Experts discuss AI legislation, green software, and sustainability. Topics include using cost as a proxy for carbon emissions, the Tech Carbon Standard, and optimizing energy consumption in data centers. They also explore green software emissions and announce a carbon hackathon to tackle software emissions.

Kate Goldenring, Senior Software Engineer at Fermyon, discusses the environmental benefits of serverless computing. Topics include cloud computing, soft allocation, WebAssembly, resource optimization, and deep green concepts. The conversation highlights the future of green computing and reducing carbon intensity.

We're gearing up for the return of Carbon Hack 24 happening from March 18 to April 8, 2024. This year we're focusing on the Impact Framework, aiming to innovate how we measure the environmental impact of software. It's a chance for engineers, designers, and creators to dive into challenges, ranging from plugin development to non-technical content creation. We're inviting students too, with special categories just for them. Join us to push the boundaries of sustainable software. For details on how to register or to become a sponsor, check out the link below:Register at https://grnsft.org/hack/podcast 👈Find out more about Impact Framework:Environment Variables Episode 58: BETA Impact FrameworkIf 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: Hey everyone, Asim here. Carbon Hack is back this year. The hackathon will take place from Monday, March the 18th to Monday, April the 8th, 2024. Carbon Hack 24 is all about redefining the way we measure software to reduce its environmental impact. footprint. At the heart of this hackathon is Impact Framework, an open source tool that lets you compute and report the environmental impacts of software applications accurately.It takes observations you can easily gather about running systems such as CPU utilization, page views, or number of installs, or anything else, and converts them into environmental impacts like carbon, water, energy, air quality, in an auditable, replicable, verifiable, and transparent way. With Impact Framework, if we can observe something, we can measure its impacts.If you want to find out more about what the Impact Framework does, you can listen to episode 58 of Environment Variables. Why the focus on measurement, you might ask? Well, we've learned that at the intersection of software and sustainability, measurement is the compass guiding our way. How we measure software's environmental impact is more than just a technical detail. It's the key to unlocking the magnitude of change we can achieve. Here's the challenge. Alone or in small teams, participants will have the freedom to choose from a variety of prize categories, including Best Plugin. Impact Framework itself is just very, very simple. The power of Impact Framework is its plugin ecosystem. We've got plugins which take CPU utilization and turn it into energy. We've got plugins that take energy and turn it into carbon. We need more and more and more of these plugins to be built for my statement I said previously to be true, to take any observation and convert it into environmental impacts. We need plugins for that. So one of our prize categories is best plugin. We want you to build the best plugin you can build. If you submit your plugin idea on the Hack website, We actually nurture you, we help you, we guide you towards designing a plugin which has the best possible chance of winning.There's another prize category called Beyond Carbon, which I'm very, very excited about. If you can build a plugin which outputs an environmental impact that's not carbon, for instance, water. You can submit your solution to the Beyond Carbon prize category. We really want to move the conversation beyond carbon this year. That's my personal goal. This year, we've also got prize categories for non technical contributions. We've got a best content category. This is a category for people who would create the best piece of content, be it a how to video or a tutorial or a written booklet on how to use Impact Framework in any context, be it for a particular domain or in a generic sense, that's what best content is all about. How we're also expanding best content is if you're going to write a case study that uses Impact Framework to measure the impact of something and you write up that case study in such a way that it becomes a learning resource that also counts for best content as well. We also want to encourage people to contribute to the framework itself. The framework is a piece of code which sits on the Green Software Foundation's GitHub repository. And if you can contribute to that code by going to our GitHub repository and picking up an issue and saying, I would like to work on this issue for the hackathon. Please go right ahead and we'll nurture you, we'll guide you, we'll support you because we want to make sure your contribution is accepted. But that is how you can submit the best contribution category. And this year we're thrilled to open our doors to students. We have two prize categories for students. We have an undergraduates category. If your entire team is made up of undergraduates, you can then win a set separate accessory prize for undergraduates.And again, if your entire team is made up of under 18s, we also have another prize just for you, an under 18s prize. So how can you become part of CarbonHack24? It's as simple as signing up on our website at grnsft.org/hack/podcast that's grnsft.org GRN SFT. org forward slash hack forward slash podcast.There you'll find all the details about the event registration and upcoming live sessions where I'll be talking every single Monday, giving you an overview of the hackathon, what's going on the latest information and just taking you some of the latest projects. This is your opportunity to be part of a global movement that's shaping the future of sustainable software. We also extend a warm invitation to organizations that align with our vision to join us as sponsors. This is your chance to witness early stage innovations, connect with talented individuals, and showcase your commitment. If you're interested in sponsorship, visit the same link, which is grnsft.org/hack/podcast. I'm thrilled about CarbonHack24. We're going to explore innovative ways to measure the environmental impact of software. Join us for three weeks of exciting challenges where engineers, designers, and content creators will use Impact Framework to measure software's environmental footprint.We can't wait to see what innovations and solutions emerge from this incredible event. See you there.

Gabi Beyer and Brendan Kamp from re:cinq join host Chris Adams to discuss the challenges of measuring carbon emissions in personal laptops and cloud services, as well as the complexities of quantifying environmental impact. They also talk about recent policy developments on the right to repair and reducing embodied carbon. The importance of transparency among cloud providers and the Green Software Foundation's hackathon event are highlighted.

Host Chris Adams talks to Kristina Devochko, a tech lead at CNCF, about tech sustainability and the Environmental Sustainability TAG. They discuss mission and projects, joining the Green Software Foundation, upcoming meetups, and the impact of AI and machine learning on sustainability.

Learn how the Impact Framework models software's environmental impacts across different platforms. Explore integrating the framework with SCI Open Data and the future of green software development. Dive into measuring software emissions accurately and the challenges in creating emissions models for serverless computing. The podcast also discusses the importance of prompts in AI development and the use of simulation tools in cloud computing. Don't miss the announcement of the Carbon Hack contest for developers to measure carbon emissions using the Impact Framework.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Arik Smith and Cameron Cash from Thoughtworks in this episode of Environment Variables. Together they discuss the Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) tool and the role it plays in sustainable software development. Join this conversation as they nerd out together about the future of measuring carbon in the cloud, open source collaboration, and some cool posters in the background.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteArik Smith: LinkedInCameron Casher: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Responsible Technology Playbook: Tools for the United Nations | Thoughtworks [06:40] GCS23: Cameron Casher on Responsible Tech & Cloud Carbon Footprint [07:05]Cloud Carbon Footprint [09:25]Etsy Engineering | Cloud Jewels: Estimating kWh in the Cloud [12:41] 20231124 - green coding summit - ai environmental impacts assessment workshop [26:19]20231124 - green coding summit - infra/cloud environmental impacts assessment workshop [26:52]Resources:Arik’s awesomely distracting looking poster [02:36]Notes from the SDIA Green Coding summit [07:05](GreenOps) A forecast of green clouds | Thoughtworks [08:18]Green Software Patterns [08:24]Electricity Maps API Documentation [28:36]Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [32:38]GitHub - cloud-carbon-footprint/cloud-carbon-footprint [38:04]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Arik Smith: [00:00:00] At the end of the day, CCF is a community supported and collaborative tool, and I think that's the biggest and strongest part of all is that this isn't a methodology that one organization has owned or came up with, but that the, I want to say the entire industry who really cares about this subject has contributed and promoted growth within.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 [00:01:00] development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In our first episode of Environment Variables, we spoke about the team working on Cloud Carbon Footprint, about the subject of carbon calculation in the cloud. And a lot has happened since that episode. We've basically seen a spawn of imitators, and we've seen a launch of a number of native new platforms that various cloud providers use to help people understand the environmental impact of using digital services. Cloud Carbon Footprint has remained the open source reference, and as we'll discuss in more detail, parts of it end up making it into all kinds of other services these days. So it's been a while since we spoke about Cloud Carbon Footprint, or even Carbon Calculation in total. So joining me today are two of the main maintainers of the project to dive into some of the weeds on this. All right, today I'm joined by Cam and Arik. Folks, I'll just give you the space [00:02:00] to introduce yourselves.Cam, if I give you the floor, then Arik, I guess you can introduce yourself after that.Cameron Casher: Thanks, Chris. Really happy to be here. I'm Cameron Kasher. I work at ThoughtWorks on software, data, sustainability, general responsible tech, and really happy to talk to you today about Cloud Carbon Footprint.Chris Adams: Cool, thank you. And Arik?Arik Smith: Hey, I'm Arik Smith. I also work as a developer consultant at ThoughtWorks, mainly as a cloud SME and a green software specialist. But I am also excited to be here, so thanks for having me.Chris Adams: You're very welcome. I'm excited here, but I'm also quite excited by that awesome looking poster that I can see inside the video. I'm afraid that you can't see it in the audio, but there looks like there's a Japanese poster behind you. Is that Zelda or something? Arik, can you please tell me what that is, because it's totally distracting, but it looks really awesome.Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. So behind me I have my home office, which is basically in my basement that I call my culture cave. So what [00:03:00] you're looking at is what I call my wall of culture, where I just hang up artwork that I usually find at local vendors around town, mainly around my favorite video games and movies.So yeah, the poster is a poster with Link on it and in Japanese katakana, it says Zelda, but there's also some other stuff on there. I have an Avatar poster right next to it for The Last Airbender, and a Final Fantasy VII, and an Arcane League of Legends poster. Lots of fun stuff going on. Chris Adams: Wow that's an impressive nerd cave, and I think anyone who's been following Zelda this year will probably be excited about a reference to Tears of the Kingdom, amongst other things. All right, and Cam, we met in person, actually, about a month ago, when you came over to Berlin for the Green Coding Summit, and I A, I realized you were so much taller than me, oh my god, but also I didn't realize whereabouts that you were coming from.So you were coming from Colorado before, and at the time of recording, this is the 21st of December, so there's a bunch [00:04:00] of really explosive political news that might impact what will happen with elections next year. But, as much as I do want to talk about that, and what the climate implications of having different leadership in America might be, I think I should ask you about one thing you told me about, skiing in Colorado. That's a thing that you do on a regular, right?Cameron Casher: Yeah, it was great to see you in the flesh in Berlin. It was really awesome to be there. And yes, Colorado has found itself at the forefront of U. S. politics at the moment. So, that's exciting. And, yeah, we're in uh, ski season here. I'm excited to get out and snowboard a bit. But still waiting on some of the good snow to hit some of the Colorado ski resorts, but I'll be trying to get some days in this winter for sure.Chris Adams: Nice. Okay, cool. I'm calling from Berlin, and if you haven't heard this podcast before, I should probably introduce myself as well. My name is Chris Adams. I work as the executive director of the [00:05:00] Green Web Foundation, a small Dutch non profit focusing on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. But I'm also one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation's policy working group, where we do work with standards bodies and other organizations working in this field of sustainable software and general sustainability. All right, I think with that in place, I should ask you folks, are you sitting comfortably?Looks like you are. Okay, then I guess I'll begin. Okay, Cameron, I'll ask you about this because you were talking about this notion of responsible tech when you came over in Berlin, and then maybe that will use that as a way to talk about some of the projects that you've been working on. Maybe we could just open with what this notion of the Responsible Tech Playbook that you're presenting, because that looks like it provides a bit of context and that helps understand where tools and carbon calculation might actually fit into the context of using technology in a more responsible basis.If you could start there, maybe.Cameron Casher: Yeah, [00:06:00] definitely. I know you'll probably hint to this, but we can definitely link to these resources in the podcast description. But Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for reminding me. If you hear any projects mentioned or anything like that, and if we don't put it in the show notes, please do let us know, because we realize that people who listen to this podcast often use every single project as a jump off board for their own research. So we will do everything we can to make sure this is useful for other people who are taking their first steps or trying to explore this new field. All right, Cameron, yes, you were saying we were, you werepresenting about this, yeah.Cameron Casher: So ThoughtWorks has done some really cool stuff in the area of responsible tech. We had a playbook that came out a couple years ago. And really cool thing recently is we got in touch with some folks at the United Nations and they were very interested in our Responsible Tech Playbook. So we were able to do some really cool work partnering with them to create a more customized [00:07:00] version of it. They're very large around the world and they have a lot of people doing a lot of great stuff. So incorporating responsible tech principles and practices was very important to them and doing it in a more customizable way. So that's what I talked about in Berlin a bit at the Green Code Summit about what the playbook was.So maybe it's worth just defining what we consider responsible tech.Chris Adams: Yeah, go for it.Cameron Casher: We consider responsible tech as the active consideration of values, unintended consequences, and negative impacts of technology. A lot of times these tend to go overlooked. It's not always necessarily a negative intention when developing technology, but really it's, the idea is to manage and mitigate potential risk and to be inclusive to all communities.There are a lot of different topics we cover in the playbook, including data and AI. Accessibility is a big one, but what I really focused on in [00:08:00] Honestly, because a bit of my background was sustainability, so I was able to shift the focus at the conference talking about it, but also help get a really cool chapter in the playbook around sustainability and how we could incorporate the idea of GreenOps and incorporating Cloud Carbon Footprint.Chris Adams: Okay, and GreenOps in this scenario is essentially what DevOps is to developing. GreenOps is to this same idea, like it's essentially operationalizing some of the kind of aspects of green software. Is that the idea behind it?Cameron Casher: Yeah, and another ops really, there's a ton of ops these days, but the idea is tying it really close to DevOps or FinOps too, from a more financial standpoint, really considering green software, carbon emissions, carbon footprint within your development process.Chris Adams: Ah, okay, so that makes sense. And now I understand the link between there and Cloud Carbon Footprint in its own right, which basically ends up essentially using some of the [00:09:00] usage data that gets produced as a byproduct of operating various digital services and then providing that in a way that you can act upon, or do something, or, or, you shouldn't.Arik, I see you nodding, so I suspect maybe I should actually give some space for you here. Maybe you can introduce Cloud Carbon Footprint to people who have never heard of this, and why someone who is a software engineer who is curious about environmental sustainability in this context might care about it or want to know about it.Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool for tracking your energy usage and carbon emissions across All the major cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. And, which we can talk about later, we've also added, or begun to add support for Alibaba Cloud as well. It's a great tool, it serves as an unopinionated monorepository of multiple toolkits for you to go about grabbing your estimates.So we have a CLI, uh, or a command line interface you can interact with, uh, we have an [00:10:00] API that you can integrate into existing workloads or directly carry, as well as an out of the box dashboard for visualizing and tracking your emissions over time. Um, and we present this at a daily granularity, sometimes even hourly.Because what we do is we query your usage from your billing data. So think about AWS, Athena, costing usage reports, exports, or your Google Cloud, BigQuery, billing data exports, or your Azure cost details API or exports. We take all of that in the granular usage data that they use and convert that into energy where we can then convert that into carbon emissions to display.Chris Adams: Ah, cool, okay, so anything that can basically expose billing data or usage data can then basically provide a single view across maybe in a state or a different set of services. So rather than having 3 or 4 competing and possibly incompatible calculators, you have one [00:11:00] consistent way of looking at this stuff, right?Arik Smith: Absolutely, yep, you'll have one unified methodology to be able to view your usage across multiple cloud providers all within a single dashboard or a single place, which is great just to get a holistic view of where you stand and comparing apples to apples in that way.Chris Adams: Gotcha. All right, okay. Now, I know that I've been somewhat familiar with Cloud Carbon Footprint and there's a bit of a backstory behind how it came about, because I think there was actually a few years ago there was some really like pioneering work from some folks at Etsy who started on some of this. I'll leave that open for either of you to actually talk a bit about that, because I think there's a really interesting story about how some of this work done in the open there ends up turning into a tool which ends up feeling a little bit like, you know, that XKCD cartoon where there's that one piece of project that everything gets built on? That's how I see a bunch of this. And maybe I, maybe I'll let one of you folks explain some of the origins of this and how that end up, how some of that led to [00:12:00] CCF, or Cloud Carbon Footprint, being like an open source project with a number of users.Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So within ThoughtWorks itself, there was a lot of growing interest within climate action and getting a hold of our own infrastructure and where our footprint stands with that, especially within our cloud resources. And what we found was that there was not really a tool to do so at the time.So this was about, and Cam, feel free to correct me on timing, but I believe about 2020, where the bulk of this work was done. And being ThoughtWorkers, we typically decided to look into ways we could perhaps create a way for ourselves to measure our own cloud usage. And we came across Etsy's awesome Cloud Jewels methodology and saw the way that they were estimating compute resources within the cloud, and it served as a great basis and foundation for us to build and find out how can we do that for Google Cloud and AWS and Azure, all the [00:13:00] different cloud providers that we have some level of usage within.So we started building out a proof of concept to estimate our own internal usage and eventually we made the decision that due to the absence of any tooling out there that this is something everyone should have because we want to empower all organizations and all users to be able to have this level of transparency with their cloud usage because the compute resources and overall energy usage of the IT industry in general is a big major part of our global footprint, especially in major large tech companies and large scale product companies.We went open source back in March 2021, and since then we've been iterating on it ever since until the cloud providers came out with their own native tools, which is great, and we saw more and more tools and interests popping up in this space.Chris Adams: okay. That's cool. So basically there's this OG climate calculation stuff, uh, from Etsy, and then that big, that served as some of the basis for a more polished [00:14:00] tool that could be used in lots of different contexts, rather than just the ones that Etsy used, because I think back then, Etsy had a bunch of on-prem stuff and a bunch of Google Cloud, so that was where some of it looked like, but when CCF became, I think the first version that I saw, actually had support for both AWS and a bit of Google Cloud, and now it's actually got support for, like you said, all the big ones, plus Alibaba, I didn't know about Alibaba, actually.it. Arik Smith: Yeah, Alibaba is limited to compute resources for now, but we're still looking into ways to expand that. Um, similar to how we did Um, at the beginning with Etsy, they were estimating cloud, um, compute resources. And then we started thinking about how can we expand that to memory and to networking. And all of that has been a collaborative effort, which is why we call out Etsy within our methodology as the basis from where we started from.Like even just the networking estimations. We work with Benjamin Davey from Teads based on a write up he did for estimating network as well as embodied admissions and iterated within the other [00:15:00] usage levels within the same way.Chris Adams: Ah, cool. I think I remember, actually, there's a bit of work by David Mitton there, when he did some work around the CPU coefficient stuff as well. I realize I'm diving into, like, loads of really nerdy stuff, uh Cam, I see you nodding, so maybe I'll let you just touch on some of that stuff, because I think it might be worth talking a little bit about where else this turns up, because we've seen a number of calculators kind of launch now.A lot of them either reference CCF, or have started using that as a basis. But before, though, I'm getting ahead of myself, yeah. Maybe I'll give the space for you, Cameron, because I saw you getting a bit excited there when we were talking about some of that.Cameron Casher: Yeah, what's funny is the opportunity to speak here today with you gave us, gave Arik and I a chance to be a little retrospective about our time with CCF and think about lessons learned and what's gone on, what's been challenging. And yeah, even just hearing Arik talk about our partnerships and collaboration, I think it's just worth saying that's been a really cool aspect of being an open source maintainer. [00:16:00] Just being able to openly work with the community, being able to have really awesome discussions with industry experts like David Mitton or Benjamin Davey or everyone at Etsy to just continually evolve the methodology for CCF and make it better, make it fit users, and getting into some of the challenges, I don't know if it's necessarily a challenge, but it's just a tough point is that. We don't have the best transparency into who's using the tool, and I think that's a pretty common trend for open source software, but a lot of it is just through word of mouth, or even when I was in Berlin and talked about it, I got the chance to meet a lot of people that approached me and let me know that they were using CCF, which is, it's really cool to hear about that and the impact that it's had.Chris Adams: Oh, thanks, Cam. So you mentioned David, uh, David Mitton, and, uh, and I realize there's a couple of other people who are also involved in this as well. I mean, well, the original person on the podcast was, uh, [00:17:00] uh, Danielle, uh, oh, Cameron, I need you to help me with her surname. What was Danielle's surname again?Because she wasthe original product manager on this.Cameron Casher: Danielle Erickson, and she was, yeah, one of the first guests, and she was a very integral role with the open source launch and continued feature development for CCF as our project manager. So, um, yeah, Danielle had a serious role. And also Lisa McNally, who is the, also on the policy working group with you, um, she helped spearhead a lot of our development too.And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Marco Valtas, who had a significant role on the dev team as well.Chris Adams: Oh, cool. I'm really glad you mentioned that, actually. And, uh, actually going back, Jesus, in a few years back now, oh, uh, was, uh, I believe Chelsea, Chelsea, I think it's Chelsea Mozen. She was one of the people who was organizing Climate Action Tech back in 2019 2020, and, uh, I learned so much from her, and she was one of the people really pushing the stuff at Etsy as well.So, it's, I'm really glad [00:18:00] you spoke about some of the other people, because there's a whole lineage of people who've been contributing to this now over the years.Cameron Casher: And so many people are coming to mind and, you know, even Dan Lewis-Toakley, who's been a part of the Green Software Foundation, really spearheaded the open source launch too, in the early days. So important to include him as well.Chris Adams: Yeah, happy days.Cameron Casher: So I think we're just trying to look for ways to have a better understanding of who's using it.We have an adopters markdown file in our GitHub repo. We're still trying to get the word out that we want to know what your story is and what your experience has been with CCF. And we have a blog that we just put on the microsite and we're very open to just sharing stories and experiences to providing help for anyone new who wants to try and get it set up at their organization or just for their own personal use.Chris Adams: I can definitely speak to this because, uh, we maintain, where I work, we maintain a library called CO2.js, which we know is used in a few places, like, uh, we [00:19:00] spoke to Mozilla, and it's in their browser, which is cool, and we work with some other people where we collaborated, but then sometimes it turns up in totally random places.So, like, I did a talk, um, in Hungary, uh, and I was invited to speak at this event, and then when it was launched, I found out that it was actually used inside one of the key projects that people were actually launching on the day. I was like, "oh! Wow, that's cool and unexpected, but nice to know," right? And I feel that seems to be some of the cases when I see with CCF, because I know that, um, there's a tool called GreenPixie, which is a quite well developed, quite sophisticated commercial product that initially had some origins with CCF, where they use some of that.I understand, I believe, I think VMware uses some parts of it, as well as IBM. So it turns up in all these interesting places that I didn't, that I hadn't thought about. And when I actually was at the same event as you. I didn't realize the footprint it had in the financial services industry. And that was the thing that really blew my mind, actually, and this, it's, I guess it kind of does [00:20:00] make sense, really, because if you don't have access to information here, having an open methodology is quite useful, and we, at that event, we saw at least one person from a well known bank, ABN AMRO, this is like one of the third largest banks in the Netherlands, they basically said, we're a regulated organization, we, when we calculated our emissions, it's like 40 percent of our carbon footprint comes from our use of digital services.So we want to have an open tool that doesn't have us rely on a single thing and lets us be transparent with both our regulators, but also our sustainability teams. And this was actually mind blowing that you'd actually have companies talking about this because for the longest time, people tend to either don't say too much about what the environmental impact of digital services might be in their organization, or they say it's very low.So to have organizations say, yeah, we're using it, this is what we use as our basis, and this is how we calculate it, was mind blowing. It was really useful to see that actually because Like you said, it's really hard to see, and it would be so nice to know that it's [00:21:00] reassuring to find people using your projects, but sometimes it's so hard, you do ask yourself, like, could we have found out another, did I have to really fly across the Atlantic to find out that people are using this tool?Cameron Casher: Yeah. Yeah. And I'll just add, I think we might touch on this a bit too, but our roadmap, how we decide what we want to continue to build and look into is really community driven. So it's really helpful to understand how people are using CCF to help us understand what to fix or implement. Yeah, it's just very important, really.Chris Adams: So maybe we can talk a little bit about that then, because we spoke about roadmaps, and like I saw you nodding along when you were thinking about some of the things that are on this list, and I realize that you've been implementing some of this. Are there any kind of, like, exciting things that you're looking forward to seeing the light of day, or being able to work on, that you're really thinking, "Ah, I cannot wait for this to be visible," for example?Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a few things in the works that I think are [00:22:00] exciting. One of the big things is a lot of improvements we've been trying to do this year is to our overall implementation of Azure, as well as just performance and scalability, which has been one of the biggest lessons learned during the time that we've been developing CCF.Because ThoughtWorks itself isn't a product company, so we don't have a lot of internal cloud usage. So really learning and leveraging partners and collaborators and sometimes even clients to figure out what type of issues or what type of considerations that enterprise level product companies will have when using CCF has been really helpful and what we've been really leaning into.And even just Azure as well, because Azure has a Different implementation where it's more API based instead of SQL based like your Google Cloud BigQuery or your AWS Athena, which we interact with for usage. So we currently have a migration going on to migrate to some of the new ways that Azure has made available to [00:23:00] grab billing data.And one of that is through their new Cost Details API, which we were previously using their Consumption Management API. And then as well as the ability to export cost into an Azure blob and be able to parse a large amount of data from that. So that's currently in the works and we can't, we think this will help a lot of large scale Azure users, which unfortunately due to the differences in implementation.tends to lag a little bit behind in some of the ways we deal with the other cloud providers. But also, even beyond that, we've seen a lot of interest in Trying to get a grasp of usage and cost for Kubernetes workloads and clusters. And we have a really cool partnership coming up in ways we are looking into collaborating with OpenCost, another open source tool for diving into Kubernetes spend and finding ways to use CCF as a basis to showcase energy [00:24:00] usage and carbon emissions alongside the data that they show within the tool.We've done a similar collaboration in the past with Backstage, making CCF a plugin for their platform. And that is also another cool opportunity coming up because people use open costs and we're trying to really leverage the ways that CCF is flexible and extensible to where you can still use CCF's methodology as we've seenin some of the other tools we mentioned, but also in your existing toolkit, and that's why we keep referring to it as a tool and not just a product, because it's really just a means to an end to be able to get transparency into your cloud usage and carbon footprint. I think those are two of the biggest things.Oh, and we also have Boavizta, but I may actually toss that to Cam because that's something he's been a little bit closerto to talk about. Chris Adams: Alright, Cam, before we go into that, I just want to, I realise that we didn't actually speak about this now, um, CCF [00:25:00] is a open source product, um, it's presumably written, is it TypeScript or JavaScript? Maybe we could just touch on that briefly because I realize that we didn't actually talk about any of that, uh, and it might be useful for people who are curious about taking their first steps, right?Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, CCF is an open source monorepository, all written in TypeScript. And that was a deliberate decision because we wanted to have a single language used across the entire codebase to make contributions and onboarding to the project easier. So if you're looking for an open source project to contribute to, we welcome it.Even if you just want to read the methodology and provide feedback, we welcome that as well. But yeah, so the dashboard itself mainly leverages React. It has a simple React dashboard for visualizing your data with the API being in Express and the rest being in native TypeScript. Tried to keep it simple, but,Chris Adams: so it's stuff that people are likely to be, to use, it's not something like written in Sorry [00:26:00] Haskell Friends, like Haskell, or something which is not that popular. Okay, cool.All right, Cam, yeah. Cam, you were about to talk about some of the other things on the roadmap that you, uh, touched on. I think, maybe it might be worth just briefly explaining what Boavizta is, because if people haven't heard of Boavizta, they might not know about the cool French guys and, uh, women working in that particular project.Cameron Casher: Yeah, Boavizta actually had a really cool workshop at the summit that we were at in Berlin. And they were explaining some of the ways that you can go about measuring the energy from some of your server usage, which is some really cool work and props to those guys who did an excellent job there. Because I think there was a really good collaboration in that workshop and it was pretty well received and spawned a lot of great conversation.Chris Adams: I agree with you on that. I remember, so the, so the thing with, the interesting about Boavizta is like, we'll share a link to the workshop, because one thing that was nice is they did this, Boavizta led one of these workshops about understanding [00:27:00] the both embodied energy and the usage energy in cloud, but they did another one about AI as well, but they were gracious enough to share the entire decks and everything online as well, so we'll add some links to that.So we've established Boavizta, that was one thing, but you mentioned there's some other products or other kind of integrations that are on the roadmap that you might be talking about, possibly also with French speaking people involved, I suppose.Cameron Casher: Yeah. So I guess for context, we, with our methodology, we've had to rely on a lot of other public and open datasets since a lot of the information around carbon or energy estimations, we haven't been able to grab directly from the major cloud providers, at least just yet, we are really reliant on some of the open data sets we find.And with that comes a lot of manual updating and monitoring to make sure we're aware of when some of these data sets get published with new information, this really led us to the idea of wanting to [00:28:00] more automate the way that people could get some of this data, whether it's energy estimations for servers or even carbon intensity values. What I really wanted to try and do lately is almost integrate feature toggles. You can always default to some of this average data from the publicly available sources, but if you have a Boavizta subscription or however you'd connect, then maybe you could select that as your way to get some server information from some of your, let's say AWS vCPUs. Or another thing that we wanted to express was our partnership with Electricity Maps. This is another company over in Europe that's doing a really great job around understanding real time carbon intensity values from regions globally around the world. This is really nice for CCF because you can really get more accurate carbon [00:29:00] intensity data, which is a integral part of our estimation for carbon emissions in our methodology. And some of the work we were able to do lately was map the Electricity Map zones to cloud provider regions. So you're able to directly connect. If you have a subscription to Electricity Maps, you essentially just pick a box and say you want to use this and get to see some of their data and map it to some of the daily values that you'll see from your cost and usage report.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Okay, so if I, to make that a little bit more concrete, when you often have, say, some values which might be, so people often talk about the idea that you can maybe change a region to reduce the environmental impact. Let's say you're using AWS, and on one part of the United States, on the Eastern Seaboard, New Virginia, not Eastern Seaboard, but North Virginia, yeah, that's going to be using a bunch of coal, and you, but on the other side, you might have, say, in Oregon, it's going to be a very [00:30:00] kind of like cleaner grid by comparison, but there may be other places which might fluctuate at various times and that will capture some of those changes specifically that an Electricity Map would give you, right?If there's maybe times of day where it's particularly sunny and windy, you'd have green energy there and it would actually reflect that in the billing, for example, or show it in your stats in a given day or hour, right?Cameron Casher: Right. And the really cool thing about their API is that we are able to grab historic data. And a lot of people using CCF are wanting to see what their usage looks like for the past year or two. So we're able to actually map on those given days of their usage, backtrack and backfill. And yeah, they also offer hourly estimations too.That's something we're looking forward to potentially implementing for CCF is estimations on an hourly basis.Chris Adams: Ah, I did not know that. That's very cool to know. All right, because this is one of the scenarios that I'm curious about. Because once you do actually have like enough usage data, you often, the question is, it's almost hypothetical. [00:31:00] "Now I know I've been doing this year. What could I have done so that I can inform like future discussions?"This is why, because a lot of the time having maybe a bunch of historical data and then being able to see would it have made a difference if I switched to another region, or would it have made a difference if I moved a particular piece of job that happened, a computing job that happened every single time at this time, could I have measured that?And it sounds like this, these are some of the tooling that actually makes some of that possible, so you can start comparing what you would do then, say this is what we should be doing next year, now that we've actually got some of our own usage data and some carbon information about what, where we might go from there.Cameron Casher: Yeah, and I know a lot of organizations that are trying to set their sustainability goals for the future and even in the case of ThoughtWorks, having that baseline year is very important where you can set a year and be able to say, okay, this is our baseline. This is where we want to measure up against as we try and hit some of our goals that we're setting, like our 5 or 10 year plans.Being able to see that historic data is very important today. If you want to [00:32:00] set 2023 as your baseline, you can see what your cloud carbon footprint looks like from that year and just move forward and try and improve it.Chris Adams: Ah, okay. That's helpful because basically the entire sector needs to halve its emissions by 2030 in order to stay on the kind of pipe, on the trajectory for 1.5 degrees. And I guess that gives you some context that works out to be about a saving, you need to reduce emissions by between seven to 10% per year depending on what you have.And this might give you a way of saying, "okay. Here's what they are now, this year, this is what we need to beat or stay inside if we're going to be on track." Huh, I didn't know that.Okay, Cameron Casher: Yeah. And actually that's a good plug for the, the SCI standard at the Green Software Foundation because, uh, CCF does a really good job at giving you your holistic view of all your usage and emissions, which a lot of companies is only going to grow as they scale. Also using this alongside the SCI could be helpful to see more of the rate of carbon emissions.Chris Adams: [00:33:00] Okay, so this is one thing that I think is interesting that really caught my eye, because when I was initially looking at Cloud Carbon Footprint, there was this idea that you can tag certain services, so you can say, here's my team, or there's a particular there's maybe a particular digital service I make available to people. Presumably you could track that, and you could say, "over this week, the SCI has been this much, which is the Software Carbon Intensity. And then I want to improve that by X percent," and you could set that as a target for the next month, and so on. That's essentially what you would be able to do. Is that correct?Cameron Casher: Yeah. So we did implement tagging, which was a really crucial feature for us in a lot of ways to help with this whole idea of GreenOps and just understanding how you can do different breakdowns for teams or resources. And actually Arik was a really pivotal developer for the tagging. So I might let him speak a little bit about,Chris Adams: Yeah, please do. Yeah.Arik Smith: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so tagging [00:34:00] basically allowed for us to display the same tags that you would use within your AWS or Google Cloud or Azure Resources, but also expose them on the resources that we were estimating within CCF. And it's great because not only does does it allow you to filter at a more custom level when you're using the CCF API, if you only want to seeresources tagged with a specific value, but it's also great for when you're trying to see aggregated estimates for a custom grouping of resources. So Cam mentioned whether this may be at a team level, or a sub organization level, or a project level, or however you wish to organize it. So, it has been great in getting a grasp in a much more custom level of where you stand within your organization and what your big contributors are that go beyond just the account and service level.Chris Adams: No, that's actually really interesting. So, what I think it sounds like you're saying is, with tagging like this, you could basically say in a given [00:35:00] month, I know that all the billing for this particular service has been this much. And I know I've done maybe 100, 000 or 10 million requests. Then basically, because the software carbon intensity is essentially, it's the number of things you've done, divided by the emissions, or the other way around basically. That sounds like you could plausibly get SCI ratings for almost any service very quickly that way, across an entire project, basically. I didn't really, I didn't really think of it that way, but that, that, that would be right. If you just have a bunch of things tagged, you know how much usage you have, like, how many people have used this, or how many requests have you served? That will be enough to put together some calculations for a rate like that that you could track over time, right?Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I think it also opens a lot of possibilities for the ways that you can use CCF. So it's something that I forgot to mention on our roadmap. We're trying to continue to expand upon right now, a lot of those features are available at the API level, which just so happens to be the most [00:36:00] popular way people interact with CCF.But we're also trying to leverage the dashboard to be able to view a breakdown of your tagged resources in a much more custom way and be able to filter through data through there as well. But absolutely, yeah, it opened up a door to where the world is your oyster in terms of how you choose to bring your estimates or certain groupings into your overall footprint.Chris Adams: Okay, so I'm glad we had this conversation, because the next thing I want to ask is about community involvement, because when you're running an open source project, there's, there's a, there's a challenge about working out, do you use a mailing list? How do you actually get feedback from people? Let's say we just had this conversation about, okay, I want to have automatic SCI readings for every single thing that comes through, like, where would I ask?Is there like a Slack channel? Is there a mailing list? Or is there a GitHub discussions board or something? Maybe I could ask one of you about where I would ask something like this to have this conversation, because I'll be honest, I might look at some of this over winter, if nothing else, over the winter break, [00:37:00] because I'd, that didn't occur to me until we just had this conversation now.Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a learning experience for us. Um, ThoughtWorks has had a few open source projects previously, but at least for us personally, we've never been maintainers, so we've definitely still have been trying to figure out that cadence of what is our preferred communication method? What do people prefer?And with this project being targeted not only to the software engineer that's curious about their own team's carbon footprint, but also IT execs that are can actively make decisions and utilize CCF to provide a lot of information behind those decisions. We have to be flexible. So we started and currently still use a simple Google group, which is on our website that you can join and become a community member of.And we get lots of emails that way, either asking direct questions or troubleshooting information from our team or just the community at large, which has been [00:38:00] great because sometimes people may chime in and share their experiences or give their feedback. Of course, since our project is on GitHub, we leverage a lot of GitHub issues and the typical cadence that you would find within the open source repository there.So people usually raise new issues for bug reports or features, and we've also recently enabled the GitHub Discussions board for our repository to allow for further discussions, especially around feedback or general questions to hopefully try to lessen the load on our email group a bit and keep it closer to our code since we've been seeing a lot of technical questions and bug reports and troubleshootings coming through there and more recently we've been trying to experiment with a Slack channel to get some of those conversations going at least a little bit more seamlessly because one of the main things we've been troubleshooting and learning from is the way that we interact with collaborators.A lot of times when [00:39:00] other organizations or companies are standing up CCF within their own organization, they often want to get back to the tool or they may find a bug or something to improve and may open up pull requests and a lot of that conversations have been through the email group or GitHub at large, but for instance, that Azure API migration that we're working on is actually being collaborated with some engineers from Resync that Cam met during his time in Berlin.So we've opened up a Slack channel to hopefully make some of that collaboration and communication and questions easier. Before it's been ad-hoc, "okay, we'll join your Slack or we'll join your, your Teams account or maybe we can do a simple Google chat," but hopefully to centralize and encourage a lot of those communications and collaborations going forward.Chris Adams: Ah, cool. So you said one thing that was quite interesting there, about that it's not centri It's, this gives me the impression that it's, that Cloud Carbon Footprint is almost like yes, there's obviously some work from ThoughtWorks, and some [00:40:00] contribution there, but it exists as its own project, and I think when I'm looking up now If I go to GitHub, it's its own organization, so there's like a, there's the implication there that this would be like a community project that, in the long run, would have other organizations contributing and maintaining it, because I didn't know about Resync actually contributing in that way.That's really neat.Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. That's the stance we've always taken with CCF. I know we mention ThoughtWorks a lot, and that's why we're trying to pivot the language to ThoughtWorks just being the primary sponsor of the tool.Because at the end of the day, they have invested a lot. Within Cam and I's team and the sustainability solutions team at large to put in a lot of the day to day work within the tool, but everything we spoke about from that initial methodology and building on top of Etsy Cloud Jewels, like there were conversations with Etsy actually being had to get Feedback on the methodology, we're coming up in the okay to move forward that way.Uh, we've collaborated with cloud providers [00:41:00] themselves to get feedback on the way we're doing things and to see if our estimates make sense. And yeah, even with other organizations on our website, we have a list of innovation partners, which really don't even cover everyone we've worked with that have contributed to the project in some way.And that's why even on GitHub, it's organized within, at least all the, all of the CCF related repositories are organized within the Cloud Carbon Footprint Organization. Because at the end of the day, it is a community supported and collaborative tool. And I think that's the biggest and strongest part of all is that this isn't a methodology that one organization has owned or came up with, but that the, I want to say the entire industry who really cares about this subject has contributed and promoted growth within.Chris Adams: okay, so like an open place where there's some consensus to actually figure out, "okay, this is how you measure this stuff." All right, wow.Alright, we're coming up to time now, so I just want to make sure, are there any things that you folks would like me [00:42:00] to draw attention to, or are there any questions I haven't asked yet that you'd like me to ask or you want to talk about before we come to the end of this?Cameron Casher: I'll just say that I just want to thank you for letting us speak to CCF. Um, If there's anything that's become more apparent to me recently, it's been the impact that CCF has had in the community and in this domain. And I know we talked a bit about this, but just stressing that we want to hear more from the community.We want to understand the people using it. So really feel free to reach out to us in any of the ways that Arik just explained, Google or GitHub. And. Yeah, we'd love to talk more and understand about how you're using CCF and one of the things we didn't really get into today was just how CCF can really be like the starting point for a lot of companies because just understanding where you're at in measuring is a first phase of even this Green Ops idea where you get into [00:43:00] understanding, measuring, and then the final act of reducing your carbon footprint. So, we'd like to think that CCF really helps enable that act of reducing, and I know the Green Software Foundation has a lot of great material around where to start, especially around the cloud with the green software pattern.So, using CCF to have sort of a perspective and baseline of where you think you can start to tweak and make some changes is really a cool and important way to understand how different people are mitigating their carbon footprint in the cloud.Chris Adams: Brilliant, thank you for that Cam. And to Arik, I realize that I should have asked this at the very beginning, but if someone wants to find out about Cloud Carbon for the project, is there a domain name, is there a website, what would you, what would they type into their favorite search engine or browser?Arik Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Usually, if you Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we're appreciatively [00:44:00] one of the first, if not the first, to pop up. But, yeah, you can definitely find us at cloudcarbonfootprint.org. Um, it contains our website, our main documentation, and a breakdown of our methodology. There's also a live demo there, if you don't want to download the tool but want to get familiar with what the dashboard is and the capabilities of it, um, and also links to our GitHubs and some of the community groups like the Google groups that we mentioned is available there as well. Otherwise, like Cam mentioned, we're pretty open, so if you still have a question or want to get involved in some way or even have feedback, which we welcome a lot, feel free to hit us up on LinkedIn or shoot us an email.Maybe we'll provide a link or something and, or any preferred channel that you can find us on.Chris Adams: Brilliant, thank you for that. Okay then, and maybe we'll just wrap up there, but I feel like there's maybe one thing that it's really worth emphasizing. If you're using tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint, please do tell the maintainers that they're using them. [00:45:00] Because usually you only ever hear from people when they're unhappy with your product or project rather than when they are using it. And it does make it easier to feel better about your life choices. So that was the last thing I might share with you, uh, because it's something that we actually experience ourselves with CO2.js as well. But folks, I really enjoyed learning about cloud carbon footprint with you here. And, uh, I'm looking forward to some of the cool new things that come up from there.Once again, thanks again for your time. And Cam, enjoy your skiing. And Arik, enjoy adventures with Link, alright?Arik Smith: Will do. Thanks a lot, Chris.Cameron Casher: Thank you, Chris.Chris Adams: Thanks guys, see you around. 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 [00:46:00] 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 we take a look back at another talk from our Decarb 2023 Event while we’re all on the New Year break at the GSF. Titled Driving Climate Change Solutions with AI, Charlotte Degot of CO2 AI and Diana Dimitrova from Boston Consulting Group talk about the Third Annual Carbon Emissions Survey titled Why Some Companies are Ahead in the Race to Net Zero. Learn more about our people:Charlotte Deogot: LinkedIn Diana Dimitrova: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterTopics:CO2 AI and BCG’s Third Annual Carbon Emissions Survey | Boston Consulting Group [2:55] Resources:CO2.AI | CO2AI [1:19]Boston Consulting Group | BCG [1:19]Klöckner & Co. [6:00]Nexigen® Data Services (PCF) | Klöckner & Co SE  [6:45]The Economist Group [8:55]CodeCarbon.io | Code Carbon [14:53]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: 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.Chris Skipper: Welcome to another episode of Environment Variables. Happy New Year, and I hope you are all enjoying this holiday period and looking forward to 2024. Seeing as we're all on a bit of a break here at the Green Software Foundation, we've got another highlight from the recent Decarbonize Software 2023 event.We'll be showcasing a talk on driving climate change solutions with AI. From Charlotte Degot, CEO and co founder of CO2 AI, and Diana Dimitrova, managing director and partner at BCG. They are introduced by the wonderful Namrata Narayan, director of communications and member relations at the GSF. So it will be her voice that you hear first.So, without further ado, here's driving climate change solutions with AI.Namrata Narayan: Now we're going to hear from another steering member, BCG, and their partner, CO2 AI. I'd like to welcome Charlotte Degot from CO2 AI and Diana Dimitrova from BCG. The GSF is focused on addressing the environmental impact of software. With the rise of AI, we wanted to take a moment at Decarb to discuss how this technology can assist our efforts to decarbonize software.Charlotte and Diana are here to cover this topic and highlight the results from the Carbon Emission Survey Report that was just released. Charlotte and Diana, over to you.Diana Dimitrova: Great. Thanks so much. And thanks so much for hosting us today. We're super pleased to be here. And as you mentioned, today was the launch date of our third annual survey that actually found some fascinating insights around green software and how that propels climate action globally. So Charlotte and I are thrilled to take you through it.So maybe as a first step, we can just introduce ourselves. Charlotte.Charlotte Degot: Yes, very nice to have us, I'm Charlotte Degot, I'm the founder and CEO of CO2 AI. Just in a few words, CO2 AI is a sustainability platform that helps large organizations on their end to end net zero journeys from measuring and reporting their emissions down to reducing and proving their impact.Diana Dimitrova: Excellent. And, um, I'm Diana Dimitrova. I'm a managing director and partner, uh, in BCG, and I focus on building digital solutions for clients, um, that advance their climate goals, um, that's specifically in our unit called BCGx. I'm going to kick us off with the main findings, um, of the report, and, and let me just contextualize that a little bit.So, we publish a third annual report around carbon emissions, uh, and measurement. It includes. 1,850 organizations that reported back to us. It does represent over 20 countries in 18 major industries. And based on the reported emissions, it's about 40 percent of global emissions. And the report is called Why Some Companies Are Ahead in the Race to Net Zero.Now what we found, the unfortunate bit, which is the first column, is that comprehensive measurement of scope 1, 2, and 3 actually hasn't improved. It was 10 percent this year, it was 10 percent the year before, and 9 percent the year before that, so real stagnation there. Now, we did see some elements that gave us quite a bit of hope, and that was really in scope 3.So in scope 3 measurement has landed at 53 percent or partial scope 3 measurement has landed at 53 percent which is up 19 percentage points in two years. So we are seeing organizations actually be selective of which categories they measure but really starting to get at scope 3. And more interestingly is they've actually set targets and that's the 12 percentage points that you see on the bottom there.Organizations at this stage are setting targets for scope three categories at 35 percent rate, which is a notable improvement. And regionally, we are seeing changes and we are seeing certain regions pull ahead in the race. And again, this is a scope one, two, and the comprehensive measurement that they have.South America, APAC are really pulling ahead when it comes to their measurement. And then finally, the most important bit is why are companies doing this? And 40 percent of the folks who responded are telling us, well, they do this because they're seeing a hundred million or more dollars in annual financial benefit when they get on the reduction journey.So there's a real financial incentive for them to be tackling these massive challenges. And then let me tell you a little of how they did it on the next slide. So these companies are doing four things twice as well as the average organization. The first thing that they're doing well is they're collaborating with their suppliers, meaning they have workshops together, they have joint targets, they have joint programs.So they're engineering products together for a lower carbon solution. The second bit is Digital solutions that allow you to measure at a product level, so it's not good enough to just know what Apple's total emissions are, it's actually much more interesting to know what the iPhone's emissions are, and getting at that product level is fundamental to enable consumers to make a greener choice.And the highest number on this slide, as you see, is the use of digital technologies, and Charlotte will give us a few examples of that, but those that adopt digital solutions or green software really make a dent versus those that don't. And then lastly, I heard our host kick it off, regulation, and those that view regulation in a positive way, catalyze around it, really are seeing those benefits when it comes to meeting their reduction targets.Now, to give you an example, I'm going to take you through a client where we've done this. The client is called Klöckner & Co. What does Klöckner do? Klöckner actually distributes steel. So steel is a heavy emitting sector. It represents 7 percent of the world's emissions. We all have a stake in the ground to really decarbonize steel.Unfortunately, there is no net zero steel, but there is a lot greener steel than what we use on average. What Klöckner did is recognize that they needed to get to that product carbon footprint element, which is the second pillar I just talked about. So they actually built a software that was able to calculate their product carbon footprint for over 200,000 products, and you see that's called Nexigen PCF algorithm.It's cradle to gate emissions. And it covers, as I said, 200,000 products, and it is certified, which makes it really important that whoever gets a number actually gets a certification. And then they decided that wasn't good enough, they needed to push a little bit further, and then they created Nexigen Data Services, which is an online purchasing platform where anybody who's buying steel can log on and look at what the carbon footprint of their basket was in the last purchase, and how, what greener alternative is available to them.And so this platform allows procurement individuals to actually really arbitrage where they're going to spend their carbon because they're given the transparency and the choice to make the lower carbon solutions. So it's a great example of leveraging technology and getting at product carbon footprints, which is still a bit of a panacea that organizations are gunning towards.Having said that, I'm going to hand it over to Charlotte and she'll take us through some of the other details on digital.Charlotte Degot: Yes, thank you. So, as Diana was saying, one of the four key things that companies will succeed better on their reduction journey do is adopting digital solutions. As you can see on the left part of the slide, what we see is that companies who use automated digital solutions are actually two times 2.5 times more likely to comprehensively measure their emissions.And this is very important because what gets measured gets done. This may look like a basic, but it's a basic that just sets the foundations right for you to then decarbonize. And what's also encouraging is that when we ask the 1,800 companies who answered our survey, what is the number one enabler that they see and that they think they need to adopt to accelerate on emissions reduction, they quote, technology, uh, as the first enabler.Before leadership buy in, before sustainability focused, uh, culture. So it really means that they have, uh, perceived the importance of digital and that, uh, we can hope for a wave of adoption in the years to come.I just want to give you one example from real life of what it means to be using tech and how it can bring value to a very large and complex organization. We are talking here about The Economist Group, so the press media group as they are very large and they, um, they issue a lot of newspapers. They are very committed to sustainability and what they do with technology is using CO2 AI to help them steer their end to end net zero journey. So what they use it for is first to measure and automate their carbon footprint calculations. They have a very complex carbon footprint. They need to capture a lot of data points, and CO2 AI helps them collect those data points, structure those data points, and get to a level of granularity in their footprint, which is really good and really helpful to make decisions.The second thing that they do with CO2 AI is to really set up a road map. And define the hotspots and the reduction levers that go with the roadmap so that they really have a plan and they can cascade the plan across the organization. This is a big pain point that sustainability face team, um, sustainability teams face today.They tend to have targets, but high level plans and no resources to actually make that happen. Technology can really help broadcasting the information, make sure that operational teams get involved into the decarbonization journey. And last but not least, as we were saying, scope three. So the emissions that come from outside the direct operations of the company, typically the emissions from the supply chain, the suppliers, et cetera, are, um, extremely important.They are on average 90 percent of total emissions. And those are the hardest to tackle. What The Economist is doing with CO2 AI is mapping suppliers and being able to