Join Chris Skipper and this week’s guest Namrata Narayan in discussing the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event taking place this November, as well as the role Namrata plays in the GSF. In this episode, they cover the relationships between different member organizations and their role in green software and how they can work toward the same goals in a competitive environment. They touch on how and where this year’s Decarb event will take place and even how it has been set up to reduce its own carbon footprint. Hear about the planned sessions of the day and how to register in this episode of Environment Variables.Learn more about our people:Chris Skipper: LinkedInNamrata Narayan: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Decarbonize Software | [29:08]Register for Decarbonize Software 2023 | [34:58]Events:Decarbonize Software 2023If 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:Namrata Narayan: If we see software as an agent for climate action, then we are going to be a lot more successful in articulating why software aligns with sustainability.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. 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. Chris Skipper: Welcome to this episode of Environment Variables. I'm your host, Chris Skipper. And in this episode, we will be discussing the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event with the Green Software Foundation's Director of Communications and Member Relations, Namrata Narayan. Hello, Namrata, and welcome to Environment Variables.Namrata Narayan: Hi Chris, excited to be here.Chris Skipper: Cool. So before we dive into the meat of this podcast for our listeners, could you please introduce yourself?Namrata Narayan: Sure. So, as you said, my name is Namrata Narayan and I really lead communications and member relations now at the Green Software Foundation. I've been with the foundation for about a year, actually more than a year.Chris Skipper: That's amazing. And Just so people know, I'll say a little bit about myself. You might have heard my voice in this podcast before. I'm Chris. I'm the podcast producer. The other Chris is the host and I'm an absolute noob when it comes to green software. I don't have a software background at all. In fact, I have a musical background and a podcast background.So, but yeah, so other than doing podcasts, I like drinking lots of coffee and at the moment avoiding all the cherry blossoms here in Australia because it is spring and I have a grass allergy. So there you And before we dive in, here's a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode.So before we talk about Decarbonize Software 2023. Let's chat a little bit about yourself. So what does being the Director of Communications and Member Relations in the GSF entail? And what are your responsibilities and goals in this role, Namrata?Namrata Narayan: This is a role that was just recently created. I was doing this work for the last few months and it just made sense to formalize it and make sure that everybody in the community knew who to reach out to and in what capacity. So my role is really focused on building awareness about green software, the work we're doing at the foundation, and nurturing relationships with our member organizations and their people to support knowledge sharing, participation in our projects, and ultimately really support a culture change towards sustainability in tech. So in nutshell, I oversee content marketing, run our social media and weekly newsletter, advise our leadership and working group teams on branding and messaging and identify opportunities to support our members within the context of our projects and initiatives.Chris Skipper: Awesome. And so you've been with the foundation for just over a year. Have you seen, in your role with marketing and promoting the growth of the community, have you seen a change, A, in the number of members that have come into the Green Software Foundation, and B, in the type of members that have come into the foundation?Namrata Narayan: Yeah, that's a good question. I certainly have. I think since I started working with the foundation, we welcomed probably 10 new members at this point. They're all different shapes and sizes, which I love because it really speaks to the fact that this is an issue that everybody should be concerned about, and all types of teams should be working on, it's not just a problem for the big giants, but also for small engineering teams, for consultancies, for service providers.So we've got a really nice variety of members that we're now working with.Chris Skipper: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I think I probably came on around about the same time as you then, because Environment Variables is just over a year old, or maybe I think it's been longer than that because there was a lot of planning for this podcast to actually go ahead and then eventually Asim got around to recording something and sent it to me.But yeah. So, and I'm not as in touch with members, I would say, as yourself probably, but I've definitely seen global membership the Green Software Foundation. For context for listeners, I'm currently in Australia, but Namrata is sitting in Canada and that's just within the people who work for the Green Software Foundation.But we have had people as far away as Japan and I think, I believe even South America attend events. So yeah, it's very much global. I don't need to, I'm preaching to the choir here. I've forgotten how the term is, yeah, but people, people who are listening to this podcast are probably members of the Green Software Foundation.And if you aren't already, you should probably join. How easy is it to join the Green Software Foundation?Namrata Narayan: We've got a few different tiers of membership. So based on what organization, yeah, what they can do, they can either come at the steering committee level or at the general level, there's, we have a standard agreement because we want to treat all of our members equally. And yeah, it's relatively straightforward and as soon as they become members, as soon as everything's signed and sealed, then that's really when they get passed on to me and I support the onboarding process, which we've now made a lot better, there's still definitely room for improvement and we're looking forward to just making it even more seamless, but are able now to provide so much information right off the bat in terms of what we do, how they, how different, how different people within member organizations can get involved, where they can find all the information.I mean, it's all available and ready for the taking.Chris Skipper: Great. I think one of the best inductions into the Green Software Foundation, if you're not familiar with it and you've just stumbled upon this podcast episode in the riches of the amount of podcasts that there are on the internet, is actually the Green Software Foundation newsletter, which is actually one of the sources for a lot of the material that goes on to Environment Variables.The newsletter is fantastic. It's a fantastic resource. Let's talk about more about your green software journey. When did you first encounter green software and how did you come to find yourself at the Green Software Foundation?Namrata Narayan: So it's actually quite a serendipitous story. I've been working in the sustainability and SDG space for over a decade. I've worked on, I've worked with mostly nonprofits, not-for-profits, think tanks, et cetera, that are really focused on meeting one or more of the sustainability development goals. And then a couple of years ago, I decided to start my own practice so that I could work with more organizations as opposed to just one at a time. And soon after I launched my own company I got approached by the Green Software Foundation leading up to their first ever hackathon called Carbon Hack that took place last year, I believe in October, and they were looking for additional support, and I had never even heard of green software. I had some idea of how we could be more sustainable with our sort of, in our digital practice, but the term, the concept, the theory was all quite new to me. So I just found it so interesting. It aligned so much with what I care about that I really didn't give it too much thought. I said, "yes, how can I help?" Um, and that was a really wonderful experience. It was a deep dive into the foundation, um, and all of its inner workings. Um, but it was a love, it was a lovely experience.I fell in love with the team pretty quickly and once CarbonHack wrapped up, they were like, "we would like you to keep working with us."Chris Skipper: Awesome.Namrata Narayan: I was like, "yes, please." I want subversive movement. I want this to be as big and as successful as it can be. I took it on.Chris Skipper: Yeah. Carbon Hack 2022 was a real success. It was great. Uh, I spoke to Adam a little bit about how it would be a source of inspiration for people that are doing talks at Decarbonize Software 2023, because there are some brilliant talks and some brilliant ideas that came from Carbon Hack 2022. And if you're interested, you can go to the Green Software Foundation's YouTube channel and you can view actually all the videos of submissions from that, and they've all been put together in really concise videos, but looking forward to Carbon Hack 2023, the flavor of things that will come, they're community focused, obviously, they're not, it's obviously not in the hackathon style of events.But we'll talk about that a little bit later. So let's talk more about your involvement with the Green Software Foundation in your role as the director of communications and member relations. Has this lead led you to a deeper understanding behind the aims of creating sustainability focused goals within an organization?Obviously, you're very experienced in that already. How would. People go about communicating sustainability focused goals within their organizations, particularly in relation to green software, and what are the first steps that someone would take to achieve this?Namrata Narayan: There's probably a really intelligent way of answering this question, but I'm going to answer it in a slightly unconventional way,which is something I, which I hope is also intelligent, but one of the things I realized a few months ago is if we see software as an agent for climate action, um, then we are going to be a lot more successful in articulating why software aligns with sustainability.And we'll also, I think, be able to make sense of the metrics that we need to use to measure software and its environmental impact. So, I would say the first thing we need to do is really see software as not just a thing, not just tech, but really something that can move the needle in our broader sustainability pursuits. And then it gets really fun to then tell the story once you look at it from that point of view, then you don't get bogged down in the numbers and in things, frankly, people don't remember. You focus on the narrative, you focus on why we're talking about software. It's one of the easier things to fix and get right, right now, when it comes to reducing carbon emissions, when it comes to developing product and creating processes that are more climate conscious, that are more carbon aware, to use some of the language that we use at the foundation. So I would think that's really the first thing we should do, and then everything gets a lot easier after that.Chris Skipper: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned it as an actor, right? Because I think most people that aren't in the software industry, that aren't developers, see software as just, or see using their computer as just this guilt free, it is a guilt free exercise, but they don't see the consequences on the environment, especially when it comes to data and using cloud services, for example, that type of thing, or engaging with services that have a big pull from data centers.Namrata Narayan: Yeah.Chris Skipper: I was shocked just through editing this podcast at the sheer environmental impact of AI, for example.That type of thing is terrifying in my eyes. So I think for everyday people, it can be enlightening to hear that type of communication from organizations like the Green Software Foundation. Yeah, I think more, more people should adopt that within their organizations, taking the approach that, yeah, this is something that's easy to change right now, um, and that can have a dramatic effect on, yeah, on climate change and just generally more, have a knock-on effect towards more sustainable goals as well within organizations.This is a question that kind of sprung to mind, but because of your involvement in the Green Software Foundation, do you find yourself adopting more sustainable changes in your day to day life at all? Like through, in other means, not necessarily software related ones?Namrata Narayan: Yeah, absolutely. So I was aware of, I was aware that there were things we could do digitally to just be a little bit more responsible, but when I started working with the Green Software Foundation, I never thought about how software was built and what made it, what made certain applications and certain interactions with the software we use, so seamless, and so easy, and almost desirable. And ignorance is bliss, I'm no longer ignorant. And, for example, now, when I'm using, oh, this is a great everyday example, tabs.Chris Skipper: Yeah. Namrata Narayan: I am notorious at having a thousand tabs open, at all times. Okay, I have, yeah, I have, like, tabs open for work, I have tabs open for personal, I have tabs open for, like, every facet of my life, and I don't close any, any of them ever, or I used to not close any of them ever, which also tells you what, how my brain works, a bit of things going on here at all times, but now I've gotten a lot more disciplined about closing web pages that I'm not actively working on, closing documents that I'm not actively using. And those are really small sort of actions. I think it's a meaningful one because it tells me in that moment that I'm being really thoughtful about what I'm doing, how much energy I'm consuming, how much energy I'm taking, and what I'm able to give back. So, that's one thing. Also, ever since ChatGPT. Boy, do we love it. But ever since it came about, and I, one of the first articles I read was, I think this was for chapter two or three, I can't keep up now, but for a conversation with 24 prompts, that consumed, what was it? No, a conversation with 50 prompts consumed the equivalent of 24 bottles of water. And I was like, that's ridiculous. I'm not always asking really good questions. At the start, I was just playing around with it. I just wanted to see what it knew and what kind of information it was pulling and what it, and where it was pulling it from. And I quickly learned that ChatGPT just loves to make shit up.Chris Skipper: Yeah, it does.Namrata Narayan: So now I've gotten a lot better. If I do use ChatGPT or any sort of generative AI tool, I'm really careful about what I ask, which means I have to do a little bit of homework beforehand. So it's maybe not as fun. I don't go down this crazy rabbit hole of Q&A with the application, but I try to limit it so that I'm being a little bit more resource sensitive.Chris Skipper: Yeah. I think it's made, made a lot of, yeah. People rethink the way they do things. Like you said, like just having fewer tabs open is, yeah, starting point. And I think that's the, go on, no, sorry.Namrata Narayan: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interject, I just want to say that's on the personal front, and thenprofessionally, I think I'm in a unique position to then take AHA that I received from the GSF and pay it forward, so now when I work with clients, when I do any sort of consultancy work, when it's around web development and web design, I do talk about green hosting, I do talk about you can actually design your websites in a way that are more, um, environmentally friendly, that require less energy, um, about the images you use, think about how many videos you have, where they're placed, do they load automatically, do you, do they have to be triggered?All of these things make a difference and I'm now building in this knowledge into the conversations that I'm having with people that are actually looking to create websites.Chris Skipper: Yeah.Namrata Narayan: So I'm hoping, I'm hoping I'm helping.Chris Skipper: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's the way everyone can help is by paying the information forward. It's interesting that you mentioned, yeah, website design is one of the things the way I think most people, at least people that are in the, in the sort of freelance or creative sphere where they have their own personal website can really make an impact.And I think one of the great examples of that, I don't know whether you've had a look at it, is Branch Magazine.Which Chris Adams helps to run, which is just incredible. I have no idea how the coding works behind it, but yeah, it adapts basically to the way that you, to the power in your area. So when it's clean, you get more kind of images more color on the screen.And when it's a period of dirty energy, you get, how can I put this, binary black and white version of the magazine. And