbon bread if you leave it in the oven for too long.Chris Adams: Oh yeah,Asim Hussain: wait, wait. Oh my God. Where is it? Where is it? I don't know which one it is. You do it.Chris Adams: I think I know what you're after.Asim Hussain: Oh, there we go. Oh no.Chris Adams: This is what you're after?Asim Hussain: That was it.Chris Adams: Yes, it, yeah, as, you, Asim has discovered the sound effects on the, on Riverside, the podcast platform we're using. So-Asim Hussain: You told me about it.Chris Adams: Yeah, I do apologize. So if we have, we might be like two children at the front of an aircraft playing with this, flip, flicking all the switches, but we'll try our best to not make listening to this too insufferable.Okay, so we've, mentioned about the baking forecast as a way to talk about carbon aware use of electricity and things like that. Shall we look at some of the stories together, Asim?Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's do it.Chris Adams: Oh, if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams, or if I'm in trouble, Christopher Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a small Dutch non profit focused on reaching a fossil free internet by 2030.I'm also one of the chairs of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation. The other thing I'll share is that at the end of this show, we'll be showing a link with all the show notes, and it's usually written in Markdown, and we do accept pull requests, so if there's a thing that we've linked to that you think is incorrect, or if there's things you'd like to add, then it's open source and you can do that.And I think that's the main thing I'll share. The stuff we talk about will be linked. And I guess we should probably find something to talk about then, shouldn't we?Asim Hussain: Yeah. Something that's not bread related.Chris Adams: Alright then, well in that case, shall we move on to, I want to make a joke about biochar, but let's just move on from, yeah, alright, so let's, focus on the first story, which is GreenOps, FinOps, and the Sustainable Cloud.This is from, uh, I think it's actually originally from Forrester, a big analyst firm, who have now kind of woken up to this idea that If you're tracking cost, in many cases you might be tracking carbon. And this is the main thing they're talking about here. There's a few kind of key takeaways and key points inside this.And this basically does talk about things like, say, you can reduce emissions through kind of looking at kind of existing cost bills, for example. There's different steps you can take. They talk a little bit about some of this stuff. And they also provide a very, high level idea that Right now, we do have inconsistency across the large cloud providers, so Google and Microsoft, they might report all of the emissions, or all of the emissions according to the kind of GHG protocol, which is like the gold standard of reporting, giving you scope 1, 2, and 3, where the majority of the emissions for what we do is probably in scope 3, and talking about how Amazon is doing this, and they've recently, we now know on the grapevine that they've started to rehire people.But at present, if you look at the dashboards or the calculators of Amazon, you're only going to look at scope one and two, which on average means that you're missing a significant chunk of the picture. So that basically means if you dashboards, and you think, oh, my numbers are really low, that might not be the full story.All right, Asim, I trust you had a chance to look over it. So are there any particular takeaways or hot takes you had on this one that you might share with us?Asim Hussain: Well, I don't know if I had any particular hot takes is stuff I've heard before and kind of stuff I've heard mentioned kind of in quite a few times over the past few years. And what I was actually interested in is perhaps just having a more. I'd actually love to hear your thoughts and maybe we can like walk through some of the ideas and some of the question marks I have are just about the whole premise of this link to cost and carbon and like, there's a few things I think of when I think about that.One of the things I think of is, well, isn't, the cost of things the reason why we're in this problem in the first place? You know, how can costs, how can money both be the cause of the problem and the solution to the problem at the same time? And then, like, you know, you know, yes, there is this argument that kind of reducing cost reduces carbon, there's this kind of correlation.I've spoken about it extensively, in my past, but kind of I'm trying to refine my thinking in this space. We know that there's somewhat of a correlation there. But we also know there's things you can do which can dramatically reduce carbon, which don't affect your bottom, the cost at all in the slightest.So what is the, how big of an opportunity is that and is therefore focusing on cost kind of distracting us from things that we can do, which can dramatically reduce our carbon that they've got nothing to do with the cost. And another thing just kind of pops up in my mind as well, which is I remember I was speaking to just the energy purchasing department at Microsoft years and years ago. And I actually asked them, can I quote, quote you on this.Chris Adams: And this is because you worked at Microsoft.Asim Hussain: I used to work at Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. And a rule of thumb that they gave me was, which was the, this is pre AI, was that the cost of running a data center is only 10 percent energy. The actual dollar cost, 10 percent energy, 50 percent depreciation of assets.So you bought some chips, and they're gonna be worth zero in five years, so they're depreciating of assets. And everything else was like, you know, people and everything else was number one. And so like, when you think about that, certain parts like that emits carbon into the atmosphere, all of those-Chris Adams: The creation of, oh, each of these, right?Asim Hussain: The energy emits carbon, but it's only 10%.You know, the human beings running around emit carbon, the actual physical infrastructure like emit carbon when it's created. And then what happens in an organization is you normalize that into a dollar value, which you then charge for services that run off there. But does that dollar value, like represent, you know, accurately, you know, like the carbon emissions put it that way like there's probably a lot of nuance here yes. Reducing your cost reduces emissions, but maybe reducing costs In this way has unbelievably emissions reductions and reducing, you know, reducing $10 in another area, eh, probably doesn't have that much impact at all.So I'm kind of a little concerned with how I don't really think the link is kind of that well understood and I'm worried a little bit that if we focus too much on cost reduction, we might be able to reduce costs in ways that have no impact on carbon emissions reductions. That's kind of like where I'm thinking about.Chris Adams: Mm.Asim Hussain: I was just wondering what your thoughts were, actually.Chris Adams: So, I think there's two things. I'll share a question to that, but you said two things which I think are really interesting there. First of all, the cost of energy as, like, that's a part of what the data center might be, right? And you also said, like, depreciation of assets being one of the big costs.And that, I'm assuming that basically means, like, I've got a server, it's going to last over, say, three or four years, and because of that I split the cost over four years, and that's how I, that's, you know, it's-Asim Hussain: Yeah. Accounting wise that let me see exactly how they figure out accounting wise. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right, so there are two things. Most of these discussions seem to be about energy usage, with the idea being that, I think you're right, there's totally mismatch between these two things, because we are, in many ways, we don't see any of this stuff, we don't have the visibility in a bunch of these things.And one thing that we've, one thing that I guess we've seen a number of large companies start talking about now is saying, well, we are looking to extend the life of our servers, and we're doing this as a way, as a green measure, right? That sounds great, yeah? But if you extend the life of your servers, you've gone from 50 percent depreciation to maybe 30 percent or 40 percent depreciation, right?I mean, from a financial point of view, that basically, I mean, Amazon did this. It put like billions onto their, on to their balance sheet because they now look way more profitable than they were before because they don't have to kind of write it off. So, yes, there are some things being shared for this but whether how that actually factors into some of the calculations people use.I mean, I don't know. There was an announcement there. We haven't seen any changes whatsoever in any of the kind of cloud dashboards, so you would have expected that to make a difference if you did have, if we did see that, and both Amazon has done this, Google has done this, and Microsoft had done this, right?So, I would argue that looking at calculators, there's a gap here between what we're seeing here and what we are being taught to optimize for. And there's also another question. Yeah.Asim Hussain: Yeah, no, it, and there's also, I remember just as you were saying that, I remember this, and this is years, this is information is years old, but I was chatting to the, uh, the Xbox team at Microsoft and like one of the things, I mean, I still, no, I don't have an Xbox. I finally got rid of it. That initial estimationChris Adams: You sorely miss. Your love to Xbox, that is. Yeah.Asim Hussain: Yeah, love.Chris Adams: Oh no, you don't work for them now. You're okay. You can say anything.Asim Hussain: I'm okay. I can, get rid of it, I think. I think. Yeah, you wouldn't get, you wouldn't get a free Xbox if you went to Microsoft, and I always thought they should give you one. But, it was, like, they assumed that it would only last, like, four, three or four years. I can't, I'm, don't quote, no one quote me on this.But the actual lifespan of kind of these consoles turned out to be a lot longer. And people, I don't know how old Xbox is now, like, it must be like six, seven years. But it's still, like, pretty, you know, still pretty active. The decision was to kind of still keep, from an accounting perspective, still keep it kind of three, four years, even though the reality was it was being used for longer.So those decisions are being made as well. But it's interesting that's part of the, yeah, I suppose that's part of the story we don't really, The point I'm coming from is this, is a $1 reduction in your costs, how do you link that to an actual carbon emission? Because coming back to my point of like the energy versus the embodied, like how much of the emissions is linked to the energy versus the embodied and therefore how much of your cost is linked to reducing the energy versus reducing the embodied?Does that make sense? It'sChris Adams: This comes to basically disclosure of cost structure, which is a bit of a kind of like jargony term but basically without having visibility into how this stuff is paid for because in many cases we have very proprietary services, it's really hard to basically, be sure, like, is this really happening?And even when we talk about things like, say, cloud, moving to cloud compute, moving to, say, serverless, all these other tools, which are kind of higher up the stack, right? There is, it's not like the profit margins for cloud at the very bottom, like paying for compute per, on a per hour basis, will be different from things higher up.And we don't have much in the way of visibility into any of that stuff. I mean, I, as I understand it. The higher up the stack you go, the more value you add. A bit like if you're buying refined, if you're buying oil, and then you're selling, say, refined kerosene or something like that, it's going to be a different price, right?So you can think of, I think we have maybe some mental models we can apply for some of this. And this is actually possibly one way that you can say, well, if we have If we're running a bunch of companies, and we have a set amount of resources, and we cannot use more resources, like more inputs, there are ways to still continue to increase the amount of kind of value and profits being made by shifting people to kind of go higher up the stack to get them to purchase, maybe say, a serverless thing, or something like, something which allows you to kind of cram more stuff onto the same infrastructure.But the problem is, In order for you to do that, you need to not build more infrastructure. And what we've just seen is the opposite of that happening right now. And I think this is what, I think you're somewhat right. It's easy to talk about cloud costs because it's, you've already got the numbers there and you don't have to, yeah.Asim Hussain: It's like one of the most obviously disclosed, like, facts about your cloud usage is how much it's going to cost you.Chris Adams: Yeah. And like, if you're in an organization, it's probably easier to start optimizing a number that you already have than to pay for someone to, or even pay for a solution for someone to do this stuff. Because I've invested like. We've, uh, okay, I promise we'll get back to the other stories a little bit later on, all right?But inside the Green Web Foundation, we've been looking to, like, audit all of our own services recently, or just, like, work out our own kind of, look at our own annual emissions. And the thing we found is that, let's say we've, uh, the majority of our impact, because we're a quite small organization, comes from, not necessarily from the services we're paying for on an hourly basis, like, we use Hetzner, and we don't, Which we're spending maybe, I guess, maybe a thousand euros a year on Hetzner in total?Asim Hussain: What's Hetzner?Chris Adams: Hetzner is a German cloud computing service. So, about half of all of Mastodon run on Hetzner service because they're so cheap. So much cheaper, and in Europe at least. They've been one of the greener ones to use, because they build all their own software. And if you look at their prices, they're typically, like, you know how DigitalOcean will sometimes be cheaper than, say, the big cloud providers?They are cheaper than DigitalOcean, once again. So as a result, we're a cash strapped non profit, we're going to go for the cheapest green, option we can find. And the cheapest green option that We can find that has cloud like APIs and is used and works quite well. So we've been using those ones, and as a result, cloud makes a small amount of our kind of digital estate.What ends up being a larger thing is the infrastructure we use, like the laptops and the monitors we have inside our own houses, inside our own offices. But, even if we buy those from circular providers, so my laptop is from BackMarket, which is like a kind of second hand provider, and likewise, Hannah does the same thing with hers, and all this.Hannah's my, she's my colleague who's been leading on this work here. We've done this, but under most of the ways there's no guidance on, okay, is it someone else's carbon? Do you know, has someone else banked it so therefore it's free for you because they've depreciated the carbon there? There isn't much in the way of guidance or real stuff that you can adopt.Like, you can might, you might be able to sight a paper, but that's not the same as there being, say, guidance that you might use for your own reporting to say, this is why we've chosen these numbers here, for example. And like, this is what, these are some of the problems. There isn't this recognized way to account for circular versus buying new stuff, for example, and this does speak to this idea of, well, okay, how do you estimate this stuff and work out what is the most effective thing, which, you know, which levers should you be pulling if you want to reduce the emissions from software or digital services in general?Asim Hussain: So that would be like an example of, well, yeah, cause I've even had these conversations before we're talking about like, what'd you do? I think with all these like hyperscalers, like once they actually reach end of life, they're not broken.Chris Adams: MmAsim Hussain: the, equation that they're running is like, we've got per square foot of infrastructure, of real estate, what is the profitability? And at a certain point, it becomes more profitable to take out this old server, which is perfectly fine.Chris Adams: Yeah, usable. Working.Asim Hussain: But you can just put something else, which is more profitable per square foot for that given situation. So that, I mean, people think these things are breaking and then no, they're not, they're just perfectly fine and working.They might be more inefficient. Then we've had like conversations in the past with, I've had people going, well, if I was to take that server. End of life server and build my own data center. Could I argue that is zero? Could I argue that it has zero embodied emissions? Is that like a reasonable statement to argue?And, I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that question is.Chris Adams: The question, the answer is likely to be about, oh God, this is so nerdy, mate. I'm so sorry. But like, what is the depreciation that we've just spoke about now? You said half of the cost in a data center is a depreciation. What's, how do you split that? How do you kind of, Amortize the carbon over these years and then how do you then share that with someone else?So there's a company called Open, I think they're called Open Sesame or Sesame. They basically build data centers or like racks and stuff out of all of the, uh, Yeah, decommissioned stuff from Facebook and all these open compute projects, because all the companies, because you know how these servers are designed, and know how they're specced, it's actually quite common to buy these, and these tend to be cheaper than what you might have elsewhere.And in many cases, it's not like, It's not like they rust, right? They really, they're, kept in kind of quite good con condition and they are working in a lot of cases, but the, they make the argument that, well, this is circular, so this is gonna be greener what you have, what you've been using elsewhere, but whether you are able, but yeah, it's, a number question.It's an open question about how you account for that stuff inside, if you're purchasing, say, computing from these folks compared to people from somewhere else, because a lot of the time, order for in you to do this, you probably need organizations to be really transparent about where they got their servers from, and that's not always what companies are incentivized to do, basically, right now.Asim Hussain: but then we get to that same argument of like, at the end of the day, that's going to be sold to somebody as like a dollar cost, like dollar per hour of a CPU. and if we just look at cost as a proxy for carbon, then you could argue there that will, they might have to end up selling that service at a rate that is actually quite comparable to a brand new server.Chris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: This is where I think there's this kind of, I don't know if it's a breakdown or there just needs to be a lot more thought put into it. It's almost like there's a, that you pay a dollar value. There's a black box. And then at the other end, we know there's some sort of carbon emissions. And I think there's a lot of nuance there.And maybe what I'm saying is that actually cost isn't a great proxy for carbon. Because really, maybe that is, I'm kind of refining my thinking as I'm talking to you. Maybe cost isn't a great proxy for carbon. Or maybe you put it this way. Three, four, five years ago I was advocating for it because we had nothing else.Chris Adams: Mm.Asim Hussain: There were so few other options, but I'd actually argue now, we have the capacity and capability, even if a cloud provider, somebody themselves don't even know what the carbon emissions are. There are models that now exist where you can estimate from what you can see about. But the infrastructure that you're using and make your own assumptions and make your own judgments as to what the carbon emissions are.So I think I suppose where I'm thinking now is we can actually move beyond costs. I suppose that's where I'm thinking.Chris Adams: Well, the thing I might share with you, and if you forgive the plug, so I've just been travelling all around Western Europe by train, and I literally started on the 31st of May, and I arrived at this conference called DjangoCon, which is a conference all around DjangoCon, Django, which is a very popular framework that initially powered, say, Instagram, and like, part of the NHS website, all this stuff here, yeah.Asim Hussain: I used to be a Django developer. That was like my job. Yeah. My job, my paid for profession for quite a few years was a Django developer.Chris Adams: Wow, I did not know that. Okay, no, that's a, okay, that's a story I'm going to use then, because I think we can bring this back to the cross thing for a second. Anyway, I did a talk, I, there was very short notice, I was going to deliver a workshop about how to, basically, how to use some of the tools available to kind of green your Django stack.Right, so we were using a tool called Green Metrics Tool, which as Ana, one of the, like, I guess the founder of this, the guy who, the lead maintainer, he says the name is descriptive more than creative, but you kind of know what it's for, right? I quite like that. Anyway, that does give you figures for energy usage and embodied carbon and it does provide these and even provides like SCI figures. So there's now like a workshop and a deck and I will show a link to it to see how you can take an existing project and come up with SCI figures for various user journeys and things that you do have. Asim, I didn't have time to talk about the Impact Framework, and I, once I know enough about the Impact Framework, I'd be really up for using it.But one of the key things I had to do was I was doing this workshop and then literally the day before I arrived, we had someone with a visa problem, so they couldn't do their talk. So basically the organizers asked me, said, Chris, are you, do you have a talk ready or are you, would you be up for filling this spot?We have a 30 minute slot to talk about this. And I basically had 24 hours to take the workshop, turn it into a presentation. And the thing, the reason I'm talking about this is that I presented a kind of taxonomy of ways to think about these tools that you have. And I described things in terms of usage based and cost based specifically for this reason.So you would use cost based tools to do your first round of disclosure or to work out like a baseline because until you, and until you've been able to demonstrate any value from doing this, it's going to be really hard to argue for like weeks of developer time to come up with some numbers. Right?Whereas this at least gives you a number that you do have. And then I spoke about how you would use usage based tools to start figuring out, okay, well, what changes can I make to reduce some of this stuff? And yeah, I'll share the link to the deck, because it's, it allows us to create the, you know, we need, like, taxonomies to realize that we're not conflating these ideas too much.Because a lot of the time, you're doing different jobs, and you're asking, you're being asked by different people. So, like, for example, the whole kind of Software Carbon Intensity thing, initially, it was, as I understand it was created partly because the sustainability, like the head of sustainability asks for some numbers, and if you're going to report along these numbers, you don't really see much in the way of incentives to show how you're changing in future, right?it doesn't incentivize changes at the engineering level.Asim Hussain: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Chris Adams: right? So therefore you need a, you know, one of the thrusts would say, well, let's come up with a metric to show that we are planning forward. And we're taking some steps so that if you're an engineer, you have an idea of what's, what, you can do rather than just outsourcing all to energy procurement, because that-Asim Hussain: Yeah,Chris Adams: isn't necessarily the full solution, for example.Asim Hussain: I mean, the way, I mean, I really love your taxonomy of cost based versus user based. I think that, yeah, I like that actually. And user based being more, perhaps more, more granular and more action. Cause it kind of gives you more, more specific things you can do. Whereas cost is like this really high level thing.Just to bring it back to what you said about the SCI, the, one of the things, And I really, I didn't coin this, uh, but when it was coined, I loved it, but they described it as measurement for reporting versus measurement for action. And that's, I think, an interesting way of looking at kind of the different measures, uh, in this space.And, you know, we talk about regulations. We need to talk about regulation. We want regulations a lot, but once you start talking about regulations, the measure that you have is a measurement for reporting and the, behavior it triggers is what, number can I disclose that I can defend? What can I defend? Whereas a measurement for action is kind of what number do I need to drive action change. And that's when we think about the SCI, it's a measurement for action. I don't know whether, where, it will need to land to be something, you know, to be, you know, To be, you know, defensible.Like, I don't know why I'm gonna go off on a massive tangent right now, but-Chris Adams: Go with it, let's go with it.Asim Hussain: Go with it. Let's go with it. We know Krav Maga. You know Krav Maga?Chris Adams: Wow, yeah, the Israeli martial art you're talking about?Asim Hussain: The Israeli martial art. Like, I've always, there's actually a place nearby and I've always wanted to learn.Chris Adams: I did not expect you to go in that direction, let's go withAsim Hussain: Well, but let's just go with it.Because here's an interesting thing about it. And one of the things that the founder of Krav Maga said, this is will never be allowed to be done in like a competitive environment. There will never be the world championship of Krav Maga. There will never be like this, you know, global Krav Maga, blah, blah, blah.Because by, by that's when you start bringing in rules and the actual nature of the sport changes. So it doesn't become good at what it's supposed to do.Chris Adams: Ah, yeah, so for people who are not familiar, Krav Maga is, it's like, oh, it's like punch him in the love spuds and all the stuff like that. It does all the kinds of things which you wouldn't do in a, kind of formalized mode, because they are, they're basically weapons of war, rather than actually weapons of art, right?So it's more like, there's more martial than the art part, perhaps.Asim Hussain: I mean if I'm gonna learn a martial art, it's gonna be there so I can like actually get out of trouble, so I don't mind like poking somebody in the eye or kicking them where they shouldn't be kicked.But like, but I think that might, that's just one of my thinking and I'm, and I, this is just my thinking and this is a consensus based organization, so I just want to really be clear that I'm just expressing kind of some thoughts have and they might change in the future as well. You know, can you have both things?Can you have a measure which is good for action and good for reporting? Or does, you know, as soon as you bring a regulation into a measure, does it then transform the nature of it, so it, you know, it doesn't become good as an action driving measure and it can only serve as a , as a measure for reporting.That's kind of some of the thinking we've gone, I don't know how we got to this.Chris Adams: No, this is a graceful segue into the next story, Asim, don't worry. AllAsim Hussain: But yeah, that, that's some of the thinking I had.Chris Adams: I don't have a, I won't try to directly answer that, but what I will do is name check the new story, the next story we have, which is from Linklaters, the law firm, and they talk about, so this is going to be a bit of jargon.Asim Hussain: Oh, yeah.Chris Adams: I'm afraid, so this is a, this was a new story from actually a few weeks back, say, the new CSDDD compromise finally accepted by member states.That is impenetrable to most people who are programmers, but the short version is that there is a piece of law. called, we already have a piece of law called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is a bit like, which essentially compels organizations of a certain size to disclose their carbon emissions on an annual basis, just like they disclose their financial things and their financial figures.Different parts of the European Union are now, okay, for want subclassing the directive and turning it into their own law, right? So, France has been the first of the countries in Europe to actually do this. And Egalité, CSAD, yeah, like, they have a really hardcore version of the law, where if you are a corporate director, and you don't disclose, and you take steps to block disclosure, You have jail, you know, there are jail time sentences and stuff like that now.There's some really, hardcore things, right? And that's like the disclosure thing. But the thing that's interesting is that this plays nicely with this new law, which is the Corporate Sustainable, Corporate, I think it's Corporate Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive. And this introduced some new demands.So you basically need to like, as you'd imagine, Have some due diligence in your supply chain, but they also need to demonstrate how this fits into some of the laws or some of the kind of longer term goals of being a company active in, like Europe, where Europe has set targets of saying, well, you need to reduce emissions by, you know, we aim as a kind of union to reduce emissions by 55 percent and who knows, maybe even 90 percent by 2040.And as a result, you know, you now have to publish a climate transition plan, which shows what your steps are to actually help get there. And, uh, this I think is interesting because this now means that you have basically a mechanism for accountability each year, I mean, kind of anyway, but you've also got something to show that you're looking forward.So you've got forward looking and backward looking. And I think this is quite helpful for the conversations around, say, a consequential model like The Software Carbon Intensity thing, plus some of the kind of somewhat backward looking models that you might have with the GHG. And I think the GHG protocol, and this is how I now think about this, you will say that you might use the SCI to plan forward and say, well, am I going to do this versus that?And that allows me to talk about, it's not just my organization, like, uh, are there places where impact is taking place where I don't have to put it on my books, but I know it's a significant problem, right? Because the current state of the law doesn't actually incentivize you to do that. And, uh, particularly if you're like, say, a media company, for example, where, you know, most of the impact is in a router in someone's home, or in someone's end user device, like their big ass television, you might not try and tell someone.Hey, can you please stop using your big ass television and use a, tablet, right? Yeah, you might do that, but like, it's, that's going to be a hard thing for you to kind of argue is inside your kind of organizational boundary, for example, for, reporting. So this is why having two ways of looking at this is actually quite helpful.And this is how I've expressed the difference between an SCI and the GHG protocol. The fact that they are complimentary to each other, but very but different.Asim Hussain: Yeah, and I think that's, I never meant to throw shade on any kind of measurement for reporting, like it's all, needed. it's just different audiences. It's just different audiences, different needs, different, other things. So would you say the CSDDD is, because I just think the way you just described it, there's, it's, different to how some of the ways I've heard it described, but the, does it go beyond the organizational boundary?So the climate transition plan that you have to expose, is it how it supports the EU's aggregate goal, or is it just how you, your organization plays, how its emissions has to reduce? Because if, it's an aggregate goal, then the kind of debate that you're just describing, which is like, I'm making my TV more efficient, but who cares? It's not part of my or something. That's not part of my effectively changing Help showing how you're helping the climate transition by things outside of your value chain.Chris Adams: I need to stress, I'm not a lawyer. All right. Okay. And uh, I think I see, I think you mentioned that there might be someone who is a lawyer who does look at this, that I think it would be really nice to have someone who, with that deeper domain expertise to kind of talk about this 'cause. I'm mindful that because I have an English accent, it sounds like I know what I, that I am confident and, uh, about what I'm talking about when I might not be that well informed.Asim Hussain: In a lot of you're very well informed in a lot of areas. But anyway, yeah.Chris Adams: Alright. So yeah, I'm definitely not a lawyer in this con in, this context. Uh, but the, I guess the key, you know, your question is do you use 'em differently and would you be, I mean, is that the question that you had? Like, uh, uh, is that, maybe you could just repeat that to make sure I understand the question.Asim Hussain: Well, I think it's interesting. I think it's, I think, because a lot of these questions are kind of like insular to an organization. Like what are you doing? What's your organization? How is your organization reducing its own like emissions? And then the conversation is basically coached around, "well, that's not my problem. That's not me. I, even though you could do something materially to reduce those emissions, it's just not part of my value chain. So I'm not going to be focused in on it." Is it, I presume because it's a business reporting directive. It is kind of very much like how, like you've, made, how are you as an organization going to your emissions in line with the EU's target by 2040?Chris Adams: So, okay. That's, yeah. I think I understand your question now. So, uh, as I'm aware so far. The CSDDD is basically, they're still all focused very much on your own organization, right? So it, I think most of the supply chain due diligence part is about your upstream, right? Not necessarily so much stuff that you have downstream, for example.So, you know, you might talk about who you purchase things from, but it might not be about to what extent am I incentivizing or am I accelerating the production of fossil fuels, for example, right? So right now, let's say, when we saw this, when we saw, I think Will Alpine, you know, he was a guest before, and so, so, so, so, so he mentioned this a while ago, and I think way, way back in the first or second episode.He spoke about, okay, we need to be doing, you know, we, need to be using, we need to be responsible for our use of AI. Yes, we need to think about the green part, but we also think about these parts elsewhere. He's been like really, he's been leading on a bunch of this stuff and talking about this. Yeah.Yeah. So, the yes.Asim Hussain: Scope 4, he got me onto the idea of scope 4 emissions, which is like Very interesting.Chris Adams: Yeah, so he, so like, he's been talking about this in quite kind of clear ways for quite some time. So, the scope 4 stuff that you've just mentioned, don't know to what extent that's actually included in this right now. But if you're talking about your plan, it's likely that if you're going to have a transition plan, you probably would have very good reasons to talk about what your transition plan looks like because you're helping transition the entire economy.So it may be that you might refer to this, but this is where I'm outside of my kind of comfort zone, basically.Asim Hussain: We can, lobby right now for what we'd want. I mean, what the ideal solution I would say is not lobby. That's the wrong word. We don't, do lobbying, but you know, you know, There is this overall aggregate goal that we need to achieve. And that's it. I love this. It was Henry Richardson that said that.I remember it so specifically. I know the person that said it. And I know in what meeting they said it. was such a great statement. We were talking about the SCI. And we were talking about this whole idea of double counting. You know, double counting, when it comes to reportings and all this stuff, it's so significant because you're an organization.You don't want to, you know, You don't want to be responsible for somebody else's emissions. You don't want double counting. But he said, actually. As a humanity, we want double counting because what does double counting mean? Double counting means that there's more than one person incentivized to reduce that emissions, right?That's, the advantage somewhat of double counting. And actually, if you think of scope 3 in a way is double, counting