really prioritize with who, with what suppliers to engage and what to discuss with them to go at a level of granularity. We were talking about product level at a level of granularity, which is good enough to have proper discussions about reductions and, and impact measurements.Finally, I want to say a few words about AI before taking questions. We talked about tech and digital in a broad sense, which is extremely helpful and will drastically help us accelerate on our sustainability journey. In this field, artificial intelligence is Extremely important. You see here on the page, 30% of respondents who plan to adopt AI, uh, to, uh, steer their net zero sustainability and journey moving forward.Uh, they see artificial intelligence and, uh, as an enabler and a helpful way on many that different dimension. Uh, a couple of ones are making intelligent decisions. Typically on energy usage or decarbonization initiative. Artificial intelligence is a key lever to automate and increase the quality of carbon footprints.This is what we do at CO2 AI, and I could talk for hours about that, but there is a huge accuracy issue and granularity issue with carbon footprints. On carbon footprint when made manually, and artificial intelligence can really help solve this topic. And finally, making predictions and making sure that roadmaps ahead, both from a business and from a sustainability standpoint, are optimized.So we're reaching the end of our presentation. You have two QR codes here to go deeper into either the report or what we do more generally. And I think it's time to take questions.Namrata Narayan: Thank you so much for sharing. I know we've got a ton of questions to follow up with, but first, I do see we've got a few audience questions, so I'm going to ask you both. The first one is from Jean Luc Bonnet, and he's asking about the baseline. He said two times of 10 companies is not so great, but two in 100,000 companies is a great achievement, so could you comment on that?Charlotte Degot: I think the question is related to the four levers that accelerate and that multiply by two the likelihood of managing your reduction journey. So what I can say is that what we ask for in the survey is what percentage of companies are measuring the emissions comprehensively. And as Diana was saying, this has not moved and this is stagnating at 10%.And the other key metric that we asked for in the survey is how, what percentage of companies have actually managed to reduce their emissions in line with their ambition. And here this number is 14%. So I will I will see the glass half empty on this question, and I will say that the baseline is not high enough, and we need to really accelerate the adoption of those four levers, and that will increase the baseline.Namrata Narayan: Thank you so much, and then we have a question with regards to the carbon emissions survey, a couple which I'm going to you know, group together. So, one is, how many companies were part of the survey, and did the survey find any advice regarding how to decarbonize AI itself, since it's also a cause of emissions?Diana Dimitrova: Great, so let me take the first part and Charlotte, I think you can comment on AI itself. So it was 1,850 organizations up from 1,600 last year and up from 1,450 the year before, so we have been seeing a steady interest in folks giving us this information back and the sample is hoovering for some of the kind of large organizations that are between 10 and 25,000 employees, and it said based on their self declaration it was 40,000 percent of global emissions, so we're quite comfortable with the sample that came through this year.Charlotte Degot: And on, uh, uh, how to reduce the footprint of AI, this was not part of the questions we've been asking, uh, on the survey, but what I can say is that, um, there are, uh, many ways to optimize the carbon emissions of any model. Also, tools that exist like CodeCarbon, et cetera, I'm not going to teach anything to this group about it, but clearly, the impact of AI needs to be monitored as any other type of impact, and it needs to be used wise.Namrata Narayan: Well, Charlotte and Diana, thank you so much. There are several more questions, so we might have to come back to you at a later time to get them answered. Thank you so much for joining us at DeCarb.Chris Skipper: So, that's all for this episode of Environment Variables. If you liked what you heard, you can actually check out the video version of this on our YouTube channel. Links to that, as well as everything that we mentioned, can be found in the show notes below. While you're down there, feel free to click follow so you don't miss out on the very latest in the world of sustainable software here on Environment Variables.Bye for now!Asim Hussain: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by guest Savannah Goodman from Google, to bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. They discuss insights from Google’s Sustainability report, the need for a fossil fuel free internet by 2030 and the importance of microgrids and nanogrids. They also highlight Google's sustainability tools including Cloud Region Picker, ActiveAssist and  Carbon Footprint.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteSavannah Goodman: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterTopics:We need a fossil fuel free internet by 2030  | Branch Magazine [6:38]Tesla Megapack | Microgrids & Tesla [12:27]Google Sustainability Goals | Google [21:19] Google & Fervo Geothermal Partnership | Google  [22:58]Google Cloud Region Picker | Google [26:44]Google Active Assist | Google [29:20]Google Carbon Footprint | Google [30:13]The Realtime Cloud Project | Green Software Foundation [32:15]Resources:Octopus Energy  [15:04]The Week in Green Software: Modelling Carbon Aware Software | Environment Variables episode with Iegor Riepen at TU Berlin [20:07]UN Global 24/7 Compact | UN [24:46]Vincent Poncet LinkedIn | Linux Foundation [32:08]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:Savannah Goodman: [00:00:00] While it's important for us to reduce our own carbon footprint, we think the opportunity to provide these flexibility services to the grid will actually help drive broader system decarbonization and allow for broader carbon emission reduction.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. your host, Chris Adams. when we talk about green software, whether you're diving into papers about carbon aware computing. or hearing someone talk about GreenOps, a new [00:01:00] variation of the term DevOps, or even as a consumer, looking at the work that the company's been doing to make it easier to understand how you can reduce the carbon footprint of things like flying. It's hard to escape the work of Google when you look at climate and tech. be honest, it's not that surprising. They operate at a scale that's hard for many of us to really comprehend. Alphabet, the holding company for Google, has a market capitalization of 1. 75 trillion dollars these days. And they use enough digital infrastructure to really care. Their own sustainability report in 2023 shows that Google used something in the region of 22 terawatt hours of electricity last year. This is not a small company. Since 2007, they've generally been one of the leaders when it comes to decarbonizing infrastructure. And recently, they set a public goal to match every hour of power they use with an hour of generation from carbon free sources by 2030. This is something we've seen a [00:02:00] number of organizations get behind, and even the UN with their recent 24 7 compact. So we know there's a lot of smart people working at Google, working on the greening of digital. And today, I'm joined by Savannah Goodman from Google to talk about the finer points of doing green software at scale. Hi Savannah, the floor is yours to introduce yourself.Savannah Goodman: Thanks, Chris. Hi, everyone. I'm Savannah Goodman. I lead the data and software climate solutions team at Google, and I'm super excited to be here. I'm an energy nerd at heart, and I've been studying and working in the climate space for the last decade.Chris Adams: Thank you, Savannah. Okay, so if you are new to this podcast, here's a quick reminder of how it tends to work. Uh, When we mention projects or papers or any links like that, we'll add them into the show notes. And if there's a thing that you heard us talk about that you'd really like to learn more about, please do leave a comment.It really helps other people who are trying to actually learn things about this as well. The other thing I should probably do is introduce myself. My name is Chris [00:03:00] Adams. I work at the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. And I'm also one of the chairs of the policy work group inside the Green Software Foundation, which Google is also a member of. All right. I think that's pretty much it. Savannah, if you're happy for us to go and sitting comfortably, shall we start?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, let's go for it.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. So we're going to talk about some of the cool carbon intelligent computing stuff that Google does shortly, but before we dive into there, I figured it might help to talk a little bit about how you got here first, because as I understand it, you've worked with technology that interacts with grids at various scales in your career.And if we start at the small end, I realize that if you're going to be talking about data centers, it helps developers to understand some of the principles that are behind the kind of power grids in the first place. And this is something you worked on before. And I think what I learned about was there was a project that you worked [00:04:00] on previously with the idea of an off grid internet cafe in a box.This seemed too cool to not ask you about basically. So I should ask, how did this come about before you worked at Google?Savannah Goodman: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking. It was a super interesting project and happy to get the chance to start small and then go all the way to data centers. But yeah, I was in grad school and I was interning at a company that was focused on improving energy access in East Africa. And they were working on a couple of different products for pretty specific applications and they were really tailored to the needs of the local communities that we were working with.So just a few examples, they had very small microgrids, you'd maybe almost call it a nanogrid to provide lighting at night or to charge a few cell phones. So really small kind of mobile solar and storage. And during their research they identified one of the other kind of key pain points in these [00:05:00] communities was the need for better and more reliable internet access.And while some internet cafes existed in the cities, they could be cost prohibitive, they may be very far from some of the local communities, and oftentimes they were actually unreliable because of grid reliability issues in the region. And so my job was essentially to do the research and propose what an off grid internet cafe in a box might look like as a product, and how it could actually solve the pain points in thesefrom these local users. And so I did a lot of really interesting landscape research, developed some product specs, and ultimately also came up with the business case. And I think what I really liked most about this project was the fact that it had a ton of potential impact. I was really excited about the idea of enabling information access for everyone, not just folks in developed countries and big cities, and especially through more [00:06:00] reliable clean energy access.Chris Adams: It's actually timely that we're having this conversation now, just after COP28, because we've seen a few specific announcements that tie into this, actually, things like this goal of tripling renewables globally, for example, by 2030. And there's actually, it's interesting that you talk about some of those things there, because T that was maybe a few years back, and I want to ask you, if you were to come back to this, were there any trends that you saw back then that you might have seen playing out that you'd probably look for immediately, or you'd probably want to dive into if you were coming back to this?Because you mentioned some things like nanogrids, and the idea of moving past basically fossil based generation, because we know in lots of places, like for example Nigeria, You still have two thirds of the power is coming from generation rather than the grid. So it's extremely dirty power compared to what you have now. Maybe I'll just give it a bit of space for you to say what you would be looking for, what you're excited about seeing over the next few years in this particular field.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, thank you. It's definitely some really interesting trends and a [00:07:00] lot has changed even since I was in grad school. And I think one of the first things I remember thinking about is how big, right? What is the optimal size of a microgrid? I mentioned this term nanogrid, which was, like I said, a few solar panels, a small battery that was very mobile.I think that that sort of solution can target a few very specific and acute pain points, but didn't necessarily, I think, scale to the level that these companies were looking to have, especially given the impact that they wanted to drive. So I think one of the interesting trends we've seen is maybe moving from these nano grids towards more true micro grids that can enable multiple applications and are not necessarily mobile, but actually require more robust grid infrastructure.And so that's something very interesting and especially in the context of the developed region, especially in the U. S. where I'm from, grid infrastructure is a very big focus right now. And I think it'll be [00:08:00] really interesting to see how we can take some of the learnings of how we've grown our own grid infrastructure and hopefully leapfrog in some of these areas that don't quite have the existing distribution or transmission build out.Certainly a challenge as I don't think we've fully figured it out for ourselves, but there's definitely a lot of lessons learned along the way. So I think that's . Something really interesting that will play out. Another area that always really stood out to me was the energy and water nexus. And this is something that is really important in a lot of developed countries where there's also a lack of clean water access.And there's been a lot of kind of technology development over the last decade, and I'm sure there will continue to be. And I think the challenge with this is more, again, the kind of go to market of those products. How do we actually ensure that these products fulfill really specific needs and have an appropriate business model that actually meshes well with the type of [00:09:00] communities that need it most.So that's an interesting one that I'm really curious to see how this will continue, especially as there's more and more focus on the global south and adaptation for climate change, which is closely tied both to water and energy as well. And then the last thing. Chris Adams: Oh if I can just stop you there, you said you introduced this term, which some other listeners might not be so familiar with. You mentioned the energy water nexus. Could you maybe expand on that a little bit? This is the idea that basically generating water uses energy, but there's also a flip side to that.Could you maybe expand on that? Because I think that's quite an interesting topicSavannah Goodman: Yeah.Chris Adams: up some people's ears actually.