it's still just as informative. You can still get the same amount of information across, which is fantastic. So, and I want to do that for my website as well. Namrata Narayan: Same here. I didn't even, this is the other thing when I started, where I did not even know we could, this was possible already. My mind blown when I started. It was, it's one of the first things Asim showed me when I started working with the foundation. He said, "hey, have you seen this?" Because he obviously thought I would think it's the coolest thing ever.You can do this already, like I just think it just. That, to me, is a smart solution. That, to me, is smart software, is the ability we give it to be responsive to what is actually happening in our environment and in our climate. And the fact that we can do it already, it's not something that we have to work towards. We can do it today. Having to know about it is a really, to me, is a really powerful message and also a really inspiring one.Because we can make significant change today.Chris Skipper: Absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, that's obviously where you come in. And so, and that's obviously where the event that we're going to be talking about, Decarbonize 2023 comes in because it's very important. And so now when this podcast goes out, we're at the stage where the registration for talks unfortunately has already closed.But, and you're probably in the midst of picking who you're going to choose for the final tracks and that kind of thing. So let's just talk about a little bit about the rundown of the event. So it's going to be happening on November the 16th this year. For those who don't know, it's entirely virtual, right?Okay. I'm particularly interested in hearing about the event's objectives related to advancing green software practices and principles. Could you give us a little bit more information about that?Namrata Narayan: Yes, so this year, I think with Decarb generally, it's, we want to really focus on action and solutions, and not so much dwell on, um, I think our community, our audience is more interested in what we can do, and how we can be better, and so that's how we frame a lot of the events, and a lot of the sort of spaces that we organize. So Decarb this year is really about our community and giving our members and individual contributors a platform to inspire and learn from one another. Whether it's green software patterns or the software carbon intensity specification. Our members have actually taken the knowledge and tools that we've shared with them and spent the last several months applying them and learning how to make them work for their systems and within their infrastructure. So we want to really create a space where these stories can be told because they provide a path for others when organizations are able to hear what their peers or their competitors in some cases are doing and how they're addressing a very similar issue. It gives them additional motive and also guidance on how they might be able to do something very similar. And one of the things I'm personally very passionate about doing at the foundation and for the foundation is helping our, encouraging our members to actually see each other as peers. We obviously have members that are competitors in the market, but when working at, when working on software sustainability and working within the Green Software Foundation, we don't want them to treat each other like competitors. We actually want them to operate like they're peers and they're collaborators and they're helping support one another towards a shared future and a shared goal. So that's really the directive and I'm excited about hearing what they have to say and hearing how they've taken the patterns and what they've done with them, how they've applied the SEI to develop base measurements that they didn't have before, and what those calculations have told them about their, there's a lot to be excited about.Chris Skipper: That's awesome. Yeah. I like how you framed it in the fact that it's not a competition. I think one of the unique things about the makeup of the members of the Green Software Foundation is that you do have competitors in the market that have come together to Fight for a greater cause, for want of a better phrase, but yeah, there, there's, there are people from Avanade, and from Linux, and from Accenture, big companies like that, that are part of this organization, as well as people who are just starting out, and people that are from other industries.We had Jo Lindsay Walton, who's a university lecturer who has nothing to, he doesn't, he does have a relationship to green software, but his relationship is a little bit more tenuous compared to other people. And I'm sure he won't mind me saying that, but yeah, so that that's one of the joys of it. And I think people who attend the Decarb 2023 event will see that and will be able to not only benefit from, like you said, learning from their peers, um, and getting some direction, but also just networking in, in general and making new connections through, uh, the event itself, because as with it being online as well, will there be opportunities for people to go into sort of breakaway rooms and chat to each other and that type of thing?Namrata Narayan: We're not going to do breakaway rooms, but we, there is definitely an opportunity to ask questions during the event, and last year we got a plethora of questions, so we are anticipating a fair number of questions to come our way, to come towards our members as well. We also, through GSF Discussions, which is our sort of open forum on GitHub, are going to really be encouraging people to participate, ask questions, answer questions, share insights, connect with one another, and continue the conversation. It's not something that needs to end after the two and a half hours of decarbonized software. We want people to keep taking these questions forward. Go further because chances are the people that are attending the event have answers to questions others are attending, others who are in attendance are asking, so I would say that's part of what we're looking for and looking to create is just an opportunity for that knowledge to be shared and exchanged so that we can move forward and accelerate the pace of change.Chris Skipper: Yeah. I like the idea of people educating one another. I think with that in mind, there's, I think you've, you've probably said this already, you've implied it in the way that you've said it, but it's for everyone. It's not just for the that are super experienced in the green software sphere, but also just if you're a student and you're at university and you're perhaps learning computer science or you're even at school, is there an age limit?Not.Namrata Narayan: I actually have gotten this question a couple times, especially last year, because last year Decarb was the end of the hackathon. This year, obviously, it's its own event. It gets its own time and place to shine, but every individual, regardless of their seniority or role or industry, if they believe they have the power to make a meaningful difference and drive sustainability forward, then they should attend this event. We want students. We want practitioners. We want, whether they're developers, designers, architects, data scientists, analysts, because everybody is part of the matrix. No one is spared and it's everyone's responsibility and I, and similar to a lot of others, I think environmental problems, you know, when it comes to solving carbon emissions, when it comes to reducing software's harm on the environment, we need a real mixed bag of people working on the problem, it can't just be engineers. They need the support of designers. They need the support of project managers. They need communication people. So we really want diverse audience and we believe that's only going to add value and, I would say, support to everyone who really is eager to do something.Chris Skipper: And also, just a reminder to people, it is free as well, don't have to pay anything to come, and it's only two and a half hours long as well, so it's, and it's probably going to be, it's going to be what is going to be completely jam packed with really diverse things. So with that in mind, do you have an idea of the sort of tracks that people are going to be able to attend?What sort of, can you give us an idea of any specific sessions that will be featured at Decarbonized Software 2023?Namrata Narayan: So for this event, we don't have specific tracks. The way. In terms of the format, we will have a series of community driven sessions showcasing stories and demonstrations, which will really show how different practitioners across industry are using tools and resources available through the Green Software Foundation and others in reducing their emissions, improving the way they measure their emissions, how are they making their software more energy efficient or less resource intensive? Sprinkled between those community-led sessions, we are going to have a five-side chat on responsible AI and introduce new initiatives and projects. So, what I'd like to say, you won't be hearing from us, aka the Green Software Foundation very much, but you will hear a lot from your peers and organizations that you're really looking, that you, that inspire you, that you're really engaged with and interested to hear from.Chris Skipper: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, we, we already touched a little bit on the idea of, yeah, responsible AI. I know just from looking at the website for Decarb 2023, which is dcarb.greensoftware.foundation. You can go to that website, you can have, that's where you can register as well. But just from looking at the website, you can tell that there, if from this, there's some reference to last year's event, which was huge because that's where the SCI, so the Software Carbon Intensity, Software Carbon Intensity Specification was announced, um, as well as the Linux Foundation, um, uh, training program, the Linux Foundation, let me say that again.Presume there will be a lot of talk about that. We've already mentioned that they're gonna be talk about the way people have used the SCI and there's also going to probably be a lot of talk about the SOGs, the State of Green Software Report as well, which we've featured on this podcast before. And you can also have a look at that website if you go to stateof.greensoftware.foundation and you can find, you can find a heap of topics there. So I presume there will be crossover between the, what we see on the website and what we're going to be hearing at Decarb 2023. So with that in mind, also on the website, there's this statement that I find really profound and it was a statement that I think is, probably sums up a lot about what the Green Software Foundation is about, which is having software at the forefront of climate action. Can you delve into how Decarbonize Software 2023 plans to highlight the role of software in achieving climate goals, particularly in relation to the upcoming COP28?Which I think will be happening in November.Namrata Narayan: Yeah, it starts at the, it starts at the end of November and goes into December. So at COP28, for anyone who might be unfamiliar, global leaders will discuss how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Their aim is by 43 percent by 2030. This is a pretty ambitious and admirable goal. In my time working with the GSF, I've learned that nothing really happens without software anymore and it makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. I can't even cook a meal without an app, but it's a perspective in terms of what my life looks like. Advancements in technology and the way we live, I think, have flipped the script on engineers, they're no longer necessarily being told what to build and do, they're being asked how it can be done, and how it can be built better, and any organization that isn't looking to their engineering population as sustainability problem solvers, we really hope Decarbonize Software changes their mind, because it's this community of software practitioners that are going to be able to have a really meaningful and tangible impact on what tech companies are actually doing about their environmental footprint. If they're a tech company, the first thing they should care about is what is their tech doing. And I really do feel that software practitioners are now going to be seen as real critical players to solving sustainability problems. And I think that's new. I don't think that's always been the case.Chris Skipper: No, it hasn't always been the case. You can tell just by the existence of the Green Software Foundation and how young it is, it hasn't always been the case. And just from the people that have come on the podcast to talk about green software, they will talk about it in, a lot of the, sorry, a lot of the terms and a lot of the, the phrases that are being used around green software are so new.And that's just the nature of, I think the nature of the industry. But like you said, yeah, software developers are going to have to be at the forefront of this battle against climate change for most tech companies, if not all of them. So yeah. Namrata Narayan: And it might be a challenge for some. I think, I don't want to speak out of place, but there's, there are probably a good number who haven't been perceived that way. They haven't been trained to see themselves in that sort of position. Hopefully the next generation will. And so it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a culture shock for them too, right? "Oh, what do you mean? What do you mean I'm, reducing carbon emissions in the way that I code, what are you talking about?" But the, the fact of the matter is it's something that we can, like I said, do today. It's possible we have the knowledge, we have, we have the SDK, we have these tools to make it possible and work for different types of applications across different types of domains.So I, I really do think that software is where everybody's focus is, will be in the, in the next few years.Chris Skipper: Yeah, absolutely. And Decarbonize Software 2023 is the event that you should come to if you want to learn more about it. And in particular, because like we said, this is such a new term, the Green Software Foundation is just over two years old, I believe, and so if you do attend this event, and if you do want to join the Green Software Foundation, or just be a part of the community and, and just involve yourself in green software in any way, you are at the forefront of this movement.This is the start of it. And it's exciting. And it's something that we can all get behind, I think. So everyone should be able to attend this event to learn more. And my final question to you on this is how do they go about doing that?Namrata Narayan: Yeah, so everyone can register online. We've created a short link so you have to type less, which is grnsft.org/decarb. We'll share the link in the notes as Chris mentioned. That's it. That's all you have to do. You just have to register and we'll push any and all information that's important to your experience to you as soon as we, as soon as you register and you have your information.Chris Skipper: Yeah, so it seems like it's going to be a really exciting event. You're all set. Obviously, it's not too far away now. It's probably a month away from when this episode goes out. So before we head off, we've come to the end of our time now. And before we head off, we have a closing question that we normally ask our guests on Environment Variables.And so with that statement that I talked about on the website in mind, I want you to know, as the Director of Communications and Member Relations, at the GSF, you're obviously very in touch with the message of the Green Software Foundation and promoting the goals of it, as you've spoken at length about, if there's one tagline or catchphrase you could use to convince people to join the GSF, what would it be and why?Namrata Narayan: So I think I'd go with, let's say, Green Software Foundation: Where Software Meets Sustainability. And I think it's short and sweet. It reinforces our commitment to align these two domains, which are often approached separately, it's inclusive, it doesn't leave anybody out. I'd like to think that it's evergreen.I don't think it's something that we're going to necessarily solve in our lifetime, but it forces us to keep working on it. It doesn't have an end date. It has to, we have to continuously ensure software is meeting sustainability. And I think it's easy to remember.Chris Skipper: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I like how you used evergreen. No pun intended there.Namrata Narayan: No pun intended. Chris Skipper: Cool. All right. So we've come to the end of this podcast episode. All that's left for me to say is to say, thank you so much, Namrata. This was really great. I really enjoyed this chat. Thanks for your contribution and we really appreciate you coming on in Environment Variables.Namrata Narayan: Thanks Chris, it was great fun.Chris Skipper: Awesome. So that's all for this episode of Environment Variables. All the resources for this episode are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser.Thanks again, and see you in the next episode! 