across the board because somebody's scope 1 and 2 is somebody else's scope 3. But I actually completely forgot where I was gonna go with this.Chris Adams: I'll try and rescue Asim before we move to the next story. So, we were talking a little bit about, and bring it back to digital services, right? The, so, I can't name the organization that we did some of this work for, but we were talking about a large media company, we were talking with a large media company, and we were helping them understand this, because some of the jargon, I'm afraid, that people use for this is like an attributional approach, which is like, are they my emissions? Versus a consequential approach, which is, do these emissions, you know, is this activity going to increase or reduce emissions? And when you're looking at media, for example, essentially, if you look at the attributional part and the GSG protocol, what you have to report on, right, you are incentivized to care about the data center more than anything else, right?Because that's kind of inside your boundary at the moment, or what. Most organizations report as their boundary, right? Not every organization. But if you were to look at the consequential approach, you'd be looking at, yeah, all the things mentioned before. And like, the, this is quite a significant thing because for consuming digital media for consumers, the data center's making, Less than 10 percent, right?It's tiny compared to the, well, the energy use at least of the, yeah, and uh, if you look at the energy use, it's going to be, you know, more than two thirds is coming from all the stuff at the end users, which is outside of your, you know, it's not on your book, so why would you care right now?Asim Hussain: Well, it's an externality in a way, isn't it? Yeah.Chris Adams: So this is, this is why I think it's interesting to see these two things have some interplay, and we, I think we need some wording for this right now.Like, the one I'm trying to popularize is, you have climate disclosure, Which is one of my missions. And then there's climate response. What was my plan to reduce this? Right? Climate disclosure, you want your missions to be small. Your climate response, you want it to be really big. really, like, massive and ambitious and, like, loud and everything like that.And that's what I think you can get behind.Asim Hussain: But I think that's what Scope 4, that's why I think Scope 4 is a really interesting concept. It is, I've forgotten how it's defined exactly, but you know, things like your response, like things that you are doing outside of anything to do with making money or products, like that is what's counted in Scope 4.But also it's like the impact you're having, the impact your, business and the work that you're doing is having on the fundamental problem of climate change. So, i. e. like, if you're enabling something which helps people to find another oil reserve, that's a massive scope for. That would like overshadow anything that you're producing in this world.But scope for could also be negative, because if you're doing lots of work that actually sucks out carbon from the atmosphere. You can actually have a, like a, scope four, which a note, scope one, two, three, can't be negative, like, unless you're not doing, unless you're just not breathing or just sitting very still, but like, it can't be, but scope four could potentially be positive or negative and it shows your, like, how you, really like impacting the world, like.Chris Adams: Yeah, so the thing we could possibly link to, I'm going to add to the show notes the episode we did, the podcast episode, which was all about AI and ML impacting climate change way, way, back in the day, I think June 13th. Oh wow, it's literally two years ago.Asim Hussain: Is it two years?Chris Adams: Yeah, we're recording on June 12th.Asim Hussain: About AI?!.Chris Adams: No, we've spoken about it before, but this is the, this is one I'm really, actually, I really loved this one. This was recorded on June the 13th, and this included, it was Abhishek Gupta, who's now, like, inside CAT, inside Climate Action Tech, which is a community that we're both part of. He's being funded on a micro grant to come up with some sustainable AI principles, but Will, Will Alpine, he, well, Will Buchanan is what he, before he got married, he was called Will Buchanan.He mentioned a bunch of this stuff. And we also have Lynn Kaack, who was one of the co founders of Climate Change AI, which is another one of the really, in my view, really fantastic organizations who have real authority in talking about that. They mentioned a bunch of this stuff, so if you want to know a bit more about AI, look at these things from two years ago, because a lot of that still stands, and it's very, it's, I, learned so much from that one, basically.So yes.Asim Hussain: I get pinged by organizations all the time going, "oh, we want to talk about, or media, we want to talk about AI and, oh, AI and sustainability is suddenly a problem." And I'm like, we've been talking about it for a long time, like well before chat GPT came on the market as AI being a, hot topic of conversation in sustainability circles.Chris Adams: Well, maybe the thing we should also link to in then Asim is, A, there's, so the GSF has actually started to endorse some existing legislation in America, to make this a bit clearer. But also, in Europe, I think something like a million and a half or a million euros, there was a tender a few years ago, to basically start researching some of this stuff that you might refer to as Scope 4, basically.Like Scope 4 is, it's an idea, but it's not, there's no standard around it right now. So there was some work there to start looking at. This to see how you might quantify the positive and negative impacts of various steps. Now, because you've got, this was funded by the Green Digital Coalition explicitly to kind of measure the positive impacts, it's not surprising that every single intervention is only positive.So it's not like there's a methodology for talking, oh, if we use AI to extract oil and gas, does this mean that we've, you know, there is nothing like that. And I would be very happy to see something like that because those climate emergency, see all this stuff here, right?Asim Hussain: Well, that's one of the reasons I was thinking about this recently is kind of where we're starting to, well, we've somewhat measured our emissions. I'm starting to like, now that we're growing, right.Chris Adams: This is the GSF you're about?Asim Hussain: GSF. Yeah. And I suppose the green web is the same, isn't it? Like if you were to employ just one more person, your emissions would jump up significantly.And so like, how do you meaning, meaningfully have a plan? Or what do you even say when you're like a very small organization that's just growing? Like, I mean, forget if you'reChris Adams: If you hire five people, you've doubled yourAsim Hussain: have like you've doubled your emissions and you've set yourself a target to reduce that, what does that really mean?And I think for, especially for organizations like you and me, like Green Web and Green Software, like if there was a scope for, our scope for is significant. Because the activities that we do as an organization, I don't mean scope 4, our negative scope 4's are significant. Because the act, us existing, arguably, hopefully, reduce the overall emissions of the world.And so in a way you could, you know, it'd be interesting to look at organizations from their scope 4, because then you're investing in kind of a different component. There could be like startups out there who aren't like in the green software space, but have a negative, if you have a negative scope 4.The more you grow, the more emissions get reduced from the atmosphere. It's interesting.Chris Adams: I'm I'll be honest, dude, I'm a little bit I'm sceptical of this scope 4 idea because it very much, when I've seen people talk about it, they use it as a way to either say well this is why it's okay for us to deal with these really damaging things elsewhere, right, it's used to basically draw attention away from other things, or I just don't think like It's not, it's never going to balance out.It's okay for things to be like, orthogonal, in two different, moving along two different axes, right? And I think it, that makes more sense. What you can do instead, is actually be responsible about the impact that you do actually have. And the, there's a, an approach used by the New Climate Institute, who I think, which I think is really interesting.What they do, they basically say, look, We're a small non profit, our job is to be at, say, COP 28, 29, 26 or something and essentially work with policy makers to set the rules that end up impacting, influencing ginormous organizations that are way, larger than us. And what they do instead, they basically say, well, we have to fly there, we have to do something like this, we're going to impose an internal cost of maybe 100 euros per ton that we put into a kind of, I forget the term they use, Let's just call it a carbon war chest, right?A climate war chest. And then they use that to fund other systemically effective things. And, like, this feels like a much more sensible way to do it. And this dude, like, dude, like, you know how the GSF, where the GSF came from, right? The funding for the GSF came from the internal carbon levy inside Microsoft.You told me this before.Asim Hussain: Well, actually, no,Chris Adams: Oh,Asim Hussain: I didn't, get there. No, there is an internal carbon levy in Microsoft, which is then used, to fund green measures but the actual, like, technically the money from this actually came from a different bucket.Chris Adams: Ah, dude, I, ah, that would have been such a good story.Asim Hussain: It's unfortunately not a good story, yeah.Will Alpine, a lot of his work he did at Microsoft was actually funded from that war chest. He knew how to navigate that space and get money from that war chest.Chris Adams: So this feels like a more sensible way to do it, right? The idea of saying, well, you're not trying to say, you're not trying to get back into eco heaven, you're being an adult about the emissions, and about that there is an impact being caused, and then you're talking about, well, what is the way that I can do it, which doesn't give you my sugar rush of saying, I'm carbon neutral again, but says, well, we have a societal goal to get to, so let's think about it in that sense.I'm, this was, I mean, Microsoft is using an internal carbon price. It's not the same as a carbon tax, but it does revolve like, it's a discussion about how you allocate time and money to projects, rather.Asim Hussain: It's a tax because different departments have to pay different amounts depending on how much carbon they've been deemed to have omitted. So it is kind of like a tax.Chris Adams: Yes, this is something we can-We don't want to use the word tax? Oh, is this another topic?It's not so much that, it's, I mean, it's more that, yeah, you might not want to use the word tax in various places, because certain people are in favor of tax, certain people are not in favor of tax, right? And like, there are loads of ways where people allocate funds to various things inside this.I mean, like, there's a reason inside Microsoft they use it, they called it a levy, right?Asim Hussain: Oh yeah.Chris Adams: But like, we, you know, there are loads of places where we allocate a percentage of some funds to funding something else. So this is why I've stayed away from using the term tax inside this, because in the way I see it, governments get to levy taxes, they get to like raise taxes and stuff like that, but organizations don't necessarily, and there are loads of cases where if you're inside an organization, you're going to allocate this much to kind of keeping your staff happy.Is that a staff happiness tax? Or if I'm paying for cloud, right, and it's a chunk of my, let's say I'm building a digital service and I'm paying Amazon a chunk, or Microsoft, is that a Microsoft tax? I'm not sure it is. It's, I'm paying for something, right? Yeah.Asim Hussain: Good point. Now that you've said the word tax like five times, every time you said it, I get a-Chris Adams: You, sir, have said the word tax. I have not used the word tax at all.Asim Hussain: Have you not? Okay. Well, I think it, I think anyway.Chris Adams: I talk about internal, I talk about internal carbon pricing, because this is internalizing the costs that are otherwise being shifted onto society, and that seems a kind of economic and kind of grown up way to think about this.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, uh, yeah, I'm not using that word either for very good reason, because there's another thing. Anyway, we've totally gone off script. This has been fun, though. Let's, should we go back to where we are? So we were going to talk about CarbonHack, some of the aftermath and learning points from that before we wrap up.So are there any particular projects? So maybe it might be worth you just briefly summarizing what CarbonHack actually was, and then maybe if we talk about one or two projects. So, two projects that really caught your eye, then we can wrap up after that because we've this, has been, this was going to be a short, one and we're running about 50 minutes already, basically.Asim Hussain: That's okay. People must have some long journeys ahead of them. Summer holidays coming along. Yeah, no, it was really good. So CarbonHack this year, we focused on Impact Framework, but more specifically focused around measuring, like how do we actually measure software, so it's really exciting. So, I'm really excited to be here where we can actually talk about this.So, really quickly, Impact Framework is a framework that we've been building here to a very low level. You can measure, print, kind of most things with it, but also provide that evidence of the measurement in this impact manifest file. So there's a couple of, we had a couple of prizes. We had the ones I was very excited about.I was inspired by all of them, to be honest with you. But the one I was really keen to see what people It was we just threw it out there. We were like, well, let's just see how people respond to this one. And it was beyond carbon. Because we've talked about carbon all the way through this episode.But, you know, as we know, the sustainability challenge we had to have ahead of us is actually far bigger than just carbon. And we just left it fairly open. Kind of anything that kind of measures the environmental impacts beyond carbon was effectively it. And there was some really interesting submissions.Like the one that won was, as we might guess, like water, like they, they measured the impact of water. And it also triggered some like really interesting conversations around, you know, the, I know there's been some research in this space, but like, at what level are you measuring it? Are you measuring the water impact?Like at the data center? Kind of like primary. Primary and secondary, primary water and secondary water kind of was like the concept and it was just exciting. But now, what that means now is that there's now a plugin for Impact Framework where you can just, there's actually two, but you can drop it in and just say like, I just want to estimate my water impacts of my workload.You can just drop it in and do it. Another, team was from a team called Grasp and I loved it because, you know, one of the things that plugin measures. Actually does a couple of different beyond carbon categories, but the three main ones are death.Chris Adams: Okay.Asim Hussain: Premature death, social cost of carbon, plus a dollar value on like the carbon emissions and displacement, which is kind of interesting as well.Like how many people and all this stuff is like one of the, you have to submit like citations and research to prove and evidence kind of where these numbers are coming from. But yeah, you know, like social cost of carbon, we know like what is the cost of carbon as we take it down through the generations and, you know, all this other stuffChris Adams: So that's the harm caused by, on society, by the people, right? And like, this is what the, that was 50 under Barack Obama's time in America, went down to 1.Asim Hussain: No, I think it's two.Chris Adams: or 2, and then that's gone up to 190 now. No, I think it's actually back to 50. But there, I think the, it's now shifted to a very, a much, Like, fourfold increase, or nearly a fourfold increase in the US, for example.But this is like, and in Europe it's around 100 right now, that's the figure.Asim Hussain: I don't, yeah. I don't believe they use what Biden decided and wrote on an exec. It's it was more, more from research.Chris Adams: Oh, I'm not saying that's like, that's not Biden saying this, that's like, the group who was allocated to do this work, these are the things they've recommended for this. And that's how they've, that's what the number looks like is being mentioned. I'll share a link to that as well, actually, because that's actually This is, really helpful for the internal carbon pricing stuff we discussed before.If you're going to think about, okay, how do I create a carbon war chest to fund the work like Will Alpine did, or founding an organization, or doing any kind of systemic work. Yes.Asim Hussain: Yeah, but I think that's kind of like where it's interesting. cause you know, sometimes I do feel that. We sanitize this conversation too much. Like it's too sanitized. Like we talk about carbon, we talk about this, talk about that. But actually, the reason why we're here is this is there's a lot of human suffering that is happening and will increasingly happen because of the work that we're doing and the work. There is, that value in this whole, whole question.Are you trying to like add a cost to carbon? How many people will likely be displaced because of rising sea levelsChris Adams: Always like climate migration being informed.Asim Hussain: Climate migration. Yeah. so like, and of course there's also research which talks about what is the increased death rate, you know, You have to look at kind of, not just carbon emissions, but air quality and things like that.So there's these, so these are the impacts. I mean, I, and I know it's kind of, it can be hard for some people to swallow, but it is, you know, something I think about a lot. I actually have a big skull next to me. It's like, I'm very stoic.Chris Adams: You are full of surprises. Wow, you've got kind of Shakespearean kind of Wow.Asim Hussain: A littleChris Adams: Alas, poor Yorick. Wow. I did not see that coming at all.Asim Hussain: Well, you, it's a stoicism thing.It's like, if you, contemplate death a lot, you, live life more. But those are two, two, two, two really good plugins there. But there's just been, it's hard to like really pick up on the rest. There's some really good work done to using Impact Framework, not as like, not building a plugin for it, but just leveraging it to examine what the emissions of machine learning is. And the important thing about that is, is the output of it is this kind of very standardized manifest file, which anybody can read. You'reChris Adams: Like an auditable or repeatableAsim Hussain: audible, readable, and you're just reading this manifest file. And as soon as you look at this manifest file, if you know now how to read these manifest files, you can go, Okay.So, straight away, I know you did this, you used that coefficient. I get the kind of measurement that you are. I can, that's an interesting number you generated. So that's one of the things we want to drive from it. And the best, yeah, there's some great work from, I've forgotten the name of the team now.But the, they did work on the, trying to figure out the, using impact frame in a very In a usual way, which is like in logistics, can you drive, can you create a manifest file which represents the emissions of like a fleet of cars, like delivering Amazon packages all over? Can there be a manifest file for that?And, uh, I think the winner was they built, it's called green. Oh, no, I want to mention two other teams and they both got the same name, which is very confusing in the hackathon. Find a called green and meet green. Oh, I forgot the actual name of the team. It was green something, but they, uh, they built Kubernetes.So an interface into Kubernetes and the reason why it won, it was just like Kubernetes is so ubiquitous on the internet. And now if you've got, and it wasn't using, there was a separate one for Kepler, but this is very specifically for Kubernetes, independence of Kepler, taking the observations from there.And you can compute the, environmental impact of that. And I think, actually, I shouldn't have mentioned it, that my favorite solution was a team called Greener Meet. My absolute, I all, I'm sorry, all of the rest of you, you all weren't my favorite solution. My favorite solution was a team called Greener Meet.Chris Adams: Green Me, as in, like, Greener You, Greener Me, or Greenami, like Konami?Asim Hussain: Greener Meet, as in having a meeting.Chris Adams: Oh, Greener Meet, as in zoom, not like.Asim Hussain: Zoom. And it was exactlyChris Adams: Okay.Asim Hussain: And we had an under 18s prize, which we really spent a long time with lawyers trying to figure out, can we do an under 18s prize? But we managed to get one together. And it was a team of 16 year olds from school in California.And they created, they used the Impact Framework to actually measure The environmental impact of Zoom. So they literally like they, they got Python libraries. They, ran Zoom calls. They could get the utilization. They compared it to Watttime and they even found they were like, they even switched on and off features of Zoom to show like how that changed the emissions profile of your call.And even I loved it. They found a curtailment that they were having a meeting and cause they're in CAISO. TheyChris Adams: CAISO being Californian Independent Systems Operator.Asim Hussain: I knew you'd know that.Chris Adams: And that's basically the grid operators in California you're talking about.Asim Hussain: And California has a lot of renewables, as you know, so they had a moment in the meeting where they curtailed, which means that the emissions are effectively zero for the call now because they're factoring that in.It was really good work, and we tried to give them the prize on the call. They, we were delayed. They had to go to class. So we couldn't give the kids the prize, and if we can, maybe we can bring them on this podcast. I'd love to speak to them. I just, it gave me such, honestly, you watch this, And I'm sorry to the rest of the prize winners, but I think this was the best video.It was the best presented. And I'm just sitting there thinking, these are the, now we're going to, now we're going to, " the kids of today!" - we are old. These are the kids of the future. You know, maybe it gave me so much hope, like these are 16 year old kids and they were doing some incredibly advanced green software, measurement, reporting, zoom, understanding curtailment, understanding like how to measure this stuff.And I was like, ooh, we've got a, we've got a good future ahead of us. I think, I don't think, yeah.Chris Adams: Asim, this sounds really cool, but I have to ask, right, why are we relying on a bunch of literal children to do this work when Zoom is a multi billion dollar publicly traded company that does have to report on its own figures like this, and they are doing, Zoom doesn't expose these numbers themselves, right?Like they will tell you how much you've saved, but you can't see the figures from this. We're relying on children to do the work of essentially publicly traded companies here, right? Right. This feels like a, we, I think this is really, cool. But this has an open question about what they would do maybe Zoom or they might join an organi organization like the GSF and say, well, this is how we do measure this stuff. And, uh, 'cause if not, I think we might need to refer to the work of children until that happens. Because this is just like, I mean, if, this embarrasses them to actually being more transparent about how this is being used, I think, we should be doing it because it's kind of bonkers that you are relying, like, it's nice to have like youth of today, but one of these groups has literally access to billions of dollars of capital and one of these groups is doing it in their spare time and couldn't even accept the thing because they had to leave for class. Yeah.Asim Hussain: For class. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a fair point. But at the same time, I mean, I want to counter your point for a second as well. I mean, I'm, you know, I have multiple views. Like, do you really want to be waiting all the time? Like, we're just waiting all the time. We're just sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, for everybody to be transparent about all of their emissions all the time.If we can just take that power back into our hands, And we why not wait for people to be transparent, but actually like, look, this is a model that I've created. I think this is the emissions profile of your product. I'm going to publish it. If you feel somewhat different, that's the beauty of open source.If you feel somewhat different, create a pull request and be, as transparent as me. I think in a way we, it is good. That we're leading the way, it is good that the kids are leading that way in the future because it kind of brings power back into our hands, if that makes sense.Chris Adams: I think what it sounds like you're suggesting is in the absence of information, it might be worth using the age old internet trick of ask a question on Stack Overflow, answer it with an incorrect answer, then hope that people will actually come up with better answers, because that's the tried and tested way to get a good answer on Stack Overflow.You answer it incorrectly, then someone goes, no, you're getting it wrong. Now I'm doing it, because they're so incensed that someone is wrong on the internet. So this basically, I think what we can use that, we can harness this natural resource and we can say, we're only going to use the worker of these children, and we're for talking about Zoom calls until someone comes in with actual better figures and ideally the organizations with full access to this, like maybe Zoom themselves, or maybe a competitor of Zoom.So if you'd like to do this, I'm chris@greenweb.org, no, I'm very happy to have this conversation because this does feel like it's necessary. Anyway, oh, blimey, I've just seen the time. Asim, we've, gone a bit over, but this has been really, fun and,Asim Hussain: Yeah. It has been!Chris Adams: I, this is, We've got another one of these in a few weeks time.So, Asim, really lovely chatting with you, nice to catch up, and sorry to hear about the mushrooms, but I guess the Mushroom Kingdom's loss is the Bread Kingdom's gain. So, I should probably wrap up now. Folks, if you've made it this far, we will be sharing links Pretty much everything we've discussed and which you can find at podcast.greensoftware.foundation. And thanks again for listening. My name is Chris Adams and this is Asim Hussain of the Green Web Foundation and Green Software Foundation respectively. All right. Thanks, Asim, mate. Take care of yourself. Okay. Bye.Asim Hussain: Cheers. See you later.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 greensoftware.foundation in any browser.Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of the TWiGS, host Chris Adams welcomes back Anne Currie, Sara Bergman, and Sarah Hsu, authors of the book Building Green Software. They dive into the latest updates and hot topics at the intersection of sustainability and software engineering. The discussion highlights the importance of making software and hardware more efficient and explores cutting-edge topics like serverless computing on Kubernetes with WebAssembly, the circular economy for electronics, and the potential for dynamic pricing in cloud services based on renewable energy availability. The episode emphasizes the ongoing energy transition and the need for innovative solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of technology.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteSarah Hsu: LinkedIn Sara Bergman: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Introducing SpinKube [04:11] Staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin | Grist [10:25] THE GLOBAL E WASTE MONITOR 2024 [10:50] Analysis: Fossil fuels fall to record-low 2.4% of British electricity - Carbon Brief [16:27]https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/issues/2020 [23:03]Explore Traces | Honeycomb [24:40]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/report?icid=SustainabilityHomepage01Report2024 [30:20]Events:https://ndcoslo.com/ [47:55]Resources:Building Green Software Environment Variables Podcast | Ep 67 Building Green Software https://links.danielle.fyi/ [05:55]Working toward a net zero future: Evolving our work with energy companies - The Official Microsoft Blog https://grist.org/accountability/microsoft-employees-spent-years-fighting-the-tech-giants-oil-ties-now-theyre-speaking-out/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/ [37:54]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:Anne Currie: That is the nature of renewables, is that they are variably available, and we just have to, we have to take advantage of that, not fight against it, and not constantly wish we were in the fossil fuel age.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 the Green Software Foundation podcast, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we welcome back the authors of the book, Building Green Software, Anne Currie, Sara Bergman, and Sarah Hsu, for an episode of This Week in Green Software,our roundup of what's happening and hot at the intersection of sustainability and software engineering. So Anne, Sara, Sarah, I know that you've been on the podcast before, but I wanted to just provide a bit of space for people who are new to this to let you introduce yourselves. Anne, it's okay if I give this floor to you before we run through the usual roster?Anne Currie: Yeah, thanks Chris. So, my name is Anne Currie. I am the CEO of a training company, Strategically Green, and I have been in the tech industry for pretty much 30 years now, and I am one of the co-chairs of the Green Software Foundation Community Group.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Anne. All right. Sara, is it okay if I hand over the floor to you next?Sara Bergman: Sure. Thanks for having me back. I always enjoy being on the podcast. So my name is Sara Bergman. I am a senior software engineer at Microsoft, where I work with the Microsoft 365 products, which is very fun and exciting. I'm also one of the co-authors of the book Building Green Software. And other things that are new in my life is I'm recently back at work after maternity leave.So I'm still figuring it out, you know, what is life now?Chris Adams: Well, welcome back and congratulations on, yeah, the new instances of Sara, I suppose. Yeah.Okay. And moving on to other Sarah. Sarah Hsu, if I give space to you to introduce yourself.Sarah Hsu: Hi everyone. It's nice to be back. So my name is LSara Hsu. I am an SRE working for a financial institution. I'm also a project lead for the green software course for the GSF and similar to Anne and Sara, we recently just published a book by O'Reilly called Building Green Software. Very excited to be back.Chris Adams: Cool. Nice to see you again. And Sarah Hsu, we met in person for the first time when you were in Berlin delivering a keynote for, was it CamudaCon, the conference there?Sarah Hsu: Yes. A Process Orchestration Conference, which is exactly what we need, right? Because their motto is automation. And automation is the foundation of modern software systems. So...Chris Adams: thank you for that, Sara. I was also pleased for us to both realize that we had arms and legs and were more than just a YouTube square, basically, or a square in a Zoom call. So yes, that was lovely as well. Okay, for folks, if you've never been listening to this podcast before, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation.It's a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching a fossil-free internet by 2030. I also work as one of the policy chairs of the Green Software Foundation Policy working group as well. And before we dive into some of the stories, that's the format of this show, we'll be sharing links to the show notes and all the stories that we do discuss.So there'll be on GitHub and Markdown, what else, for you to look through. Alright, so the format we normally do is do a round up of news stories, but you three, because I have the pleasure of speaking to people who've written a book about green software, we figured we'd make it a little bit more interesting for listeners and touch on some of the topics in the book, so we've got a bit of a kind of nice way in to cover some of that content. Does that sound okay to you folks?Anne Currie: Great.Chris Adams: Alright then, so the first story that we have is actually about a new project called SpinKube. So this is hyper efficient serverless on Kubernetes powered by WebAssembly. Now a few podcasts ago before, we did a whole story all about Wasm, WebAssembly, and why it's an interesting piece of software. But, previously, back then, it was only available on Nomad, which is a similar scheduling tool, but not the same as Kubernetes. And this story, as I understand it, is basically the idea of providing some of these kinds of tools for Kubernetes, the most popular scheduling tool for this. This basically means that if you thought that was a cool idea, you've got access to it yourselves. And Anne, I think I might hand over to you for this, because this really touches on some of the things you spoke about in your book about operational efficiency versus coding efficiency. Maybe I will hand over to you here.Anne Currie: It really does. So Wasm is something that I find absolutely fascinating. It's both, as you say, both from, at the moment, the operational efficiency perspective, because they're really focused on how you can bin pack as much work onto each machine as possible. So you can reach that magic 50 percent utilization number and then get even higher, which is very hard to do without a tool to help you.Very hard to do. But beyond that, what also is, is they have ambitions even further, which is that they want to start actually optimizing the code that you write in WebAssembly as well, so that under your feet, it will become more efficient. And we all know that writing efficient code is really, really hard.There's a, there's a huge impact on developer productivity. And we, we cover this quite a lot in the operational efficiency and the code efficiency chapters of our book. And one of the senior engineers, Danielle Lancashire at Fermion, who's behind all this Wasm, one of the, one of the groups behind all this movement in Wasm came and talked to me, talked for me at a conference in London a few months ago, and she was actually talking about code efficiency, the code efficiency improvements that come from Wasm.Now they're a bit down the road. The moment they're focusing on operational efficiency, but I really like to see a platform with a vision for, because in the end, we're all going to have to run on much, much less power at times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That is the nature of renewables, is that they are variably available and we just have to, we have to take advantage of that, not fight against it and not constantly wish we were in the fossil fuel age.And so I really like to see a platform which is thinking about operational efficiency now and also thinking about code efficiency down the road. So I was, I like Wasm from that perspective. I think they're doing a lot of nice work.Chris Adams: Yeah, we have some nods here. I just realized when I spoke about this story, I dived straight in without really explaining why some people find this actually exciting in the first place. So when we spoke about things like, say, serverless, and one of the, as I understand it, one of the key things behind this tool is it's like a very fast version of a serverless platform that spins up and down quite quickly.So we've had previous generations where you might need to have a bit of a wait before a piece of software can start running before you can really use it. And this is like one of the key things that Wasm has made available. And that allows for, like you said, time, it basically means that there's less wasted time, but it also provides, opens the door for newer, more efficient platforms like this. Okay, before we move on to the next story, Sarah, Sara, is there anything that you want to add to this?Anne Currie: Actually, before we move on, I'm going to just hark back to something that Sarah said just before this, which is that the benefits of modern ops and automation is that a big part of automation, of modern automation is the ability to spin up quickly because things like auto replacing, just having stuff sat around waiting and for you to fail over to with autoscaling, which is vastly more operationally efficient, relies on things being able to spin up fast.If you can't have fast instantiation, you can't have a lot of these modern automation, this modern