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, definitely. And, um, I think there's, yeah, this sort of exciting concept of the fact that energy and water are two absolutely necessary resources for thriving communities. Like you said, you can, you need usually energy to make water accessible, especially to make it clean and to make it drinkable and portable, right?There's usually some sort, usually using [00:10:00] electricity to do that can be really effective. There's other ways to do it without electricity, but it's a lot more challenging to have infrastructure that scales and is robust enough. The flip side too is water can be a really great energy source. We think of pump storage and hydro, and that's really important for providing clean, dispatchable resources.Of course, hydro is very dependent on the weather and the climate, and as climate changes, it can become actually a less reliable resource. And so there's just a lot of interesting intersections there. We can also think about the climate impacts and droughts and how that might impact both water access for drinking, but also for energy.So, it's a generic term, but it's intended to capture the fact that there's actually a lot of intersection and dependencies between these two fields both ways, and I think it's a really important focus area, right, as we think about you know, impacts on the climate and how communities are going to need to adapt.Chris Adams: Thank you. That's really useful. I [00:11:00] didn't, I've been looking for a term to describe some of this and this immediately makes me think of, say in France or in Germany, where we saw in the heat wave last year, for example, we saw some of this, we saw the reliance on water from things like say nuclear power stations in France, for example, which were essentially. They end up having to come offline in some cases simply because they didn't have enough access to water to actually keep them cool, for example. And this is something that a lot of us don't really think about necessarily in the first place. Okay. It's power, but where does the water fit into this? But flipping, that's actually a really good example of some of this. Okay, cool. So we spoke a little bit about grids. You mentioned that there's like nano grids and say slightly larger grids, like a micro grid. It's worth moving to there, actually, because I understand that when you were working at that company, then you've also worked at Tesla working with microgrids. And when most of us think about, say Tesla, they might think about electric cars more than microgrids. And in fact, I suspect that most developers might not have heard what a microgrid actually is. So for people who are not familiar [00:12:00] with the term, you maybe just explain what a microgrid might actually be? And just to give people some context, because we'll talk about how this relates to data centers a little bit later, but in the short term, maybe you could just briefly provide a kind of microgrid 101 and why you might care about it, why an electric car company might care about some of this, because that will probably be useful context when we talk about data centers and how they integrate with grids and stuff like that.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, absolutely. So a microgrid is a localized group of energy sources and loads that can typically operate independently of a larger grid system. And so this sort of independent network of resources can be useful for a few reasons. First, microgrids can improve energy security and reliability. They tend to be less vulnerable to large scale outages because they can usually kind of disconnect or what we might call island and continue to [00:13:00] operate even if the main grid system goes down.So this is especially beneficial for critical loads. So oftentimes hospitals or emergency shelters may have their own kind of generators and may be able to create their own sort of micro grids. Further, microgrids can actually help reduce, you know, the cost in carbon, uh, depending on the situation. So, for example, a lot of island nations typically have some form of microgrids.Because they're not physically connected to large land areas that have the privilege of having these large scale grids and a lot of infrastructure and robustness. And so while a lot of these island microgrids have historically relied on diesel generators, they can instead integrate wind, solar, and batteries, which can then actually reduce the cost compared to diesel, importing diesel, and will actually reduce the carbon emissions.So that's another big advantage of, or opportunity for microgrids. And to answer your other question on [00:14:00] why companies like Tesla might have incentives to build batteries for the grid, it's really a way for them to scale their battery production for EVs. So Tesla Energy was created actually a while back and it really helped drive down the costs of manufacturing batteries at scale, and it also has the, you know, added benefit of actually creating new business value, new business lines for the company. And the other thing I would say is there's also some really interesting synergies between electric vehicle charging and using grid connected batteries to manage consumption spikes and, and some of the charging costs.So when Tesla deployed the supercharger network, they also looked at deploying grid scale batteries at those charging networks to help manage the costs that they were paying to the electric utilities. So it not only can be a business line, but batteries for the grid can be used to help manage their overall kind of infrastructure costs for the [00:15:00] EVs.Chris Adams: Ah okay, so that makes it a bit clearer for me to understand, and also this makes me think of some of the stuff we've recently seen in the UK, for example, there's a company called Octopus Energy, they're an energy company, and they basically They have this new deal working with people who are building homes and they have this kind of this deal basically if you have batteries or renewable energy fitted into the house when it's being built they're offering zero energy bills for the next for the first five years as long as you're able to make the house integrate into the grid and it seems to be like you said because sometimes energy is expensive when there's, it might be cheap when there's lots of renewables on the grid.For example, it's taking advantage of some of that and storing energy when it's cheap and then using it locally rather than having to buy expensive energy from the grid and vice versa. Ah, okay. That helps me understand that now. Thank you. you said something else, actually, about the fact that you've got grids which are interconnected.So they're independent, but they're connected in some ways because there's a larger thing. This made me think a lot about the internet, actually, how the internet is [00:16:00] basically made of a series of smaller networks which are interacting with larger networks. So there's some parallels there. And I can imagine how some of these ideas might scale all the way up to something like a large hyperscale data center. I suspect there's probably a bit more to it than that. And I guess this is probably where the work that you've been doing with Google might come in, actually. So for folks who are following along for the ride, when you're talking about, say, hyperscale data centers versus micro grids or small grids here, what are the differences when you're working at that different kind of scale, for example?And is this idea that, okay, you've got a series of small grids connected. That's a little bit like the internet. Is that a comparison that you could really make? Well, maybe you could just expand on that a bit more. Cause that's what I immediately think about when you talk to me about series of grids connected to each other, for example.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. Like you said, the internet is made up all of these different kind of nodes and is really a network of nodes and connection points. And that's [00:17:00] exactly what the grid is. And some areas are better connected, right? They have more interconnectivity and nodes, and that can make them more reliable than others.Also similar to the internet, because there's this network and different demand and supply pockets. There can be congestion of just like there may be network congestion for internet or data transfer. There can be grid congestion for the flow of electrons. And so keeping this in mind, as I alluded to earlier, there are a lot of opportunities to really better optimize the grid when you have flexible resources, whether it's EV charging or storage for the grid. This flexibility makes it a lot easier to manage the grid during peak times. The example you, you mentioned with Octopus, I think is a great one, where they're fully recognizing the value of having flexible grid to the point where they won't even charge you for the energy because they know that's really important for the way they manage their portfolio.And so for data centers, the way that we [00:18:00] contribute to this load flexibility is we can actually shift our compute load. And we can do that in response to signals from the grid in specific locations, where there may be congestion or during kind of the peak times of the grid. And this is what we would typically call demand response.And just,Chris Adams: Ah, okay.Savannah Goodman: yeah, and it's- Demand response has actually been around for a long time, but what's really, I think, new and innovative about what we're doing at Google is leveraging compute demand to be able to participate in these demand response programs. Historically, demand response has typically been from industrial factories who are turning down their manufacturing or from thermostats, right, who are turning down the heating.But what's really great about compute load is that it's a virtual load. And so the fact that we can shift it not only in time. But also in space is really, um, the unique part of, of, um, compute. And we've [00:19:00] actually been shifting compute at, at Google for a few years now. Historically, we were shifting in response to a carbon intensity signal from the grid.In order to minimize our own carbon emissions. And for demand response, we do it a little bit differently. We will typically receive a notification from the grid operator, or we'll agree on the local peak time. And then we dispatch our kind of global compute planning system to overwrite that existing schedule that was carbon optimized.And that basically limits non urgent compute tasks for the duration of that event at the data center. And I think we're really excited about these capabilities because while it's important for us to reduce our own carbon footprint, we think the opportunity to provide these flexibility services to the grid.Will actually help drive broader system decarbonization and allow for broader carbon emission reduction through enabling the increase in clean [00:20:00] energy and just being able to turn down load when the grid is being supported by gas peakers, for example.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. So for people who may have listened to this before, we, we did a podcast with, I think, I believe his name is Igor Repin at the Technical University of Berlin. He was talking and going into quite a lot of really nerdy detail about how some of this stuff was modeled on the European grid to explain this and saying, if you're able to smooth out these kinds of spikes, then you don't need to actually have quite so much infrastructure in the first place.Or it may be that you don't need to have things like, say, as many peaker plants, often tend to be very carbon intensive and tend to burn a lot of fossil fuels. I see now. All right then. So maybe we can actually just talk a little bit about this being part of a of broader strategy. So we spoke a little bit about there being a kind of target to be entirely fossil free by 2030, for example. Is it a chance we could maybe just dive into some of that a bit more? Because for most of us U understanding [00:21:00] why you'd have a target to be running entirely a fossil free energy by 2030 might not be obvious to everyone. And sorry, I think the term that Google uses is carbon free, but basically this idea of you want to have things running 24 7 rather than just saying, having an annual kind of claim, for example. Could you talk a little bit about some of that and what some of the thinking behind that might have been?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, definitely. So As you mentioned, 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. 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, uh, system, how complex that gets and there's no playbook. But we see these goals as a way to actually help scale new [00:22:00] global solutions that drive broader system wide decarbonization because we're actually aligning our own goals with what the grid needs.Through these hourly local matching, that's how the grid operates, right? It operates, you have to have local constraints. You have to match supply and demand every hour. And so we've seen research from folks like TU Berlin and Princeton and the IEA that show 24 seven procurement is one of the best ways.For corporates to help accelerate the energy transition towards grids operating on clean energy every hour, every day. And for 24 7, load flexibility is really complementary because it provides this nhe gew sort of flexible resource that can help us better match the clean energy that's on the grid or the clean energy that we procure on a local hourly basis.So we're also looking, besides load flexibility, at other new next gen technologies like geothermal. We've [00:23:00] announced the starting operations of our geothermal plant with Fervo in Nevada. We're also really excited about battery storage. And there's a lot of other technologies that we're looking at, and research shows that having this diverse portfolio, both of Load flexibility and next gen technologies is what can make 24 7 more cost effective and more accessible and actually meet the grid needs, especially when we consider rising demand in electricity from things like electrification and data center growth.So, so yeah, all of this demand response effort is really a key part of our kind of sustainability strategy, and we've recently announced a couple of pilots to prove out that this is real, this can work, it has benefits for us, it has benefits for the grid, and we're going to continue to evolve our capabilities and work with our utility and grid operator partners to make sure that we're maximizing the shared impact [00:24:00] of this system.Chris Adams: ah, okay. So it sounds like rather than just we're saying I'm going to buy a green energy tariff and that, it's all more I want to shift the entire paradigm that the grid actually operates on. And I know that Microsoft have also come on board, but they're not going to call it 24 7, of course, because that's what's called by the competitor.So they're using the term 100, 100, 0. I think it's 100 percent of the time. Coming from a hundred percent renewable energy or zero carbon. It's something like that. It's not as easy to remember as 24 seven, but that's one thing we've seen. And we've also seen the federal government. I believe they've made us, they made it last year, actually saying they're aiming to have by 2030, 50 percent of all of their power. And that's the entire federal government, not just a single company, for example. So that was like another example of this. Okay, cool. And I think we might have alluded to this. This is actually a kind of wider scheme. The UN has this global 24 7 compact that any organization can sign on to and get on board with as well, I think, right?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, exactly. And we're really excited to see during COP that the US government officially also [00:25:00] signed on to the compact. There's over 100 signatories at this point. And I think what's most exciting to me is that it is really a community of different kinds of companies and organizations from all across The energy sector that need to come together.So there's some energy buyers. There's energy suppliers. There's governments. There's cities. There's software and data providers. There's hardware providers. And I think we're not going to do this alone. But what we're really excited about is creating this ecosystem And developing technologies to advance that ecosystem so that we can all collectively work together to meet the ambitious decarbonization goals for the grid that are really needed to enable the broader climate targets for 1.5 degrees.  Chris Adams: I see. Okay. All right. Thank you for that. So we've spoken a little bit about data centers and how flexibility there can actually have some kind of impact inside this. And we spoke also a little bit about, [00:26:00] uh, the kind of wider context of why you might think about this in terms of decarbonizing a grid. This gives a bit of visibility there, and you spoke about some internal things. Maybe we could talk a little bit about some of the things that end users of services that, say, Google might offer, might use, because we've got a lot of developers who use, say, Google Cloud Platform or even other such platforms as well, and I know that I've used some of Google's tools previously, and I know that there's some projects inside the GSF, the Green Software Foundation, that talk about this and are contributing to that, but maybe you could just tell touch on some of the tooling that you've seen in use or made available for end users, because there's a couple of cool things, which I think are worth develop, worth some of our listeners not knowing about.