Guest Molly Webb from Energy Unlocked discusses the latest G20 summit and their commitment to triple renewable energy by 2030. They also talk about Apple's support for the Right to Repair, W3C's Web Sustainability Guidelines, and the high energy usage of data centers in Ireland. The podcast covers topics like grid decarbonization, supply chain issues, mandatory scope three reporting, and upcoming events in sustainability and tech.

Joining host Anne Currie, is Jo Lindsay Walton, a research fellow in Arts, Climate, and Technology at the University of Sussex. Together they will explore the dreams of a green future inspired by Science Fiction and the practicality of these as solutions to climate change. This adventure will cover interdisciplinary approaches to viewing and tackling climate change and green software from angles of technology, politics, and especially literature. The discussion will touch on the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition and it’s toolkit that can help researchers minimize their carbon footprint, and will revolve around the ASCEND programme as well as other opportunities and missions to attempt the clean and efficient use of data centers in environments like our moon, and the complexities of protecting and cooling the servers, and also the aspect of polluting the moonLearn more about our people:Anne Currie: LinkedIn | WebsiteJo Lindsay Walton: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association | [4:42]Data Centers in Space: The Promise of the Moon | [15:26]Beyond the Stratosphere: Computing in Orbit | [31:29]Resources:Digital Humanities Climate Coalition toolkitUK-Ireland Digital Humanities AssociationCommunicating Climate Risk: A ToolkitVector: The Critical Journal of the BSFABritish Science Fiction AssociationImagine AlternativesA Greenwashing GlossaryJo reviews KSR’s Ministry for the Future onceJo reviews KSR’s Ministry for the Future againIf 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: [00:00:00] Jo Lindsay Walton: Building data centers on the moon is very productive of fuzzies, but not utilons.Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes, indeed.Jo Lindsay Walton: And I also feel like any, any file I saved on the moon, I would also want to save somewhere else as well.Anne Currie: I think that would be sensible. It's not exactly your ideal disaster recovery location.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.Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Anne [00:01:00] Currie. For those of you who are regulars to the show, you've probably heard me on the other side of the microphone, but in this episode, I'll be host, so this is goint to be an interesting episode, because we'll be talking about kind of science fiction approaches to climate change. What's going on and what's actually useful to us to be thinking about and what probably isn't useful for us to be thinking about what we, we might be distracted by? But it should hopefully be a very interesting episode that we have a guest today who is also massively interested in science fiction.So I would like to introduce to you our guest, Jo Lindsay Walton. So hi, Jo. Welcome to the, uh, the podcast and please introduce yourself.Jo Lindsay Walton: Hello, Anne. Hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm Jo Lindsay Walton. I'm a research fellow in arts, climate and technology at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and I'm really excited to be here. I'm a relatively new member of the Green Software Foundation and I've really come here via the Digital [00:02:00] Humanities Climate Coalition, the DHCC, which is a kind of community-led initiative, which I guess we'll be speaking about, around digital decarbonisation, around climate justice, and I also do some work on climate communication, how do we talk about climate, bringing in interdisciplinary angles there, games, arts, literature, including science fiction. So this overlaps with my interest in science fiction, including the sort of post cyberpunk fiction of writers like Cory Doctorow, who directly explore contemporary issues around tech, law, and climate as we encounter them today, as well as more classic works by people like Ursula Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, that like to imagine life under better or just radically different social institutions. So I'm really happy to be here.Anne Currie: Excellent. Thank you very much. Um, so, uh, just a little bit about me for, for people who perhaps aren't regulars. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the co-chairs of the Green Software [00:03:00] Foundation Community Group. I'm also currently writing the O'Reilly, the new O'Reilly book about green software, co, um, a co-author of that. It's called Building Green Software. It's being published as we go on the O'Reilly website, and I'm doing that with my fellow GSF members, uh, Sara Hsu and Sara Bergmann. Uh, and, and my sci fi, the reason why I'm, I suspect why I'm hosting this episode today is that I'm also the author of a science fiction book series, the Panopticon series.It's similar in some ways in terms of kind of time in which it's set and, uh, and ideas to, to Cory Doctorow, so it's post cyberpunk. Yeah, and it covers a lot of the stuff that we'll be talking about here.Jo Lindsay Walton: Including the moon!Anne Currie: Including the moon, including the whole book on the moon. Oh yeah, the moon is great. I love the moon.Before this podcast, I listened to, just to get myself into the mood, I listened to the theme music to Space 1999, which is a, it was a really good show [00:04:00] about the moon. The science was a little bit dodgy, but it was in the 1970s it was a good show, and although I, and I, and it was repeated a lot on television in the UK through the, my entire childhood.So, it's constantly watching this story about people living on a kind of renegade escaped moon. But anyway, before we start, because we can't get to, we're just going to get horribly sucked into talking about the moon and science fiction. But before we start, it's just a reminder that everything we talk about here will be linked today in the slow, in the show notes below the episode. As I said, before we get into the sci fi discussion, because that's gonna basically take up all our time, Jo, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition? Just to give us all a little bit of a context.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, I'd love to. So, the Digital Humanities Association of UK and Ireland launched a few months ago, and the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition, the DHCC, is one of its community interest groups. But we have been doing things more informally since about the time of COP26, [00:05:00] and we began really out of that kind of sense that, as Margaret Atwood puts it, climate change is everything change.So every field, every domain should be exploring climate impacts and climate actions. Everybody should get their own climate coalition, and this one is ours. So, what is the Digital Humanities? It's an eclectic mix. One of the things the Digital Humanities loves to do is talk about what the Digital Humanities actually is.Um, you've definitely got some kind of brilliant research software engineers, some very technical people, and then you've got less technically proficient people, including me, I should say, um, who've maybe come in via a history angle or a literature angle from the kind of more traditional arts and humanities and come to the tech from that direction.And I think that's really our niche, is that there are all these fabulous new tools and methods appearing all the time. And hopefully we can signpost those and maybe build some bridges for the less technical users. So the DHCC's mission is to help everybody, and [00:06:00] especially arts and humanities researchers, to understand and improve the climate impacts of our use of digital technologies.And it's community-led. You mentioned the link will be in the show notes, and I'd really invite your listeners, especially if they have any interest in widening participation in sustainable digital tech, you know, creating those on-ramps for different levels of experience, I'd really invite them to get on the mailing list in the GitHub and get involved.As well as that side of things, we're also really keen to equip users to reflect on the big picture of climate change. So the Arts and Humanities loves to think about politics, ethics, about the social and cultural. features of the decisions that we make and the perceptions that we have. And when you work in tech or use digital technologies, it's very easy to get excited about this or that solution or optimization and maybe lose track of the bigger picture of climate change and climate policy.A key thing for me is that the planet has a finite [00:07:00] capacity to generate green energy and to absorb carbon, growing, but growing at a finite rate. So there are these hard trade-offs there about how we use resources up until 2030, up until 2050 and beyond. Yes, it's complicated by innovation, by actions that might stimulate demand and investment and so on, but those trade-offs are there, and a particular legal entity might be net zero or better, but if it's using green energy, if it's bagsied some of our carbon absorption budget, then that means that's not available for other things.And part of what we like to think about in the DHCC, in the resources that we provide, are these climate justice angles. Can anybody seriously think that we shouldn't prioritize food security, healthcare, transport infrastructure, disaster management, sanitation, biodiversity, things like that, especially in the global south, where the needs are greater and where the responsibility for climate change is so much less?So encouraging that kind of critical scrutiny is something that we're really keen to support as well.Anne Currie: That is very interesting. Yes, and of course, you've mentioned the [00:08:00] links to the DHCC toolkits in this notes before. That's all great. So I had a quick look at the DHCC stuff and it is really interesting stuff and an immediate thing that came to mind was something that, uh, I think is the is the key issue when you start to talk about climate and climate change and using sci-fi or, uh, literature to change people's minds and move people's, move people forward, which is that... Uh, and, and Joe, this, um, you're gonna know more, you, you probably know similarly, you probably think about this a lot, as I do, which is that fiction, and driving things forward, and getting people involved in things, is often about individuals, because there's no story without a protagonist, so literature tends to be about individual action. But, climate change, there's a big battle at the moment between individual action, which we know doesn't work, and we know, and I don't know if you've read Michael Mann's 'The New Climate War,' about, [00:09:00] it's not a sci-fi, it's, he's one of the, yeah, Michael Mann is one of the, the, I think it was theJo Lindsay Walton: I actually, I bought that book yesterday, coincidentally, but I haven't read it.Anne Currie: Yeah, it's a good book, it's well worth reading. So Michael Mann was the inventor of the hockey stick on climate change and everything's going to go horribly wrong, we need to do something about it. And in his new book, in his latest book, which is well worth reading, The New Climate War, it's about disinformation and propaganda against climate change through, and not just climate change, but all change.Big business propaganda tends to be about trying to steer people onto individual action, which doesn't really, for these kind of huge scale changes, doesn't really work. So it's a distraction. It keeps everybody's, "eh, don't drop any litter. Look over there." So yeah, it's litter dropping as a distraction to various things in the past that big business has not wanted us to be looking at. These days, you know, turning down your thermostat, we should all be turning down our [00:10:00] thermostats, but it's not in and of itself going to move the dial, ironically enough, on climate change. But, in fiction, you have to have a protagonist, you have to have a story, you have to have individual change, otherwise you don't have much interest.I'm quite interested in your opinion on that, and also, I think somebody who tried to tackle that bit, with loads of issues in the book I would say, but nonetheless did attempt to tackle that, was Kim Stanley Robinson in Ministry for the Future. Um, I don't know if you want to talk about that at all.Jo Lindsay Walton: So, yes, this is the book that comes up a lot, doesn't it? What Kim Stanley Robinson does in that book that's very interesting is throw everything at climate change, and then actually withholds judgement about what's been effective and what hasn't. He makes some judgements, but there isn't a kind of overall narrative that says, "these were the key drivers, these were the secondary drivers, and these particular measures [00:11:00] were ineffective."It's a, it's a very interesting book. I would definitely recommend it. One of the things that interests me is that it does seem that, like, paramilitary action is a big part of the relatively hopeful future that he paints, but it all happens offstage. Yeah, I was so interested in that book, I wrote two reviews of it, two, for two completely separate, uh, venues.But your, your, your really interesting point about this question of individual action and systemic action, um, or systemic change, i, I agree, I think 90 percent or 99%, maybe 100%. I might frame it slightly differently when that dilemma comes up. When