progress in automation. So yeah, it is a really good thing.Sara Bergman: Also, I think one thing that has been said before and can always be said again is the benefit of the sort of platform that makes it easier for people because people want to be green, but sometimes it's a lot of work and anything that can make it less work to be greener is a great thing and should be celebrated.And on the ops side of things, not every software developer or software person is like, highly interested in that. There are some people who love it and like go all in, and there's some who like, "I just want to write my code and like deploy it in some way to my users." So therefore things like this is so important to, to help bridge that gap in a green way.Sarah Hsu: Yeah, yeah. I a hundred percent agree. Like software engineers, we're inherently lazy people, right? Like none of like, not speaking for you guys, I'm not a security expert, but I know how important a secure application is, right? I'm waiting for this tooling framework and best practice from the security people. So I think that's the gap we really trying to fill, that "how do we make everyone else have that ability to be green at their fingertip without having all the knowledge of like being really green?" And like, yeah, I feel like we can talk about operation efficiency to... I mean, to, 'til tomorrow, yeah, because it really is the lowest hanging fruit and people don't realize how many things we're already doing or have like knock on green benefits, like exactly what Anne said about reliability and resiliency.Yeah. They all like come down to like automation and how do you utilize automation? Right. Anyway, I think we should stop. We can always come back to it. Let's get through all the other stuff. And then we come back to talk about Green Ops.Chris Adams: Okay, all duly noted. All right, so we've spoken a little bit about operational efficiency, which is the running of servers. Spoke a bit about coding efficiency, which is what a lot of people might reach for first, or people wouldn't typically think about. And, but there's other ways you might talk about this.So let's move to the next story. Sara, I might actually ask you about this one. So this one is a story from Grist magazine, which basically is talking, it covers the staggering quantities of like, Transition metals that we're currently throwing out when we could be mining them. And while we'll share a link to this in the show notes, one of the key things that the four of us can see right now is a chart showing some of the minerals that we hear associated with a transition away from fossil fuels to greener forms of power. There was a report by the UN called the Global E-Waste Monitor and they've shared some of these stats for the first time. And one of the key things is basically that we are throwing out something in the region of 62 million tons of electronics. And when you look at the actual mineral content of that, in some ways it's actually comparable to the demand for new kinds of metals that we have.So the charts that we'll link to here, things like, say, copper, it's not that, it's quite similar to each other. Some things like cobalt or neodymium. These are, we're basically looking at the amount of minerals that could be circular. Some cases are not the same. So things like lithium, for example, we still, there's still a lot of demand and there's not nearly enough that's in circulation. But this feels like this provides an interesting flip side to the whole discussion around what we do with our stuff. And I think the term that I saw in the book, which was hardware efficiency. So I kind of wanted to like, see what you folks thought about this, in particular Sara, because this is one thing we spoke about in a previous podcast, like, this feels like there's more than just "hold on to your kit," for example, there's maybe a chance to talk about things in a more circular fashion.Sara Bergman: Absolutely. And I think the key word there is circularity. E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world, which is saying a lot. And it is growing for several reasons. Like we consume more, we have more devices, like more devices are smart devices. My, like kitchen fan has an app. I don't know why it needs an app, but you know, there, there are an increasing amount of what can be classified as electronic, not what can be classified, but what is electronic.I see the same with like toys and things. So that's one thing. And also we crave the newer and the newer things and things have shorter and shorter Life cycles or the use phase is short and shorter. So it's, it is fast growing and before, in a time before time... no, but when it was not the case that it was so fast at growing, we could maybe afford to mine everything.But now when the consumption is so high and the throwout rate is so high, we really need to start thinking in a circular way. Because, in the end, there is only so much metal in the ground and our earth is finite. It's not something that grows back, at least not very quickly. So having this thinking, I think it's going to be, it needs to be a game changer.And I know several countries have adopted what's called the right to repair, which is basically that you Chris Adams: is big thing in Europe. Sara Bergman: Yeah, it's a big thing in Europe. China has, no sorry, not China, India has a similar legislation. New York has a similar legislation. And that's really good. And that's about what you said, holding onto your kit longer.But that's really only one side of it. I think the right to recycle should be equally hotly debated, perhaps even more hotly debated. Because we, the hardware industry has been forced to make hardware kind of hard to recycle because we are demanding better, yet smaller devices, or bigger screens, but thinner, lighter hardware.And that's really complicated to produce. And it makes it really hard to recycle. Also in this article that you linked, let me find the number. But, what they said, the percentage of ethically recycled waste was also staggeringly low. It's like a business as usual case was only 20%. It's, well, you're all going to have to go to the show notes the article for yourself to find the percentage.What I'm meaning to say is that this is incredibly important and something that is an additional dimension to the conversation beyond holding on to your hardware. It's also the reuse and recycle part of the story.Anne Currie: It's a sales feature as well. It's recycling and it's a sales feature. I just bought a new phone, new, it was an old Pixel 7a, because my previous one had run out of security patches, the classic way that you have to throw away a working piece of kit. So I was quite annoyed because I was having to throw away a perfectly working piece of kit.So I bought 7a. But the 7a sent me all the stuff to do a, to send my old phone back, and I got 25 percent off and I thought, "well, actually, that was pretty good." I actually felt quite good about that in the end. I thought, well, it's going to be recycled. I got 25 percent off. All right. That was, it was, it felt like a feature that they were offering me.Chris Adams: Well, this is, maybe this touches one of the key ideas that, if you're moving away from linear economy, once you've, dug these minerals up once. One of the ideas is that once they're in the kind of sphere that we are in, right, you don't need to have, it's not that going into the atmosphere like say fossil fuels for example.You can have these things circular. Now, this is one thing that we don't have quite the policy support for yet, but this is one thing that we could definitely be seeing more of in future, and this feels like the direction we might be heading towards if things work out, basically.Sarah Hsu: Yeah. I also think it's an age old thing, right? We should find the thing that fits your purpose. It's similar to say, we want to find the VM instance that fits my purpose. I feel like people shouldn't want the latest and the greatest. Like my laptop is not that great, but I don't do that much on my laptop.So like, I think people also need to start having that mindset. Like, "Oh, I don't need like the fastest, like the most, you know, cores, power laptop, choose to go on Zoom call, do a little bit of coding." And yeah, I think that's another bit of the things that also really fit into operational efficiency, you know, where you want to find things that fits your purpose.And I think that applies to hardware as well.Chris Adams: I agree, actually. All right. Thank you for that, Sara. All right. So, we're going to move to the next story now. This is a story from Carbon Brief. And, Anne, I'm going to hand over to you for this one because this is one thing we discussed before. So, this is a story from Carbon Brief who basically mentioned that earlier on this month, no, last month, actually, now.The UK's electricity grid operated for a whole hour with just two, almost no power coming from fossil fuels. Now this is a record low for the country and this hopefully is a sign of things to come. So Anne, I know that we discussed this here, but maybe you could talk, touch on like why you found this interesting and what it's kind of telling us as software engineers perhaps.Anne Currie: Yeah, I mean, obviously this is an incredibly positive story, and it's actually the direction that almost everybody's going in. If you haven't had a play around with electricitymaps.com to have a look at how green all the grids of the world are, it's absolutely fascinating. You'll learn a lot. And if you step back in time, it shows you what the carbon intensity, the average carbon intensity is of every grid in the world that they can get data on, which is a surprisingly large number of grids.You'll see that if you, and then you can go back in time and step forward and you'll see that everything is becoming greener and greener. The energy transition is happening. You know, it's not just something that will be happening in the future. It is happening, but it won't be easy. Oh, I saw an excellent Uruguay is apparently completely a hundred percent green for eight solid months this, this year.So there are, but that is because, but the interesting thing on this is that every country does it in a different way and every country being the green intensity of their grid, it varies over time in different ways. It depends what you're using to generate the power. So places like Uruguay have loads of solar and wind, which is fantastic, but they also have tons and tons of hydro and the hydro is used to smooth out the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.In the UK, we don't have so much in the way of stored, so it's great if it's windy, and if it's sunny, but mostly in the UK, so if it's windy, we do an awful lot of offshore wind, rather, not onshore wind, but offshore wind.Sara Bergman: I thought going to say, we don't do a lot of sun here.Anne Currie: We do not do a lot of sunny here. It's actually, it's not as bad as, I've got solar panels, and through the summer, it's actually, well, through half the year, that will cover all my household usage.It's oddly much better than you'd think, but nonetheless, in the UK, it's mostly wind. But there's not so much in the way of storage. So it's, the UK is an absolutely excellent example of we're going to have to get good at using power that's variably available and cheap when it's available and either demand shift or demand shape so that we are using the renewable power and using less of non renewable stuff.So it is absolutely fascinating. It's a great story. It's a really good move forward, but not all grids are identically green. They all have difference. Different ways of doing it and results.Chris Adams: Alright, I've got a pop quiz for you then, because you're talking about the fact that the grids change, and sometimes they're going to be greener because there's more clean generation on the grid versus other times, right? We know in the UK, for example, there's groups like Octopus Energy, who basically will change the cost of your power, depending on the time of day.In some cases, they even pay you to use this. And we see this in other parts of the world. When do you reckon we're going to start seeing cloud providers do this in the net? Because we know it happens, and we see this stuff, but none of these signals are passed on to software engineers yet.Anne Currie: No, and every time I'm speaking to somebody from a cloud provider, I ask about it. Normally the people are quite green people and they want it to happen, but I think it'll be a way off. Now, it's, it's interesting. I spoke to somebody who was working for a cloud provider, but was a software engineer who used to be in the insurance industry.And he was saying to me, "Oh, well, you know, I can totally see it being to the advantage of the cloud providers to start doing dynamic tariffs, time of use tariffs, because then they have another product they can sell." So the people who can't do it, they will sell them insurance with a price cap. And obviously they'll charge a load of money for that.If you know, but, and then that is a product. Now, well, is that what they're gonna do? They'd be quite sensible to do it. It's, you know, the cloud providers are very good at making money and it won't be cheap. So I would love to see it, but I think it's going to be years before it happens.Chris Adams: Okay, so you're thinking three years at least for you, Anne, yeah? Okay. Any other takers for anything faster?Sara Bergman: Yeah, no, I think, well, working for a cloud provider, I just want to say, I don't know. But what I think all, at least the major cloud providers are fairly open with their use of PPAs, so Power Purchase Agreements, as a way of, yeah, meeting the green energy needs, because they have data centers sort of where they need to have data centers and then use PPAs to, to handle their Scope 2 emissions.And I think because all of them at least are so seemingly tied to those agreements, it is a contradiction between those and billing a customer for actual usage. So I think it could be like a complicated thing for them is what I suspect. But I also think it's something that customers would really appreciate.So I'm hoping it will be sooner, but no, I'm with Anne.Chris Adams: Okay. Years away. And Sarah, you've got something to say, it looks like.Sarah Hsu: Oh, I was just going to say, probably not in the near future, but we just need one person, one cloud provider to do it and everyone else be like, "right, we need to do it too."Chris Adams: Do you know what? I had a conversation from people outside of the big three, the big cloud providers. So, in Texas, there's a company called Build AI. They've been doing some work to basically, they'll provide you computing, but at certain peak times, you don't have access to it. And as a result, they're able to have much lower costs for this stuff.So I'll share a link to that. And there's a company called Saluna, also in Texas as well. And what they do is they speak to generators, people who run like clean energy. And they'll basically say, we will give you a floor price under which you will never, you know, we'll always get give you something like that.And using that, they are able to provide these kind of services. So we are seeing this start to develop, just not with the big providers. And we'll, I guess the next question will be, at what point do these new providers get bought by the big providers to protect the margins? Because that might be the logical thing to do if you have these kind of funds. All right, let's move on from that, because that was a, we spent a bunch of time talking about carbon awareness, and there's a few other stories that we have up here.Anne Currie: But carbon awareness is the most important thing.Chris Adams: It's definitelySara Bergman: And operational efficiency.Chris Adams: Alright, ok, so let's move to the next story then. So, we have another story here, this is actually probably the nerdiest story we have here. This one is actually a link to an issue in the OpenTelemetry repository. Basically, there is a standard called OpenTelemetry which is designed to make it easy to understand what the, I guess it's to make Infrastructure Observable, and Sara, I might need some help from you on why observability is important.But this one is basically put forward by, I think, one of the people who's inside the Green Software Foundation to start agreeing some sustainability metrics to expose in all the kind of tooling that we currently do have. This was really interesting because this feels like, A, this is something that I saw discussed in the book, but also for people who are not familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenOps, or even Observability in general, is anyone who might want to go, like, enlighten us or at least give us some points about why this might be interesting from a Green Software perspective? Sarah, I might hand over to you because you wrote part of this chapter for the book, I believe.Sarah Hsu: Yes. So I guess observability was born out of necessity because things are so complicated now. Microservices is made out of our world. And sometimes one requests have to travel like the entirety of a street of like a hundred houses before they actually reach a part of their journey. And it's really impossible to figure out what and where things have gone wrong, right? Metrics is for when you know something is going to go wrong and then you set up a metric to monitor that. But then in this unknown world, it's really hard to figure out who is going to break, for example, like, oh, I can't, I forgot that guy's name, but someone from Honeycomb.You guys know how much I love Honeycomb. He gave a really good example. Like if you're like a, like an iOS developer and you support like 10 different phones in 10 different countries, and suddenly one version of the phone in this country is going to break. How do you know to monitor that using metric?So I think that's a really good example, like why we need observability and observability borrowed its thinking from control theory, which is like, we are trying to understand the internal state of a system by just looking at its outputs. And outputs here are like telemetry. And telemetry, you've got logging, you've got metrics, you've got traces.And so basically OpenTelemetry is, it's like a set of framework. It's about the creation and then the management. All of those telemetry, it's actually not a backend. So it's not like Prometheus. It's not Jaeger. It's not like Grafana cloud. It's just a convention, which is really good. I remember when we were all in QCon a few years ago and Daniel was talking, Daniel from Skyscanner was talking about their OpenTelemetry migration plan or something.They basically went from like 300 different components down to 150 because they used OpenTelemetry as a standard, as an auto collector. And then that's the way, become one stop shop for all the telemetry. It's like, you don't need developers sending three different telemetries to three different backend systems.And then one big thing, everyone's being on call here. One big thing we find difficult is how do I context link everything? Why I need to basically, "oh, this logs happen at 1:21 PM. Right. Let me go find the traces that also happen. But what if time shift, right?" And sometimes like Something is in a different time zone.So anyway, that's a massive rant about why we need observability. So it's, I know, sorry, it's my job guys. And then I guess one big thing we talk about in the book is that green software needs to be ready with observability. Like we need to be with it. Right. So for example, in this complicated microservices world, we want to be able to know which component, which process.It's emitting the most carbon. Right. And that's where we want to be. And we need OpenTelemetry. We need people like OpenTelemetry to help us get there. So it's like absolutely amazing to see so many people are standing up and then it's like, Hey, we should add this like semantic thing.Chris Adams: I'm really excited about seeing this because I've used Honeycomb to understand what was broken about some applications I've been running before. And I was always a little bit wary about saying, well, okay, I'm not sure about, I want to be totally tied to one provider. And this here seems, and we have seen some providers who have started to make some CO2 figures for this. There's, confusingly, a, so a company called Sentry that do provide this and they even propose like a HTTP header for CO2 per request, right? But to see this at a kind of standard level, this feels like it might make it easier for a larger set of providers to come up with and at least make it easier to kind of see some of this because I think this is something that came out the book was that we, you need to be, you need to observe this, but it's often quite difficult to get the underlying numbers from some providers, and this is something that we need a bit, we need some more work with, or we need some progress on, basically.Sarah Hsu: Yeah. And I guess one big thing about OpenTelemetry is that it, because it is just a framework and it's vendor neutral, I think sometimes people forget how important staying vendor neutral is. So yeah, I think that's why it's so important that we locked in with OpenTelemetry now, because it is going to be the solutions for this observability space going forward.Sara Bergman: Absolutely agree, because I think sometimes when people talk about software, they think of a specific type of software that runs in the public cloud. But that is not the entirety of software that exists out there. There's so much software who runs on different places and nowhere near the cloud. And that software is equally, equally important.So, having something that fits more than just the one most popular scenario is incredibly important. And, and I just want to say that, I think this is important because I don't think anyone should get away, quote unquote, from doing sustainability work because, oh, I don't know my number. That should not be an excuse.Anne Currie: No, I totally agree. But, but even if it's impossible to get your number, there's still so much you can do without the numbers. as well. And yeah, it's amazing how people go, "Oh, I can't get the numbers to get" well, just work on your operational efficiency.Sarah Hsu: Yeah. Yeah. And like one of the biggest takeaway I gave at the CamundaCon in Berlin was that you can think of BinOps as a really natural evolution of DevOps and FinOps. FinOps is the optimization with money. We basically need to do the same for sustainability. And there are so many things we already can do and yeah, people should really pack themselves on their back because they didn't realize the transition is going to be much smoother than they thought.I Chris Adams: Okay, I'm glad you mentioned FinOps actually, Sarah, because this is talking about OpenTelemetry, some ways to expose some of the figures into this. As I understand it, there is a is it focus, which is the standard that the FinOps groups are pushing for trying to come up with like standardized cost, cloud cost figures, because I understand, as I understand it, there are some people pushing to put some CO2 figures in those as well, so that you'd be able to get some of these ideas from not just billing, but also from operational figures.So, because in some cases, one view will give you a slightly different view than the other, for example. We've got this, and we're just moving to the last of the stories that we have today. One of the largest providers has published their sustainability report. Microsoft published their 2024 environmental sustainability report in the last week or so, and there's a lot in it, actually.So, they're one of the large providers, and they have various commitments about getting to net zero by a certain times, but there's actually quite an interesting amount of data for the nerds inside this. Sara, I might hand over to you, because I suspect that you've been poring over this in quite a lot of detail, actually.Sara Bergman: Thank you. Yeah, I think I love it when this report comes out every year, because even though I work for Microsoft, there's no way I can keep up with everything that's Like, it's just too big. So I always learn so much. But I think for me, I'm a measurement geek, in case that wasn't obvious already.So some of the things I thought was super interesting was firstly, that the PUE of the data centers was published. I don't think Microsoft has ever published that number, but they said that this year, the design rating of the new data center is 1,12. And I think that's pretty impressive. That's pretty close to 1, which is, you know, the dream where all the energy that goes in goes to actual compute and to know other resources.Chris Adams: I'm glad you mentioned this, because I wanted you to actually just, for folks who are not familiar with what PUE means, maybe you could just, like, expand on that a little bit, and say why people, why you might even care about that number being high or low, for example.Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. So P U E stands for power usage effectiveness. Or if, yeah, effectiveness. Yeah. I always mix up the E words. Power usage effectiveness. And I think in the sort of early days of green software, this was the number people spent a lot of time focusing on. It is a number that's higher than 1.So it measures all the power that goes into your data centers and how much goes to actual compute. If, if all the energy or all the power that goes into your data center goes to meaningful compute operations, your PUE = 1. Only half of what goes into the data center goes to actual useful compute.Then your PUE number is 2. Chris Adams: I see. Sara Bergman: There's been a race to get to one, where you waste basically as little power as possible.Chris Adams: And when you say little power, you're talking about, like, keeping the machine from overheating and melting, or stuff like that, right? Like keeping cool enough?Sara Bergman: Yeah, cooling is one thing that consumes a lot of extra power. It's probably the biggest consumption of power, but they're like, they're lighting in the data center also, that's also consumes power. So anything that's in there that doesn't contribute to compute, go into this rate.Chris Adams: Do servers need to see? I mean, they don't need to be inthe, like, it's not like they have Sara Bergman: there people who work there.Chris Adams: Okay, that's fair enough. Okay, so this is, so in this report, they're publishing this information, which has traditionally been a thing that you do not see, all right?That's one of the key things from this.Sara Bergman: exactly. And I thought that was interesting. And in the sort of early days of green software, this was a number of people obsessed a bit about because I think there was like this, I don't want to say miscomprehension, but this notion, at least, that if you just got the PUE to 1, all the problems would be solved, like, magically, everything would be so efficient that we would not have to care about everything else.People were, like, hyper focused on data center design. And I'm not saying it doesn't matter. Of course it matters. Of course it's important. But it's an area where, over time, we paid down massive knowledge and spend time on. And in the end, that's only one side, because if whatever compute operations you run are vastly inefficient in themselves, it doesn't matter if all the power going in goes to compute if the compute is wasteful in its matter.So it is one part of the puzzle, but it is not the most important. But I'm glad to see it getting so close to one. I think it was very impressive.Chris Adams: Yeah, this is interesting to see this because there's a project called Realtime Cloud which is run inside the Green Software Foundation and one of the key things that people are looking to do is figure out the PUE for all the different regions from all the different cloud providers right now. And they've got a carbon intensity figures for each hour of compute. But now they're able to use, because there's this information published at a data center level or actually a region level, you've got a level of transparency that you don't see from the other two so far. I think. Google might be sharing some of this, but we still have a kind of like patchy spreadsheet listing this stuff.What I'll do is I'll share a link to the spreadsheet for this, because this is one of the things that once you have this, that should allow you to start being able to kind of optimise what the carbon intensity and of the compute you're using based on these kinds of figures here. This doesn't touch everything though, and I wanted to just leave the floor open. And Sarah, is there anything that caught your eyes on this, because there is more to this report than just PUE, for example.Sarah Hsu: Don't want to be the bearer of bad news, though, although I remember hearing this from Anne, so I'm just their messenger. I'm not the bearer. I remember you and Anne mentioned that because PUE has got a lot of branding around it at the moment, and people know that it's like the sort of like the efficiency factor for a data center.So like people then don't want PUE to go up, even though they need cooling. So they end up using water to do the cooling. So they actually trying to get PUE to as little as possible, closer to one as possible as Sara mentioned, but then they compensate that with using water and water is another like sources that's just as sacred.Is that how you say that word? Yeah. But anyway, I will like, and talk about this because I remember I heard this from you.Anne Currie: Yeah, no, as you say, we do fetishize PUE a little bit. It's a measurement and everybody loves to meet it. But the other thing is it's not a carbon aware measurement because it's just a flat number. So it doesn't say, "Oh, well, actually, you know, this is what we did when the sun, when the carbon intensity of the grid was high.And this is what we did when the carbon intensity of the grid was low." And actually you want, we need behavior to change. Between those two, two times. So it's nice, you know, it tells us something, but we need to make sure we, with all things, you know, it's context specific. We, it doesn't provide a lot of context and we might need more context.Well, we will need more context in the future.Chris Adams: Okay, so better than nothing. So two cheers rather than three cheers. So good to see this. But as Sara mentioned, I believe the technical term is impact transfer when you go from one factor like energy to impacting water, for example. And in some places, you may be, you may have data centers sited in regions of water stress or pulling power from like local aquifers and things like that. If that's used for drinking water or agriculture or things like that, that's not really ideal. But there's a big discussion about what happens with this water. In some cases, it might be, I think the term is withdrawn and waste and consumed. So you have water that might be taken in and some of it might be discharged, given back.But if it's at a different temperature, that might not be ideal for fish. And stuff like that. Or if it's consumed and like just evaporated away, that's not ideal either. So there is a whole bunch here. And maybe this is one of the things we need, we should be hoping to see, or we should be looking to see more of. There's, okay, if we've got data center level PUEs, should we be thinking about water of usage effectiveness and other things like that?Sarah Hsu: I think there's one, I don't know what to call them, but I know they're called Scaleway. And I think you did a thing for them that they, I think now they have like a landing page where you can see the PUE and the WUE. So I think people are start doing it, but again, like much smaller scale provider instead of like cloud providers, Chris Adams: I'm really glad you mentioned this actually, Sarah. So, the thing you're referring to, we'll share a link to this. So, Scaleway, they're basically one of the largest cloud providers in France, and they also operate in a number of other countries, but they basically do have these dashboards. But the thing that's, the thing about these dashboards, they were initially created by by Facebook in 2014. So there is nothing stopping every data center exposing these numbers from a technical point of view. And like, if you're looking at a policy level, what they have there is totally something that could be done. It's something that we could be seeing if people chose to be disclosing some of that. And we might see some of this come out as a result of new laws that may be landing or that have already landed in some countries.For example, Germany has this. But there are more on the horizon, actually. Anything to add from there, perhaps, Anne, you're about to just say something, yeah.Anne Currie: I am. So, so Scaleway, I think it's kind of related to stuff we talked about earlier. I was on this podcast with Scaleway where I learned a lot of stuff about what they were up to. And there's some interesting things that they're doing totally away from PUE and WUE reporting. So, in Europe, there's a group called the SDIA, which is an acronym.I can never remember what it stands for. Chris Adams: Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance,Anne Currie: Excellent. And their raison d'etre is to try and get European data, non hypercloud data centers to start learning from the American hyperclouds and actually delivering some of those services. And one of the, one of the things they're pushing for is actually starting to orchestrate and offer services on your data centers that will provide operational efficiency and code efficiency in the same way that the hyperscalers do. And that generally, you know, your bog standard data centers don't. And that's a really, that's a really bad thing about bog standard data centers.They don't do this because it's very hard to do. If you can get your data center to provide it, then that makes life much easier. And interesting, on the podcast that I was on with Scaleway, they had a, one of their engineers on who was working on their serverless offering. So a bit like Wasm we were talking about earlier, services that improve operational efficiency and code efficiency provided through your data center. That's what we want. That's where the cloud is good with being, is potentially green, but only if you adopt them. And all these things, if you just lift and shift into the cloud, if you lift and shift into good data centers like Scaleway, you don't get any benefit really, or don't get much benefit.You need to be moving over to efficient services.Sara Bergman: Yeah. And I think that was another thing that Microsoft mentioned in the sustainability report that they are working on several ways to increase resource utilization. And just to mention too, they have these power aware workload allocations, and they're also like smartly allocating CPU cores for internal workloads.Because don't forget Microsoft is also a software provider, not just a cloud provider. And I thought that was really good that they called out because sometimes when we say things like this, yeah, the hyperscalers are good at this, people question it, like, "oh, is it really worth their time?" So I thought it was good to see them calling out specific things that they're doing that can also hopefully inspire others to do the same with their data centers.Chris Adams: So here's one question I have there about this report. So, yes, it's very good that you see some transparency here. And yes, there are definitely cases where moving to the cloud can be more, can be greater. But we've seen, both Microsoft and Google and Amazon, their emissions climb. Year on year. And this year, we're seeing emissions 30 percent higher this year than last year, which is not going to make it easy to get to net zero.And this is one of the key things that Microsoft themselves have been talking about, saying, yes, this is a real challenge for us, and a significant chunk of our emissions are in our supply chain. Scope 3 is the largest source. So this is one thing that I think that it's, it feels like when we're talking about this, green software doesn't really have that much to say about right now in terms of the actual creation of data centers. And this is something that I kind of want to open the floor up, like how do we actually deal with this fact that things can be more efficient, but still growing in absolute terms? Is this something that we can be doing or do we need to be having discussions about absolute resource limits, for example, and things like this, or how are we going to get here? I'm going to hand to Anne because you've got something, but you're about to say something I think.Anne Currie: I am always about to say something. I think this is a really, the whole, the whole thing of, you know, the degrowth, people shouldn't be allowed to, we shouldn't ban people from doing things, it's a very unpopular argument and it is why people, you know, are not, even though everybody now believes in climate change, they don't want to have to give up all the things they want in life.Now, efficiency can often really deliver you the same standard or less. I mean, it's not all, I mean, Jevons paradox, we all know about Jevons paradox. The Jevons paradox is you, you, things become more efficient and where there's untapped demand, where people really wanted to use them and they couldn't previously because they were too expensive and now they can.That's a, that's actually, that's a big improvement in life. But it's not a guaranteed lock in. Everything that you make more efficient doesn't always result in overall there being more usage. So we use a lot less electricity to run household appliances now than we used to. They've become more efficient and there is only a certain number of times that you can wash the dishes with the dishwasher or wash, you know.At some point, demand does become Chris Adams: there's an upper limit to how often I want to vacuum my room, for example. Yeah,Anne Currie: me, it's quite a low number of times I want to vacuum my room. I'm more worried about things like Bitcoin, where there is no upper limit. I mean, so what worries me about things like Bitcoin is there is no, literally no upper limit to how much you might want to do it.There is no, there's no point at which you go, "Oh, do you know, I'm happy now, I've just done all the things I wanted it to do." So with those things, where there's no upper limit, I think. And they potentially don't have a great deal of benefit for most of society. We might want to go down the China route and start banning them.But for things where eventually our upper limit will be reached and they are providing societal value, I'm minded to let them grow a bit, at least. I don't know. I don't know what everybody else thinks.Chris Adams: No, this is actually, this is, you're right, this is a complicated question to deal with, and this is one of the things that we, one of the things that's probably bigger than green software that we need to be aware of when we talk about this, because if we make things more efficient, then we've got to figure out, okay, what's the flip side of this, like you mentioned with Jevon's paradox? We do have an episode with Vlad Kouraoume, where we dive deeply into this if you're interested in listening, and we'll share a link to that. There's a number of other things we might want to talk about for this, but what we'll do is we'll share a link to the report so that there's plenty for us to be discussing. All right, I think that takes us to the stories that we do actually have. We're coming up to time. Folks, I want to say thank you so much for kind of coming onto this. If people were curious about these terms that we've been using, like operation efficiency, coding efficiency, things like that, this is what's outlined in the book that you three have been working on.Is that correct?Anne Currie: It is indeed. Yes. Building Green Software, the new book from O'Reilly. Chris Adams: Anne, there's one question I want to ask because we spoke about this a few months ago. So this is currently available right now, and you can get it via O'Reilly, but there was a discussion about this actually going. Available into the commons eventually. Is there one thing we could just touch on some of that, because this is a really cool thing about this that I was really excited to hear about when you first shared this with me, Anne.Anne Currie: Like, I feel terrible about this because this is, we just haven't had time to do it. 