Environment Variables

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

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

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.