we think, "is this about individual action or is this about system change?"I tend to like to prioritize individual action, but I frame the individual action as saying, "you need to find your collectives. You need to find your alliances. You need to found your, your coalitions, [00:12:00] work within larger organizations, work within your employment context, within activist contexts, within NGOs."So it is still your individual action, but you're, you're looking to drive that bigger systemic change. Because I also think that while individual action can be a distraction, so can complaining about the distraction. That itself can become a distraction. And just to bring it maybe a little bit to software.I think software and design is a really interesting space for thinking about how individual agency meets that kind of systemic plane. So, I observe myself doing carbon intensive things on a daily basis. I now don't use a thesaurus, I just go over to my tab and ask chat GPT to give me a bunch of synonyms.But these are design questions, they're not just questions of individual responsibility. There are ways of adjusting the structures and [00:13:00] incentives so that individual desires are manifested in different ways and perhaps in more sustainable ways.Anne Currie: Yeah, it's, it's interesting you say that actually, cause I, one of the things that I noticed on the DHCC website was the quite correct point that should developers be developing in Python, which is a hundred times less efficient than C, for example, which is something that I used to talk about years and years ago, and it's certainly true because I used to be a C developer and Python's terrible compared to C, but I can see why people moved over to, to Python because C is just so much more difficult to write and it is certainly isn't low hanging fruit. You could bash your head against a brick wall there. But having said that, I used to rail against it myself. And now I rail against people who rail against it, as you say. But the Python development team have now produced tools that will compile Python to C, so you can write in C and get the performance characteristics of writing Python, nice easy language, [00:14:00] get the performance characteristics of C. Now. That's the perfect solution for this. That is a good foundational strategic solution, which means that you don't have to change what you're doing. You can still write your code in Python. You get the really great performance out of it. But would it have happened if we hadn't all been moaning about how unperformant Python was compared to C? So, so to a certain extent, individual action isn't effective, but moaning about it often is effective.Jo Lindsay Walton: That's really interesting. Do you know, by the way, anything about the sustainability of this Mojo character that's just popped up?Anne Currie: Mojo? No.Jo Lindsay Walton: The new programming language apparently combines the usability of Python and the performance of C.Anne Currie: I mean, it's entirely possible because, really, you, you're, what you write in and what actually runs are completely separate things. There is no difficulty at all, not that no difficulty, there's a lot of difficulty, but it is entirely possible to compile something which is [00:15:00] incredibly verbose, like Python, or presumably this Mojo language might be even more verbose, and compile it into something that's just assembly language, it just runs and doesn't, that is the purpose of a compiler. So you just need compilers that optimize for performance. But more and more compilers are doing that, which is really good. That's the solution we want. We don't want people to change their individual behaviors, we want compilers to get better. But what we should probably do is get back to the actual thing that we're supposed to be talking about today, which is the moon and, uh, data centers on the moon and also data centers in orbit. Now I have, as, as our usual host, Chris Adams would say, I have a lot of reckons on this subject, so both good and bad. So just to give you a bit of context on this, as a, as a listener, back in May, we published an episode of Environment Variables called 'Data Centers in Space,' which I was on, which discussed the possibility and the real, very real possibility of building a data center in [00:16:00] space to mitigate power consumption and pollution and various other things. And again, I've, I've done a lot more thinking about that in the intervening time. And we focused on the ASCEND program, which is basically a space cloud for Europe with an awful lot of finagling around acronyms to turn it into ASCEND. And basic, the idea is to move data centers into orbit. And today we've got a link in the show notes below, it's a blog post from Western Digital written by Ronni Shendar which discusses the idea of, just a very real possibility. Not necessarily a possibility for tomorrow, but a possibility for at some point for building a data center on the moon. So just to give you a rundown of the, of the blog post, it talks about a startup company in the U.S. Called Lone Star Data Holdings, which wants to revolutionize data storage by building uh moon based data centers uh by using the, uh, lava tubes on the moon where you've got some kind of effectively, although, [00:17:00] although there's going to be an awful lot of demand for these lava tubes, because every plan for the moon involves using the lava tubes, how, how many lava tubes are there? But anyway, lava tubes on the moon to give you a kind of built in warehouse with stable, relatively, which actually is mostly about shielding you from space rays, which are pretty horrendous outside of the earth's atmosphere. Not just the atmosphere, but the, but the magnetic shield around the earth. So everything's terrible out there. But the idea is you build data centers on the Moon. And Chris, our excellent editor for this. So you, you use the reader as a listener will never encounter it, or will seldom encounter it, but Chris is marvellous and he does all our prep for us for this, and he's asked us some questions that we should discuss about the idea of Data Centers on the Moon, and the first question that he's asked us to discuss is how much energy could this really save in, for example, cooling compared to earth based data centres? And what impact [00:18:00] might that have on reducing carbon emissions? And what would be the issues with polluting the moon? Uhm, Jo, if you have any thoughts on that. I have loads of thoughts.Jo Lindsay Walton: Um, I'm glad. So I, I asked actually, um, yesterday, my friend and collaborator, Polina Levontin about this, because I read the article, I'm not qualified to comment on the science, and she is a scientific one, and she just gave the wonderfully poetic answer that, "have we not always already stored data on the moon?Our dreams, our forebodings, our utopian desires." So maybe that kind of speaks to the point about polluting the moon. Maybe it's the idea of this pristine wilderness that we don't want to spoil. In a very unscientific way, off the top of my head, and you know more about this than I do, the pros are that it is cool, both figuratively and literally cool,and you've got plenty of sunlight, and then maybe some kind of co-benefits of a permanent lunar presence, [00:19:00] a staging post for Mars missions, an opportunity to do science on the moon. The cons would include lag time. The moon is over a light second away. Obviously, lifting a lot of mass and the energy and embodied carbon implied in that.I don't know if they're, are they planning 3D printing and stuff in situ? If not, or even if so, there's a big carbon cost to putting stuff on the moon in the first place. And then remote maintenance. I would like to see you do this in Antarctica, under the sea first. A lack of legal framework as well. And then just broadly, the con of uncertainty.Does a data center in low gravity in a vacuum with just a soupçon of atmosphere, no magnetic shielding, does, is the data going to behave differently over the years? So basically, I think it is completely bananas. I think they should absolutely go for it, but I'm definitely, I'm one of the haters that they need to prove wrong.Put, put, put a data center on the moon. I think, uh, it's maybe slightly more probable, but [00:20:00] only slightly more probable than putting a data center in Narnia. Um, the White Witch's Curse of Eternal Winter also creates very favorable conditions for, for data center cooling.Anne Currie: Yeah, oddly enough, my views on it are really very similar to yours, and Ihave done a reasonable amount of research and it's, yeah, it's that I really want to see a moon base, I want toJo Lindsay Walton: What? Yeah.Anne Currie: I, I, uh, so, um, Jeff Bezos, oddly enough, has some quite good thoughts himself on this, which is, in answer to the second question of, uh, won't it pollute the moon? Bezos's, uh, position, and I tend to think he's probably right, is "yes, good." Because actually you want to move the pollution that goes alongside industry from the earth to the moon. It's, uh, that is the purpose of industrializing the moon is that you get the pollution happening up there rather than down here, and we love the idea and the hopes and dreams and that sunny, [00:21:00] and I love to wave at the smiley face of the moon, full moon. But we know that in 1000 years time, that's going to be completely built over. If we survive, that's going to be completely built over and the ideal would be that the earth is better and the moon is a bit of a, a rubbish tip for Earth and that's not a bad thing. That is a, that is better than, than stuff polluting the biome. But you, you're totally right. And we said this in the last podcast. For climate change, it's, it's of no use to climate change whatsoever. The, the timescales are way too long. And you can get all of the benefits that you would get from a moon, a moon data center, much as I love the idea, and I really wanted to have them at some point, through, Greenland and Antarctica eventually will have constant 24/7 power through water, hydroelectric power runoffs from melting glaciers. We've got limitless power there if we were willing to use it. If we were willing to be bothered to put a data center on Greenland, [00:22:00] which has, has issues. But much, much fewer issues than building a data center on the moon. And we, and we, uh, even Microsoft are already building data centers for under the sea, which they find actually is very good for cooling. And if you don't poke around with them because there aren't people around, then they last longer. So you get better on, you get better use out of your embodied carbon and things like that.Yeah, I totally agree. Climate change wise, it's a crazily stupid idea. It's a distraction. Although I love the idea and I really want this to happen.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, it's an interesting paradox, isn't it? That, that, that we do love the idea, even though we, we know it's a terrible idea.Anne Currie: Yeah, we love the idea. We've got to have a Moonbase. We've got to have a Moonbase.Jo Lindsay Walton: I think, I think it's quite a common thing, isn't it, that amongst sustainability leaders, amongst environmentalists, you get this understandable, and I have a lot of empathy with it, animosity sometimes [00:23:00] towards space travel and space exploration. And I can see where it comes from. It comes from these completely unscientific imaginaries where we can mess up this planet and simply escape to another one and it comes from, uh, you know, for example, within degrowth discourse, which is a very big conversation, but which I think captures some important aspects of the climate crisis that are not well articulated elsewhere. Within degrowth discourse, I think there's an association between space travel, space exploration, and the sense that there will be an infinite plentitude of resources for us to continue to keep expanding into if we just find the technological solutions. So I can see where that animosity comes from, but at the same time, earlier in the episode, I gave that kind of big list of things that I would like to see prioritized when we use our carbon budget.Basic things like food security, transport infrastructure, [00:24:00] social connectivity, disaster management, etc. I would put space science in there as well. I think this is something that is exciting, inspiring, worth doing one of the, kind of, something that you wouldn't regret doing, something you wouldn't regret spending resources on.So I'm interested in knowing if there are ways of separating that positive vision and association of space and space exploration, of separating that from the environmentally catastrophic set of discourses that it's been meshed with. What do you think?Anne Currie: Yeah, it would, it's, it is a shame that the, the degrowth movement is never going to sell anyone because it's a bit hopeless. It's, it smacks of regressing to a, to a world where, it's, we talked, we talked about the Kim Stanley Robinson book, The Ministry for the Future. And, uh, one of the things in there was, it was talking about, oh, well, no, there are no mass holidays anymore, but there are still these lovely [00:25:00] holidays in which people go to amazing places on, on, hotter in hot air balloons and airships.And the thing is, those are really crazily expensive. I can see why people resist the climate movement, because it really played to that thing of there won't be holidays for everyone, but there still will be holidays for an elite group of people, men, that's, you're not in it. We've got to keep technology that gives something good to everyone