'Cause we're crazily busy. We've got to take the code, but we, we do have a license. We negotiated, O'Reilly very kindly allowed us to make it available under the O'Reilly Creative Commons license, which is a, a kind of read only license, but totally that's, that's still absolutely fine.That's great. And so we just need to do it, but we haven't got around to doing it yet. Cause we have to do some tidying up and actually publish the thing, but it will at some point be available under a Creative Commons license.Chris Adams: Cool, alright, brilliant. Well, thank you for that, Anne. Well, folks, this takes us to time. If people do want to find out about, if they're interested in what you have to say, or what you've been looking at, folks, are there any maybe just do a quick whip round of where people should be looking. Anne, if I hand it over to you first, then to the Saras. Anne, if someone has listened to you and they want to find out more about what you're up to, is there a website you direct people to or a network or anything?Anne Currie: If you want to find out more about me, then LinkedIn is where I tend to hang out these days, and I'm very happy to chat to people and answer questions. And/or our website strategically.green will give us an idea, and I do an awful lot of public training as well, so you can always sign up for that.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Thank you for that, Anne. And I'm going to go for Sarah with an H, if that's okay. So where should people, if they want to learn about your things, or maybe hear about your talk, where should, where should they be looking?Sarah Hsu: Similarly, LinkedIn, I call LinkedIn the grownup version of Instagram,Chris Adams: Yeah.Sarah Hsu: but yeah, LinkedIn and yeah, I do fair bit of public speaking. So if you're ever catch us or catch one of us, don't forget to come get the book signed and because it's such fun, who can get to collect all three signatures. Because we are never in the same place once.Anne Currie: We're never in the same Chris Adams: Okay, sara, and over to you. If people want to find out some of the work you're working on or things, where would you direct people's attention to?Sara Bergman: Yeah, I'm also on grown up Instagram, aka LinkedIn, Chris Adams: Yeah.Sara Bergman: but follow me, don't send me a friend request because I'm terrible, or what's it called, a contact request maybe, because I've not been good at accepting or rejecting people, so now it's an uncomfortable list and I just ignore it, it's a red flag with me.So yeah, you can follow me and that that's the best way probably. And yeah, I'm speaking at NDC Oslo in about, yeah, in June. So if you have the book, come and get it signed. It will be lovely to meet folks. I also have a few copies that I can hand out if anyone catches me. h Chris Adams: Ohere., exciting. Thank you for sharing that little one. All right, then. Well, folks, it sounds like I guess we'll see if people want to follow what you're up to. Millennial Twitter, LinkedIn is the place to go to. All right. What we'll do, if you have any of this interesting, folks, we are going to, and if you're listening to this for the first time, we'll be sharing the show notes with all the links to the projects that we've mentioned here, along with some of the other episodes where we touch on some of the things like Jevon's paradox, or some of the finer points of serverless. All right, folks, this has been fun. Thank you so much for giving us the time and,yeah, have a lovely day, folks. See you around, all right? Anne Currie: Cheerio everybody. ByeSarah Hsu: Bye guys. Lovely seeing youSara Bergman: Thank you. 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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

Join us for a special episode of Environment Variables as we celebrate over a year two years of bringing you the best insights on Green Software! In this episode, we explore the key insights and voices that have contributed to the weaving of sustainability through our conversations this year. Tune in for a refresher on the most interesting discussions on the progress, challenges, and future of green software development.Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterEpisodes:The Week in Green Software: AWS & Scope 3 Emissions Data | Ep 27Fact Check: Colleen Josephson, Miguel Ponce de Leon & AI Optimization of the Environmental Impact of Software | Ep 29The State of Green Software Survey with Tamara Kneese | Ep32   We Answer Your Questions Part 2 | Ep 39 Sci-Fi Fantasies with Anne Currie and Jo-Lindsay Walton | Ep 42The Week in Green Software: New Research Horizons | Ep 47Decarbonize Software 2023: Recap | Ep 53  The Week in Green Software: Google, Grids & Green Software | Ep 55BETA Impact Framework | Ep 58AI Legislation | Ep 63If 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:Chris Skipper: Hello and welcome to this special Year 2 Roundup episode of Environment Variables. I'm Chris Skipper, the producer behind the scenes. As we mark the second anniversary of this podcast, it's a perfect moment to reflect on the journey we've undertaken with the Green Software Foundation over the last year, and how that has been encapsulated through our episodes.From its inception, Environment Variables has aimed to be more than just a podcast. It's a platform for advocacy and education on sustainable software practices. Over the past year, We've seen the Green Software Foundation grow and evolve, and we've been right there to document and discuss each milestone.This podcast has not only followed the foundation's developments, but also mirrored the broader shifts towards sustainability and tech, bringing these insights right to your ears. Today, rather than revisiting our top episodes, we will explore how the themes of sustainability have woven through our discussions.Highlighting key insights and the impactful voices that have contributed to this dialogue. You'll hear about the progress, the challenges, and what lies ahead for green software development. For your listening pleasure, as always, links to each of the episodes will be down in the show notes below. Or, if you want to listen to all of the episodes of Environment Variables, you can head to podcast.greensoftware.foundation, preferably after this episode, please, to hear them all. So, without further ado, let's dive into the collective journey of the past year with Environment Variables. Chris Skipper: To kick us off, let's start off with an episode of one of our segments entitled the week in green software, or as we like to call it twigs,This segment delivers a concentrated blast of the latest in green software news, keeping our listeners informed and engaged with current trends and advancements in the field.In fact, it's a nice touch that this episode covers AWS and Scope3 emissions data, as the very first episode of Environment Variables way back in April of 2022 also covered Amazon's Customer Carbon Footprint tool. In this snippet, our host Chris Adams discusses a fundamental concept in environmental accountability, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is the de facto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or activity.Chris breaks down this somewhat complex subject using a relatable analogy involving coffee, explaining the three scopes of emissions. He uses everyday examples to illustrate Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, making it accessible for both newcomers and seasoned professionals, which has often become the role of twigs.This approach not only simplifies the understanding of these emissions, but also highlights the significant impact of Scope 3 emissions, which often constitute the majority of an organization's environmental impact. Let's listen to Chris explain this in more detail.Chris Adams: So I'll just quickly, for those who are new to the subject or folks who have never heard of GHG, the greenhouse gas protocol, essentially, this is a way, the kind of de facto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or any activity. And you typically split it into three kind of buckets of emissions.And because we're nerds or developers and drink coffee, we can use hot beverages as the mechanism for understanding the difference between scope one, two, and three. You can think of scope one, which is from combusting fossil fuel. That's a bit like turning on gas to heat up water so you can have a nice cup of coffee, right?Scope two, it's like turning on an electric kettle. So someone is setting fire to something to heat up some water somewhere to generate electricity so that you can heat up a kettle. So it's all the emissions associated.Scope 3 is a bit like walking into a Starbucks or a Third Wave coffee shop and then buying a cup of coffee. So you're not involved in actually farming beans or burning anything, but there is definitely a supply chain associated so that you can have coffee. So these are the three kinds of scopes. And typically, Scope 1 and 2 are quite the common ones that organizations tend to report on, but for these, for lots and lots of organizations, scope 3 can make up 80 percent plus of the environmental impact.And this is why we've been talking about it as being quite a big deal because if you do not have 80 percent of your reported numbers, they may look somewhat different to the other providers.Chris Skipper: In the past year, Environment Variables has also introduced a new segment called Fact Check. This segment focuses on verifying claims and clarifying misconceptions related to the environmental impact of technology, providing our listeners with accurate and actionable information. In episode 29, Host Chris Adams discusses the role of artificial intelligence in optimizing the environmental impact of software.He is joined by experts Colleen Josephson and Miguel Ponce de Leon from VMware, who delve into the intricacies of sustainability in virtualization and networking, as well as VMware's internal efforts towards decarbonization. In the snippet we're about to hear, Colleen Josephson highlights the challenges associated with training AI models in the telecommunications sector, a field where VMware has significant expertise.She points out the substantial energy required to train these models and raises critical questions about the energy savings versus the environmental cost of AI, emphasizing the importance of evaluating the longevity and efficiency of AI models before committing resources. Let's listen to Colleen Josephson.Explain these complex trade offs.Colleen Josephson: Training is a very expensive process nowadays. Whether it's in the telco space, because, again, VMware, as you hinted, we have a long history of virtualization and cloud, but that also has become very relevant to telecommunications. We need to train the models that we use to make these decisions to try and save energy.And the process of having so much data and training it, it can be really power consuming. So I think one of the things that stands out to me is, what is your anticipated energy savings? savings. Once you've deployed this model, how long do you anticipate that this model will be good for? And do you need to retrain it?All of those you want to have some idea of so that you can calculate whether or not it was worth the energy to train this model in the first place.Chris Skipper: Continuing the insightful discussion on the role of technology in environmental sustainability, we turn to Miguel Ponce de Leon, who shares his experience working on a collaborative project in Ireland. This initiative, a partnership between VMware and a local grid utility hosting a data center, focuses on integrating measurements from renewable energy sources directly into data center operations.This effort not only enhances the understanding of energy usage within the data center. but also promotes actionable strategies for optimizing energy efficiency. Let's hear Miguel elaborate on how this collaboration helps data center operators become better environmental stewards by enabling precise monitoring and proactive management of resources.Miguel Ponce de Leon: So one of the things I can mention is that we are working with a grid utility in Ireland and with that grid utility that also hosts a data center if that so happens. We're also working with an accelerator program, a program that is helping startups to look at how you can not just link but actually be able to take the correct measurements from the green sources, the wind farm locations, and the usage within the data center for its performance.So, again, here it's about leveraging not just the research, we'd say, that would come from research performing organizations or from the offices of CTO of VMware, but also looking at start ups and start ups within the space and being able to link this. And that is helping the utilities. understand what type of usage, and imagine it's a utility that has their own data center.So it's helping them be a good citizen even within their own environment, but being able to measure it and then being able to take action on it, right? Because that's the important thing is, okay, you've got your baseline, but what can I change about what I'm delivering within that data center? Even down to the containers, how can I move my clusters and pods over and maybe consolidate some of the pods?We're even moving some of that research as well to look even with the pods. It's been available. How many of the CPUs are they using within the cluster? So again, it's about being able to help data center owners being good citizens around that space.Chris Skipper: This next snippet comes from episode 32, which was all about the State of Green Software Survey, with lead researcher at the GSF, Tamara Kneese. The State of Green Software Survey serves as a political resource for the Green Software Foundation, offering crucial insights into the involving landscape of sustainable software practices.By highlighting trends like the carbon footprint of crypto mining and the need for stringent regulations for generative AI, the report informs and influences stakeholders across the tech industry, from developers to policy makers.In this snippet, Tamara emphasizes the report's role in enhancing the visibility of green software initiatives. Tamara Kneese: So one of the main goals was really to raise the profile of green software. And I was really interested to see the percentage of developers who actually had some degree of awareness of green software. And so it makes sense that a lot of the people who filled out our survey already were somewhat aware of it.and already interested. Although there were a number of people who replied in the comments that this was the very first time they'd been exposed to green software. And so by putting out this public report that can be taken up by the press, that can be taken up by policy makers, that can be taken up by academic researchers, it is a way of really getting the word out about green software.Thinking about the reporting Court as a mechanism for evangelizing green software is really part of what we wanted to do. And we also wanted to understand after knowing that 92% of developers who surveyed said that they were concerned about climate change and wanna do something about it. So what do they need to actually make that happen?What resources, tools. and other forms of support do they need to take action. And another key element of this is reaching out to ICT industry leaders to the C suite who really want to know how and why they should make green software part of their organization. And really trying to emphasize the business case for green software from their perspective was another really key part of this survey.Chris Skipper: As we continue to look back on the previous year's journey, our next segment brings you insights from the Green Software Foundation's HotCarbon event, which took place on World Environment Day, June 5th, 2023. In episode 39, host Chris Adams, alongside Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation, Asim Hussain, Delved deep into a mailbag session, addressing questions that remained from this engaging live virtual event.Their discussion begins with a look at the challenges of quantifying energy consumed by various computer components in the software carbon intensity specification, and transitions into real world applications of measuring SCI and CI/CD pipelines. The efficiency of GPUs and innovative uses of data center cooling water.In our first snippet, Asim highlights a memorable talk from the previous year's Hot Carbon event, emphasizing the critical role of green software in managing the burgeoning demands on cloud infrastructure without the need to expand physical resources. Let's hear Asim explain this further.Asim Hussain: It shows how important the work that we're talking about is. It's like, actually, it's one of the really great talks from last year's HotCarbon, which I loved, which was, I've forgotten, I've got to apologize, I'm not going to remember which one it was, but it was talking about how projecting forward kind of compute growth and how green software was a way of being able to handle the additional usage and load of the cloud without actually having to build more servers.Because fundamentally we are constrained at the rate with which we can actually increase the cloud. But the growth is growing significantly as well. So like being more efficient actually allows you to, to deal with growth. So I think that sounds like what you're describing. So you have to be green, you have to use green software if you want a realistic chance of generative AI being as ubiquitous as you want it to be.Chris Skipper: In this second snippet from Asim, he emphasizes the importance of broadening the dialogue beyond carbon to include other critical resources like water, acknowledging that managing environmental impacts often involves navigating trade offs between different sustainability goals. Let's listen to that now.Asim Hussain: There might be situations where it's mutually the opposite, being more carbon efficient might actually make you more water intensive. Like for instance, doing things that reduce carbon emissions might require more water consumption, which is why I think it's exciting that we're actually are starting to have this conversation right now because I think we're so focused on carbon.And we're optimizing for carbon, but actually the landscape is much more complicated. It's much more of a surface where you're trying to minimize the environmental impacts of your choices, and you might have to make trade offs versus one versus the other. If there's a water scarcity right now, you might have to increase your carbon emissions.I'm excited that this is where the conversation is evolving to, because once we add water to the mix, we can add other things.Chris Skipper: As we continue our exploration, our next episode takes a fascinating leap and dared to go where no podcast, or at least this podcast, had gone before, into the realm of science fiction and its role in envisioning a green future. In episode 42, host Anne Currie is joined by Joe Lindsay Walton, a research fellow in Arts, Climate and Technology at the University of Sussex.Together, they delve into the imaginative horizons that science fiction opens for tackling climate change, the practical application of these ideas to green software, and the impact of speculative futures on our environmental strategies. In this snippet, Joe Lindsay Walton questions who really holds the reins in crafting a global strategy against climate change.Let's listen to Joe's interesting take.Jo Lindsay Walton: Are these orbital data storage facilities, are they going to Out compete the earthbound data centers that are using the dirty energy. Who actually holds the big picture of global strategy here, of addressing the urgent issue of climate change? Is it the conference of parties? Kind of, but they're mired in all these geopolitical rivalries.Is it the scientists? The IPC? Yes, but they're constrained by the remit of political neutrality and face challenges around communication. Is it the finance and markets? They're waking up to something. They're trying to incorporate climate into these risk management methodologies that they don't really play all that nicely with.Is it science fiction? Yes, we're drawing in a really interdisciplinary way. We've talked about Kim Stanley Robinson throwing everything at climate change, but it is ultimately a story. I'm not really sure who does hold the big picture. And if I was to try and summarize it in a crude way, it seems that we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game.We haven't even adjusted them yet, but we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game so that Goods and services and enterprises and value chains and industries and sectors and whole communities and regions that are incompatible with a broadly livable planet are going to be destroyed in the Schumpeterian whirlwind of creative destruction, will crash and burn.And I think there's a lot of emphasis. on the creation side of that, building data centers on the moon or in orbit, but not enough imaginative, creative, realistic thinking about the destruction side of it. There's this expectation that enterprises are going to snitch on themselves. Oh, we've tested for impairment.We're reporting against this particular standard. All our assets are stranded. We're just going to shut up shop. Goodbye. So I think I would be interested in more science fictional Thinking about the potential pain of switching from carbon intensive activities to the sustainable ones. Not just the focus on the kind of shiny new possibilities, but also the focus on what it's like to shut up shop.Chris Skipper: Environment Variables also dared to break boundaries on the academic front. Our next snippet comes from episode 47, titled, New Research Horizons, which takes us to the forefront of innovation in green software. Host Chris Adams is joined by Dr. Daniel Sheehan from the University of Bristol to delve into the evolving landscape of digital sustainability.Their discussion spans from the implications of historical studies to the transformative potential of recent research, offering listeners insights into how new findings are reshaping our approach to sustainability in technology. In this snippet, Daniel discusses the nuances of energy consumption across different media delivery platforms, emphasizing the complexities in interpreting data that could potentially mislead consumers about the energy impacts of their viewing choices. Daniel Schien: The academic publication that I'm sure you will link to it in the show notes. There's a graph that compares the energy intensity of those four different modes of delivery of television from the BC. So IP, cable, satellite, and terrestrial. And even though they, they differ. So between, if I remember correctly, between 60 watt hours to 180 watt hours, that's in the year 2016, there's a potential step in the interpretation of those results that consumers might take, that needs more support.If you see this graph, you might I think as a consumer, if I change from streaming to watching something via terrestrial broadcast, I am going to save 100 watt hours per viewer hour. However, that would not be a correct interpretation because all of those delivery modes, they are provided by an infrastructure that is inherently inelastic in its energy consumption.Chris Skipper: Jumping to November and Decarbonize Software 2023, an essential event for the Green Software Foundation took place. This annual gathering is crucial for those passionate about reducing the environmental impact of software. Bringing together experts, practitioners, and innovators worldwide to exchange insights, breakthroughs, and strategies for sustainable software development.With COP28 kicking off on the 30th of November in Dubai, we wanted to highlight projects which are driving momentum towards a low emission and climate resilient world. At COP28, global leaders discussed how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030.In sync with this ambitious goal, Decarbonize Software served as a vibrant forum to promote collective action and shared knowledge. in our pursuit of greener software practices at the forefront of climate action. In episode 53, I was joined by Sophie Trinder and Adam Jackson of the GSF to give a rundown of what happened. In this next snippet, Sophie gives a rundown of one talk from the event titled Responsible AI, a fireside chat in which Jesse Mccrosky, Head of Sustainability and Social Change at ThoughtWorks, talked about integrating real time environmental impact metrics into our everyday software tools. Sophie Trinder: Jesse painted this hypothetical picture. What if there was a carbon counter or there was a water gallons clock at the top of ChatGPT? Would you use it differently? Would you only use it when it was essential? Maybe you would write shorter prompts? Would you ask it to write its answers briefer? Similarly, he painted another picture where, what if a software developer's screen went red?If the developer made a decision that, yeah, might make them save some time, might make them slightly more efficient, but what if it came with a huge carbon cost? So their screen went bright red when there was a carbon cost associated with the code that they were writing. I think it was just a really interesting way to Start thinking about being more transparent with that data so that we can be more conscious with our decision making.Chris Skipper: Continuing our dive into the impactful insights from Decarbonize Software 2023, next we'll hear from Adam Jackson. In this snippet, Adam eloquently draws parallels between well crafted software and green software, emphasizing the necessity of built in quality throughout the entire software lifecycle.Let's listen to how Adam articulates the holistic approach needed to integrate sustainability into software development.Adam Jackson: I often tell folks when they ask me what green software actually is, that there's a lot of parallels with well crafted software. So well crafted software like green software focuses on built in quality throughout the complete software life cycles and architecture, development, operations, and getting all of the stakeholders together to take responsibility.And we need the same thing for green software. So at the GSF, we often talk about software practitioners. And this is a broad term that goes beyond developers alone. It includes product managers, uh, program managers, designers, UX, testers, IT operations. And what takes the time, and GSF does have some materials that can help here, is developing the best practice, the processes, and the learnings that bring all of these people together.into a really holistic software life cycle and I think that's why we're really keen to get organizations to hear and listen to others even if they're competitors. What's the best practice that we can all share that's gonna deliver green outcomes?Chris Skipper: Transitioning now to our next insightful episode of The Week in Green Software, we delve into the pioneering sustainability strategies at one of the tech world's giants and GSF member, Google. In episode 55, Chris Adams is joined by Savannah Goodman from Google.Who shares the ambitious climate goals set by the company. Google aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2030 and to operate on 24 7 carbon free energy by the same year. Savannah explains the complexity of moving from annual global matching to local hourly matching of energy use. illustrating the innovative approaches Google is deploying to meet these goals.This episode not only highlights Google's efforts, but also discusses broader implications for the tech industry's push towards a more sustainable future. Let's hear from Savannah on how Google is tackling these ambitious targets.Savannah Goodman: Google has two main climate goals. One of them is to be net zero by 2030. The other is to be running on 24 7 carbon free energy by 2030. And just to clarify too, 24 7 carbon free energy is much more complex. And I'm going to talk to you about how we've been able to make this a little bit more complex than the annual matching schemes that have been most common to date, because we're essentially moving from global annual matching to local hourly matching.And so you can imagine how, especially over a global system, how complex that is. And there's no playbook, but we see these goals as a way to actually help scale new global solutions that drive broader system wide decarbonization because we're actually aligning our own goals with what the gridNeeds.Chris Skipper: Next, we focus on episode 58 that dives deep into the Green Software Foundation's impact framework, probably the biggest highlight of the previous year. Host Asim Hussain is joined by Srini Rakanathan and Naveen Balani. who are at the forefront of developing this transformative tool. They discuss the challenges and solutions in creating a framework versatile enough to assess the environmental impact of software across various platforms, from large cloud providers to personal devices.This conversation sheds light on the critical need for standardized models that can adapt to different environments without compromising on maintenance and adoption. Listen in as Srini shares Insights into the decision to implement model plugins for more effective integration and broader applicability in green software efforts.Srini Rakhunathan: With the original concept that we had, where we wanted to cover all, we would have had to build multiple flavors of the impact framework. And that would have caused issues in maintenance, that would have caused issues in adoption. I think the standardization of a model plug in was more important. a decision that we took once we realized that one model is not going to cut the cake for all of us and you had different models depending on whether you are hosting it on AWS or Azure or GCP or your laptop or even your mobile devices.But if someone wants to just look at the raw emissions from the software, agnostic of the hardware, you could do that only if you have a very thin measurement tools.Chris Skipper: Finally, let's finish off on another episode of Twigs. In episode 63, we focus In episode 63, Chris Adams, Asim Hussain, and Anne Currie delve into the evolving landscape of AI legislation and its implications for green software. This first snippet from Asim highlights the accelerating integration of AI technologies and their significant energy demands, which could dramatically reshape global emission profiles by 2040.Asim Hussain: The growth in AI has been significant. We all know on this call that the previous dirty secret of data centers where most of those servers were idle, in a future of AI, those chips are not going to be idle. They're going to be running at a hundred percent. So like, I think we've spoken on this call previously about, you know, various previous reports that talked about, you know, given the current trajectory by 2040, the tech sector will be like 14 percent of global emissions.I wonder if anybody's doing any analysis. To revisit, well, now, given what we now know about the complete AI will take over everything. It is taking over everything right now. How does that look now? Where will we be in 2040 with the current growth in AI? Will tech be half of all emissions? And will we just be sitting there, you know, being carried around by robots and being fed by little tubes like that robot show?But I think, I strongly suspect that they factor that in, and I wonder if it's an underestimate.Chris Skipper: Our final snippet comes from Anne as she contemplates the future of green software practices.Anne Currie: All discussion we're doing around this is great, fantastically great, but I always think about taking it back to my Maturity Matrix projects on the GSF Maturity Matrix project. You need to do different things at different times, so this information is useful to you in different things at different times of your journey.So for most of us at the moment, we're not doing anything at all. Just, you know, you really don't need that much data. You know, your scope 1, scope 2, scope 3 are not immediately critical to most people who just need to turn off the machines they're not using anymore, do a bit of right sizing, have a think about what they're up to.To start to think about, are they in green regions? What are the future, what platforms are they choosing? Are they likely to be aligned with the green future? To start with, where most of us are at the moment, you don't need a great deal of data to, to really make a huge difference. So it's absolutely fantastic that they're doing this work and that every, that we're doing this work.Everybody's doing this work, but we don't want to lose sight of the fact that. For almost everybody at the moment, we don't even need data. We just need to start to, to use best operational practices.Chris Skipper: What does the future hold for green software? Is it all doom and gloom? Absolutely not. The GSF is actively working on expanding its initiatives, pushing for widespread adoption of sustainable practices across the tech industry.You can expect this podcast to bring you all the significant updates showcasing both the challenges and the innovative solutions that are making a real difference. Thank you for joining us on this look back on the last year of Environment Variables. Make sure to follow us on your preferred podcast platform to stay updated on all future episodes.And don't forget to check out the show notes for links to further information discussed today. A final reminder. You can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now! 

Mike Gifford, an accessibility and open web veteran, discusses digital sustainability, drawing parallels to the wins from the accessibility movement. Topics include the importance of global standards in software procurement for sustainability, the intersection of accessibility and inclusivity, and the impact on legal consequences for organizations. The episode emphasizes the need for verifiable sustainability claims and early consideration of accessibility in software development.