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, absolutely. And just to set the context right now, as part of our Carbon Intelligent Compute or our demand response programs, we're not actually shifting customer workloads. We're focused first on shifting some of the internal workloads that operate Google [00:27:00] products like YouTube videos and things like that.However, we're very keen on exploring with customers who are interested in reducing their footprint to shift their customer workloads. In the meantime, we've developed some tools that can help these cloud customers reduce their carbon footprint themselves. And so, just to talk through a couple of the different tools, one of the first ones we launched was called the Region Picker.The Region Picker allows customers to look at all of the different kind of characteristics that they may want to optimize for, in particular, latency, cost, and then carbon footprint. And based on,Chris Adams: Hmm.Savannah Goodman: you can essentially adjust the weighting of those different Aspects, depending on what is most important for you and your business.And based on that, the tool will actually provide you a optimal region or a set of optimal regions to site your new workloads in. And this tool, we've also embedded [00:28:00] the essentially green leafs into the cloud platform. So when customers are choosing regions, they can actually see which ones are cleaner.by based on meeting a certain threshold of carbon free energy. The reason we started with the region picker tool is through our own analysis and data we've seen that one of the most, pretty much the most impactful factor when siting workloads is location. So, eventually we'd love to be able to shift workloads in time as well for customers, but this spatial sort of shifting or site selection is really impactful because customers can move their workloads from a dirty to a clean grid, and that makes a really big difference.Chris Adams: So the region picker, for people who haven't seen this before, as I understand it, when you're using this, it basically gives you an idea of saying if your audience is in Germany, rather than running it in say, one part of there, you might want to consider looking at Switzerland. Who are still in the same place, but have much, much cleaner power, for example, [00:29:00] and still would be staying inside your latency requirements is tools like that.And that's the kind of stuff that I, uh, that I saw. And I think that's the first time I've ever seen any large organization sharing some of that stuff. So that is included in active assist now, or some of the tools inside Google. Is that what you were saying?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's part of our region picker tool. The active assist tool can help customers reduce their footprint in a slightly different way. So the focus of the active assist tool is, let's say customers have some projects that have just been running in the background. The ActiveAssist tool can recommend automatically certain optimizations, could turn down a project, or minimize the runtime of a project, which will not only help reduce cost, but also reduce carbon.So the ActiveAssist tool is using machine learning and AI to serve predictions and recommendations for cloud customers.Chris Adams: So the active assisting, so it's a bit like, so yes, there's AI and things, but it also just tells you, by [00:30:00] the way, mate, you've left your computer on, or you've left this project running. Maybe you want to turn it off if it's not serving any traffic, because this is one thing that comes up. It'll basically do some stuff like that, as well as providing some specific, much more tailored recommendations as well.Yeah? Savannah Goodman: Yeah, exactly. That's right. And then the last tool that we've developed is called Carbon Footprint. And this is really a reporting tool. There's also some kind of insights that customers can glean to optimize how they're setting up their infrastructure. But this is the rounding out the suite of tools we developed.It helps customers understand what their actual carbon footprint is from the use of cloud services. So as they make changes, They can see how that impacts the trends of their carbon footprint over time, and they can also use the data for their own corporate reporting. Usually the use of cloud falls into a customer's scope three, indirect emissions, and so this is an important, an important [00:31:00] reporting tool for our customers to be able to meet their reporting needs.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. And this is something that is just built into the system from day one, or is it part of something you need to purchase separately, for example?Savannah Goodman: So this tool is available and free for everyone in the cloud console, can access it directly and it's organized per billing account. You can see pretty granular data too, per month, per project, per region. So there's a lot of different ways you can slice and dice the data. There's also a data export, right?If you want to integrate that data directly into some of your own dashboarding and marry it with other kind of cloud operations data. So yep, it's free and available for everyone on Google Cloud.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Savannah. All right, then. So I know that you work for a specific vendor, and I am mindful of us spending too much time talking about this, because I know that, I can see why it's useful for one company to share this visibility. And from the perspective of a non profit, I'm glad that there's one company pushing this stuff and has been. forthcoming sharing this information compared to some of the other providers in this [00:32:00] kind of space. And I know that from speaking to one of your colleagues, I think Vincent, I never pronounce, I'm going to pronounce, mispronounce his name, Ponset or Ponset. He's also, he's been involved in some of this as well.And I met him at the Linux Foundation at LF Energy Summit in, in, in Paris, basically. I understand that there's a project called the Green Software Foundation Real Time Cloud Project, which is, being led by both Adrian Cockcroft and Pindy. I, oh, Pindy, I totally forgot your surname, but there's, we have a couple of people inside the GSF who are members who are leading on this, maybe we could talk a little bit about why that's important and why as a member of GSF, you've been involved in some of these projects to create some kind of consistency and conventions around this data that gets exported or exposed to customers.Savannah Goodman: Yeah, definitely. So we've heard from our customers that the data we're providing is super helpful, but they also need more, more transparent data that's consistent and comparable across their cloud providers. [00:33:00] Often customers will have multi tenant use cases and will have multiple cloud providers. And so it's really important that we can provide more accurate data, more transparent data and comparable data to help them, like I mentioned, with their reporting needs.And to also make better informed decision for taking action within the cloud environment on how to reduce their carbon emissions. And so we're really excited to be working on the cloud project with Green Software Foundation. Um, that's looking at two main use cases for the project. The first one is this emissions reporting, and the second one is really carbon optimization.Ideally, these two use cases would be tied closely together, but in reality, because of the way the current accounting and auditing systems work, the reporting Use case typically has a significant lag in the data. And so we're hoping that this project will enable better standardization across metrics for better comparability for reporting.But at the same [00:34:00] time, we think there's a lot of opportunity to provide more real time, more accurate data for the optimization aspects. And so we're hoping to develop methodologies and tools that can enable cloud providers to offer this more granular and realtime Data. That will support the carbon optimization use case in the near term and then ultimately with the goal of reducing the lag of carbon reporting in the long term . So we're super eager actually to explore working with our cloud customers and seeing what tools are most useful for them, what metrics, how can we help them optimize their carbon footprint, whether it's in an automated way.Through our own carbon intelligent compute system or through the tools that we're providing through the console.Chris Adams: gotcha. Okay. Thanks for clearing some of that up. And I know that because I'm also in that working group right now, I can actually speak to you and say, quite honestly, that some two years ago, Google started publishing some of the information at a kind of region by region basis, showing [00:35:00] like the carbon intensity or like the amount of power that is considered carbon free for every single region, um, sharing it as like a CSV on GitHub. This has actually been really helpful to provide a kind of starting point for sorting out some kind of consistent metric, consistent way of reporting this or requesting this from different providers. Cause we know that Amazon has a cloud calculator and Google has a cloud one and Microsoft have one, but having a consistent thing to refer to has been really helpful for this and it's made it quite a bit easier to then say. For example, I'm glad that Google has been one of the earlier companies to talk about information, emissions across all three scopes, scope one, two, and three. And this is something that we don't have from all the providers right now. So being able to point to an example and a data set has been really helpful in this scenario here. I wanted to ask you, coming to the end of the time for this chat, and we've spoken a little bit about like changing some of the kind of paradigms around, rather than basically just buying green energy, like essentially changing how [00:36:00] people think about using power to actually incentivize more carbon aware or approaches for reducing the emissions associated technology, for example. I want to ask you, is there anything that you'd like me to draw attention to? Or you, you reckon we should talk about as well, because we've covered quite a ssions ssions lot of ground from like nanogrids all the way up to ginormous data centers that use as much power as small cities, basically. So what else are you looking at or what else would you like to draw people's attention to right now in this field?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, I think overall we're super excited about the potential for green software to reduce emissions. I think there's a lot of different ways that we can go about making software more green, whether it's through our hyper scale carbon intelligent compute type platforms or even individual developers choosing cleaner regions for their workloads.We're really optimistic about how these solutions can come together to enable broader capabilities across the GSF community and beyond. [00:37:00] We think that load flexibility is such an important part for the future of the grid and we think software has some really unique Flexible capabilities that other kind of loads don't necessarily have.And so, that's why we're really thrilled to be part of this community to see how we can really maximize the, you know, level of flexibility that green software can offer to really help drive the energy transition at the broader grid scale and reduce carbon emissions.Chris Adams: Brilliant. All right, then I think we're coming up to the end of our time. So I just want to ask if people have, if their interest has been peaked by any of this, where would you suggest people look, or if people were interested about what you're doing specifically, where would you suggest people look to follow on for updates about what's taking place in this field, beyond the projects we just mentioned, like the real time cloud thing in GitHub, or like Google's account on GitHub, for example, or some of the other things. So maybe, let's say I'm a developer. I'm [00:38:00] curious about some of this. I don't know where to look. Where should I be looking to learn more about this or continue my research?Savannah Goodman: Yeah, definitely. So we publish quite a few updates through the sustainability topics in the Google Cloud blog where you can see the updates on the latest work and not just for green software, but a lot of the different sustainability areas that we're developing new technologies for. If you're interested in learning more about kind of Google's overall strategy, not just cloud specific, Sustainability work, then google.com/sustainability . It's a good place to start. That's where we publish all of our papers and annual reports. But yeah, otherwise, we definitely recommend the Google Cloud blog and following the sustainability topic. Lots of exciting updates to come.Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. And what we'll do now is we'll just try. And if, if you're a listener and you've listened to some of this and you caught your eye, we're going to take a moment now to just get as many links as possible to all this stuff that we've spoke about, because we've covered a lot of ground. All right. Savannah, I've enjoyed this. I've learned [00:39:00] a lot and I think our listeners probably have as well. I want to wish you have a lovely week and yeah. Have a lovely winter break. If you're, if you celebrate your time away over winter.Savannah Goodman: Thank you so much. Have a good one.Chris Adams: Okay. Cheers.​[00:40:00] 

From the recent Decarbonize Software 2023 event, this episode showcases a fireside chat on Responsible AI with Tammy McClellan from Microsoft and Jesse McCrosky from ThoughtWorks. Jesse shares his thoughts and experiences from years of working in the field of Sustainable Tech on the topics of risks, sustainability, and more regarding AI, before answering some questions from the audience. Learn more about our people:Sophie Trinder: LinkedInJesse McCrosky: LinkedIn | WebsiteTammy McClellan: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterEvents:Decarbonize Software | GSF Resources:AI Transparency in Practice | Mozilla Foundation [04:19] Reducing bias and improving safety in DALL·E 2 | OpenAI [09:31] Responsible AI: Fireside Chat | Decarb 2023 [18:41]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: 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.Chris Skipper: Welcome to Environment Variables. Today, we've got another highlight from the recent Decarbonize Software 2023 event. We'll be showcasing the fireside chat on Responsible AI from Jesse McCrosky, Head of Sustainability and Social Change and Principal Data Scientist at ThoughtWorks, and Tammy McClellan, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft and Co-Chair of the Community Working Group and Oversight Committee at the Green Software Foundation. They are introduced by our very own Senior Technical Project Manager for open source projects, Sophie Trinder, so it will be her voice that you hear first. So, without further ado, here's the Fireside Chat on Responsible AI.Sophie Trinder: Hi everyone, I'm Sophie, the technical project manager for our open source projects at the Green Software Foundation. Today I'm going to introduce a special fireside chat to our Decarbonize Software event. We're continuing the conversation that began on the 5th of October at our panel on responsible AI. The conversation surrounding responsible AI is dynamic, oscillating between optimism and skepticism. one side, practitioners believe that AI has the potential to drive sustainable development goals, from responsible consumption to waste management and energy conservation. The promise lies in our improvements in measuring software's environmental impacts, and innovation across energy-efficient algorithms, hardware optimizations, and the growing use of renewable energy sources. On the other side, the rapid expansion of AI, particularly large learning language models, and the insatiable demand for this technology, are raising concerns. If left unchecked, the energy consumption and resource utilization associated with AI make many feel like we're endangering a future where software causes zero harmful environmental impacts. To help us explore the path forward, I'm thrilled to introduce Tammy McClellan, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, and Jesse McCrosky, Head of Responsible Tech and Principal Data Scientist at ThoughtWorks. Thanks, both. Take it away.Tammy McClellan: Thanks, Sophie. And a hello to all you sustainability addicts. Jesse, hello. Let's start the question with, how do you see the relationship between responsible AI and sustainability?Jesse McCrosky: Hey Tammy, great question and nice to see you all. So at ThoughtWorks we use a framework that I like which we refer to as the greening of tech and greening by tech and I think this is the best lens through which to view that question. Greening of tech refers to the fact that these systems and especially generative AI as we're talking about now have serious energy consumption, they have serious sustainability issues that need to be tackled.The other side is greening by tech and recognizes the potential that this technology has to actually improve sustainability of other processes, either within or outside of the tech world. And I think what ties these, these