and doesn't just mean that there's, like, super stuff for a tiny number of people and terrible stuff for the majority of people and they can't go on holidays and that.We have to come up with a solution that is in some way inspiring. If we get rid of all inspiring stuff, we're never going to sell anyone to get started. Although, having said that, I know we, we, we slag off progress against, on climate change, but we've made a lot of progress.Jo Lindsay Walton: Huge amounts of progress. Yeah. And there's a, there, there are a number of perception gaps in terms of the kind of progress that has been made, [00:26:00] and the risks that, that we face. The IPCC science is not well understood, uhm, not broadly understood.At the same time, there are also a huge number of kind of scientific uncertainties that are not well understood. Perfectly normal scientific uncertainties, a perfectly normal kind of part of scientific practice, all good science produces uncertainty. But these are not well reflected in contemporary climate policy.And particularly, I think, in some of the more techno solutionist visions of the future. I think you're right that degrowth has a branding problem, and I'm interested in seeing some of those same ideas appearing under different rubrics, under different titles. I think often it's the way that the most kind of interesting, fascinating, and hopeful ideas somehow appear, with the absolutely worst possible labels attached to them.But definitely, if [00:27:00] you drill down into a lot of degrowth discourse, you'll find a variety of opinions, but you'll certainly find ideas reflecting what you're saying about a climate transition being, needing to be just, and needing to be inspiring, something that has something for, for everybody, and realizes co-benefits in, in, in everybody's lives, and is not just about an, an elite enjoying a legacy of luxuries while the rest of the world kind of wanders around in hair shirts self flagellating.Anne Currie: Yeah, because it struck me, say, in the Kim Stanley Robinson book, that was, he'd obviously made some effort to not write that, and yet he'd still written it. It's really hard for degrowthers to think about how they're going to pitch the message, I think. And I think it's a totally pitchable message, but it's also very difficult for them.Even things like the 15 minute city, you'd think. Who would possibly object to the idea that you'd be able to,like, get to the shops [00:28:00] with, with in 15 minutes walk, or a quick cycle, or a bus, and then we're regularly by... who could object to that? And yet, it's become a horrendous political hot potato. But we, we can't really, as Michael Mann put, points out in, in his book. "Don't underestimate how much money the other side have to put into convincing everybody to keep with the status quo." It's, you have to be a fantastic communicator to communicate change when there is an almost limitless amount of money arrayed to make whatever you say sound bad.Jo Lindsay Walton: That's very interesting. The 15 minute city thing was astonishing, wasn't it? It got, as I understand it, mixed up in all these kind of conspiracy theories, where people thought they were going to be contained in these like urban oubliettes where they couldn't travel any great distance. Yeah, really astonishing, and the point about disinformation, about misinformation, about greenwashing is really interesting.I think we're entering a time of [00:29:00] great epistemological uncertainty. I even wonder if the framing of greenwashing is adequate to cover all the sorts of instabilities of meaning and information that we're likely to be encountering. I wrote this kind of musical glossary of terms called, I think it was a greenwashing glossary or something like that, and coming up with other terms like greenwishing, for example, where you are doing something good, it is improving the sustainability of your practices, but you're also indulging in wishful thinking and you're not duly weighing the actual sustainability impact of what it is you're doing, and a bunch of other kind of terms like that.Anne Currie: Yeah, it reminds me of the effective altruism movement, which is the kind of utilitarian charitable movement around 'you put your money where it's going to have the most effect rather than where you feel good about it.' Totally, that's had, a big proponent of that was the guy behind FTX. The [00:30:00] cryptocurrency collapsing thing.So fundamentally, EA has been completely blasted away by, by the behavior of FTX, but they had a very good description of how you might think about doing the right thing and the wrong thing. And it was 'get your fuzzies and your utilons separately.' It's about what makes you feel good, you know, it might make you feel good to do certain charitable actions, but they might not actually be very effective.In fact, there might be actively bad whereas there are other things you could do that you'd get no real potential, you get no internal strokes from, that would be very effective. And, but yes, you'll get your young, your fuzzies, which are about feeling good about yourself and your utilons, which is actually about having effective change and making effective changein, Jo Lindsay Walton: So,Anne Currie: separate ways. Yeah, I, andJo Lindsay Walton: for you and me at least, building data centers on the moon is very productive of fuzzies, but not utilons.Anne Currie: [00:31:00] Indeed, yes, indeed. Actually,Jo Lindsay Walton: And I also feel like any file I saved on the moon, I would also want to save somewhere else as well.Anne Currie: I think that would be sensible. It's not exactly your ideal disaster recovery location. And inJo Lindsay Walton: Maybe I would save it on the sun.Anne Currie: all, all the disaster happens on the moon and the Earth's fine. Another thing where if you, if you're going to do DR, you really need to stop in both places. But so we better get onto this to the second bit.Otherwise we'll just chat about this forever. Uh, and, and the second bit I think is even more of an interesting link than the first. This is about computing in orbit which is about doing more, having data centers, orbiting data centers. And there's a very good, interesting blog post about how we should all move into, move more data into orbits and you can analyze all the data. And it's a charming blog post about if you could process data that you are seeing in faster real time in orbits, you could monitor what whales are doing in even faster real time, [00:32:00] but it's, what it clearly is, it's a giant advert for Lockheed Martin and other American military companies, because it is the thing that you are doing, if you want to be processing data that you want to be looking at the ocean, processing data real time about what's going on there, that's entirely for military stuff, which I don't have any particular reckons whether that's good or bad, but there'll be a load of money going into it because China will be start doing it, America will start doing it, eventually India will start doing it, Russia will start doing it.It is, uh, an arms race, I would say. Not a gre, this is greenwashing. You want a new greenwashing term for this one.Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, I mean, I feel like, um, let's assume it does work. Let's say that the technology is solid.Anne Currie: It'll work.Jo Lindsay Walton: And under that highly hypothetical circumstance, right? My question is still, how does this fit into the big picture? This is something that we're interested in the DHCC. How does it fit into the big picture? Are these orbital data storage facilities, are they going to outcompete the [00:33:00] earthbound data centers that are using the dirty energy? Who actually holds the big picture of global strategy here, of addressing the urgent issue of climate change? Is it the conference of parties? Kind of, but they're mired in all these geopolitical rivalries. Is it the scientists?The IPC? Yes, but they're constrained by the remit of political neutrality and face challenges around communication. Is it the finance, the markets, they're waking up to something, they're trying to incorporate climate into these risk management methodologies that they don't really play all that nicely with?Is it science fiction? Yes, we're drawing in a really interdisciplinary way. We've talked about Kim Stanley Robinson throwing everything at climate change, but it is ultimately a story. I'm not really sure who does hold the big picture and if I was to try and summarize it in a crude way, it seems that we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game.We haven't even adjusted them yet, but we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game so that goods and services and enterprises and value chains and industries and sectors and whole communities and regions that are incompatible with a, with a broadly livable planet are going to be [00:34:00] destroyed in the Schumpeterian whirlwind of, of creative destruction will, will crash and burn.And I think there's a lot of emphasis on the creation side of that, building data centers on the moon or in orbit, but not enough imaginative, creative, realistic thinking about the destruction side of it. There's this expectation that enterprises are going to snitch on themselves. "Oh, we've tested for impairment, we're reporting against this particular standard, all our assets are stranded, we're just going to shut up shop, goodbye."So I think I would be interested in more science fictional thinking about the potential pain of switching from carbon intensive activities to the sustainable ones. Not just the focus on the kind of shiny new possibilities, but also the focus on what it's like to shut up shop. I Anne Currie: Yeah, which, you should read my books.Jo Lindsay Walton: will.Anne Currie: Yes, yes, I completely agree. All the stuff we've talked about today, about sci-fi is marvellous, it's [00:35:00] lovely, it's fuzzies, but it's not green at all, and it will be no part of the climate solution, or very little part of the climate change solution. There's nothing here that is being suggested that couldn't be done vastly better on Earth. Now, I'm not saying that none of this stuff should be done, but it's not part of climate change, and it is being washed as if it is, and it's not. So, we, we, we have chatted for too long, and we have overrun all our, all our times today. We're now just having to, uh, zip through and do our, um, closing questions. Jo, if you had a data center in space, which fictional sci-fi franchise would you reckon would be best at running it? It's a good question.Jo Lindsay Walton: Because we've been saying the word data so much, I can't get Star Trek Next Generation out of my mind. So, Data, Picard, Bev, Deanna, that lot. I think it would be hilarious in general because the captains always ride roughshod over the metrics that officers present them with. "Your download will complete in one hour" and they're like, "give it to me in 30 minutes."[00:36:00] "Aye aye, captain."Anne Currie: Yeah, I think the only, yeah, Iagree that Data would be excellent running a data center, but I think it would have to be Data on his own. I don't think anybody,Jo Lindsay Walton: Aww. Anne Currie: But you wouldn't need anybody else, wouldyou? You really wouldn't need anybody. But actually, I think the best people would be from the same franchise, the Borg.I would justJo Lindsay Walton: Oh my gosh,they are already a big data center, aren't they?Anne Currie: They are a big data center, terrible customer support, but I think there are some major folk who be better at customer support than the Borg. And I will, I won't mention their names, but we all know who they are. Thank you very much indeed. We've come to the end of our podcast and all that's left for me to say is thank you so much, Jo, that was really great. Thanks for your contribution. And it was, and for our listeners, where can they find out more about you?Jo Lindsay Walton: Thank you, yes, it's been really interesting. I wish we could talk longer. So, I think many of your listeners might be interested in the DHCC toolkit. Um, you don't have to think of yourself as a digital humanities person, [00:37:00] I hope some might be tempted to get involved and contribute. If you're interested in science fiction, I'd encourage you to check out the British Science Fiction Association, again, you don't need to be UK based, um, and our journal Vector, which I've been editing with Polina Levontin for the past few years.If you're interested in climate communication and maybe some of the broader issues around the political economy of climate change, you can check out our Climate Risk Communication Toolkit, which is a publication of the UK University's Climate Network. And yeah, I think that's, I think that's plenty to be getting on with.Anne Currie: Thank you again. So that's all for this episode of Environment Variables. All the resources for this episode are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.Foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google [00:38:00] 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.

Adam Jackson, LinkedIn, discusses the upcoming Decarbonize Software 2023 event and the theme of empowering software practitioners to decarbonize software. The podcast highlights the importance of creating a Green Software community within organizations and showcases what people have done with Green Software. It also explores the growing importance of Green Software and its future impact, including the demand for greener software services. Join the Green Software Foundation and register for the D-Cobb 2023 event to learn more.