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams explores the theme of Community Publishing and Greening Software, by talking to Branch Magazine’s Hannah Smith and Marketa Benisek. They discuss community publishing and the lessons learned from producing Branch Magazine, which supports sustainable digital practices and includes diverse voices from the Green Software Foundation. The discussion covers the complexities of adopting digital sustainability and how Branch Magazine, through its innovative, carbon-aware design, has been a platform for expressing these nuanced themes in sustainability and how finding beauty in the imperfect might just be the answer to all your problems! Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteHannah Smith: LinkedInMarketa Benisek: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterTopics:Branch Magazine | climatetech.action [1:50]Designing a Grid Aware Website [13:09]Content Trends [20:38]Sneak Peek Preview of issue 8 [27:12]Resources:Grid Intensity Library | Green Web Foundation [02:29]Green Web Foundation [3:30]Wholegrain Digital [4:04]WebsiteCarbon.com [4:07]Solarpunk [24:12]The Wabi Sabi Web - Branch | Tom Greenwood [28:49] Embracing friction: A conversation with Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters - Branch | Marketa Benisek [30:08] Talking it out: Restoring information ecosystems through authentic human connections - Branch | Bárbara Paes and Olivia Johnson [31:26] Echoes of electronic waste - Branch | Joanna Murzyn [31:37]Connectivity, infrastructure and the defence of the Amazon's socio-biodiverse ecosystems - Branch | Hemanuel Veras [31:41]One Movement, Four Wings: Connecting climate strategies - Branch | Melissa Hsiung [32:47]  Ministry of Imagination - Branch | Rob Hopkins [34:58]Issue 8 community-assembled playlist - Branch [36:30]Curiously Green, the green web newsletter - Wholegrain Digital [39:59]co2.js | The Green Web Foundation [40:44] 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:Marketa Benisek: Perfection is essentially the enemy of progress. So it doesn't really matter if something is imperfect, but we can build on it. That's when Hannah came up with the idea that actually we could collaborate on the next issue of Branch Magazine, and this could be the theme.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 another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. The world of green software and digital sustainability has come a long way since the Green Software Foundation was created three years ago.The Software Carbon Intensity Specification is now an international standard. All of the large hyperscale cloud providers in North American Europe now publish guidance about incorporating sustainability principles into building on their platforms, and we're also seeing unprecedented policy interest in both understanding and managing the emissions associated with digital services in general.There's more to sustainability than just making our software greener, though. If we want a truly sustainable industry, we also need new visions of how we relate to technology and the role it might play in a more positive, regenerative future. One such vision. Is that laid out by digital magazine Branch, a publication featuring writing from many of the active feature figures in the Green Software Foundation and one of the first ever websites to pioneer a carbon aware design that changed in response to the carbon intensity of the underlying electricity grid that its servers ran on.Originally from climateaction.tech and published by the Green Web Foundation, Branch is a twice yearly publication, and at the time of this podcast being recorded. It's now into its eighth issue. Now, in the interest of disclosure, I should probably share that I've written for Branch a few times and that I worked on the grid intensity library, the JavaScript library, that the site relies on for its carbon aware design features.I'll try my best to keep my bias out of this episode, but it's worth acknowledging that before the GSF, The Green Software Foundation was as prominent as it is now, is one of the better known non commercial places to read about the intersection of software and sustainability and see how folks are doing it.I'm joined today by two of the contributing editors, Hannah Smith and Maketa Benesek, to talk about community publishing as a tool for change and the lessons learned publishing a magazine that tries to walk the walk as well as talk the talk on sustainability in the digital realm. So, Han, Marketa, thanks so much for joining me today.Can I give you the floor to introduce yourself and what you do?Hannah Smith: Great. Well, thanks, Chris. Thanks for the introduction. And yes, you are definitely a little biased in talking about Branch. I think that's fair to say, but anyway, I'll introduce myself. So hi, my name is Hannah Smith. I am director of operations at Green Web Foundation, where some of you might know, I work alongside Chris and I'm very excited to be here.I was a WordPress developer for a long time. I also run a meetup community called Green Tech Southwest. And quite recently, sort of over last summer, I was very involved in a project looking at grid aware computing as a, as an alternative or an improvement on carbon aware computing. So, Marketa, I guess over to you.Marketa Benisek: Thank you. Thanks for the intro, Chris. So, my name is Marketa Benisek. I work as Digital Sustainability Lead at Wholegrain Digital, the authors and kind of creators of WebsiteCarbon.com, the online kind of first and original online carbon calculator. And I'm really, really excited to be here. And I'm super excited about this project. I also did a climate reality training with Al Gore, uh, during the pandemic and I'm a carbon literate professional. So that means that I essentially, I'm just really passionate about explaining people kind of the essentials and the basics of the climate science so that they understand the urgency of why we need to take action.Chris Adams: Thank you for that, Marketa. Now, before we dive into the world of Branch and community publishing and all that, we normally ask where our guests are calling from to get a bit of background color, really. Han, can you just tell me a little bit about where you're joining me from? And then if I hand over to Marketa after that.Hannah Smith: Yeah, so thanks Chris. I am dialing in from the temperate rainforest in Exmoor National Park, which is over in the southwest of England in the county of Somerset. And today, as I look out the window, all the trees are coming into leaf and it is a truly, truly glorious view.Chris Adams: Wow, I spent 30 UK and I'd never realized there were rainforests. So you said temperate rainforest as opposed to a tropical rainforest. Is that how it works?Hannah Smith: Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't know that temperate rainforest was a thing until I moved here either, but there is this growing movement to reestablish these, these ecosystems or, or just make people aware of them. It's basically a forest, which is on the coast and pretty wet, and that's how you end up with a temperate rainforest.It sounds, it sounds exciting, but you know, you need good wellies and a good Mac and not to be afraid to get a bit muddy if you live here. Yeah.Chris Adams: Marketa, over to you as well.Marketa Benisek: I am joining this call from Prague in Czech Republic. That's where I'm based currently. I relocated here a couple of years ago from very busy London after having a kid. So yeah, it's just, it was a beautiful spring weather just about a week ago. And now we're back to snowy weather. So we got all of those like winter jumpers. And yeah, we'll see what happens.Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. I did not know that you were in Prague actually, Marketa. I thought you were still in London. Okay. I should probably go myself and also introduce myself because I realize I've just done this massive introduction without saying who I am, what I'm here for. So folks, if you are listening to this podcast for the first time, my name is Chris Adams.I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I'm also one of the organizers of Climate Action Tech, which is a online community full of essentially climate aware techies, I suppose. I also worked as one of the policy chairs in the Green Software Foundation, and that's partly how I know Han.As Han mentioned, I did work on the Branch Magazine, a few years ago, basically. So I have some kind of background there. I'm calling from Berlin where today it's been sunny and hailing at the same time. So that's my kind of contribution to the meteorological diversity, I suppose. All right. Okay. So I think we're all sitting comfortably and we've got a good idea of where we're all kind of calling from today.Maybe we should talk a little bit about Branch. So I understand there was a new theme for this that the two of you wanted to kind of talk about because it's, we've had different themes for publishing different issues, but the theme this time was I think finding beauty in the imperfect. And I believe this was on, this is a kind of reference to some of the struggles we see when people start trying to adopt digital sustainability principles or kind of working around that.Would either of you maybe just explain a little bit about how this came about or maybe what drove you to kind of come to it from this point of view, actually?Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. So I should probably start by saying that Hannah was one of the first to I met a lot of female voices that I came across shortly after I met Vinita Greenwood, the co founder of Wholegrain Digital. And she was one of the first female voices that I've heard talking about digital sustainability and digital carbon emissions and all that. And I introduced myself, this is it must be about six years ago, seven years ago, something like that. And then we kind of stayed in touch ever since, you know, we collaborated over several projects and we just stayed in touch and connected about once a month over a call just to catch up and talk about what's new in the digital sustainability world, so to speak. And about six months ago, we got together on a call. We were both pretty upset about some recent articles and mentions of the different tools and, and projects that people criticize for their imperfections. And it felt, it wasn't really the criticism itself that was so upsetting, it was mostly the fact that they made it sound as if there's just no point in tryingif it's not perfect in the first place. And so we got to talk over this and, and about this, and we just realized that this is something that we feel really, really strongly and passionately about, and we wanted to address it and kind of just voice out that, you know, perfection is essentially the enemy of progress. So it doesn't really matter if something is imperfect, but we can build on it. That's when Hannah came up with the idea that actually we could collaborate on the next issue of Branch Magazine. And this could be the theme that would kind of give the platform to lots of different voices in this field and to people from CAT community on like, what can actually be done and what is already happening in this space that is imperfect, but it's still very much meaningful.Chris Adams: Okay. So thank you for that, Marketa. That does provide some of the context that makes it a bit easier to understand this theme. Han, maybe I could maybe hand this over to you to talk a little bit about why you chose to explore this theme using a magazine like Branch, for example, rather than trying to get a white paper written or something like that, perhaps.Hannah Smith: Thanks, Chris. Yeah. So, so as Marketa has said, we kind of had these conversations and we kind of realized that we felt that this narrative, which can be quite dominant in the tech industry of, you know, of always having perfection in your data or, you know, always striving for everything to be a hundred percent accurate.We kind of felt that we had a lot to say on it, and we also thought that there'd be a lot of members within the climateaction.tech community that would have a lot to say on it too. Perhaps they were in a place of work where they were having to overcome some of these, you know, some of this pushback from their own team, or perhaps they're in, you know.Developer communities that were maybe not embracing these ideas again, for these reasons. So we kind of realized that Branch would make an absolutely amazing place to bring loads of different voices. From across the whole tech industry together into one place. And, you know, Branch is very much founded on this idea of bringing together different voices and perspectives from even different industries, not necessarily just the tech sector.You know, we know that there's people working in research or people who work with tech. You have an awful lot to say here too. So Marketa and I were like, yeah, okay. Let's get the CAT community involved in this. Let's see if people want to tell stories from their places of work, or maybe there are founders of companies that want to talk about how they're embracing things in different ways.Maybe there are some people who are, you know, uh, practitioners, maybe freelancers, maybe independents. Maybe people from research organizations. Let's get all of these voices together, let's get all of these perspectives together, and let's kind of create, we've been talking about it as a bit of a tapestry, a kind of tapestry of views that start to answer these questions or start to explore what it actually means in practice when you're working in digital sustainability to find beauty in the imperfect.So what is beautiful, and what is imperfect? So yeah, we've kind of thought Branch just lent itself to be the perfect place for people to do that. And again, the awesome thing about Branch is it's a non profit magazine, as you well know, Chris. So that awesome, we thought made it easier for people that were perhaps within organizations that maybe don't have a platform to speak within their own organization.They could come and use Branch. And be able to talk about things in an open way that perhaps their organization might not be so cool with them publishing on their own blog. So it feels like a great opportunity to bring a really diverse, in the biggest possible way, set of voices together, I think.Chris Adams: Okay. I see. So you've got this idea of diversity. And one of the key things is that it's not just one person, you know, the internet isn't just for like developers, for example, there's other, there's users and there's other people who are affected by it that it's worth hearing some of their voices involved in it as well.Okay. Thank you, Hannah. That does make it a little bit clearer, actually, since you spoke a little bit about Branch and actually the design part of it, maybe we could just switch gears for a second and talk a little bit about some of the realities of trying to make some of this, because one thing we mentioned before is that Branch was one of the early magazines that essentially changed this design based on how green the grid is, basically.And I figured maybe we could just provide, have a bit of kind of catnip for the nerds talking about how that was actually done. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, okay, yeah, that's a cool idea, but. There's all these considerations from a production point of view. So maybe are there any kind of particular challenges you found or things we would have bear in mind if they're going to take their first steps into designing, say, kind of a grid aware or carbon aware design like this?Hannah Smith: Yeah. Well, thanks, Chris. So Marketa, I might pick that question up if that's okay with you. Cause IMarketa Benisek: Yeah, please do.Hannah Smith: yeah, so, I mean, Chris, I know you were sort of involved in building the first issue of Branch. I came on board to help out on the second issue and beyond. And so I think it's worth saying that first of all, the way that Branch responds to the grid is that it provides a different experience based on what's going on, on the grid on a certain day.So if you've got loads of fossil fuels on the grid, on a particular day, you don't see the images by default. So you have to actually opt in to see the images. If you've got a nice windy, sunny day, maybe then the intensity will be low. And so you will see the images. And then you've got this middle, middle scenario there, where the images are converted into a really fuzzy kind of web format so that you can see the images, but there's a clear and obvious degradation.The thing I really, really like about Branch and the way it does that is that it's, it's giving you a different, um, experience based on the renewables that day and in that place. So it's, it's more responding to demand or, or supply really of what's on the grid. And I think that's quite clever. So rather than sort of doing stuff like shifting around location or time based. I find that that is actually a very, very visceral way that people can understand what's going on in terms of the supply coming on to the, onto the grid. Actually, I find it throughout Marketa and I putting all the articles up for issue eight, I found it brilliant. I've now know exactly what's going on on the given day as to what the renewables are, because the background color of Branch tells me, which is super, super handy.But actually we did notice just last week as we were kind of finalizing some of the images that well I don't know if it's a new level of carbon intensity or if it's a just a level of carbon intensity we don't get very often in the UK. But I, to my absolute shock and horror, went on Branch and it was grey and I was like, oh, That's not a color Branch.Chris Adams: What's going on here?Hannah Smith: That's not supposed to happen. What's going on here? And we looked into it and realized that actually the grid was running at very low carbon intensity that day, which kind of made sense because when I looked out the window, it was super windy, yeah, super sunny day and we were like, all right, cool. So I guess like, that's quite a fun bug in a way, or a fun thing is that, you know, I guess our expectations over different carbon intensity levels can change a little bit, or, uh, you know, if you're connecting through to an API, something, something suddenly shifts and, and you get a bit of a surprise.So that's definitely a bit of fun to be aware of on the production side of things.Chris Adams: I remember you, I remember you talking about some of this actually, like, like, you thought, oh, the grid's never going to get that green, right? And then you see it changing, like, oh, Christ, you need to update the design because of this. Yeah. This idea of like having different thresholds was, you know, Yeah, that was, that was a new thing because I remember you asking me and like, it took scratching my head a little while because it doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the code.And then you realize, oh, the API that tells us the carbon intensity must then have started to introduce some new levels that we need to design for. So yeah, that's, uh, that, that, that was, that was actually kind of a fun thing from this. Okay, cool,Hannah Smith: Happy days though. I mean, I'm happy that we were running on very, very low intensity on those days of, you know, Hey, that's what we're here for, right?Chris Adams: Yeah, that was, I guess, the technology being somewhat more enthusiastic than the design five years ago, or four years ago, perhaps. So that's like one of the examples that we need to take into account. And maybe one thing that I'm glad you mentioned the idea that when you first visit this, you don't see the images.One of the things that I think is There was some fair amount of focus, which is often overlooked is the accessibility of this, like deliberately trying to make sure that if someone can't see an image, you at least have some way to make it perceivable to people, for example, maybe we could talk a little bit about some of that thing, because people tend not to, this may be a thing that is overlooked in publishing, that's actually, I guess, part of the web, maybe, and maybe you could expand a little bit on the accessibility aspects before we talk about some of the actual content of Branch, perhaps, Han.Hannah Smith: Yeah, sure. So I mean, something, when you're uploading content to Branch, you realize just how important alt text is on your images. Because that's one of the key features of Branch is that if you have a very carbon intensive day, so e. g. there's lots of fossil fuels, bad, that's not what we want, you don't see the images.And what you see instead is the alt text and a caption, which describes it to you. You do see kind of, you see a grayed out placeholder of the image. So you're very aware that there is an image there, but you can click show image and you can see the image and opt for that to get downloaded to your machine and opt for for that, that additional action to happen. So accessibility is a really interesting aspect here as well.Chris Adams: Yeah. Cause I guess on one level you're, that's kind of like forcing how other people might perceive the web, if it might be, might be partially cited or something. It's kind of some of the decisions there to kind of foreground the fact that the way that you experience a digital service may not be the only way it can be experienced, for example.Hannah Smith: Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I love the way that Branch does that. It plays with almost messing with your perception of what a website is and can be, and I, I mean, that was always one of the key ideas of it was to imagine different ways that a website could be, it doesn't always have to be the same, exactly the same.It should be responding to different things. And also remind you that people interact with these things in different ways as well. As you rightly said there, Chris, you know, not everybody will see the images all the time.Marketa Benisek: It's a great preview into someone else's world and how they see the world, how they see the digital world as well. I think this, this often doesn't really get enough attention. That not everybody sees the images in perfect high res, you know, some people might see it blurry, some people might see it, I don't know, pixelated, whatever, you know, so paying attention to these alt texts and, and just a different setting for people who might have different needs and different kind of health conditions is really important and the entire web. should be built that way. I mean, that's why we have this technology in the first place. So the fact that Branch has that is really important, I think. And I'm just, that's just one more reason why I love it so much.Chris Adams: So, Marketa, you're right, actually, there is this notion about, I guess, the web being something that should be accessible for everyone, because, like, the internet is for everyone like this. Maybe we could talk a little bit about, actually, some of the high level themes in the content for this issue. Like, are there any trends that you felt really deserved attention or could do with more people writing more openly about, for example?Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, first of all, you know, the, the theme, we were pretty set on, on the theme, Hannah and I, you know, since. The very early days, finding beauty in the imperfect. I guess as two women working in tech, you know, it may come across, it may have come across slightly more poetic or feminine to some. And I think that some people, there was a need to kind of explain what we really mean by this. So we spent quite a bit of time on this explanation, you know, through the open call page, just to really clarify what this means. And obviously it was an invitation for everyone, not just for women in tech. I just wanted to make that really clear, but yeah, I, I mean, after we set the open call page on Branch, we received a really great number of submissions that we carefully read through and selected the best ones that really spoke to the theme and then we narrowed it down to I think seven or even eight categories and we got super excited and obviously we wanted to involve everything and you know, we wanted to give a platform to everyone who even reached out and things like that. But then we got a bit more realistic and we realized that actually, you know, we really do need to narrow it down. So we narrowed it down to four key categories that kind of spoke really strongly to just new ways of building just and sustainable web that is also a humane web. And so now we have four categories that, that they are meaningful connection, kind of solar punk and imagining different future, new ways of looking at the design philosophy and how we might be able to build the web.You know, that is not perfect or not in that kind of usual perfect way, seamlessly perfect. And then finally, obviously the perfection itself and just not letting it be the enemy of progress. So those are kind of the four key categories that were really, really, important for the theme, I think. And yeah, I just really can't wait to share that with the world.Chris Adams: Okay, and that's presumably the logical grouping inside the content. So someone, when they go to the magazine, they'll see it grouped like that. So they might look at dive into one, for example, and then the other, right?Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously this wasn't a straightforward process. You know, we spent a long time kind of going through all of those images, grouping them together. But shortly after we received all of the submissions, we could see patterns in some of these, you know, submissions and we obviously group them together and kind of organically these four key themes.Chris Adams: Ended up being the logical group for this.Marketa Benisek: And yes, ended up being the four categories, yeah.Hannah Smith: And I think I might just add a little bit onto that as well, because the, the whole idea of this theme was that we wanted to explore the subjective ways that people Think about finding beauty in the imperfect in digital sustainability, whatever lens they're looking through, be that developing carbon calculation methodologies, be that designing things, being that the way that people use the internet, being that even questioning, should the internet even be a thing in the first place?So we did throw it very, very wide and then as Marketa explained, you know, we, we grouped things. And then what we kind of discovered, the thing that makes me very happy because I'm quite nerdy and I do like everything to be neat and tidy, is that those four categories then yes, you're laughing because you know this is true because we then noticed that those four categories almost become a journey in themselves.So, as Marketa said, that the first category we saw was around meaningful connection. And I guess the first thing that you ask yourself when you're Looking for beauty in the perfection when you're designing something is, why? What are we designing this for? And we realized that actually, at the very, very heart of it, what the internet should be about is creating meaningful connection.Not just connection for connection's sake, but meaningful connection that's humane, that is just, and that is sustainable. And we kind of really noticed that theme. And then we kind of thought, alright, so you know what you want, So the next thing that happens is, well, in an ideal world, what does that success look like?And that's where that imagination piece comes in, these ideas of Solarpunk. And if anyone's listening and hasn't heard of Solarpunk before, you're in for such a treat because it's just such a cool movement. It's all this idea of kind of imagining regenerative, renewable futures. So you kind of, once you know what you mean, you know what you want, EG, a meaningful connection, you start to imagine what it looks like.And we had so much fun with all the pieces that imagined the future, like there's some absolutely amazing, beautiful, yet imperfect stuff in there. And then once you're imagining things, what we realized is the next step on your journey is the logical question is, well, how are we going to make it? And we realized then that we had this grouping all around design philosophy of people talking about all these different ways that they want to make this stuff, that they want to make things on the internet, that they want to design things on the internet.And then we came to this fourth category and I wouldn't say it's the last one because the other thing we realized is that everything is just so deeply interconnected. And I think you realize that when you're doing anything in sustainability is that connections that are everywhere. It's never finished and it's never linear.But we noticed this last question was around, well, let's talk about some of the things that get in the way of us designing our things or building our things. And we realized, well, perfectionism is this key thing that seems to come up and up again and is so often used as a kind of defensive measure for why we shouldn't bother.We kind of realised that that was almost the last stop on the journey,in a way, probably before you go around again. So the categories do stand in isolation from one another, but can also be read and taken on a journey as well for kind of completing a whole process here as well. So when, when that kind of made itself obvious, I was very happy cause that, that felt very neat, very neat and tidy, so-Marketa Benisek: Yeah that was a beautiful day that oneHannah Smith: It was a beautiful day, but obviously there's imperfections there too, even in that.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Thanks. Maybe I'll just bring, hand over to Marketa. So we've spoken a little bit about themes and like the kind of, the motivation for this. Maybe we could just move to like some of the concrete pieces, for example, if we would have like a preview of some of the things you'd like to draw attention to, or kind of give a sneak peek, sneak preview of this.Are there any articles you particularly enjoyed or you found a lot of, that you, would like to draw people's attention to, for example, if I hand over to you, Marketa, first, and then Han, I'll give you a chance to kind of name some of your favorite children, as it were, or favorite babies, or whatever, whatever phrase you want to use for this, then we can see what we've got there.So, Marketa, you first, if I can.Marketa Benisek: Yeah sure so I guess throughout this process, what I enjoyed the most was seeing these kind of similar patterns occurring in different places around the world. That was really just fascinating to, to witness and to be a part of, because, you know, all of these authors are from different parts of the world. They are talking about different problems, different solutions. And yet they were using very similar language. So for example, we mentioned perfectionism as kind of one of the obstacles to building a more just and sustainable and humane web. And interestingly, several people, at least my authors, you know, the authors from my group, they kept mentioning friction and the need of friction.Somehow it seems like friction and imperfection is what makes any experience more human. And the web and trying to make it kind of perfect and frictionless and seamless and everything like that, that goes against that human experience, that humanness in the first place, which was really interesting, kind of realization out of this whole process, this project. Some of the articles that I really love, obviously, there is Tom Greenwood's article, the co founder of Wholegrain, who talks about the Wabi Sabi Web. And I just really love how Tom thinks and how he articulates his, his thoughts. It's just, it's kind of like a beautiful journey through his mind. And so Tom picked a Japanese philosophy called wabi sabi, and he used several examples of how we might use it to build a more humane web.So wabi sabi is a concept where you kind of accept the imperfection and kind of the fact that all things All of these are beautiful because they reflect the time and the experiences that they have been through, but we don't necessarily see that on the web. And maybe that's the problem. Maybe, you know, all of the data are kind of like set in stone and we don't see how the users behind the data changed and evolved over time.So this is just a really interesting and very fascinating exploration of how we might. Imagine a different kind of web called the Wabi Sabi Web, so toChris Adams: S W S W, instead of dub dub dub, right? So, W W W, W S W, perhaps.Marketa Benisek: Yeah. Yeah,Good point. Then also just going back to friction, I actually, Hannah pointed me to a really fascinating project called Designing Friction by two artists based in the Netherlands. And I did an interview with them and they really very much go against this whole concept of what the web is becoming. You know, it's becoming this unhuman frictionless space that doesn't really allow for playfulness. And they are against it, not only as artists, but as parents, as human beings. And so it was really interesting to read through their principles of how we should kind of make friction part of the digital culture.It should be something that is celebrated and even sought for. You know, it shouldn't be something that we should avoid. And they give a whole bunch of examples of how we might be able to do that. And just to clarify, this is not to say that friction should make the internet slow or, you know, it's not about making the user experience awful. It's just about making the whole user experience more human. It shouldn't be about users, but it should be about people. So to speak, and then we've got a whole bunch of real examples. Uh, from authors who are actively trying to understand what the internet is like for people in different parts of the world. And yeah, for example, there's a really lovely article from Barbara and Olivia from the Engine Room who talk about their research on the information ecosystem in Latin America. And another one about e waste in India and another one from Hemanuel on the importance of the internet connection for the peoples of Amazon. In order to help them kind of defend not only their own rights, but also the nature around them that they are living in harmony with. So these real examples of what the internet is like in different parts of the world, not just in our kind of privileged, rich, you know, Europe or our part of the world, has been just really so eye opening and I really, really strongly recommend people to, to go and have a look.Chris Adams: So you spoke a little bit about say, you know, friction, making things a bit more kind of legible or possibly understanding where it's not just kind of totally seamless, fast thing where there's no agency for people at the end use, but you've also spoken, and there's maybe some content about essentially this intersection of climate and technology, how it manifests in different parts of the world, like you just mentioned, those, those writers from various places.Thank you for that. Okay, Hannah, can I hand over to you perhaps to talk about some of the things that have been catching your eyes, that you direct people's attention to now that you've been working on this magazine for the last, like, couple of months, for example,Hannah Smith: Yeah. Thanks, Chris. I think there is a piece written by Melissa, who's one of the organizers at climateaction.tech. And she has talked about a concept using a four winged butterfly. And the idea of the four winged butterfly is it represents a social transformation. And I think if we're going to transform the internet to be a more healthy place, to be a more humane place, to be a more just place, to be a more sustainable place, I think this is something everybody should read.She talks about the, it's not her concept. It's, it's a concept from somebody else. But she's put it into a digital sustainability context. And the basic idea is that you need these four different elements of change. So each element of change is a wing of the butterfly and a butterfly needs all four wings or all four parts in order to be able to fly.So it's this idea of, yeah, it's a lovely idea. I think it's a really, really good one. And the way she talks about it is, you know, she says, well, look, if you're looking at something that somebody's trying to do, if you're looking at a project and you think, ah, this is rubbish, this is no good, this isn't, you know, perfect, what about X, Y, Z, she said, well, you know, you can look at these other wings of the butterfly or these other aspects and actually maybe understand that, you know, this particular change or this particular initiative you're looking at is only one part of the butterfly.But if it's connected with other parts of the butterfly together, it actually makes a movement, you know, a social change that can move, that can fly. And I loved that practical toolkit that she was giving there to say, hey, you know, if you think something's imperfect, perhaps You're only narrowing in on a really tiny part of it and, and if you zoom out, there's yeah, look at the bigger picture, you might realize that this is an absolutely essential part of making other things move or, or of giving other areas flight.So I loved Melissa's piece and I, I really recommend that for anybody who's, who's interested in, in creating change and, and making progress. And I'll say two other quick things. One that just, it was a bit of a late addition to Branch, but it's just absolutely captured me, floored me, is there, it's a piece by Rob Hopkins.And he's just published something called the Ministry for Imagination, which is the work coming from a hundred podcast episodes where he invites people onto the podcast. To talk about the world. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So you've got a long way to go, Chris, a hundred episodes. So he has sort of through working with these different people, they're interviewing on the podcast, come up with this manifesto for what it means to imagine a better world.And it's not really just tech related. It's far broader than that. It's across all of society, but it is an absolutely incredible example of why imagination is important. And how sometimes it can lack a little bit in the digital space. I think we, we can get a little bit narrow minded about things perhaps, or see things in a bit too black and white and maybe not, not be playful enough.So here's Ministry of Imagination. I can't recommend strongly enough that everybody takes some time to have a look at that for like an absolute definition of the power of imagination and solarpunk. And then the last thing I'll, I'll mention super quickly. Is when Marketa and I were looking at all of the articles, we had a hope at the beginning that we would not just have loads of writing, but that we would have art and we would have poetry and music.And we noticed that poetry and music was a little bit lacking in the edition. So we've set off and created a Branch issue eight playlist. Where we have asked a whole bunch of people from across the community to suggest songs that motivate them to take action. But then also pick out lyrics that really speak to them.And actually I had a chance to listen to the playlist before launch. It is so eclectic. We've got rock, we've got classical, we've got trance, we've got acoustic, we've got reggae, we've got funk. We've got like, hardcore dance music. We've got all this stuff. And I think what that speaks to me is that there is no perfect music choice to get motivated by.Everything is different. It's, it takes a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of, of vibes, energies to make change. And I think the playlist really, really embodies that. And I think it also speaks to. The wider movement as well around needing a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of cultures.Songs are all in different languages as well, but actually you bring all of that together and you get a real tapestry. And I loved listening to the songs and I loved reading the lyrics that people highlighted and their reasons for including these songs. So it's, I know it's not that much to do with tech, but we are all humans at the end of the day.And I think music is, can be a really, really big motivator and something that really brings people together as well. So I'm a big fan for the playlist as well that came about and you can find that on Spotify too.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So it sounds like there's, okay. Let's say that we have prose, poetry and music and references and links to other forms of music as well. All right. This is, this is sounding quite rich actually. Okay. We're, we're just coming up to the end of time. So this is basically a kind of project. If there's something of a passion project, but there is still a focus very much on like digital culture and things like that.I understand that you do more than just make magazines. So Marketa, we should probably tell people where to go to look for this. I mean, maybe is there a domain name or a search search term they should be looking for if they want to learn about some of the things we've been talking about?Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone is interested in reading any of these articles and much more, they can go to branch.climateaction.tech. They can find all the information there and all the articles, the playlist and everything else that we've been working on over the past four or five months, something like that. Yeah. So that's,Chris Adams: so Branch. climateaction.tech is the way to look up, and that'll give you the most recent issue. So we're recording this on the 22nd of April, but I believe it's going to coming out in the next week or so, maybe the 25th, I think it was the date that I've heard. And presumably that'll be the big day.Okay. So when this comes out. If you're listening to this, it's probably out already, so you can check it out yourself along with the other previous seven issues worth of content that you have there. All right, and if I understand it, this isn't all that you do, so maybe I could actually just, while you're here, give you a bit of space to kind of talk about some of the other things you're doing.So, Marketa, for example, where else should people be looking if they want to learn a little bit about digital sustainability or some of the ideas or some of the kinds of things that we've discussed, for example.Marketa Benisek: Sure. So we frequently publish new articles on our blog. So people can go to wholegraindigital.com and then go to our blog and they can find lots of stuff related to digital sustainability, humane web thinking, that sort of thing over there. And I'm also very happy and proud to be on the team that creates a monthly newsletter called Curiously Green. And that's all about. All the things, digital sustainability. So yeah,they can just go to,Chris Adams: I really like that as well, actually. I'm gladMarketa Benisek: thank youChris Adams: And Han, if people are curious about where you've been coming from, I suppose, is, are there any projects or things you'd like to draw people's attention to in the last few minutes that we have for this?Hannah Smith: Yeah, thanks Chris. So I guess my day job is at the Green Web Foundation. So you can head over to thegreenwebfoundation.org and you'll see a lot of my work represented there. You'll see a lot of blog posts coming out from me, where we talk about the Green Web Dataset. We talk about our open source co2.js package, and also there'll be some really nice work coming out soon.With some really nerdy deep dive work into the practicalities of carbon emission estimates for digital. So Chris, obviously you and I are working on that together. Yeah, head on over there and I think you'll get a good insight as to what my day job involves on that website.Chris Adams: Okay. And just before I go, I believe outside of life, you also have run, you mentioned Green Tech Southwest, that's another community that you're involved with.Hannah Smith: Yeah, that's right. So Green Tech Southwest, it's, it's kind of location based. The community at its heart is in the southwest of the UK. Anybody is welcome to come. All of our events are online. We've got another event coming up in May the 2nd, where we'll be looking at a methodology for measuring CO2 emissions.And we'll also be looking at some really cool visualizations of renewable energy projects in the UK. So if you can't make it in person, if you're not based in Bristol or near to Bristol, you're very welcome to join online. And that is applicable to anybody, wherever you are in the world. You're super welcome to come and be a part of that community.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that. All right. I think that takes us to time actually. So folks, thank you so much for giving me your time and talking to, and giving this sneak peek of a project that's kind of close to all of our hearts, I suppose. And hopefully some of the listeners who get exposed to this, I guess all we have left is to say, thank you very much.Have a lovely week and yeah, best of luck with the launch.Marketa Benisek: Thank you. Thanks for having us.Hannah Smith: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having us along.Chris Adams: All right. Take care, folks.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 greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams introduces the co-authors of Building Green Software - Anne, Sara, and Sarah. Through candid discussions, they explore the process of writing about green software development and highlight key insights gained along the way, touching on the interconnectedness between sustainability and existing best practices in software engineering, and emphasizing that embracing sustainability isn't about adding extra tasks but rather integrating it seamlessly into existing protocols such as security, resilience, and monitoring. Join for a thorough conversation on the lessons learnt writing the newest book on green software.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteSarah Hsu: LinkedIn Sara Bergman: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Building Green Software [Book] [07:57]Amazon.com: Building Green Software: A Sustainable Approach to Software Development and Operations Events:QCon London [30:36] NDC { Oslo } [32:00] Resources:What Adrian Did Next: 2022 Conference Appearances [17:53]https://github.com/adrianco/slides/blob/master/Carbon%20Moonitorama%202022.pdf 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:Anne Currie: A lot of the best practice in sustainability is often also the best practice in other areas. So it's just one more good reason to adopt best practice in security, in resilience, in monitoring, you know, it's not something you're going "oh my goodness, mate, we have a whole extra thing to do." It's just another reason to do all the things that you should be doing anyway.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, welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We talk about green software a lot on this podcast, but if you're coming to this from, typically, a background of software engineering, it can be hard to figure out where to go next after you've done some of the kind of free training or seen a few talks online. So, you might ask yourself, "how do you build green software?" Fortunately, today, I'm sharing a podcast with three women who've written a book called precisely Building Green Software. I'm joined by Anne, Sarah, and Sara. So, before we dive into this and talk about how you build a book called Building Green Software, I just want to give a bit of space for my co-host this week to come on. Anne, is it okay if I give you the space to introduce yourself and then hand over to the next of your little gang?Anne Currie: Absolutely. Yes. So my name is Anne Currie and I am the CEO of a green training company called Strategically Green. And I'm also one of the co chairs of the GSF community working group, and I am the lead on the GSF's new Maturity Matrix project. So yeah, those things, and I'm one of the co-authors of building green software along with, and I will hand over to Sara.Sara Bergman: Hi, my name is Sara Bergman, or Sara Bergman, Bergman. I never know how to say it in English because it's so different from the Swedish. But yes, I am a senior software engineer at Microsoft, even though I'm currently on maternity leave, hence why brain is not fully switched on, and one of the co-authors of the book Building Green Software.Sarah, over to you.Sarah Hsu: I've been waiting for that sentence for so long. Sara and myself have been working together, but we never really shared a stage. So Sara over to you, or Sarah over to you, has been our dream for a long time, and now it's finally happening. But anyway, hello everyone. My name is Sarah Hsu. Similar to Sara, my surname is actually pronounced very differently with an English accent.So yeah, Sarah Hsu, it's fine. So currently I'm a site reliability engineer working for Goldman Sachs, but I'm also one of the co-authors of the Building Green Software book. And this is why we are here today. I'm also the project chair for the Green Software course that we recently launched with Linux Foundation a few years ago, and we currently have over 70 000 completion, which is amazing.But yeah, anyway, that's me.Chris Adams: Cool, thank you, Sarah, sara, and Anne. I'm saying hello from Berlin and Sarah Hsu, you're calling from London.Sara, whereabouts are you calling from today?Sara Bergman: I am in Oslo, Norway. So yeah, I am Swedish, but I live in Norway. This does not matter to anyone who lives south of Denmark, but for us Scandinavians, it matters a great deal.Chris Adams: Cool, thank you. And Anne, where are you calling from today as well?Anne Currie: I'm calling from London as well. So we're not quite as international as all that.Chris Adams: Oh, well, it's not bad. Four different cities in three nations isn't, isn't too bad, I suppose. All right. Okay, so if you're new to the Green Software Foundation podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I'm one of the policy working group chairs in the Green Software Foundation myself. I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch non-profit focused on reaching a fossil free internet by 2030. And before we dive into what it's like writing books about green software, here's a quick reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes on this episode. And because we're a software engineering podcast, the transcript will be available on GitHub in markdown format. So if there's any typos or there's corrections, then we do accept pull requests.And if there are pull requests that are accepted, we'll then credit you and shout you out in the next episode. All right, then. So, itooks like you're sitting with us comfortably, Sara, Sarah, and Anne. Should we get into it and talk a little bit about writing green software and or writing about writing green software?Yeah?Anne Currie: Absolutely.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. I'm going to hand to you, Sarah, first. If I understand it, this is one of, your first book writing about green software. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you found that process, writing about, say, a developing field like this.Sarah Hsu: Yeah. It's my first time writing a book and it's also my first time appearing on a podcast. So maybe we can make another episode on this experience. I'm joking. So what was it like writing a book on green software? Honestly, I don't want to sound too cheesy, but it has been a really fulfilling experience.And why is that? It's because finally I can use what I'm good at, which is software engineering, and use what I've been training for the past seven to 10 years to have a positive impact on the environment. And it just, it's great to see that ripple effect from something I'm good at and instead of just individual actions.So I feel that really, really close to my heart. And of course that Anne and Sara made, they're not, they're more than just the icing on cake. They're absolutely integral to this entire experience. I've always admired them since I first met them three years ago. And working with them has taught me so much.Yeah, couldn't have asked for better co-authors. And, and thankfully we all share similar humor. So when one of us put a joke or put a pun in a book, it doesn't get like, "this is not funny," cross it out. So I think that's also another icing on the cake. Yeah. But yeah, hopefully that's not too cheesy of an answer... answer but Chris Adams: No, it's okay. It's okay to be genuine if you've enjoyed working with other people, especially if you're doing something you believe in. Absolutely. All right. So that's the skinny from someone who's basically been writing books like this for a while. Anne, this isn't your first rodeo, you've written a few other books.And I know that you, and we've spoken a little bit about all kinds of sci-fi books before, so maybe you could, I could just touch on you about maybe some of the differences between writing about wacky sci-fi or writing about things when you're, if you forgive the term, at the coalface of software development trying to figure out what to do next here.Anne Currie: Yeah, that's a good point. So this is my tenth book, eight of which though were sci-fi, were futuristic sci-fi, but kind of like more speculative fiction than hard sci-fi. So it was all kind of surprisingly similar to writing an actual book about stuff that's happening now. But oddly enough, writing the fiction is much easier because you get to make it all up.Whereas, although I try not to make it up, I try to keep it quite, quite, quite,realistic. It's hard sci-fi, Yeah. but the book was much more difficult because the book, I mean, I think this is true for all of us. It was really important that we got everything right and we, and we phrased it right and we made it so that people could read it. Which I also want to do with my books, but they aren't quite so important, if you know what I mean. This feels like an important book, or we need there to be an important book, so hopefully this will be the important book, because if it isn't, then it'll be quite a long time before there is another one.It's a lot of work, writing a book.Chris Adams: I can definitely concur with that. Alright, so, one thing I didn't mention was that this was actually published by O'Reilly, who have some form writing about sustainability in this field. There was a book by Tim Frick, in the mid 2000s, called Designing for Sustainability, which was focused on web. But as I understand it, this has more of a focus on parts of cloud, perhaps, or some of the other practices. Sara, you've been working with cloud for a good few years now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what actually the content covers inside green software, because it's quite a wide term and there are ideas like web for sustainability. Maybe you could just, maybe give a high level on some of the areas you focus on, then we can talk a little bit about how you folks work together remotely.Sara Bergman: Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So definitely if you run on cloud, we have a lot of content for you, but even for people who have their own data centers or on prem and you're allowed to call like a few servers in a closet, a data center, as far as we're concerned, there are definitely material for those people as well. We all come from a more backend point of view, but there is.Web and front end content as well. Some of the points are on a much higher level than this applies only to you if you deploy to this specific type of machine. We tried to go broader, so it's really for anyone who writes or works in the software industry. Not just for, for the engineer, but for someone who is in a role that's not so directly linked to, to code.We focus a lot on ops as well. So if you are on that side, there is a lot of good content for people like that. And that was really important to us. We come from slightly different backgrounds and we don't want to exclude anyone. That was one of the things we talked about really early on in the process.You should pick this book up and feel like there is something for me here. And that's been really fun, I think, to sort of go broader than maybe you do in your regular, like, nine to five job.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thank you for that, Sara. So, I now. If I may, I'm just going to touch on a couple of things that you spoke about there. You spoke about the idea that you're writing a book for a number of different audiences, so it's not just for people who are like optimizing code. It's not just about green code, there's maybe aspects of ops as well and things like that. And, given that you're not all in the same space, and given that O'Reilly has quite a, like, established kind of setup for writing books, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you wrote this. Like, was it like, you're using a bunch of GitHub together? Was it Google Docs? Or is there some kind of magic platform behind the O'Reilly firewall that you might be using to keep track of this stuff?Because I've never, I've never understood, and we're a bunch of engineers here, or at least coders here, because I'm curious, I'm interested in it, and like, it seems a bit weird to maybe use like email versions of Word around to write a book about code, for example.Anne Currie: Yeah, it was all Google Docs. Well, well, one of the interesting things is O'Reilly have a lot of different options for how you're going to do it. So they have a kind of, there are kind of GitHub integrations where you can do all through GitHub. But we decided to do it all on Google Docs because we were so remote. And in fact, we've only met all the three of us in person once before. So it was all, all had to be remote. So we would use Google Docs. And I think it went pretty smoothly. That was quite easy. I don't know what you two thought.Sara Bergman: Yeah, I agree. And especially because all of us have been traveling at some point, or some of us traveled quite a lot, I've had, been very pregnant and then had a baby. And there are circumstances where you don't want to boot up a laptop and like sign into a Git repo. Like that's second nature to some, but sometimes it's very convenient to be able to do it from your phone at 3am, if that's when you have the time.Chris Adams: All right. Okay then. So that gives us a bit of idea of like how the sausage was made, so to speak. All right, then. Anne, I'll put this to you first and then see who else wants to bite. Last time we were speaking, Anne, you were, we were talking about, I think, lasers from space as a way to power data centers, about whether that's a good idea or a bad idea. And I learned a bunch of things about there. So are there any particular things you learned about green software along the way when you're writing this book? Because you can't, you know, you can't be the expert automatically then, and it's a very, very fast moving field. So were there any things that kind of leap out at you or that you were surprised by as you were writing this, that you had to kind of change your opinion on or rethink perhaps?Anne Currie: Well, probably my favorite chapter to write, which was, was the one that I had to do the most work on, the most research on, we only decided to add later on in the course of the book, which was the networking chapter. Because I was quite interested in what, how does networking fit into green software? You know, is it, where is all the electricity being burned?You know, and I've, the, the most interesting thing I think in that was I interviewed a whole load of people and I did a lot of reading of papers and things like that to find out what was going on. And the interesting thing for me, I think was the last mile, comparing how good or bad, or green or ungreen all the ways means of connectivity are. So, finding out that that fiber is by far the best by a long chalk actually. So fiber is fantastic. So the backbone is pretty good. The Metro, which is what takes your data across cities, that's pretty much all fiber these days, it's pretty good. And The Last Mile, if it's fiber, it's pretty good to your house. That's the best, followed by Copper. Copper is actually pretty okay, if you're still, I'm still on Copper here, and don't, you know, don't feel too badly about Copper. But once you move into wire free stuff, then Wi-Fi isn't too bad, but 3G is absolutely terrible. 2G is terrible. 3G is better than 2G was.4G is much better than 3G was. And 5G is much better than 4G. But one of the things that interests me about it is that the mobile generations are a classic. Something we talk about a lot in the book is Jevons paradox, which is the idea that as things get more efficient, you use more of them or to a certain extent, you don't use more of them because the, well, they, you, Chris Adams: The savings can be eroded by the increased amount of use in absolute terms. That's what you're getting at, right?Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Yeah. And 5G, I would say is the classic example of that, which is it's much better than 4G, but you know, people didn't invent it for that reason. They developed the efficient 5G because they wanted us to be doing a lot more stuff on mobile devices, and we will use it. The whole point is for us to do more stuff on mobile devices, more mobile gaming. And so, yeah, 5G is vastly better than 4G, but it will drive massive increase in the use of mobile. And mobile is very energy intensive compared to a landline or Wi-Fi. It's different use case.Chris Adams: So there's one thing I want to just check on before I kind of hand over to one of the... Can I say one of the Saras, or one of the... Sarahs, Saras, all right, yeah. I'll hand over to you if there's anything that you found surprising. So when you're saying better, you're talking about in terms of energy use per gigabyte transferred here. That's your use, like it's efficiency that you're referring to there, right?Anne Currie: Bits per watt or watts per bit is the industry term for it. And it's something they really do focus on a lot. And the interesting thing is, yeah, I mean, obviously networking is there because everybody wants to do more networking. There's, there's so much untapped demand, which is a classic Jevons paradox issue, really.Chris Adams: Well hopefully the fact that we've got a bunch of dark, do we still have significant amounts of dark fiber from previous dot com booms and busts where we've got all this stuff available for us to use? Surely that's one thing that we have been able to pick up on, right? Right,Anne Currie: Well, yeah, there certainly would have been, but to be honest, the past is of no use to us really. It's all the stuff that's been, we're just still laying cable at an unbelievable rate to handle people's, the desire for streamed content.Chris Adams: So there's an aspect of embodied carbon that we need to be thinking about as well then. So that's one of the things we've learned. Alright, I'll open the floor to, yeah, Sarah Hsu, in London. Are there any particular things that surprised you when you were writing this or caused you to kind of change your mind or think, "Oh. This is probably something we should be spending a bit more time thinking about," for example.Sarah Hsu: Yeah, so we have a chapter called Core Benefits. And our initial idea was to basically examine green software from different perspectives in software engineering. We have like security, we have reliability, resilience we've performance, data, all that. But while we were writing that chapter, we realized, "hey, actually, this is all very important, but one thing that we're seeing is, because of what's going on around the world, there's so many other things going on. People really are not taking green software as seriously as maybe say 2021." So we actually wrote a chapter on like how we can help our readers to convince others that green software is not as difficult as it's thought out to be, and we came up with like a three bullet points on like how you can convince others. But most importantly, that we want to say in this chapter is that there are so many other knock on benefits from doing other best practices in software engineering already. Green software is not its own ivory tower, like people shouldn't be worried like, "Hey, like everyone is already so overstretched," you don't need to worry about. "Oh, now I need to have a whole new team just to work on sustainability." People who are already very skilled in security, very skilled in reliability, they all can help our software to be more sustainable. I think that's a really strong information we really want to send out there, especially to like the grassroots people and not fail them to be really helpless in the current climate.So yeah, that's probably quite interesting realization we had later into the book.Chris Adams: Okay, that's quite an empowering message, and that sounds like, there's a really lovely quote from Adrian Cockcroft, who's leading the Realtime Carbon Project, so he says like "carbon is another metric," and yes, there are other, obviously more metrics that you need to track, but it's not like people in software engineering have never had to measure something before.So that's one of the things, like, obviously there's things about transparency that can help, but yeah, to an extent, there are lots of transferable skills that can be applied into this domain as well. That seems to be what I'm getting from you on that one.Anne Currie: Yeah, I mean, I really liked your chapter that you wrote on that. You put something in, Sarah, about "it's not a new work stream." It's, you know, a lot of the best practices in sustainability is often also the best practice in other areas. So it's just one more good reason to adopt best practice in security, in resilience in monitoring, you know, it's not something you're going "oh my goodness, mate, we have a whole extra thing to do." It's just another reason to do all the things that you should be doing anyway.Chris Adams: Okay, that's a useful framing actually. Sara, I, are there any things that you've learned, that you found, that you want to share, or that you would think would be salient for the conversation here?Sara Bergman: Yeah, sure. I think, and that maybe goes back to the process is we interviewed people, a lot of people for this book and got their perspective. We also have amazing tech reviewers, and all those people have been very instrumental to the book as well. And, and that's something where I learned a lot from to reach out to people and how willing people are to help and contribute and share their expertise inside the community.So the community is great. So that's not maybe a hard skill or a hard thing, but that's something that I really enjoyed about the process. And that's something I learned a lot from specifically around the hardware chapter, because I don't work with hardware every day. So. That was a lot of learnings for me.And actually, I listened to previous episodes of this podcast, for example, the one about the Junkyard Data Center, which is very interesting to include as well as a way to combat e-waste and how big of a problem that is. And then you also get to sort of step outside your bubble and like, okay, but e-waste is surely something that concerns software people, but also other people.And then you get to realize, okay, but there is lots of legislation around the world working to combat this. And like things are already moving in other sectors as well, which is really fun to see. And then you get additional knock on effects because industries and countries come together to work towards the same goals.Chris Adams: Okay, all right. Thank you for that, Sara. So, we've, you've written about this, and the thing, you know, when you write a blog post, and as soon as you've done that blog post, you realize, "oh, there's a things, a few things I wish I'd couldn't have put onto it." I imagine it might be somewhat similar when you're getting a book out the door, because once it's out, it's not like you can push updates to a book the same way you can push updates, you know, hotfixes and things. And now the Building Green Software, the book has gone to print, are there any things that you wish you had a bit more time to kind of write about, or that now that you've seen it, go, you know, "oh yeah, we totally missed this," or "here's a thing we should, if I could do that again, I'd spend a bit more time writing about." Sarah, if I can, if I start with you, then I'll kind of go around and then we can round this up perhaps.Sarah Hsu: I definitely had that same reaction, like two weeks before we were about to submit everything... And this is not a software product. We don't have a process on how to mitigate an incident. What if we wrote something wrong? How do we go about it? I remember just like panicking as well. But it is very interesting, like looking at publishing book.And like managing a production system. But anyway, I think the things that really, I wish I probably spent a little bit more time on is like in the observability space, like, especially how not just in green software, but like the traditional monitoring metrics and logging really isn't doing what it's supposed to do in the modern software system management, right?As our system gets more intricate, there's a lot more microservices. Sometimes like if you want to go from one hop, one request all the way for the request to come back to give you a response that can go through a hundred different systems, how do you know exactly where things have gone wrong? And I think I really wish I've spent a lot more time thinking how carbon and how environmental aspects will marry into this space and how do we actually make sure that we are not reinventing the wheel and once whatever metrics, whatever data we are ready, we can slot right into what the world of DevOps and what of SRE is already very good at doing, which is production system management, especially on how to make our system observable, if that makes sense.Chris Adams: Yes, it does. So what I think I'm taking away from you is that we've got things like spans, and we've got ways to kind of understand the impact of a particular API request or something like that. But when you've got a distributed system, we don't have something like the equivalent to that right now forcarbon, for example. You can't track distributed carbon across all your systems to kind of sum it up.Sarah Hsu: To find out exactly which system is the trouble one, like, I have a really good analogy. I was writing this the other day, like, you can think of, like, three different elementary data as like a murder mystery, right? Metrics will tell you when someone has died, right? And logging probably will tell you how someone has died, and traces will tell you where this person has died.So we need to figure out how all these three things will match with, like, the environmental aspect. And hopefully we can have, like, traces that will tell you that's exactly where the bottleneck is happening within our system that, okay, system C.5 is the one that's emitting the most carbon.Chris Adams: Okay, we're going down a rabbit hole here, but like, we already have all tools like Grafana and stuff like that that give that. Surely we can work out these numbers. This is like a problem that can be solved by,Sarah Hsu: Yeah. Yeah. But we just need to make sure we are going in the right step. I mean, and not come up with things that ourselves, if that makes sense.Chris Adams: yeah, that does, okay, all right,Anne Currie: It is,well, I'm going to say it is a bit, we'll just spend it, we'll blow all our time talking about this. We need another, we need another podcast to talk about the similarities and differences between carbon metrics and other metrics, because there is a key difference, which we can't talk about now because we're going to run out of time, but we should, we should have that in another podcast. The key difference between carbon metrics and other metrics.Chris Adams: Okay, all right, that's definitely a thing to dive into, because it's easy to get focused on carbon, and it turns out, yes, we're in a climate emergency, but there's other things we need to be thinking about as well. All right, okay, so we spoke a little bit about what's on your lap next, I suppose, and Sara, you mentioned that there's a baby on your lap, or that's one of the things that you have and you're coming back to. Are there any, like, what happens next now that this is out the door? Because, as I understand it, the book, Building Green Software, is available digitally for people, so you could get it through Safari. But I understand there was quite an interesting approach taken about making this available to a wider set of people.Does anyone want to take that at all, to talk about the kind of like open aspect of this book? Because this was something which felt quite exciting when I, when I first heard about it.Anne Currie: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. So at the moment, the book is, it's available on the O'Reilly Safari site. So anybody who's an O'Reilly subscription, or if you're a fast reader, you can, you can trial an O'Reilly subscription and read the whole thing. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because the book's very intense.I think if you just sit there and read it end to end, your head will explode. But so it's available on O'Reilly. It's available to buy from all good, well digitally, it's available on the Kindle at the moment, so you can buy it from the Amazon site. And in two weeks, I think it comes out in physical form, so available from all good bookshops. So you can order it anywhere you like and read it in real life that way. Or if you wait a couple of weeks after that, until we actually have time to go around and set something up, it'll also be available under a creative commons license, so under a, it's a, it's a fairly restrictive one.It's the O'Reilly creative commons license, which is, so you can't take it off and then write your own book, you know, you can't, it's, but you have to attribute this and it's non commercial and it's, but you can read it for free.Chris Adams: So, source available. You can read it.Okay, that's, wow, that's really, really exciting then.Anne Currie: Yeah. That will be available. I'll have it a copy up on my Strategically Green website first, probably.And then we will, we'll see where else we put it as well. But yes, we insisted on that because it's just so important, you know, it's saying, "we hope this is an important book and it's really important that people read it."Chris Adams: Great, wow, that's exciting. It's really useful to have something in the, so it's not quite public domain, but it's definitely available in the same way that you can have source available licenses that you can still benefit from and apply there. All right, then. Okay, so we spoke a little bit about some of the things we're covering inside the book, about how you can find this, and when it may be available, and some of the lessons learnt along the way. I've got a question, I have to ask now, like, what comes next, now that we've done that? Anne, I'll put it to you, and then, if anyone wants to take the question after that. So, Anne, you've written a book, or you, plural, have written this book now. Do you just sit in your laurels? Do you just like wait for the royalties to come in or does something else happen after this now?Anne Currie: If only, if only we could sit in our laurels and wait for the royalties... I don't think writing a book is something you, you ever, unless you're J. K. Rowling, you never really make a, maybe, maybe a film wouldn't be made from this book, but I suspect that's not the case. So, yeah. So the next thing I'm doing is a whole load of training around this, this stuff.So I'm, I'm doing that through Strategically Green. So started to do some public training and, and one of the things that I'm doing in the public training is, it's focusing on the thing that I would have liked to have put in the book that I didn't. Which is that it's not all bad, you know, there's just enormous benefits.And one of the reasons why we don't have a whole chapter of like, "Oh my goodness, mate, this is amazing. Why aren't you just stopping and dropping everything and converting your systems to run on renewables? Because it's, you're crazy not to" it's because I don't think a year ago when we started, 18 months ago, when we kicked this whole thing off, that was the case. It wasn't so obvious that renewable power was, was the win that it is becoming. I mean, if you look now somewhere like Spain and Portugal, I'll pick them rather than Scandinavia because Spain and Portugal were doing it the total new tech way. They're doing it with, it's all wind and solar. They're now even in the winter this year, they've had huge, they've had large numbers of weeks when power has been free for the bulk of the business day. So, you know, it's kind of like, this is the dream of humanity that, you know, through, through the ages that we would have effectively free power. And it's looking like that is a possibility, but we will need to change our systems to run on top of it because it's not all the time it's variable. And that's kind of the key message of the book.But I wish we'd hammered it home a bit more, the wins.Chris Adams: Right, I'm going to put the question to Sarah Hsu next, but just before Anne, I just want to check on that. When you're doing some research for this, we know that the power, the cost of power changes depending on how available it is. Are there any cloud providers who are making that visible to people yet? Because have you found this? It feels like it's the obvious thing to have to incentivize the use of green power, but it's almost nowhere so far. And maybe you, you might've come across this as well, or maybe the big providers might do something like this because they clearly are making significant decisions about this as well.Anne Currie: No, I don't, nobody is, but I have spoken to people at most, apart from Google, who speaks to anybody, nobody speaks to anybody at Google, but I've spoken to, spoken to folk who don't necessarily know and have no ability to affect it, but they are aware that eventually we know that the clouds will provide dynamic tariffs. There's no doubt about that because everybody's going to have to provide dynamic tariffs at some point. So, you know, I don't believe that anybody does it at the moment, but I think there's no doubt that it is coming.Chris Adams: Okay, so not from the big guys, but it's something available coming from somewhere. The one company I've found that is doing this so far, there's a company called TriBuild AI. They're doing this in, I think they're based in Texas, and they're strategically placing things, but the idea is that you can use the power, but not between 6pm and 9pm, when everyone's using power, and that's how they make it like a fifth of the cost of everyone else.So we are seeing early signs of this, and like, there's examples everywhere outside of technology that we could learn from as well. Okay, all right then, so Anne, that's what you've got on. You've got the maturity matrix to kind of maintain, and the training that you have going on. Sarah Hsu, if I hand over to you. And now that the book's out the door, what do you think happens next? Or what's, what's on your plate after this?Sarah Hsu: Well, I'm just speaking for myself, but I'm pretty sure all of us are going to be rock stars and go on a tour, go on a speaking tour and book signing tour. So yeah, I think Sara and Anne are doing QCon in April and myself, I'm not speaking this year, but we will be doing like a small book signing there. So it'd be great to see a few folks there.Myself, we'll be going to Berlin for a conference and then hopefully we'll do some book signing there as well. And one thing I really want to do is I just want to find some observability for who is also really passionate about sustainability and just see what It's just really, really chat it out about like how we can do all this is within observability.How do we actually make something observable in terms of carbon or like any environmental aspects if that makes sense.Chris Adams: Yes, that does. If you are not already speaking to some of the CNCF TAG ENV folks, I'm really excited about some of the work they're doing, and they've recently presented some stuff at KubeCon specifically about the observability thing that it's definitely worth chatting about, actually. Okay, and so,Sarah Hsu: Yeah, definitely.Chris Adams: And Sara, I'll hand over to you now. What, now that this is out the door, what's on the plate for you, now that you're coming back into the world of, like, software engineering, as opposed to looking after the little one?Sara Bergman: Yeah, out of the diaper. Well, I guess there will be still be diapers for plenty of time, but yeah, no, going back to work and then being a rockstar going on a speaker tour, like Sara said, so QCon London, which will be very fun. This is the second time only all of us see each other like in person. So very much looking forward to that.Speaking at NDC Oslo later this year. Also, the Green Software Foundation has a meetup in Oslo, which is very fun. And next, next one of those, I'll be speaking as well. So that would be really fun to like see folk on my own home turf. And yeah, after that, who knows, you know, this was so much fun. Do we do a version two?I, you know, we'll see. Right?Sarah Hsu: I think we should, I forgot to mention, we've actually have the book translated to both complex and simplified Chinese. So that's something very, very exciting. I was telling one of my best friend, my best friend was like, "Oh, now your parents don't have an excuse to not read your book," because now, my poor mother will now have to read this book.Chris Adams: Wow, I did not, that's, that's, well, it's more than a billion people. There's a, there's a readership to, to reach, and people who speak Chinese as a first language probably need to be thinking about the environmental impact of software as well, given it's the second largest economy in the world now, basically, so we've mentioned there's a growing body of resources out there for people to be looking at this. So we mentioned things like, say, some of the free training that's available from the Linux Foundation that people can pick up. And there's a book which we've spoke about, which is Building Green Software by O'Reilly that is going to be available from a number of different places. So Anne, if people do want to, obviously they know about the book, but beyond the book, where should people go if they're interested in what you were talking about or some of the things you're working on?Anne Currie: Well, at the moment, LinkedIn is, I find, is the new place where all the green chat is happening. But yeah, yeah, LinkedIn. It was lovely whilst Twitter still existed as a thing, and I'm still there, Chris Adams: drove it into a mountain, yeah.Anne Currie: Indeed. It was, yeah, I'm still there. I still find useful things there, but it's not as active as it once was.So LinkedIn is now my social media hangout.Chris Adams: Okay, alright, and then Sarah Hsu, how about you?Sarah Hsu: Similarly, I was never really on Twitter and I'm really glad I have persuaded Anne to move over from Twitter to LinkedIn. I also just can't I do want to quickly mention, we do have an email address that you can reach out to all of us. It's building.green.software@gmail.com. So if you have any feedback, any suggestions, or just want to say... please, please, yeah, just reach out to one of us.Or if you want more direct response from one of us, reach out to us on LinkedIn. Chris Adams: So if you're a retired engineer and you're going to tell people "you should be solving this all with nuclear," obviously, that's the way to, that's the place to send emails to. Okay, alright, please don't do that, actually.And, Sara, for you, where should people look if they want to keep up with some of the things you're working on?You mentioned QCon and a few things like that, but if there's a particular URL or website people should look at, then, now is your chance.Sara Bergman: Yeah, I'm also, also on LinkedIn, missing Twitter. I still hang around, or X, I guess it's called now, and feel sad about what it once was. But no, LinkedIn is the best place.Chris Adams: All right, then. Well, folks, thank you very much for sharing your time and sharing some of the insights you've learned along the way of building basically the first book about sustainability and stuff which wasn't written by men, because that's actually like about freaking time. That's very, very good. And yeah, lovely seeing you all again. Hopefully, maybe I'll see some of you in London if I get over there or possibly some of you see some of you in Berlin if you're coming over and maybe wonder if you might sign my copy if I can bring it. All right. Thanks, folks. This was fun. Really, really nice seeing you all again.Sara Bergman: Thank you, Chris. Anne Currie: Thank you.Bye bye.Sarah Hsu: Bye guys.Sara Bergman: Bye.Chris Adams: Okay, take care of yourselves. 