two questions together is issues of transparency and information and ensuring that people have the information they need to make the right decisions for our environment.Tammy McClellan: I like that, greening of tech and greening for tech. It's my new mantra now. So how can, uh, we use this to make more sustainable solutions?Jesse McCrosky: So it's a big question. To begin with, I think that I refer to transparency, and when we talk about transparency, a lot of people think that means you share your source code, or you share your model weights, and then you're transparent. Or it means you have to explain the decisions the AI is making, and that's transparency. Transparency is more than that. There's a report I did with the Mozilla Foundation on AI transparency, and we talk about meaningful AI transparency that needs to be legible, auditable, and actionable. And this means that we have to consider the specific stakeholders that the information is being provided to, what are their needs, what are they going to do with this information. So it comes down to the old adage that you can't manage what you can't measure. So for example, in order to support meaningful policy, meaningful regulation, we need to have information about the sustainability characteristics of these systems.Tammy McClellan: So talk to us a little bit about some possible solutions in this area.Jesse McCrosky: Yeah, absolutely. So when we're looking at solutions, especially using the kind of transparency lens, we can think about who is the transparency being provided to. So, for example, we can talk about consumers. And right now, consumers are very excited about ChatGPT or whatever else, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and everything like that. It's a lot of fun to play with. And they do not have meaningful information about the carbon implications of that play. So someone was suggesting to me that ChatGPT should have a real-time counter across the top somewhere that's telling you how much carbon have you emitted so far in your session, how many, you know, gallons of water have been consumed, whatever else. And it is not a matter of just shaming people, but it's helping people make the right choices, because there might be applications for which ChatGPT is really worthwhile to use, but there's other times that somebody's just idly playing or something like that, and if they realize the implications of doing, they might make other choices. This becomes more interesting when we talk about communication between, for example, model developers and model deployers. So, for example, if somebody is using the OpenAI APIs in their product, they need to be able to have information about what the implications are of those API calls so they can make good choices in how they build their software.Tammy McClellan: So awareness is key, absolutely. So Jesse, what is the potential for Gen AI to support greater sustainability?Jesse McCrosky: Yeah, it's an exciting question, and I think there is some potential here. There's a case that ThoughtWorks took, it's a couple years back now, I think, in which we worked with a international manufacturing and services company. They were interested in finding solutions to meet their sustainability goals, and they just weren't sure which way to go.They weren't sure, "should we start sourcing our energy from a different place, or using different sorts of transportation, or using different industrial processes or offering different products?" And so what we did for them was built a mathematical model of their operations and their supply chains. once we had that mathematical model, we were able to build a sort of scenario modeling dashboard where we could show them like, "hey, if you switch to delivery trucks that are using electricity instead of gas, this is what happens to your emissions, this is what happens to your bottom line, this is what happens to your customers."And likewise, depending on / considering different product mixes, considering different sourcing, whatever else. So the mathematical model here was not rocket science, to be honest, it was fairly simple stuff. The hard part of this engagement was really understanding the business at the level that we needed to in order to build that model. There were many hours of interviews and poring over notes and internal documents and everything else, as well as actually some basic desk research to determine the necessary carbon emissions factors, that sort of thing. I'm excited at the potential of generative AI to make this sort of process more accessible and more scalable. And I think that we've seen evidence so far that these models do a very good job of looking at these sorts of documents, looking at recordings and interviews, and it may be possible that you could create this model semi automatically with far, far less of the kind of very heavyweight and expensive all sorts of interventions. As well, it was challenging to understand the exchangeability. And so, for example, if the company is buying cotton in one particular country, it might be obvious to us that they can instead buy the same cotton from some other country, and that's the only possible change that could be made. But it's not so simple for the model to figure that sort of thing out automatically.Whereas GenAI, I think when we connect to these sorts of emissions factors databases, has the potential to make this process much easier. Tammy McClellan: Yeah, awesome. Let's move a little bit and talk about risks. How do you think businesses can manage the risks of AI? Jesse McCrosky: Yeah, it's it's a big question. I think everybody's talking about this. And I think what I would say is it's critical to understand that risks must be mitigated, not removed. I think a lot of people are talking, for example, about bias and discrimination, and they say, okay, we're going to produce a model that's perfectly fair and perfectly unbiased, or we're going to eliminate this bias from our model or whatever else. And this is just not the way things work. We live in the real world, and these systems are based on data from the real world. And the real world is unjust, and so we need to be able to be ready to tackle that. So, one example that I like is OpenAI with their DALL-E interface generation system. For a while, maybe some months ago, I think, if you asked it for pictures of lawyers, it was going to give you eight pictures of white men, basically.And OpenAI recognized that there was a problem there, as did the community, of course. So eventually, OpenAI had a short blog post where they talked about how they were going to fix this. And it was apparently fixed, so when people tried to get pictures, they would see pictures of lawyers, and some of them would be women, and some of them would be of different ethnicities, and everything else. So People were curious how this had been fixed and it turned out that all that OpenAI was doing was just randomly appending words like women or black or Asian or whatever else to these prompts and people were not super impressed with this solution but I think it's an important illustrated example, because it's a mitigation, there was a problem with a model, there was a problem with the data, this is not a problem that can be solved fundamentally, it needed to be mitigated, and they found a way, they said, "here's the harm that's going to come from the system. It's going to not be producing an adequate representation, and we found a way that we can show more representation." So this is the sort of mitigation that companies need to take. So when there's issues, and this is where transparency comes in around the carbon impacts as well, so that they can be mitigated, so that if I'm an engineer sitting in front of my laptop writing some software, I need to have awareness that if I call this Gen AI call or whatever else, I have to understand this is going to spike the carbon emissions of my product, and I need to find another solution.Tammy McClellan: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Tell me. So are you optimistic or pessimistic about Gen AI at this point?Jesse McCrosky: I think I'm mixed. I think that ultimately solving the climate crisis means simultaneously solving a social crisis. And I think it's very hard to solve climate change without also solving issues of social justice globally. And I think that Gen AI is a tool that might enable some of these conversations to be tackled in a more interesting way.So I think as long as we're mindful and honest and clear eyed about how we apply this technology, there can be some optimism there. We need to ensure that we have adequate transparency so that people understand the carbon implications of the choices they're making when they're using these systems, but given that, there is potential to do better.Tammy McClellan: Gotcha. So I know when you and I chatted before, you said that you had a fun story of AI. Did you want to tell us what that is?Jesse McCrosky: Ah, so actually, I think there's a misunderstanding. The fun story was an expanded version of what I was talking about before, butTammy McClellan: Gotcha. Jesse McCrosky: if we have a moment, I think one thing I want to add when we come back to the idea of how, how transparency can help Gen AI be used more responsibly. So, a lot of people are familiar with the concepts of DevOps or MLOps or CD4ML, these sorts of processes. And I think this is a really critical place for transparency around carbon emissions to be integrated. I think the point I would make is that right now, a software developer that's working in kind of a modern setup has the ability, as they're writing code, to see immediately if the code that they're changing is causing some test to fail, or is causing some performance degradation, or is introducing some bug or whatever else. And I think we need to have the same process for carbon so that it if an engineer is making a choice and for any devs out there, maybe you have a case where you need to use a regular expression, but it seems like too much work to figure it out. "Hey, I can just call a Gen AI model and it'll do it for me as well."It'll work just fine. And you might make that choice because it saves you a couple minutes or whatever. But if you then see that all of a sudden your dashboard turns red and says, okay, your carbon has just increased like 100 percent or whatever, you're going to come back and you're going to revisit that decision. And also your team is going to see that, the trail of what's happening because of what you've done. And so it creates this sort of accountability in the development process.Tammy McClellan: All right. So I'm curious. What are the top three recommendations you would give to people who are interested in reducing carbon emissions of AI?Jesse McCrosky: Good questions. And yeah, I think that's something I didn't really touch on so far, but there are a lot of choices that can be made when applying AI. So we don't need to use the biggest general purpose models for everything. I think that there are cases where a general purpose model is really needed. But um, I think that in most cases, no. And so we can talk about using much simpler application-specific models. We can talk about using a smaller model and fine tuning it for the particular task. There's processes like quantization and distillation that can make models much more carbon efficient and nearly as effective. So investigating these options, and again, I think this kind of hinges on the MLOps setup where you need to be ready to evaluate performance. You need to be able to say "how small can I make this model and still actually meet the requirements in my product." Beyond that, I think it's a matter of providing transparency to the end user. So if you're producing something, if users understand the choices that they're making when they're using that product, there's a lot of different ways this can play out, and this can mean some Gen AI chatbot or something like that, but this also can be, maybe you have an e-commerce product. platform and you're using AI to make recommendations to your users and the recommendations that you make can influence their behavior and it can encourage them to buy more products that are disposable or made in very carbon-intensive ways, and so considering these sorts of externalities as well is really critical.Tammy McClellan: Gotcha. I'm curious, do we have any questions from the audience at this point?Sophie Trinder: Yes, we do. And thank you so much, Tammy and Jesse. It's been a really great session on AI here at Decarb, and it really shows the passion in the industry for these technologies, plus the responsibility that we all must take when it comes to AI. I know we'll be hearing a lot more in the coming months. But yes, we've got a few questions from the audience. I just want to shout out first, Jesse, thanks for the fun story on OpenAI, how they were mitigating the problem with data to show more representation through mitigation. It was a really interesting insight, thanks. So one question from the audience, how important is prompt engineering for improvement of AI efficiency?Jesse McCrosky: Great question, yes, and it's it's really extremely important, because the energy being consumed by the model is going to depend in some complex ways, depending on how many tokens are coming into it, and in quite a direct sense, how many tokens are coming out of it. So if we can reduce the number of tokens going through the system, we reduce the carbon emissions. And this again, I know I'm sounding like a stuck record, but it really depends on the MLOp setup, where we should be able to test and see how short can we make our prompts and still accomplish what we need to do. And this is both the length of the prompt itself and the length of the output. So for example, go back to that example I was talking about where maybe ChatGPT has a little indicator at the top telling you how much carbon has been emitted in your session so far. Maybe if you see that number growing as you're chatting with it, you're going to say, "hey, ChatGPT, please be a little bit more brief with your answers. I don't need the whole kind of colorful language and going on and on about everything." So yes, it's very important.Sophie Trinder: Super interesting. Thank you. We've got another one on training the AI ML model, which obviously takes a huge amount of data and processing, which in turn causes a lot of emissions. How do you think that we could best counterpart the same?Jesse McCrosky: Yeah, good question. And I think that I have an article out where I actually talk about how the comparisons are a little bit overwrought, talking about how training a model is equivalent to driving a car some distance or whatever. I think that, um, the comparison, at least so far, thankfully, is not quite accurate because we have many cars on the vehicle and a relatively small number of models being trained. I think the important thing is to keep it that way. I think the important thing is that we need to encourage use of open models and shared models rather than every single organization in the world trying to train their own LLM. And this is why I would be a strong supporter of open-source models. I think it's nice to see that movement.I think it's potential. It means that organizations, first of all, save their money, but also save their carbon when they want to be able to explore elements in their business. And there's always the potential for fine tuning, for whatever other tools need to be applied to open models to make them suit people's applications.Sophie Trinder: Amazing. Thank you. And jumping back to sort of problems on data and representation, we've got another question centered around that. So do you think we should promote digital humanism and ethical AI to raise awareness about the need for sustainable AI?Jesse McCrosky: Yeah, absolutely. I think we're existing at a moment where responsible AI and such is being discussed everywhere. There's very active regulatory work in many different regions of the world. There's many people in academia, in civil society, and in industry doing this sort of work. And I think that green AI should come along for the ride, so to speak, and it should be an important part of how we think about the risks and the potentials of these models.So, yes.Sophie Trinder: Amazing. Thanks very much.Chris Skipper: So that's all for this episode of Environment Variables. If you liked what you heard, you can actually check out the video version of this on our YouTube channel. Links to that as well as everything that we mentioned can be found in the show notes below. While you're down there, feel free to click follow so you don't miss out on the very latest in the world of sustainable software here on Environment Variables. Bye for now!Asim Hussain: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and of course, we want more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation Thanks again and see you in the next episode.