On this episode of Environment Variables, Chris Adams is joined by fellow podcast host of the Green IO podcast Gaël Duez. Together they will cover the complexity of carbon accounting, new patents around carbon aware programming from Microsoft, and the flight of climate nerds from Twitter / X.com or whatever we’re calling it these days. Finally they share some exciting events from the world of Green Software including some upcoming events and we find out exactly why Gaël is a real-life bond villain!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteGael Duez: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Exploring the complexity of Scope 3 emissions and the responsibility of the digital sector | Wholegrain Digital  [5:28]Introducing Digital Carbon Ratings | Sustainable Web Design [16:21]How $1.3 billion in new contracts led Hewlett Packard Enterprise to train salespeople in sustainability | GreenBiz [24:46]Elon Musk is killing ‘Environmental Twitter | The Verge [33:05]Cloud Native Sustainability Landscape | CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability [40:28]Microsoft files patents for carbon capture and grid-aware workload scheduler | Datacenter Dynamics [40:46]Events:Apidays London - Sustainability track (September 14th, London on site [43:10]CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability Week [44:10]Decarbonize Software 2023 - 16th of Nov (Online) | GSF [44:36]Resources:Scoped Emissions as coffee | Chris Adams [8:55]Net Zero Initiative — 2020-2021 Report  [12:33]Ecograder by MightyBytes [19:01]Ecoindex.fr [19:11]HTTP Archive: State of the Web  [20:27]Sustainable Web Design [21:30]Call for consultation on the first specification for decarbonising use-phase emissions of connected devices | The Carbon Trust [22:01]Carbon Emissions in Browser DevTools - Firefox Profiler and CO2.js | The Green Web Foundation [22:24]Fairphone 5 sets a new standard with 8-10 years of Android support | Ars Technica [29:49]Commown - Cooperative for long-life electronics | Circular X [30:49]Mastodon.nl | Mastodon Green  [36:03]Climatejustice.social | Mastodon [36:25]Mastodon.energy [36:42]Bluesky [36:56]Ketan Joshi [37:19]Speakers Bureau | Green Software Foundation [39:59]   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:Gaël Duez: Financial accountants, they know for ages that one euro doesn't equal to one euro. If one euro is invested, or it's in your account ready to get used, or if you invest it in fees or in wages, it's not the same euro, and it's pretty much the same with CO2. And we tend to compensate everything. And you know, I love John Oliver's quote saying that we will not offset a way out of this climate crisis.And this is exactly what is at stake here with this so called Scope 4, which is all about avoided emissions.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 This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we're covering the complexity of carbon accounting, new patents around carbonware programming from Microsoft, the flight of climate nerds from Twitter or X.com or whatever we're calling it these days, and where we're finding our climate news instead. Finally, we'll be covering some exciting and interesting events from the world of green software coming up in the coming months. All right, before we dive in, though, let me introduce my guest and colleague for this episode of TWiGS.With us today, we have Gaël Duez. Gaël, I'll hand over to you to introduce yourself. Thanks.Gaël Duez: Hi, Chris. A pleasure to be here. Well, I'm Gaël Duez. I'm the founder of the Green IO Podcast, which aims to empower all responsible technologists, an expression I kindly borrow to our host, Chris, when he joined the fourth episode. So yeah, I aim to empower all responsible technologists within the tech sector and beyond to build a greener digital world one byte it at a time. So I guess it sounds pretty familiar to the listeners. And I'm also a former CTO trying to redeem the carbon footprint of its past IT operation, if I dare to say. I now help tech companies deploy sustainable strategies aligned with the Paris Agreement and beyond the carbon funnel.I also contribute to our community, or at least try to, via public conferences and workshops on digital sustainability, and having the privilege of living in Réunion Island, I'm also the proud dad of a little daughter who enjoys hiking in its beautiful cirques, like we did last weekend, which is why I'm so energized this week.Chris Adams: Oh, that's really nice to hear. I didn't actually know about that. So for listeners who may not be familiar with Réunion Island, maybe talk a little bit about whereabouts that is in the world, because it is quite a bit further out than I realized when I first heard you tell me where you were coming from in the first place.Gaël Duez: Yeah, well, the truth is I'm Still mostly working in Europe and with European clients and colleagues, but I live in Reno Island. It's a small volcano island on the north, I would say north, northeast of Madagascar. So I'm based in Africa. But what is interesting is that people often think about it as the tropical islands, so you know, palm trees and beaches, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, it's a very, very mountainous island. There is a 3,000 kilometers high peak called Le Piton des Neiges. And 90% of the island is protected for biodiversity issues, or not issues, actually, because it's not issues yet, but for biodiversity reasons.So that's pretty interesting island to live, even if we're a bit packed around the shore, obviously, because pretty much all the center is protected, but it's a beautiful place to hike and to do the mountaineering stuff, definitely.Chris Adams: Wow, cool. Okay, we'll share a link on various mapping tools so people can see Gaël is actually talking about, because when I first saw it, I thought, "wow, that's amazing, it's like I'm speaking to a Bond villain," the first time I saw it. In a good,Gaël Duez: I hope I'm a bit nicer than a BondChris Adams: villain.Bond villain a good way, a possibly benevolent dictator of an island, perhaps.All right. Okay, before we digress too far, let's just provide a quick reminder of this podcast, what we do, and I suppose just the usual boilerplate. So this is a weekly news roundup show. And we're going to cover a series of news stories that caught our eyes that both Gaël and I basically put together over the last week or so.I realize I didn't actually introduce myself. So my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. We're a non profit based in the Netherlands, working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. And I am also one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation Policy Working Group. So that's my involvement here.And also, I am a regular host for the Environment Variables podcast and this podcast here. Okay, then. So we'll cover some stories, and there'll also be a set of extensive show notes with links to all the things we discover and discuss. Alright. So, Gaël, I think you've listened to the format before and you've submitted some of these and you've got a good idea what we talk about.Is there a particular story you'd like to start with first so we can kind of get into the swing of the show?Gaël Duez: Yes, indeed. I really enjoyed reading the article from Wholegrain Digital, the well known agency in digital sustainability, about exploring COP3 emissions and the responsibility of the digital sector.Chris Adams: Yeah, this is the piece by, I think, Marketa Benasek. She's one of the writers at Wholegrain Digital. And this piece is called Exploring the Complexity of Scope 3 Emissions, Responsibility. And there's a couple of quotes which really caught my eye. Essentially, the whole thrust of this article is about trying to give people who work in technology an understanding of how organizations account for, essentially responsibility for emissions, both within their organization, but also outside of their organization. And this quote really leapt out at me. Basically, she's talking about how it's quite hard for you to get the header out. And the quote I like is this one here. So, "in the digital sector where products are often intangible and widely distributed, i.e. through data centers, telecom networks, travel, and so on, attributing emissions becomes challenging."So she's basically saying, it's difficult to work out who's responsible for some of the emissions when you build a service, for example. She says, like, "many companies struggle to define the boundaries of their responsibility and accurately account for these emissions associated with what they do." And she basically outlines some ways of saying, this is how you can use some of the existing greenhouse gas protocols right now to think about responsibility for this, in particular, the eleventh part of Scope 3, which is related to like use of solar products. So this is one thing that is really interesting seeing agencies talk about this. 'cause typically they've said like, "no, it's not really on us to think about." And Gaël, I'll let you come, come in on some of this if, 'cause I think there's a couple of things that you might wanna share on this and then I'll come back to some of the other parts 'cause I realize you've had to wrestle with some of this stuff yourself as well in some of your work.Gaël Duez: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always say Scope 3 is the mother of all battles, you know. And just to take a very recent example, I was reviewing with a client, a very large European tech company, it's greenhouse gas emissions yearly. So it's a yearly audit and as usual, more than 70% was Scope 3, including AWS solutions, of course.So I know that we tend to focus in the digital sector mostly on scope two, or actually we want to have the greenest possible energy or sorry, electricity, because most of the time it's electricity. But the truth is, if we really want to make a move on climate change, we need to consider seriously the Scope 3 for everyone.And you know obviously your Scope 1 and 2 is someone else's Scope 3, so it goes all the way up on the value chain.Chris Adams: I agree. There's another part about Scope 4, which we'll touch on a little bit later, but it might be worth just briefly, I realize we've just dived straight into talking about scoped emissions, and it might be useful for me to just provide a bit of a primer for people who are new to this field. And like one way that I've used to describe this to nerds is talking about the way that people report emissions for any kind of service is usually in a kind of scoped system if you follow the greenhouse gas protocol, and you can think of it belonging to these lines broadly as Scope 1 is basically emissions from burning fossil fuels yourself, things that go into the sky, Scope 2 is emissions from greenhouse gases from generating electricity that you use, and then Scope 3 is this indirect supply chain emissions, basically all the other emissions that happen in your supply chain.Now the way that I found most useful when speaking to other techie nerds is scoped emissions communicated through the medium of coffee. So, if you think of Scope 1, Scope 1 emissions is burning fossil fuels to make hot coffee, like maybe you burn gas on a stove to heat up water to turn into a delicious cup of coffee.Scope 2 might be using electricity to heat up a kettle to make some coffee. And then Scope 3 might be you walking into a coffee shop so that you can have coffee, so you're not burning anything yourself, but other people are doing it on your behalf, so there's a whole supply chain associated like that.And what we'll do, we'll share a link into the show notes with some helpful diagrams for this, because this was how, I believe, Simon, working on the Green Software Foundation CarbonWare SDK, presented this recently at the Linux Foundation. And it's a kind of relatively intuitive way to start thinking about some of this.Gaël Duez: I love it. And just to add something, please remember that Scope 1 is not only about burning fossil fuels, they are also methane emissions. And just a quick anecdote, Starbucks' entire greenhouse gas footprint, 20% of it accounts for dairy production. And obviously dairy, it's not only about burning fossil fuels, but it's also the methane emissions from the cattle.Chris Adams: This is right, yeah, I should have said greenhouse gas emissions, of which fossil fuels are a significant part, but you're right.Gaël Duez: No, but I love your example. It is straightforward, but we tend to forget all the greenhouse gas and CO2. Obviously, CO2 is the main perpetrator here, so we should focus on CO2 first. But it's good also to remember that there are also players in the game, I would say.Chris Adams: Oh, great. So now that we've spoken about what scoped emissions are, which is probably what we might have done before if we were gonna provide a kind of preamble for this blog post, there's another really interesting quote for me, which I found helpful, which is when Wholegrain themselves are talking about how they've been struggling with this, and this quote says, "calculating Scope 3 emissions is a challenge for us, ourselves, at Wholegrain Digital. Scope 3 emissions of the products we consume, such as software subscriptions, are really hard to calculate, but it's also not exactly clear whether we should take responsibility for our clients' websites during use." So while, technically, these emissions belonged to their clients, or their website's visitors, we also see it as our responsibility to assist in reducing the environmental impact.They say, like, "digital agencies that make polluting websites should take responsibility for this." And the rest of the post ends up talking a little bit about ideas which are kind of beyond your value chain, and this is like the impact that you might induce, and I think they refer to this as kind of Scope 4, and I've heard other people talk about this as Scope 0, and this is a bit of a kind of wild west right now.Because this is essentially referring to the idea that if you're building a website that makes it easier for people to, say, hire a cab or shop faster, then there's an impact from you speeding up that activity. And I think this is something that you've been thinking about as well, right, Gaël?Gaël Duez: Yes, absolutely. And can you indulge me to be the villain here? Because if I'm a James Bond villain, I'm going to play my role. Please, please everyone forget about Scope 4. I really mean it. This is the worst possible naming convention that we could find. I'm really concerned about the discussion around this so called Scope 4, which actually is all about avoided emissions.How the tools, the services you provide to your clients help them avoiding emissions. But, when we use Scope 4, there's emissions in the same bucket as Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. And to be honest, I am a big fan of the Net Zero Initiative, which provides a clear dashboard with its three pillars to how a company should contribute to the global objective of carbon neutrality and where tons of CO2 doesn't compensate, 'cause you know, financial accountants, they know for ages, um, that one euro doesn't equal to one euro.If one euro is invested or it's in your account ready to get used, or if you, you invest it in fees or in wages, it's not the same euro and it's pretty much the same with CO2. And we tend to compensate everything and, you know, I love John Oliver's quote saying that "we will not offset a way out of this climate crisis."And this is exactly what is at stake here with this so called Scope 4, which is all about avoided emissions. And if you deep dive a bit on the Net Zero Initiatives, I love their approach because it's a dynamic approach, not a static one. No company can reach net zero. That's not possible, because that's not scientifically agreed. What can be agreed is net zero in a closed environment, and the only closed environment we're talking about is planet Earth. So companies contribute to reaching global objective of carbon neutrality, and they've got three pillars to do that. And the first one, you beautifully described, Chris, is pillar A, which is reduce your own company emissions.Then you've got another pillar, which is reduce others' emissions. And it can be either by helping your suppliers or your clients with your services or whatever solutions you want to deploy to reduce their own emissions. And this is where we tend to hear now this Scope 0 or Scope 4 approach. For me, it's really all about avoided emissions.And of course, you've got also pillar