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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams engages in a fascinating discussion with Marjolein Pordon, a quality consultant at Praegus, about the exciting synergy between sustainability and low code platforms. They explore how low code tools not only streamline software development but also play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions. Marjolein shares insights into the early integration of sustainability considerations in the development cycle, and together, they demystify the misconception that companies' unique needs necessitate custom software solutions, highlighting the efficiency and environmental benefits of leveraging shared components in low code environments.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteMarjolein Pordon: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews: Introducing Flowty - Build low carbon, self-hosted Webflow sites - Fershad Irani [23:22]Data Center Factsheet [29:36]Resources:Introduction to ESG [11:51]ESG and Climate Change | CourseraMendix [14:32]WordPress [14:39]Zapier [14:49]Creatio [14:50]N8N [15:39]Windmill.dev [22:42]OutSystems  [34:15]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:Marjolein Pordon: With all the emails we send, inclusive, reply all, the, "yes, I'll see you in a minute." All those kinds of emails, there are 12 000 times from earth to the moon with a car on carbon emission. That's huge.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 another episode of Environment Variables, the podcast where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, we often talk about optimizing code we already have, or finding out ways to make the energy we use less carbon intensive.So for the computation we do end up using, we end up with less pollution in the form of greenhouse gases and so on being emitted as a byproduct of our work. However, there's another way to look at this. If we accept that the most efficient database query possible is one that you don't have to make because you've designed a system not to need them,then you can argue that the most efficient system can be one that you haven't had to spend loads of time, energy and money building, building an entirely custom version of, because you found an existing set of components that work well together. This is essentially the argument made when people make the case that a technology stack containing open source software can be more sustainable than a closed source one.In that the cost gone into building the various components is shared across all the millions of people who would otherwise be duplicating all this effort, building their own versions of these open source, the components. But does this apply elsewhere as well, though? Low code and no code environments have grown in popularity over the last few years, and one argument in favor of using them is that by building the system, or building any system from a set of existing components offered in a kind of visual, low coding environment, you avoid the need to spend so much time, money, and yes, energy, building your own custom software in the first place.This brings up all kinds of interesting questions. Does this just mean that we end up with more software in total, because more people are building their own software, rather than a relatively small number of professional developers? And are the needs of organizations so sufficiently generic that you can use low code environments for this kind of stuff, to avoid needing all that custom code?And if you're stuck using providers who are moving slowly to transition from fossil fuel in their infrastructure, what are your options? With me to explore these ideas today is Marjolein Pordon, one of the few people I've seen talking about both sustainability and low code at the same time. Thanks for joining me today, Marjolein.Marjolein Pordon: Thanks for having me, Chris.Chris Adams: Okay, you're welcome, Marjolein. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself and what you do? And because you're the first Marjolein I've ever met, if I'm mispronouncing your name, could you please just share the pronunciation so I can use it properly when I'm later on the call? Because I'm trying my best, but you're the first Marjolein I've ever met.Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, Marjolein is a Dutch name and you're pronouncing it correct. It's like Mar and then Yo from the rapper, Yo Yo, and then a line, like a thin line. So, Marjolein, that's, that's completely correct. Well, I'm Marjolein Pordon. I'm, 38 years old. I live in the Netherlands and I'm a quality consultant for the company Praegus. Praegus is a test consultancy company, and we also have a branch that looks into low code. And one of our CEOs is very much into sustainability. So I'm really in my place there. She also thinks that we should move to an office with sun, sunlight energy, and wind energy. So it's not just me, but also in the company I work for that we have these standards and I'm now, I think eight years in the business and I really love working in IT, testing and things like that.So yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Oh, and within low code, I've had a few assignments in low code and it got me the name, nickname Lady Low Code, because I'm so passionate about low code and talking on conferences about it.Chris Adams: I'm glad you mentioned that actually. First, for the breakdown of Mar-yo-line, that's very easy to understand, but also having an alter ego like Batman is also very interesting and useful to have. And that makes it really easy to find as well for the website. That was one way that we came across you actually.So, and you mentioned a couple of things that were quite interesting there. So, oh, let me just quickly introduce myself for people who've never listened to this before. So my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. It's a Dutch-based non profit focusing on a fossil-free internet by 2030.I also work as one of the policy chairs for the Green Software Foundation's policy working group where we basically do work at the intersection of policy and green software. If you are new to this podcast, folks, we will share a transcript of everything and we also, we cover, we mentioned quite a few projects and we'll be listing those in show notes.So we'll share links to that at the end of that. So if you're listening and there's something caught your eye, please do take a look out for that, because that's one thing that we have available. Finally, okay, back to the podcast. Marjolein, I think you're sitting comfortably?Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, I am.Chris Adams: Excellent. Okay, so you mentioned that you didn't always work at this intersection and you worked in a couple of fields where you might specialize, before specialize in this niche, and you said that they've kind of influenced your thinking today, like, could you maybe elaborate on some of that?Because you spoke about, say, testing and stuff like that, and we know that some of the tools people use for testing end up being the same tools you might use for driving certain activities, driving a browser and stuff like that. So yeah, maybe if I just give you a bit of space to expand on that, then that might help listeners understand some of the connections here or how you got here.Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, I started as a software tester in 2017. My boyfriend is also a software tester and he said, "yo, you, you would be perfect for it." I started on high code, traditional projects, worked there for, I think, a year or two. And then in 2019, I was available for new assignments and I get really obnoxious then because I don't like doing nothing.So then a coworker said, "well, you can fill in for a week and a half, it's low code, it's easy. Just do your thing." And then it seemed to be not so easy because low code platforms have standards. You need to use them as required. And people didn't do that. So instead of a week and a half, I was there for a year and a half.Yeah. So, and then I noticed that if you use low code well, the reusable components make the time to market quicker, but also your energy use lower. And the platform that I was working on then, also now doesn't refer to itself as a local platform, but a sustainability platform, because they say even more important than a quick time to market is that we even can go to market.Because in the Netherlands, we see that the energy use is that high that companies are not allowed to be connected to the energy network. So that local platform said, "we need to change our way of working, because if we do not do that, we cannot make new apps. Because they're simply not the energy to do that, we'll be cut down.So we need to do this something. And if other companies don't, then that's up to them. But we make the change because we see that it's necessary for the environment." And I really like that. So I got passionate about low code on the one side and sustainability became a thing. And then in 2022, I was asked for QA&TEST to speak there on green IT. And then I got in contact with professors in Spain and in Portugal, not only on sustainable green IT, but also on the connection with low code. And, well, it got me convinced that we really need to do something because it's, it's scary how much energy resources we use, but also hardware resources we use, because if we make quicker apps, heavier apps, we need new hardware, but we are losing also those resources.So we need to change the way of thinking and low code, I think, is a good way to help us change the way we feel and think about software development.Chris Adams: Okay, that's actually... so you said a couple of quite interesting things that I haven't heard people mention before. One of the first things you spoke about was this idea that, okay, given the fact that there's, there are limits that we need to stay inside, the thing we need to do is actually, if we're going to increase the kind of utility of the services we need to do, then we need to make them more efficient.So we did, a couple episodes ago, we did one all about multi-tenancy, about the idea of like multiple people sharing the same platform and using it in a more kind of efficient way, rather than having the equivalent number of like multiple separate platforms which aren't used very much. And it seems like you're touching on some of those ideas there, because this is actually the first time I've heard groups actually take the kind of limit thing more quite seriously, because you often see folks talking about, "okay, well, we're going to make things more efficient."But if you look at the large providers, say, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, all of these providers seem to have plans to massively increase the energy use they're using. So this is actually quite a different approach that you've been laying out here. It's like, "well, actually, we're going to use efficiency to kind of book those savings rather than just use it to sell more stuff" basically. Okay. And that was actually quite cool. And the thing that you also mentioned as well was this idea about the testing aspects. Now, I think that there's a term that we spoke about before in the kind of preparation session for this. You mentioned this idea of like shifting left. So, there are things that you would do when you're a tester to make sure you can meet a set of standards.And it seems like, there's maybe some ideas about applying those things as part of a kind of process, so that you kind of maintain a certain level of efficiency or a certain level of accessibility or sustainability as well. Maybe we could just expand on a little bit of that before we move to the next point.Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, because if we look to, to testing, usually we come at the end of the development cycle. The things are made and then we test it and then we say, "well, we trust this to work or we not, and" then it needs some rebook. But what we believe as test consultants is the sooner we, the earlier we are connected, then we can think ahead.We can look to the requirements, but, and not only about the product, but also about the sustainability. Because if we create awareness with the developer. How to make his application more energy efficient, it's better to be done before he starts building. Same with the product owners and the designers and the architects.They are the ones that should design the system to be energy efficient. And if we all work together and if I as a tester know what they have done, then I can also check that. And it's going to be important because at least in Europe, we have the ESG legislation. And what I hear a lot is that small companies say, "Oh yes, but it's only for the big companies."Is it? Because if you supply to a big company, you're part of the chain. Chris Adams: Yeah.Marjolein Pordon: and you need to also document and let know that you are efficient. And it could be that you lose some big clients because you do not have the things that they need for the legislation.So Chris Adams: Yeah, I see.Marjolein Pordon: So, in the whole chain, we need to shift left.We need to use sustainability as a nonfunctional. And it works broader than just environmental sustainability. Because on the marketing part, we all know that, especially the youth want a better world. If you want those as your clients, and they're gonna grow up, they're gonna work in companies, you need to be green, then you need to show that you care for the world. So, it's not just that you save the planet, but you also save your brand, you save the way people look at you, and you make sure that you are there in a few years.Chris Adams: I see, okay, so you're referring to like, essentially retaining talent and actually attracting people who are basically looking around and thinking, "hey, we should probably be doing something on this climate thing." And if a company is not kind of living those values, that's going to make them think twice about even, "should I join this organization?Should I choose to work in this field?" And so on. Okay, thanks, Marjolein. Okay, so we've spoken about low code and no code, and you mentioned that there's like one, you're working for one provider. Maybe it might help to just get a bit concrete, because it's quite a wide ranging term. So when we talk about things like, say, low code, maybe we could talk about some of the kind of better known services, so people get an idea of what they might look for.So what is, like, a low code system in this case, or who are the companies that do this kind of stuff, perhaps? If you could talk about that, and then maybe we might see if there's any open source equivalents that might be useful for developers who are listening, or people who might want to take some other steps into this field.Marjolein Pordon: I'm not connected to a particular platform. I have worked, I think, with five platforms, but as an independent tester, what we see is you have different kinds of low code. So some are in the workflow management, you have CRM systems. Webpages, ERP systems, all based on reusable codes and those can be modular.So like Mendix likes to call drag and drop.I have a component, I drag it and put it in. WordPress works the same way, but then you build a website. Those like Workflow and Aden, I think is a one, and Zapier,Chris Adams: Mm.Marjolein Pordon: and for CRM you have Creatio, and all that I mentioned are open source tooling. And I think that's important because like you said, if you share that knowledge and share those, that code, people don't have to make it their own and they don't have to invent the wheel again.That's I think important because you don't have to know everything. You need to know where to get it. But also, the energy efficiency and the environmental impact is way lower if we reuse code.Chris Adams: Okay, thank you for that. So to reiterate, so when we're talking about low code and no code, we might be talking about, so you mentioned a few platforms that people may have heard of. So one is Zapier, which is very, very common that will basically plug into an existing software as a service and then let you make a transform.And then, and there was another one you mentioned, which was N8N, which is a little bit like a kind of open source, well, open source like equivalent. I'm not sure if they're technically using an open source, it's more like source available, but the general idea is you can run it on your own servers, so you can have a similar idea of pulling information from one place and having little bits of javascript or something like that you run there, with the idea being that you have multi-tenancy, lots of people using the same things, because you'll need a little bit of code rather than having a whole running one.And you also mentioned that Mendix, which is a more visual option, and, okay, and some of them which are more specifically tied to an existing, say, enterprise system or something like that. Okay, thanks for that. Okay, so we spoke a little bit about, in the intro, some of the arguments people use about where low code might fit into this kind of, into this world of green software and reducing the total resource requirements of, of anything like this, and we've spoken about the idea of lots and lots of people using, say, shared low code.Shared components in a centralized service. Now, this implies that lots of companies have problems which are similar enough to each other that you can actually solve something like this. And when I've spoken to people in various organizations, they often, one, a common kind of theme is, "oh, our stuff is so unique that the only way we could possibly do this is by hiring a really, really expensive specialized developer because only they, only they could possibly capture the uniqueness of our organization." And this seems to suggest that's not the case. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that, like, is it that companies are over indexing on how unique they are, or where does this fit in, or are there some parts that you can do, but there's still places where you might need a specialist, for example? Maybe you could kind of share a little bit about that, actually.Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, well, it might not be a popular opinion, but I feel that companies need to convince themselves they're unique because how else are they going to stand out? And what I see with companies that embrace low code is that they say, "well, we choose to look for the components we have in common with other companies. And if we build those components, those modules, those parts that we need in low code, we have time left, we have money left, we have expertise left to build those few things that are customized." So we all know software projects takes ages, deadlines are never met, but what if we use those components that are alike, because every company has parts that align. If I sell something, I need a cash register.I need a website, all those things align. And if I need a small part that's not aligned that I want different from my competitors, then I can build, let that build by that said expensive developer. But that developer only has to do that little part for maybe a week or two weeks. And the rest is built in low code.It's energy efficient. I save money. I save time. And I invest for just those parts that I really want to stand out in. And it can also mean that you think that you're just like everything and you build everything in low code and what you save in money, you can add to invest in your company, add new products, do your marketing. So there, the, the low code embracers, I feel say, "yes, we are unique, but we use what we have in common to do in low code and what we do not have in common and stand out, we invest in that."Chris Adams: Okay, I can follow that argument now, actually. And there's maybe one question I have for you, is basically how these platforms are built, because usually, like, rather than paying to have an entire server or something like that, you might pay for kind of per use, and this is like an argument people make with serverless computing is like if you're paying for the requests or you're just paying for the amount of computation on a kind of per second basis, then you have an incentive to reduce the amount of computation you're using because you have it linked much there, there's a much clearer incentive for you to do this.Are, is this common? Do you, are there, is it fairly common for, say, low coding tools to bill for, like, provide granular billing in terms of, like, a request made or a kind of run or a workflow? Like, what are the units that people tend to use when they're looking at something like that?Marjolein Pordon: The bigger platforms I noticed have trouble or are not quite there yet to do that. But there are smaller platforms who say, "well, this is the way we do it." And I think that that's creating of awareness. What does my system do? Because I pay for it. And we all know money is a big, big incentive to say, "Oh, wow.Why am I doing this?" And when I did my, my talk in 2022, I did some research and what I noticed is what we do in social media every day. And I had a thing that if the miles from earth to the moon with all the emails we send, inclusive, reply all, the "yes, I'll see you in a minute," all those kinds of emails, there are 12 000 times from earth to the moon with a car on carbon emission.That's huge. Every single day by every mails we send and that are sent. 12 000 times, so 6 000 times to the moon and back again every single day. That's huge. When I knew that I was going through my newsletters, which one am I reading? Actually reading. Not reading? Sorry, I unsubscribe. And that's only maybe a hundred emails in the year, but still it's a hundred less. So that was for me an eye-opener. But if I had a bill every month of a hundred euros because of emails that were polluting and that I wasn't even reading or even opening,Chris Adams: Then you're going to think about that, Marjolein Pordon: then the awareness would even bigger. So I think that's it. Yeah, so I think that the platforms that are doing that billing are really good. Because that's the best way for awareness.Chris Adams: Okay, all right, thank you for that. That makes sense, and there are a few cases that, a few of them, I do believe, expose some of these metrics to you like that. At climateaction.tech, one of the communities I run, we use N8N that provides some of this for some of these things, and I've seen similar things with windmill.dev, which also gives some of these, exposes some of these numbers. So we spoke a little bit about the efficiency part. There's also one thing that came up, is, okay, if you're using one platform, for example, there's going to be there'll be things that you cannot change because they are kind of with the provider's decision.For example, if you're, like one example I can think of is, there's a service called Webflow. This is a kind of low code tool for designing websites. And they run on AWS, who for the last few years have been less ambitious on climate in terms of greening their own supply than say Microsoft or Google, based on like the things that we see in the public domain, for example, and I know there was one example, there was a project called Flowty by a chap called Fershad Irani.One thing, one thing he basically did was he looked at where you could do this, and because the thing that gets built is maybe a, say, a static website that's created by Webflow, he was like, well, if you've got this, maybe you can move this to a greener provider, for example, and, or maybe you can apply some kind of digital sustainability techniques to reduce the size of the page and do things like that, right?Now, this was one example of like a low code service, which was like, if you're going through maybe Webflow, for example, you're tied to kind of infrastructure which where, the people providing that are not as ambitious as some other groups, for example, so you're kind of stuck there. There are cases where there are options.So you can say, "well, I like what you're using, but can you move to another provider?" Or, "If you don't do this, then I will move to another provider" themselves. Maybe you could talk a little bit about like what your options are if you are using some of these tools. Because one of the things I've heard people say about no code or low coding tools is like, "yeah, they're great, but now I'm stuck inside this specific environment where I have no other way of moving away from that."Maybe you could touch on what are your options if you do want to ask your provider to improve the sustainability further down in the stack, for example?Marjolein Pordon: Well, what I noticed is one of the big platforms, Mendix, has made it a big issue. And that's because a lot of their clients pushed them and then the majority counts. Then they need to do it because they don't want big clients to walk away. Again, they are part of the chain of big companies, so the ESG legislation is probably also haunting them, which is good. But yeah, vendor locking is a big issue in low code because for example, I have an application built in Java, C#, whatever. The developer that I have or the service that I use or the company that I use, I don't like, we have issues, we part. And I just hire another Java developer, but if I do not like the platform, same with if I wouldn't like Excel or if I wouldn't like Word, everything that I did in there, I need to migrate. And it's not easy. I mean, I could open things in Google Docs, if I went from Word to Google Docs. But still, I could have issues with the outline, with the layout, things like that. So migrating from one platform to another is not easy. And the integration with platforms, like if I had used one platform and then I think, no, I don't want it, but the application can stay there, but I built something new in another platform. The connection is, is really hard because I always say, Lego wants you to use Lego and not K'nex.So, and maybe you can connect K'nex to Lego, but it won't be easy. It won't be good on usability. So yeah, the vendor locking is definitely a thing. So before you start with a local platform, wherever you need it for, do your research search on, "is this the platform I want now and in the future?"And not only on, "does it work for my company," but also "what legislations are coming, are they sustainable, what is my client group wanting?" Things like that.Chris Adams: Okay, so there's not just, so there's, you're talking, there's almost like some, a case of about alignment you need to be checking for, but also kind of influence you might have as well as actually just saying, is this really convenient for me right now, for example. Okay, all right. That's actually quite helpful.The one thing I can share with you when I was looking through this that other listeners might find interesting, especially if they are developers, there's, we've come across some tools which are open source. They provide kind of low code like environments, but they also allow you to kind of drop down into your preferred programming language.One thing I've really been quite impressed with is one organization, one project called windmill.dev. So it's an open source, kind of low code platform, but it's more like a... it's a platform where you have visual ways of working, but there's also a way that you can drop into pretty much your own language, or use any kind of docker container.And that, because the actual platform itself is open, that's one thing, but also the fact that you can drop down into languages that maybe developers might be familiar with, means that you, that reduces some of the lock in to an extent. And I think that's actually quite a promising path to go down, because yeah, you, have that separation that we know in other, in other kind of sectors.Having separation of different layers does allow for you to have more options on the table. Okay, so can I, if I can, can I just come back to one thing that you spoke about before? Because I was really surprised, and actually quite impressed by the whole thing about saying, "well, okay, we're going to use this as a, as a absolute limit in energy we can use.So the only way we can do this is by increasing, if we want to grow, then we need to make more efficient use of this rather than just say, we're just going to keep growing as fast as we can, and we're not really going to think about the resource requirements." So we spoke about this idea of, and this is one thing, an ongoing discussion in green software, which is about basically growth and the idea of the rebound effect.Are you familiar? There's a term called the rebound effect, which basically refers to this idea that if you make something more efficient, you can increase the total usage of this just because it's become more accessible to more people. And one of the key things around tools like low code is that yes, you're democratizing access to computation, but it also increases the number of people who might be making systems as well, which can have some similar effects.So maybe you could talk a little bit about the conversation and how you've seen that evolve in the Netherlands specifically, because that's somewhere where you have seen, like moratorium on new data centers being built, which has meant that you've had to, it's forced some of the conversations that are probably not happening quite so quickly in other parts of the world.And this was, yeah, you brought this up at the beginning of the podcast, so it feels like it might be worth just spending a bit more time looking into that.Marjolein Pordon: Yeah. Because if you look at data centers, we have, I think, three big ones in the Netherlands. And the one I think in Lelystad uses as much energy as the whole of Amsterdam. That's huge. One data center takes up the same amount of energy as the main city of our country. And that's huge. That's crazy if you think about it, because we cannot build at the houses we need at the moment because of the nitro legislation, because there's not energy, there's not enough water, and those data centers use water and energy of a complete city. So if we do not have that data center in the Netherlands, then we could build a complete city of Amsterdam. Think of all the houses we could build. So this is quite a discussion in the Netherlands. Arjen Lubach is a guy who makes, is a television presenter, and he makes those kind of reports on this.So also to make us aware, because they are built for a part with our money from the taxpayers. So we are aware that it gives jobs, a data center. We need it and that it's good for Google and AWS to be here, but they're not energy efficient. And well, one of the politicians said, we need them to give back because they're here in the Netherlands,they use, okay they pay for the energy and for the water, but they need to give something back also for sustainability. And what we now are looking into is that they heat water to cool down their data centers. But we could use that water to heat cities with city heating. So then we, then they should make sure that there are pipelines to the city next to the data center. And then the warm water from the data center can flow through the houses and heat them. And then when the water is cooled down, it can go back to the data center and then you have the rebound effect and you can reuse the hot water to heat the houses and the cool water can go back to the data centers. And data centers said, "no, no, that costs too much money." And we are in the Netherlands now working on a legislation that will make sure they have to do that. If you want a data center in the Netherlands, then you need to build it, and you need to build the system to heat houses. And I think that's good because then you're cooperating, then you're working together and making sure that we need the data centers, but they can give back and work together so that we can still have a better environment because if we go on like this, they had, I think, requirements for 2030 in the Netherlands. Well, we're not going to meet them. And then they said, "well, no, but we'll make them in 2040." Yeah. And in 2030, you'll say 2050. We need to do something now. And I think that by making this happen, saying to a big company like Google, "fine, you have your data center, but these are the requirements or else." It's just necessary to do this.Chris Adams: Okay, that's a very different take that we've seen in other parts of the world when discussing this actually. And what we can do is we can share some links to some of those points because I haven't heard those stats and those numbers presented in that way before actually. Marjolein, I just want to check up.So we've spoke, we've covered quite a lot of ground. We spoke about like low code and things like that. If people do want to, if they found some of this interesting and they are, they're looking to take some of their first steps into low code, into the set field. Could you maybe just like suggest a few places where people should be looking to either get either learn in their own time with some like training or if there are any particular projects that you would want to draw people's attention to for this?Marjolein Pordon: Well, for the low code part, most applications have their own playground and learning environments, which are quite good. So I would start there on the low code part. There are not many general courses on low code, but I'll check them after we're done with the podcast and then I'll, we'll add them to the show links. Chris Adams: And if there was maybe one platform people might work with or start with or is there one that you would suggest people take some of their first steps with for example or something like that if they're coming in to begin with they just want to start kicking the tires and trying it out, for example?Marjolein Pordon: Well, I would start with like a Mendix or an OutSystems or things like that, where you have a lot of information and a community behind so that you get the hang of what is low code, what are the standards that you need to work with. And if you have done like one or two of those, then you see the common grounds and then the other platforms will be a lot easier.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. All right. Well, Marjolein, thank you very much for that. If we're just coming to the end of our time now. So if people have found this interesting and they want to follow what you're doing, where would you suggest people look? Is there a website or is there maybe a pro, is there like, where, where are you online for people to follow your updates and see what you're, see what you're doing going forward?Marjolein Pordon: I'll follow LadyLowCode at my tag at Instagram and Twitter is @LadyLowCode. LinkedIn is Marjolein Pordon and my website is www.ladylowcode.com.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay, well, Marjolein, thank you so much for giving the, making the time to chat with us today. As we mentioned before, we'll run through this to make sure we've got show note links for all the things that we discussed here. And yeah, have a lovely week, all right? Take care, Marjolein.Marjolein Pordon: Thank you, Chris.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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams delves into the fascinating topic of the rebound effect with Vlad Coroamă, founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability. They discuss how improvements in efficiency can sometimes paradoxically lead to increased consumption, using examples like teleworking and online shopping to illustrate the point. Through their conversation, they explore why this happens and what conditions make it more likely. Their insights shed light on the complexities of balancing technological advancement with environmental sustainability, offering valuable perspectives for anyone interested in building greener digital services.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteVlad Coroamă: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Assessing the Potential Energy Savings of a Fluidified Infrastructure | Computer [14:40]Digitalisation and the Rebound Effect - by Vlad Coroama (ICT4S School 2021) [22:45] A Methodology for Assessing the Environmental Effects Induced by ICT Services | Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability [32:20]Events:ICT4S 2024 [41:36]Resources:Roegen Centre for Sustainability [03:00]https://pythonspeed.com/articles/software-jevons-paradox/ [05:36]The Coal Question | Online Library of Liberty  [06:34]Khazzoom–Brookes postulate - Wikipedia [10:02]Sustainability in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Reviewhttps://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lET2Yco=/?moveToWidget=3074457359170346418&cot=14  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:Vlad Coroama: When there is rebound, but if your digital service makes the activity sort of more affordable or simply more desirable, and it will be consumed more, but it will have changed in such a way that the footprint of the new activity, the modified one, is much smaller than the original one. And then although you might have rebound, the overall balance will be net positive.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 another episode of Environment Variables. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, the notion of efficiency comes up quite a lot. Take two forms of efficiency explicitly called out by the Green Software Foundation, software efficiency and hardware efficiency.In the first case, you're talking about how much energy is needed to perform a given amount of computation. And in the second case, you're talking about how much hardware might need to be created by extracting material from the environment, refining it, then turning it into electronics that we run computation on.In isolation, it's quite hard to argue against efficiency, and we can point to literally years of data showing how increases in efficiency in computing have blunted what might otherwise be eye-watering increases in the amount of energy consumption and other resources we have gone through in absolute terms.Thing is, efficiency has second order effects too, because making things more efficient can make them more accessible too. Increasing the number of people who can use them. And we can point back to published work in 1865, observing this happen with coal-powered steam engines. So the common term for this is the Rebound Effect. And joining me today to explore what it means for greening digital services is Vlad Coroama of the Roegen Center for Sustainability.I first came across Vlad's work when at a green cloud procurement workshop in 2019 held by the European Commission in Brussels. And over the years, I've had his writing and presentations about the rebound effect and digital sustainability, some of the most incisive and accessible work on the topic, on the subject.Before I embarrass him further though, I think it might make sense to give him a bit of space to introduce himself. So Vlad, thank you so much for joining. I've been looking forward to this. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself before we get into the meat of it?Vlad Coroama: Hi Chris, many thanks for your kind intro, of course, for having me on your program. So I'm Vlad, the founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability, which is a small company based in Zürich, Switzerland which tries to do a research, actually, more research than consultancy in the field of computing and sustainability, or if you want more from a, more from a deployment perspective, digitalization and sustainability.Actually before that, this quite recent and before that for my entire life, I've been an academic and I've worked in the fields of computing and sustainability and also the more technical one of smart energy for about two decades now. And with both these hats on, so both with the more sort of hands on engineering system developing hat on, and with the more theoretical hat, what my work, which of course in the beginning, it was not so clear where the path leads to, but it became more and more clear that I want to understand how we can both make computing more sustainable, which is if you want perhaps green IT to use a general term, but also to see, and perhaps in my view, more importantly, to see how we can deploy computing or digitalization again from a deployment perspective, to induce environmental benefits across our societies and economies. So in other sectors, sometimes that it's often called Green by IT and these indirect effects, as you said, it's not only about direct effects, this is very much about indirect effects, are, or can be, so much more powerful than the direct footprint. And unfortunately, it's not only the positive effect. So it's not only how can we do, you know, society and economy more sustainable, by the way, society, societally sustainable as well. We'll talk mainly about the environment today, but much of what we discuss applies to societal implications as well, but to come back, so it's not only positive effects.We also have, unfortunately, this indirect detrimental effects to sustainability, both societal, I mean, we've seen elections and so on, right? But also environmentally. That is, computing or ICT can induce more energy and material consumption, increased emissions, increased pollution, and so on in other sectors.And with this, I think we sort of arrive at the topic of our discussion today, which is rebound.Chris Adams: Indeed. Yes. Thank you very much for that, Vlad. So, just if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. That's a Dutch-based nonprofit focused on reaching an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030. I'm also the, one of the policy chairs of the Green Software Foundation's policy working group.And here's a quick reminder, we're going to be covering a few papers and a few projects and links and websites. We have show notes at the end of every single episode, and there'll also be a transcript. So if there's something you miss, we will have that available so you can kind of catch up with this or basically submit pull requests if you see things you need to correct. All right, Vlad, are you good to go? I think, should we start with this? Okay, then. So we spoke about this. The topic of this is Greening the Rebound Effect. And I've touched on what the rebound effect is, but for the uninitiated who want to learn more than what I just said, what is the rebound effect?And maybe you could tell us a little bit about where it comes from and whether it's a new thing.Vlad Coroama: Okay. Thanks. So as you said in the introduction, your introduction, the very first time that we know this has been mentioned, it was in 1865 by the British economist, William Stanley Jevons, who wrote a book, The Coal Question, it's called, and it was about what we today call rebound effect, we called it such back then.And by the way, this is a very cool thing, as a computer scientist, you seldomly get to cite, you know, a paper older than 20, 30 years, so it's really, it's really nice when writing a paper, you know, to cite something from the 19th century. So what Jevons noticed was that the more efficient steam engines and other, you know, coal using machinery was becoming in the 19th century.At first glance, paradoxically, the overall coal consumption was not decreasing, but increasing and increasing at a very larger rate. So this is not necessarily counterintuitively, but yet it requires an explanation why. And of course the explanation is that the amount of engines was increasing becausethe more coal, the more efficient machines were becoming, and by the way, some of these machines were steam engines that were helping in the very coal extraction. So coal extraction itself was becoming more efficient and thus cheaper. So both the running the machines was becoming cheaper and accessing coal was cheaper.And this means you could deploy the coal for many more machines doing the same stuff that had been done before and for entirely new applications. And this is basically what we now call the direct free buffer, which means a good or a service becomes more efficient because the energy is more efficient or some other material that flows into it.So it is more efficient to produce that good or service, thus it becomes more affordable. And thus, as we know from neoclassic, since Adam Smith, basically the demand for it tends to increase. So that's the first phenomenon. And this, by the way, lay dormant for over a century and late seventies, early eighties of the 20th century, of course, due to new researchers, Khazzoom and Brookes, Chris Adams: Ah, yeah. Vlad Coroama: we rediscovered the phenomenon in wave of the two oil crises, was the context.And basically they talked about the same, about the direct rebound effect. And then this developed also to what we now would call the indirect rebound effect, which is actually an umbrella term for a variety of mechanisms and phenomena. But all have in common that something becomes more accessible in a way.Some resource is being saved or is being used more efficiently. And that resource can be energy, but it can be any material. But it can also be immaterial stuff, such as time, and this we call time rebound. So if a technology saves us time, we'll do something with that time that likely will also require energy and produce emission.Or if it saves us money, as before, we might not spend those money on more of the same good. But, and this is called the income effect, and this is another type of indirect rebound effect, we might use the disposable income to, you know, do something else that in itself might be energy intensive and, you know, responsible for lots of emissions.Chris Adams: Okay. So, so we've got the Jevons. So there's Jevons paradox where it initially started with, and I believe you spoke about Khazzoom and Brookes. I think it's, is it called the posh term, the Khazzoom–Brookes postulate? Something like that. It's like the kind of term you'd use at a cocktail party to impress people.And then you've also described, there's a few different flavors of rebound that we might talk about, and they might have different degrees of magnitude. And this is something we're going to, we can talk about a little bit later. So in time, you know, if I'm, if I save a bunch of money by buying a bunch of things at, say, a supermarket, a cheap supermarket, I might end up spending a bunch of money either eating out or buying, getting coffee, you know, posh coffee and stuff like that.So that's, those are the, some of the rebound effects you're talking about. Okay. All right. Thank you for that potted history there, actually. And I didn't realize that it was so much based around the seventies, because presumably that's like relation to the oil crisis and when people suddenly started caring a lot more about efficiency.Right?Vlad Coroama: Yes. And actually they saw that and then also a more fuel efficient cars came around also in the U S and, but still the overall fuel consumption, not maybe short term during the, you know, the crazy months of the oil crisis, but over several years, the oil consumption, the petrol and so on was still increasing.And that's how, so for a similar sort of trigger as Jevons, a century earlier, they started looking at it, how does this happen? And what they saw is people drive their cars more.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Thank you for that. And, so when we're talking about things becoming cheaper and more accessible and more widespread. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to think about things like electronics getting cheaper or more widespread, even cloud computing becoming cheap or more widespread.So I guess maybe it's worth me kind of moving to this. So if we're gonna talk about things like the rebound effect or things like this, or why efficiency gains matter in the context of building digital services, maybe I could actually ask like, why does this matter when we talk about digital computing?And why does it matter in a world where we are seeing more laws being passed now and a kind of influx of new kind of legislation or people setting new norms about this?Vlad Coroama: So it, it matters, as you say, of course, this happens within computing as well, or within ICT, let's say, I think it's Koomey's law that, that says,Chris Adams: Is the network halves every 18 months or something, isn't it?Vlad Coroama: Yeah, it's that basically we are, or a consequence of Koomey's law, a consequence, not directly Koomey's law, is that we use all our gains for more computing and not for, you know, less energy intensive computing. And this of course makes sense. But the problem I think with computing or what does it mean, the, the big challenge of computing, but also environmentally, what can become an issue is that it's general purpose technology and that it induces efficiency, not only within computing, but also, and crucially outside it.So we, when we talk about the rebound effect of, again, computing/ICT/digitalization, choose the term that you prefer... we have to distinguish between the rebound within ICT itself, more computing, perhaps, you know, more cloud, whatever, it's more affordable. But crucially, I think also the rebound outside this in all the other sectors that digitalization makes more efficient.Chris Adams: I see. So there's, so in the context of digital, one thing you're saying is that, yes, there is, obviously we should be mindful of an efficiency argument, but because if you just only talk about efficiency rather than consumption, you can lose sight of the full picture and. If you take a second to step outside, the efficiency that you might see at a kind of digital level could also have likeabsolute increases or decreases accordingly. So you should be, so we need to take, we need to be looking at the two of these basically.Vlad Coroama: Yes, exactly.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that. That's actually, okay, that's quite helpful. And I suppose when we talk about efficiency, it's worth looking at some of the numbers, for example.So we have seen, say computing get quite a bit more efficient, but we've also seen, basically, we've also seen, for example, some of the hyperscalers, we've seen hyperscale companies like say Microsoft, Google and Amazon, it's not like they've stayed the same size and they haven't grown.We ;have seen them growing, even as things get more efficient. So these are one of the things where we need to be somewhat aware of, yes, the absolute figures in this as well as the efficiency part here. And we've spoken about how, there's, digital can have an impact on the outside world, and you might be talking to things like, so like transportation examples or like ride hailing, things like that is what you're referring?Maybe you could expand on some of those. Cause I think these are the things that I've seen you talk about quite eloquently in other places, actually.Vlad Coroama: Yes, because there is the hope, right? And very often we have the claims that ICT or digitalization, let's say now, makes so much of the world more efficient by coordinating it better, by, you know, finding patterns, by we all know how Google did its cloud more efficient and so on. But then there are many other fields outside.And in all of them, I see a pattern of how in the beginning everyone says, or a lot of the voices say, "Hey, great, you know, now we have your efficiency. Now it will be so much better." It's a sort of a techno-utopianism, if you want. I will give two-three examples. The one I will start with this one, I'm writing now actually about the rebound effects of teleworking.And I've, so I've been reviewing many studies and it's very funny because the very early studies, teleworking has been around long before sort of the World Wide Web made it into the homes. Since the 70s, they started talking about this. And the first papers have titles such as, you know, 'Traffic Reduction by Telecommuting' and then similar things.And then through the work of Jack Niles, it was, and especially Patricia Mokhtarian in the nineties already, they started to understand, "oops, wait, wait, wait, there is also lots of rebound effect." And today's papers have titles such as, you know, 'Does home-based telework reduce household total travel?' So lots of questions marked there.You know, does telecommuting promote sustainable travel and physical activity? Does telecommuting reduce commuting emissions? And so on. These all, and I have many more, but I will not go into them. But so the phenomenon that happens there is that, yes, teleworking in first instance, of course, if you don't travel to work and travel is energy intensive, much more so than, you know, the little bit of energy that we consume now to have a call, it saves energy in the sum.But then, because you have more time, because you are more flexible, you start, and because before you used to do other things while going to work or coming, you used to have multi purpose trips. So you, I don't know, dropping kids at school, you know, going to the gym, doing grocery, whatever. those other reasons still exist.So you will still undertake other trips and much more so than you have subtle effects. If you only need to commute, say, twice per week to work, you might be very tempted to move much farther away from work, you know, in a nice countryside where the kids can play, you know, in nature and safely and so on.And then you only commute twice instead of five. Well, four or five times per week, but for much longer distance and perhaps no, you can no longer do it by public transportation because you're not urban anymore, but you have to do it by car. And that's a classic. And this became more and more clear. So teleworking is not clear actually now whether, you know, the net effect is a positive or negative.And I will not go into this detail for others, but we have this for e-commerce or slash online shopping as well. Again, lots of enthusiasm environmentally in the beginning, and then you see that many other things happen. You know, you, all of a sudden you order much more. It's so easy to order from the couch at 11 pm, you know, you don't need to go to the store. So all the consumption increases, or now more recently with AI, with autonomous vehicles. And this is perhaps the last example I want to give, and I think you've heard this before because it's a favorite example of mine. Also in the beginning, we had lots of enthusiasm, you know, how the cars will like coordinate with each other.And then, you know, they, at some point we won't need traffic lights anymore. So then don't need to brake and waste energy and then reaccelerate. But this is all peanuts. What actually will happen is that, you know, they will substitute, autonomous vehicles will substitute a lot of public transportation because it will be so much more convenient to be driven by car and be able to work in the car or, you know, read a book, discuss whatever. So use the time efficiently.Chris Adams: Okay. So you spoke about these, there's quite a few examples then of the rebound effect resulting in basically first in like direct efficiency leading to increases in usage in other ways, with some kind of actually quite vivid examples there. And that's, that feels like a nice segue to talk about, okay, we have this idea around rebound.And there's different kinds of rebound that can take place. But as I understand it, there are certain conditions that make rebound more likely or increase the effects of rebound versus, making them somewhat smaller, for example. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that because I remember hearing about the kind of like vivid example of autonomous driving.Like you mentioned, there was, yes, it increases the, it lowers the threshold of you doing things to the point that, you know, there's there's a famous study about someone sending autonomous cars to just pick up a sandwich they left at home because it was so easy to do now. And that's obviously not going to be a sustainability win.So maybe you could talk a little bit about when you do see rebound and what conditions make it more likely to happen versus maybe when it's not so likely to happen, perhaps.Vlad Coroama: Yeah, there are, I do not have general rules to provide an answer. So I cannot tell you this precise, you know, class of applications or yeah, digital services are more likely to rebound than the other not. But I can give you a couple of hints or perhaps examples, and the easiest is to start with that, with the example of the vacuum cleaner that you mentioned earlier, and which is of course outside digitalization, but I think it's very nice to understand the phenomenon. When the bagless cleaners emerged to, Dyson was the first on roads to invent them.They also became so much more efficient. So they used to consume 1.5 to 2 kilowatt of power, and now they are 4-500 watts. So a factor of it's like 20 to 25%, a factor of four to five, reduced power. And the question is, do we vacuum much more? So it is of course, cheaper to run them. Do we vacuum much more?Probably we do it a bit because, you know, they are also more convenient. They are cordless very often and so it's easier to grab them. But certainly this rebound is relatively small and not, you know, 400% it doesn't overcompensate with certainty, because, well, you only need so much to vacuum your house and it's probably also not the most people... the favorite activity for most.So one of this thing is when there is something like, when the demand is satisfied,Chris Adams: Ah, like an upper limit.Vlad Coroama: not have rebound, you need to not have the rebound mechanism. And this mechanism being often, not always, again, it can be with time or transaction costs or other things, but often it is monetary.You save money and then you, you know, consume more of that good. And in this case, if the demand is satisfied, then you don't need more. So, for example, smart heating in a home, to come again now back to computing, if you have smart heating, I mean, we used to have our homes up to the seventies, even at 13, 14 degrees centigrade in winter.We don't do it anymore. We all have whatever 19, 20, 21, wherever we feel comfortable and we don't need more than that. So, a smart heating system will make our, our heating more efficient, then we'll save 10%. And that can be financially quite interesting. We'll not use those money to hit more because there is no need for it.I mean, we might perhaps, you know, let a bit more fresh air in and thus waste a bit more energy, but it will certainly not compensate the savings. So that would be one such example where at least a directory bound. It is, is unlikely,Chris Adams: Ah, I see. I'm really glad you mentioned the vacuum one because I remember watching your talk just after I bought a cordless vacuum cleaner myself, and I remember saying like, "okay, there's an upper limit to how clean my flat can actually be." And like, yeah, it's a lot more fun to use, but yeah, I, it doesn't make me... making me slightly more efficient at vacuum cleaning does, it didn't double how much I enjoy vacuum cleaning, right?Well, I might enjoy it more, but there's an absolute upper amount of vacuum cleaning hours I'm prepared to invest into my flat, for example. Okay. So that's, so there's this upper limit of satisfaction that if you have something like that, that's maybe one kind of hint that you might be looking for, for example, and we might be able to kind of take some ideas into another domain domain for that.Vlad Coroama: And if you want, I can give another such hint. So when there is rebound, but if you sort of, if your digital service makes the activity sort of more affordable or simply more desirable and it will be consumed more. But it will have changed in such a way that the footprint of sort of the new activity, the modified one, is much smaller than the original. And then although you might have rebound, the overall balance will be net positive.And again, a short example outside of digitalization is LED lamps, right? There is certainly, once you have LED lamps, there is certainly a rebound in the, in a sort of light rebound, in the amount of light that you're using. You will, because you know, they take six watts and not 60 anymore. You are not so concerned with like turning it off anymore.So there is some light rebound, but in terms of energy, the rebound is really small because even if you leave it like twice as much, you will still save 80 percent and not 90 percent, but still the net save will be... and the same in digitalization. We did, for example, a conference for it in 2009 between two continents.And that conference happened at two sites simultaneously in Nagoya, Japan, and in Davos in Switzerland. Of course, it was a seven hour difference, so there was just a four hour common slot in the Swiss morning and the Japanese afternoon. And why we did this? Because for a conference, the main environmental impact are flights of participants to the conference, and in particular, intercontinental flights.So the hope was to save intercontinental flights. And according to our survey afterwards, we have indeed succeeded to save some, around 80 intercontinental flights of people who would have flown to the other side of the world. And we induced much more, around 200 intracontinental flights. But you know, a short haul flight has such a smaller footprint than a long haul flight that although we had many more participantsand many more flights. Because those flights were much shorter, the overall impact was still positive. And again, we only talk direct rebound here. I like to stress this point. The system boundaries, as they say in environmental sciences, the system boundaries of indirect rebound are basically the words. So it is very, very tough and we do not have yet the right tools to profoundly assess the, you know, the overall impact of digital technologies, unfortunately. And this is one of the areas I'm most interested in.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Can we just dive into that a little bit more before we move into the next topic? So you spoke, we spoke a little bit about say, forms of rebound where there's an upper limit where there is, it's like me having a more efficient vacuum cleaner is one thing. And then you mentioned this other thing where there is like,where you're somehow, where the savings end up being kind of almost somewhat circular. So if I'm, maybe I can reduce, say the cost of cloud computing, you mentioned that in many cases, because I've made it cheaper, I would then recirculate those into doing more rather than actually reducing the total energy use.Is there anything, have you, maybe you could expand a little bit more on that part, because when I think about things like, say, AI, or I think about some kind of, some things related to cloud computing, we can totally see this, and there are very much arguments basically being made right now, that say, "Oh, well, all you need to do is focus on your cloud bill going down by half," for example, "and then that will be, and that will achieve your savings."Well, that's what you need to care about." And it sounds like, if I was to focus a bunch of time into halving my cloud bill, I'd then have a product manager or my CEO say, "well, okay, look at all this, look at all this money we've saved. Let's reinvest it into doing more so we can do, so we can have more of a competitive advantage in our particular field," for example.Vlad Coroama: Yeah, of course, if you want... reducing your impact means always reducing your overall impact and not becoming more efficient. So in a sort of narrow view of what you asked, if your manager came to you and said, "hey, let's be twice as efficient," the answer should be "no, let's overall consume less." This being said of course, it's again, it's very difficult because AI in particular, and AI is the most uncertain domain, as you very well know, or certainly one of the most uncertain how it will develop in terms of energy consumption.And so it might go through the roof or it might not, you know, and it will depend on so many factors, but it also has, it brings about, and I keep coming back to the indirect effect. Sorry for that. But, you know, you cannot forget them. So I hear very often the argument of sobriety, of digital sobriety.And of course, it's good because to achieve various, you know, goals, whether they're achievable or not, or any goal, any limit we want to achieve, of course, all sectors have to go down. But then AI can use substantial societal or environmental benefits when it's environmental benefits, and if you can really put your finger on them, then it's easy.Then you, then it's a no-brainer. Of course, it's worth spending, you know, the additional data center to train our models better. Also, by the way, the energy consumption in our devices for a model inference. Because, for example, I have now a paper under review where we measured a bakery chain in Germany and they deployed AI to predict the demand for bread and thus to reduce food waste and the results show, so we made a sort of a benefit-cost analysis.And the benefits, energetically speaking, are so much larger than the costs of deploying that AI system, training it, inferencing and so on. So when there is, then it's a bit of a no brainer. Unfortunately, you sometimes have, you know, societal benefit at an environmental cost. And then it again becomes harder because then it's a scientifically non-answerable question, then it's an ideological question, right?"How important?" Or a value-based question. But to come back to actually your question, because I think I went perhaps a little too far away from that, I keep, I keep bringing the indirect effects because I think they are so underrepresented in the discourse, both academic, but even more so societal.So your question was about the efficiency of, or could you say it again? Sorry.Chris Adams: Yes, so the question I'm putting is, say, if I want to reduce emissions, it's very easy for me to just talk about, "look at how much more efficient I can be" if I'm a developer, I often think that, you know, I've, I'm incentivized and I am rewarded by making things more efficient. It feels like, if I just focus on halving that cloud bill, for example, there's a risk that they'll just bring that cloud bill back up again, for example, or bring the environmental impact back up again by using some of the savings to do new things.So the thing I would need to, things we'd kind of need to be able to do is basically have this notion that, okay, we do need to be on a kind of glide path downwards in absolute terms, for example. We can't just talk about emissions intensity, because this is a common thing that you see being, that's coming up in quite a few places.And this is something that organizations tend to report now a bit more as a way to avoid talking about absolute figures. But it feels like if we're going to do this, we need to look at absolute consumption, just as much as efficiency. And efficiency is one of the strategies you would use to reduce consumption in total, in absolute terms.Right?Vlad Coroama: Yes. Yes. Absolutely.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. Thank you for clearing that part up. I...Vlad Coroama: Well, it was more you clearing it... But yes.Chris Adams: This is part of what we're now doing is we, running through some of these to make sure that I understand it and i, when I'm doing this, I'm basically standing, this is helps me explain it to other people as well. So this is a, yeah, this is totally okay.All right. So we spoke a little bit about rebound. There's a few different flavors of this that we had. And you touched on this idea that if you just look at one aspect, then you can miss some of the kind of wider systemic issues and systemic impacts. And this feels like a nice kind of segue to talk about some of the other work that you've been doing, because it's actually where I came across some of your other work about trying to quantify the environmental impact of a service across multiple areas, basically.And I found this really helpful where, when I first read it in 2020, because it found, it provided a somewhat kind of rigorous way to help address the fact that a lot of the time people will overstate either the savings, overstate the damage being done in this, in these areas. And I think the name of the paper was, sorry, it's a bit dry.It's Methodology for Assessing the Environmental Impacts Induced by ICT Services. But one thing that was really nice about this is you would say, "well, you need to think about how much more efficient something might be, but you also need to think about what kind of take up that might be for something."So, and all of these things here. So. Maybe I could actually talk to you a little bit about this because it's very, very common to see very, very kind of extraordinary claims about efficiency or extraordinary claims about savings under perfect circumstances. So maybe we could talk about like, when you look at this stuff, are there common mistakes or common kind of omissions to look out for when you see people talking about the savings delivered by maybe a new service, for example, so you can help develop some kind of intuition? Because this is one thing I think we don't really have the language to talk about this right now. And I think one thing that your papers did was actually introduce some helpful terms or some helpful language to talk about some of this.Vlad Coroama: Yes, in all honesty, I... first disclaimer, we didn't provide a cookbook recipe how to do it and how to arrive at a net impact. Again, system boundaries are the word and we don't yet have the tools for that, but this being said, you can try avoiding the most common and sort of low hanging pitfalls if you want.And perhaps the most common is that, that you read is, you know, a juxtaposition or direct footprint of a service and the benefits in fitting uses. So direct footprint, which is by definition, it's inherently negative from an environmental perspective, as almost any human activity, and the other side, the indirect benefits.But then conveniently, and I'm not saying that this is necessarily purposeful, it can be out of naivety or, you know, but it is convenient for getting the indirect negative impacts. So you always have, so I think that's a helpful way of thinking about it. You have the direct footprint, negative by definition, and then you have indirect effects, which are both positive and negative. Ideally, you would try to cover them both. The very sort of high level indirect ones, which are systemic, you cannot cover. But you can at least take care of the direct rebound, for example.Chris Adams: All right. Thanks for that. So you spoke about, so there's leaving omissions from here. There's one thing I've seen that in a few places, so I've seen like, say, caching services basically say, "well, look how much, look at the savings you've received," for example, without telling you the full amount. And this is something that I think Uber have released.They've shown, there's now a calculator to see how much cleaner your ride would be if you use an EV car versus another one, but you don't see the absolute numbers, for example. I mean, what's wrong with this? Like, is this a thing that... is this a good idea or should, or if you were to do this properly, like, how would you make this more representative, for example, when you see examples like this?Vlad Coroama: Well, I don't know those particular calculators. I haven't used them or seen them. But from how, what I understand about them, it's very often a question of baseline or of the counterfactual. What is your counterfactual? If I hadn't used this, you know, for example, green taxi service in your example, what would I have done?If the assumption, if the baseline is, I would have used, you know, a very inefficient internal combustion engine-powered car instead, then, of course, depending also a bit on the electricity mix of the grid, usually it will be positive, right? The overall impact. But the thing is, it might have replaced public transportation or no trip at all.And then it's a rebound effect. So if I am keen, you know, I am taking a taxi and you know, it just tells me, "Hey, if you now take the green one instead of this," then I would say it's probably a reasonable assumption. We have some production issues, so from a life cycle assessment, of course, it's a bit complex, than it's probably pictured, but in essence, it's probably not incorrect.But overall, what happens is that if a taxi ride is cheaper, or if I have what is called a moral hazard, so I have a clear conscious, "oh, I'm going green so that I can take it," and then I'm taking one that would not have existed in the counterfactual, then of course the net effect is there.Chris Adams: Okay. So that last part is like, I get an Uber or I get an electric taxi and, so I sort of, to a restaurant and I then decided to eat a big fat steak, as an example, like as a way to kind of balance these out. Like there's maybe an indirect, there's a direct saving, but systemically, I still have created more of an emissions. Like, I'm not going to try and do the calculations between steak and a drive, but you get the general idea.Okay. So that's where some of that comes in. You mentioned this thing called a counterfactual. And I think this is actually one thing that might be quite helpful because we've seen a number of papers and reports being used to talk about how, you know, you can achieve sustainability through AI and we've seen them written in, say, in the early 2010s or even the early 2020s.And then there is often a lot of interest in talking about how good something could be, but there seems to be less, historically, we've been less good at tracking whether those savings have been delivered. Is this something that maybe you could talk a little bit about that? Cause I remember you write, I saw recently you wrote a little bit about the, this kind of reporting, the fact that there's a kind of gap in how we talk about this and the following through part, maybe you could just follow, just expand on, on this and why you need this, this extra information to kind of see if things are working basically.MmVlad Coroama: Yes. So for AI, I think it's a bit too early to tell, we have not yet seen like a series or I'm not aware of any, a series of studies or even like one old study that made some predictions and the authors didn't come back to it to say whether anything was delivered on. And I think it's not also a typical, like, computing thing that we do lots of predictions. And as the old adage goes, "predictions are difficult, particularly about the future."Chris Adams: Yeah.Vlad Coroama: Yeah So first, you know, when our predictions were right, we might like to go back and highlight this that we were right already back then. And otherwise we might conveniently forget that we made those predictions.For the computing domain generally and not AI, because again, AI, I think it's a bit too young for that phenomenon to be seen one way or the other, but for computing generally, there is a track record of various, both companies and sort of lobby groups of the IT industry or of the telecom industry doing sort of predictions and then continuing. One very known example is GESI, Global E Sustainability Initiative that published every couple of, every four to five years, starting 2008.They publish a series of studies. The first one was called SMART 2020, then SMARTER 2020, then SMARTER 2030, and so on. And there are predictions, the first two ones are called SMART 2020 and SMARTER 2020 because they're where to the year 2020.Chris Adams: Ah, I see.Vlad Coroama: And and they predicted many gigatons that would be saved through digital technologies.I think the first one was 7 point something and the second study around 9. 1 or 2. And that's, that's quite a chunk of the sort of fifth of CO2 equivalent that the humankind puts into the atmosphere every year. So that's a very substantial chunk. And if that would have been true, it would have been amazing.But now, well, 2020 is past, heh, and we published newer studies, but they didn't look, you know, how did this stand up to the test of time?Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. That's, that feels like quite a gap that we probably should be trying to close. If we're going to be talking about, we're doing research in this and seeing what is going to be effective as time is ticking down. Right. Vlad, that's actually, I really want to dive down in that rabbit hole, but we're coming up to time.So I'm going to have to be a good boy and try my best to stay inside the time we do have. Vlad, we've covered quite a lot of interesting areas and dived into quite a lot, and I've shared a couple of links. The show notes have series of links to the papers and things like that. If people do want to continue this work or continue following what you're up to, where should people be looking beyond just the show notes of this podcast for example? Is there a website that we should point people to, or do you have a online presence you would direct people's attention to?Vlad Coroama: Well, anyone, if, I mean, you can post my, a link to my LinkedIn account, if anyone wants to contact, I'd be happy to, you know, to engage in conversation and continuing discussions, this is what I do. So other than this, there is no value that is specifically say on rebound effects of digital technologies.I wouldn't know of any, but there is, for example, the ICT4S conference. So the ICT4Sustainability, that, that conference that started back in 2013 and where indirect effects of ICT are quite a powerful presence. This year's edition will be end of June in Stockholm, Sweden, and I'm co-organizing with a couple of other researcher.So, with Mattias Höjer at KTH, with Tristan Brehmer in Lancaster, Charlie Wilson in Oxford, and Dan Schien in Bristol, we are organizing a workshop on this very topic, indirect effects of... called wait, I'm no longer sure what acronym stands for, but something with indirect something. So a workshop on assessing indirect effects.So there are a couple of venues that are scientifically dedicated to this, but I, there is no unfortunately, no like, you know, portal where everyone has the topic.Chris Adams: Like Institute of Rebound. Yeah. Okay. And yourself, I understand that there's the organization that you work for. The Roegen, is it Roegen Center of Sustainability? That's the one. Yep. So that's roegen.ch is the place people would look to if they want to see any future publications and research in this field from you.Brilliant. Well, Vlad, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this and I have to admit, I'm a bit of a fan boy. I've really enjoyed a bunch of the papers and things you've been publishing over the years, and I really hope you continue to do them because they come up with really nice examples that I can help explain to other people.So thank you once again. And yeah, hope you have a wonderful week. Take care, Vlad.Cheers. You're too kind, Chris. Thank you as well. And by the way, thanks for your great work that you and your foundation are doing. So thanks for that as well. And thanks for having me. Cheers.Cool! Thank you. 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 greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

Rachel Tipton, a full stack developer at Open Climate Fix, discusses the intersection of AI, green software, and electricity infrastructure. Topics include increasing electricity demand from server centers, EVs, and carbon awareness in software development. Insights on technology's role in decarbonizing the electricity grid and mitigating climate change.