C, which is removing CO2 from the atmosphere. And these three buckets should be counted and communicated in three completely separate way. And if you think about pillar C, it's a bit like the 1% for the planet initiative. Some company, believe me, marketing people, they will definitely know how to positively communicate on it. Could say, you know, "we allocate 1 or 2% of revenue, or whatever to financing climate technology to remove CO2 out of this atmosphere," but these tons of carbons, they will not offset anything.And I think we really need to be cautious about using three different buckets to track how we contribute to global neutrality. Sorry if I'm a bit ballistic about it.Chris Adams: That's okay. We have this podcast to have people with strong opinions and they are able to compete to share them and our listeners are able to decide how they feel or how they want to respond to that stuff. So you mentioned a couple of things about measuring the environmental impact of some of this. And I realized that you've also mentioned just before this call that there's some other groups looking at some of this as well.And we're going to talk a little bit about that in a second with the next story. But the thing that might be worth just briefly sharing with people is that the GSG protocol right now is in the process of being updated and we've shared a link to basically an update from the World Resources Institute specifically about how they're planning to make some of the updates, because they've done a massive survey with thousands of responses from companies, non-profits and groups like that and we shared some links to basically the presented findings so far and also some of the early things talking about both Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, and how different companies and organizations are actually saying, "this is how they should be changed to more accurately represent the physical realities of what's happening in the world."So should we go to the next story, Gaël? Because this one feels like it's tied quite tight to what you were just speaking about. There's idea of measuring this, trying to come up with some other ways of accounting for the emissions in a particular sector. And this link is from the Sustainable Web Design.There's this introduction of digital carbon ratings that has come out now, and I'll just share a quote from the piece and then I'll have a bit of space for you, uh, to talk about some of this, Gaël. So the general idea is that, The quote I'm going to use is, "we propose a simple digital carbon rating system that follows the original principles of sustainable web design and aims to make website sustainability much more intuitive and accessible for a wider audience" and essentially the short version of this is that they're taking an idea of the average website or looking at a body of an existing data set that is generated by the HTTP archive to get an idea of how large and how small various websites are across this data set.And they've created a kind of rating system based on where these fall in the distribution. So the fastest and the smallest sites are. Kind of graded at, like, an A or an A+ all the way down to an E, basically, or something along those lines. And this is intended to be used to provide some kind of rating, somewhat like an energy star rating, essentially, so that if you have a website, you can say, "well, we want to be building a, at least A website," or "we're at a D, we should be pushing to get ourselves to a B," for example.I think I'm gonna open up for you to kind of have a bit to talk about some of this as well, actually, before we go into this in a bit more detail, because my organization was somewhat involved in this, and it's been something that the groups have been working on for a while, and I think there's lots of places this could go in, and it's the first time I've seen people really try to do this and create a kind of shared grading system for this.So yeah, Gaël, over to you, man.Gaël Duez: So I love this one because obviously, we need all those initiatives. But I mean, to be honest, I always feel a bit schizophrenic about the multiplication of those initiatives and ratings because we've seen others popping up around the world as well. And don't get me wrong, if you're a web developer based in a dark red state in the US and working in a pickup factory with a CEO watching Fox News on loop, you have my admiration and my full support if you manage to talk about this rating tool and to implement it somehow on your website.So big, big, big kudos. And I think this is why this kind of initiatives are great. Still, it remains an awareness raising tool. I love the simplicity of the rating and the benchmarking with the HTTP Archive database because it could trigger some healthy emulations also. So really enjoy this part, this approach.However. It's based on the single and highly debated proxy for energy consumption, which is data transfer. So for web professionals, I would rather advise people to use Ecograder created by MightyBytes, which has several components and not only page weight, or even better, the open source initiative ecoindex.fr, which also try to incorporate other environmental impacts like water. Now, what I believe is that all these initiatives, they're trying to fill a vacuum and this vacuum is the lack of commonly agreed and understood metrics when it comes to how carbon intensive or even how environmental intensive is a website. And this is why the job started with the W3C community under the lead of Tim Frick and especially Lucas Mastalerz, lead the metrics workgroups in this W3C sustainability committee is so important. We need to find Some common way to measure this different environmental footprint based on the latest scientific data available.Until we do have this, I guess the more the merrier because you want to approach these issues under different angles. A super simplistic one like the one you just described in this article, Chris, and it will be very useful for some people in some situation. But other tools are needed for professionals to really deep dive on where they would have a big impact.Chris Adams: I think that's fair. Because this is largely looking at one indicator that has been relatively easy to capture and put into a data set that can be made available, and the underlying data set from the HTTP archives. This is also used in the State of the Web report that came out last year, which had, for the first time, a really dedicated sustainability chapter.So, in my view, I think this is really encouraging to see this and having some kind of rating systems is one way to make some of this a bit easier for people to understand. There's a couple of things that it might be worth briefly touching on for this because the actual grading is pretty, it seems pretty hard to get an A.So if you want to have an A+, your website needs to be within the top 5% of all the websites that you have here. And, pretty much, it stops off at like E, which is around 50%. So if your website is the average, then you have a long way to go just to get up to an A, for example. And this current has been shared for feedback from people to see how people respond to this and see where they can go with some of this.So I need to share that this is an early thing. There is a call to kind of get some more input from this and people can go to sustainablewebdesign.org to use the contact form to actually provide some feedback and share something for this. The other thing that I'll just touch on is that this isn't the only single way for understanding the environmental impact of digital tools.There is also some work with the Green Software Foundation to come up with this metric called the Software Carbon Intensity Spec. This is one tool which is currently in use. There's also some work at the end-user side, which has been one of the contentious areas. Carbon Trust literally last night said they're doing some new work to come up with some standards for understanding and accounting for the environmental impact of end-user devices, 'cause typically this is one thing that's been very, very hard to use and they've got some large companies like Amazon and Meta already online, on board for that. So I suspect that's gonna be a thing that people see more of.The other thing that we might share, so this is me from the small nonprofit that we work in, we did some work with the Firefox browser to essentially build some end-user carbon emissions specifically into that, and we've got a blog post that I'll share a link to this, and you mentioned ecoindex.fr, a French tool, and EcoGrader, which we've shared some links to there.Now, as I understand it, Tim and the team at MightyBytes that worked on EcoGrader, they were involved in the creation of these digital carbon ratings. So they are involved in this. And there is an intention to kind of make this somewhat wider. But there is a tradeoff right now about saying, 'what kind of factors do you include and how easy do you make this for who to understand?' Because even just moving on from just thinking about money is quite a jump.So when you start talking about carbon and water, and the resource depletion from the earth, and so on, it's a whole bunch of extra things which makes it really complicated. So, yeah, those are the things I might say as a response, that might provide a bit of extra context for this.Gaël Duez: Fully agree with you here. It's really this dual approach, like, you've got communication and awareness tool, and this is super important that they are super simplistic, easy to understand, easy to grasp, because you still meet, on a daily basis, thousands of people who told you, "oh, really? My website pollutes? I wasn't aware of it. Oh, I didn't even think about it." And then on the other end, you've got web professionals who are already a bit aware of it and they, they're more like, "okay, but what, what can I do? Shall I reduce the JavaScript? Is it a question of image sizing? Is it a question of data transfer? Uh, shall I take into consideration, obviously, the obsolescence of the end-user tool?" Etc, etc. And it is a large spectrum, as you said, and we need to cover all of this. I think the main battle today is really about, you know, speaking the same language. And that will be awesome if all these tools at some point, hopefully, under the umbrella of the W3C, could agree on sustainable metrics that you, you know, kind of zoom in or zoom out, depending where you are on this scale.And I fully agree with you that just moving away from money is a big challenge at the moment.Chris Adams: And that actually is a nice link to the next story we had, because I was not expecting this, but this really caught my eye. So this is a story, how $1.3 billion in new contracts led Hewlett Packard Enterprise to train salespeople in sustainability so I wasn't expecting salespeople to be the kind of vanguards of sustainability in the technology sector this is basically a piece that will share a link to from greenbiz.com which is basically, it is a little bit kind of like puff piecey, but it's essentially, some folks at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, they're people whom we sell loads of service. They're basically saying, "we're training our sales team to talk about circular economies and energy efficiency and teaming them up with the sustainability team, because we found out that that's the thing that CIOs keep asking for and they're often not getting very convincing answers from this" and there's a couple of things that I thought was quite interesting is that, so salespeople typically tend to work on commission so they get a base salary and then they get a kind of chunk of their money in the form of commissions on product sales and there's a piece which talks a little bit about how they're compensating various staff for this or linking sustainability performance to compensation.And this story talks a little bit about how the executive committee are, the compensation for them is tied to the company's performance against net zero goals. So this is something that is, in my view, kind of interesting because they're talking about things like energy efficiency, recycling content, stuff like that.And uh, they've also shared a goal, which is they're trying to cut operational emissions by 70% by 2030. So this is relatively ambitious, but the operational emissions part might be the easy part to, actually, hang on. No, we're talking about people who make servers, that may not be the case. This very much is a case of where the big emissions tend to fall is whether it's in their supply chain or whether it's in inside the organizational boundary.But this idea of actually building it in and actually having the salespeople talk about this gives you an idea of how, like, there is need or interest in having some shared language so that we can actually have essentially discussions outside of our little niche, basically. And I think this is something that you've got some experience with as well, Gaël, right?Gaël Duez: Yeah, absolutely. Let me share you an anecdote. Last year, I was facilitating a digital collage online workshop for Evonex. Evonex is a pretty big IT company. They specialize in providing IT equipment, you know, to big companies and the attendees were mostly sales and marketing people scattered all over the world, I had literally people from four continents. And during the workshop, they started to get ballistic about it, like super enthusiastic, because the digital collage workshop focused a lot on embodied carbon footprints, as well as, you know, water footprint and material footprint, often called EMIPS, and they immediately could see the benefits, uh, in their sales pitch about, hey by the way, by renting equipment, by making sure that, you know, we will take care of, um, the end-of-life and we will reuse it over and over and over again, you are actually part of the, a virtuous cycle. You, you're getting closer of the much needed circular economy. And it was not even mentioned a link with their commission. It was just like, wow, that's a good sale pitch and I'm very happy to get all this valuable information because that will help me get more contracts.Chris Adams: All right, you said something interesting about the model people are using, so basically, you're paying to have access to it rather than owning the actual tin itself, basically. That's what they're doing. Was that a trend that you saw, or was that a thing that people already are using right now in this scenario?Gaël Duez: You know something, it's quite funny, when I started to deep dive in digital sustainability, everyone told me about the massive shift in business model which is needed from makers, like Apple, Samsung, etc, etc. And fun fact is, I started my professional career in the payment service industry. And one of my job was to run a small business unit, renting payment terminals, because, you know, when you're a merchant, In Europe, in 90% of the case, you rent your payment terminals from your bank, you know, there's kind of the absolute norms.And the fun fact is, it provides a clear alignment of needs between banks and merchants. People want to have resilient and long lasting good bank, they don't want to have to send technicians to repair the device all the time. And you know, the truth is, everyone makes money with it, with this business model.Because last time I checked, banks are not philanthropic institutions at all, you see. So, so I think, at some point, a shift from owning an electronic device to renting an electronic device will become more and more the norm, first in the B2B sector, and then at some point, why not, in the B2C sector as well. And that is a dramatic change because you close the loop. And when you design your product, you need to make them easily repairable and easily recyclable or reusable first.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thanks for that. I didn't realize that was where you started out, actually, Gaël. You also made me think about some of the most recent announcements from Fairphone as well, because they announced recently they're pushing out a phone, the Fairphone 5, the newest one they're talking about. I believe they're talking about having a guarantee of between 8 to 10 years for a smartphone which is kind of mind blowing when you consider the kind of yearly kind of obsolescence process that you've typically seen before. We'll show a link to that because that's pretty wild and that's the thing that's quite interesting with Fairphone in this context is, they sell some of the devices but they also talk about some of the difficulties with managing both a kind of rental model where you're incentivized to kind of make sure that you capture the value and make it come back to also having a thing which allows people to kind of feel like they own it and they can fix it and they can do all these other things because different incentives come into play when you think about an entirely rental based model.So that's something that we'll share some links for people who are interested in learning how other people are wrestling with some of this.Gaël Duez: Yeah, I agree with you. Actually, I rent my, my Fairphone now from, from a company called Common because I really believe in this renting model, but it's more with a professional angle. Uh, and it's true that I think we need to be able to cover different needs from different people, and that's great. I mean, if you want to own your smartphone, what you've got the right to demand is to have it repairable, to have spare parts, to have, uh, accessible notice, to understand how to repair it, et cetera.And if you want to rent it, obviously you want to be able to update the operating system and not, not to face a software obsolescence, et cetera, et cetera. So, I think it's not a one size fits all approach that we should embrace, and I think Fairphone is doing a very, very good job embracing different aspects of the spectrum.They've got this five years guarantee on material, and now they claim eight years guarantee on software, which is mind blowing, as you say.Chris Adams: Yeah, I'll share the link to the piece in Ars Technica which showed that, because I read it last night, and I was, when I was doing some research, I thought, wow, eight years, they've had to use a particular industrial chipset for IoT rather than consumer technology, because the assumption around consumer technology is that it won't last long enough for you to have this kind of warranty, but it's a good piece, and it really caught my eye.All right, shall we look at the next story? Go on.Gaël Duez: Just just just a side note Chris, you and I, we're not that young, unfortunately. So just remember that in the IT's in the 80s, sorry, just remember in the 80s, that it was very common to own for five years a piece of IT equipment. Actually, the average lifespan was close to 10 years. So, you know, it's, maybe it's getting back to what used to be normal and what used to be a sensible thing to do when you know how much energy and materials and water has been used when you build those equipments.Yeah,Chris Adams: Make it in the first place. All right, okay, that is, um, thank you for reminding me of the gray hair in my beard, Gaël, I appreciate that.Gaël Duez: No, sorry. I don't want to be the villain in this episode, I'll stop. I was very positive here. I've got only nice things to say, and that's going to be the same for the rest of the show. Sorry.Chris Adams: I can dream of going into becoming a silver fox, Gaël, that's my dream. All right, shall we look at the next story? Okay. So this one is from theverge.com. This says, "nearly half of environmental users went inactive after Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter took place, research finds." So this one is a story partly because there have been some questions about, okay, where do you get your news around climate these days and Twitter, and there was a real term called Climate Twitter.The quote that I'll share with you is it's basically "almost half of environmental Twitter has vanished from the platform that's now called X, new research is showing. A wave of environmentally oriented users abandoned the site after the takeover, according to a study published this week by the journal in Trends in Ecology and Evolution."And uh, I share this because we have seen an uptick in essentially climate denial accounts on this, but I figure this might be a nice way to talk a little bit about, okay, well where are they all going? Where do you find the news? 'cause I used to use Twitter a load to keep up with lots of news in this particular field, and I found it a bit harder and I figured, I wonder if you might be having the same experience yourself, actually, Gaël, and maybe we could talk a little bit about where we are looking instead. So if people listen to this podcast, they might find other things that catch their eye, or just talk about some other experiences of what we've seen.Gaël Duez: I must admit that I've never loved Twitter. I tried, and just the idea of having to describe something complex, most of the time systemic issues in a few hundred words, characters, sorry, I've always struggled with it. So I was a very reluctant Twitter user, but I'm not proud to say that today I'm a very intense user of LinkedIn.Okay, I know it's not necessarily the best platform ever, but I recall that I follow a lot of thought leaders in sustainability, in green IT, etc. on LinkedIn, and there are a lot of people doing a very decent job crafting very in depth articles, sharing resources, etc. I'm not the most happiest person on earth on the LinkedIn algorithm, obviously, so you need to do a lot of fine tuning to make sure that it's not a post about pack of wolves and how agile your organization should be. But I'm using LinkedIn quite a lot, like a million times more than Twitter. And then, of course, I use a lot of newsletters and other community. I could mention some of them if you want.Chris Adams: Twitter's loss is LinkedIn's gain, basically, in this scenario here, yeah? So it's not particularly cool, but it is useful, and you get the information that you want to there, right?Gaël Duez: Absolutely. And, you know, we need to take a bit of time to think and write when it's about climate change or environmental crisis. So I better like the long format that you will find most of the time on LinkedIn, rather than super short tweet and then all this ego battle, etc, etc. But don't get me wrong, you've got plenty of ego battle in the LinkedIn comments as well.Chris Adams: Yeah, that's what I was thinking about as well. So I'll share some experiences I've had. I've been using Mastodon, probably I started using a bit more of it in maybe October, November, and I've been on mastodon.social and there are some really dedicated instances like versions of something like Twitter, so there's a Mastodon Green, which I know that quite a few people have moved to who I used to see being active on Twitter.There's another one, climatejustice.Social that I've seen a few people being active on as well. This is one thing that's kinda nice, is that because it's federated, you see different groups that you didn't even know existing, or like little communities, that part is really kind of highlighted rather than it just being like climate Twitter, for example.I also am experimenting with an account on a place called mastodon.energy, which is where lots and lots of really hardcore energy nerds have been moved to. So the people who I used to follow to kind of keep up with the insights there, I've seen a few people there. The thing that really surprised me though was how strong the turnout uh, on Bluesky has been for loads of climate people, so loads of the people who are not necessarily like super climate techie people, but talk about the kind of climate in the widest term, a bunch of people have moved to Bluesky, but because you need an invite to get on Bluesky, it's actually quite difficult to see any of that stuff.And when I realized, "oh, that's where a bunch of them are," it really, really blew my mind. There's a bunch of other things that I think a kind of interesting, I haven't really used it very much yet, but this whole idea in Bluesky where you can pretty much create your own algorithms and there is an easy way for people to kind of create algorithms themselves that you might opt into to follow is interesting because there is a Greensky feed maintained by one Ketan Joshi who is a relatively well known climate writer, which is also worth looking at.But there's also a few newsletters as well though, I think you mentioned before as well, and it might be worth just briefly talking about some of that because there's one or two that I found super helpful in this context.Gaël Duez: Well, I'm going to mention two because in the first one, you will obviously not mention it, but the Green Software Foundation newsletter is gold. And I would say that the Climate Action Tech newsletter and community as well is gold. The Slack workspace of the Climate Action Tech community is where I find maybe 50, 60% of all my resources.So big kudos to them. And I think it It's worth having a look at it. The issue I've got with these newsletters or these Slacks, I mean, it's not an issue, but it's, once again, all the feeds that you've mentioned, the Mastodon.green, the BlueSky, et cetera, the problem is it's very easy to fall into information bubble.And don't get me wrong, that's very convenient. I mean, if you want to have scientifically supported information on energy transition or something very specific, ah, you don't want to enter a debate with some, you know, die hard, climate denier, whatever, et cetera. You just want to be with your, you, you know, with your people, with your folks, and then you will have a very in depth discussion.Still, I also believe that we need to have these discussions happening in the open space. And today, this is why I was mentioning LinkedIn and some people are still using Facebook or Instagram a lot or YouTube even for these reasons that it's different because this is where like everyone is.And this is why I believe we should still have some activities going on, on the main platforms, whether we like them or not. So it's really, I would say, two sides of the same coin. And the last one, which is very related to LinkedIn, Facebook or whatever, is where do professional people meet? And they meet in conferences.And this is also where more and more, I mean, this is what I love when in this podcast you share at the end the link to various conferences is that in every professional conferences, we should be talking about sustainability, we should be talking about climate change, and once again, I'm going to say, instead of you, because it will sound a bit less self promoting, but the big kudos to the Green Software Foundation Speaker Bureau to make sure every professional events worldwide has access to speakers that will be able to talk about climate change, digital sustainability and all the environmental crises.I think it's very important to be, also, where non truly aware people are.Chris Adams: I think that's fair. I think you do need to find a balance between those two things.So there's one thing I'll share just very quickly. We'll share a link to the cloud native sustainability landscape. That's kind of helpful in my view, because this is one place where a bunch of this research has been put into a kind of publicly accessible place and it's a nice roundup of all the stuff that's happening in this field.We'll share a link to that. There's one story we have left and we're gonna do a quick roundup of the actual events we have coming up here. So we'll talk a little bit about patents, uh, Microsoft filing for patents around grid-aware carbon computing and ware computing specifically. Gaël, do you wanna briefly touch on this one here?Because I think long and short of it is that we've been talking about carbon aware software for a while and there is a. peace in data center dynamics talking about how Microsoft have recently filed a patent specifically for this and I figured give a space for you to kind of provide some of your reckons on this as well because this in my view shows that okay people aren't just doing it just because it's a nice thing they think there's actually some value inside this and I think this is something that you were talking about briefly before as well.Gaël Duez: Yeah, I totally agree with you. You know, we need to make the circular economy and soon the regenerative economy attractive for investors. So, hopefully, investors in the short future will truly embrace the triple bottom line because of new regulations or pressures from their stakeholders, whatever, etc.But, you know, still, in the triple bottom line, there is still the planet and people, but also P, the P of prosperity, which remains so it, it will require investments to be viable. So it's a very positive sign to see climate tech being patented. Actually, I would rather have it fully open source, but this is the world where we live in.So I think it's a very positive sign that, you know, you can make money by doing good things for the planet or the people. And the only caveat in this specific story that we shared, is making sure that the impact happens over the entire life cycle, and not only during the usage phase. So it is not that what we see sometimes, what I call climate tech distraction.Oh, we're gonna remove CO2, but at the end, manufacturing and using the device emits more CO2 than what is removed from the atmosphere. But once again, there is a very positive trend to all this lifecycle analysis and I know that people in climate tech are more and more aware of it and take care of it.Sometimes even multi criteria lifecycle assessments.Chris Adams: Okay, thanks for that, Gaël. For people who are curious, we'll share a link to the article, plus the patent applications for this specifically, because yeah, I didn't know about this until seeing, "oh, that's why they're talking about a bunch of this stuff." So, Gaël, I believe there's a couple of events. Do you want to talk about the first one that's on this list?Gaël Duez: Yeah, oh, absolutely. Apidays London, and especially the Sustainability Track. So first of all, Asim Hussain, the Green Software Executive Director, will be a keynote speaker. So I'm super proud of it. And I'll have the pleasure to host the Sustainability Track for the entire day of the 14th September, with la crème de la crème of UK green IT experts and climate activists.And yeah, some names are pretty familiar to the people listening to the podcast, but we'll have Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital, Sarah Hsu from the Green Software Foundation, Sandra Pallier from Climate Action Tech, Sandra Sido from the Climate Peach, Robert Price, Mark Butcher, Arwel Owen, and many more.So I hope that I will see many of you there. It's a great event.Chris Adams: Oh wow, I didn't know that Mark Butcher was on that as well actually. He's a really interesting person to follow on LinkedIn for catching some of this.Gaël Duez: I do, I love his LinkedIn posts.Chris Adams: Okay, alright, there's love for you, Mark, going out. Okay, the other few things I'll just draw people's attention to briefly. Cloud Native have a Sustainability Week taking place in October. This is actually a distributed remote event. There's a CFP open, so if you have a talk prepared, then there's still space to do it and it's happening all around the world.We've shared a link for that. So there isn't, isn't one particular date that's happening in October. And then finally there's an event in November that I'll let you talk a little bit about here actually, 'cause this is one from the GSF, uh, Gaël, do you got this one?Gaël Duez: My pleasure. So it's Decarbonize Software 2023. So it will be the 16th of November. It's an online event. And I think that the registration is open and it's really the annual event by the Green Software Foundation showcasing the advancements in green software by the community. So I'm really looking forward to watching this one because, you know, I don't know if you remember in 2022, it was an incredible event where the Green Software Foundation announced the Software Carbon Intensity Specifications, the new Linux training program, etc. And actually, if I understood well, the last week episode of the Green Software Foundation, the SCI specification is about to be ISO compliant.So I expect some big announcement in this 2023 edition.Chris Adams: That's good. I'm expecting some good things out of this as well, actually. Thank you, Gaël, for covering this. Gaël, this has been loads of fun. I really enjoyed you coming on, and I really appreciate you providing all the actual kind of insight that you did have for this. So, thank you again, man. It's really nice to catch up with you again, and this has been loads and loads of fun.Gaël Duez: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, it was awesome. It was good to be on the other side of the microphone and a true honor to join your podcast, you know. I can die in peace now. I've been on the environment viables.Chris Adams: All right, well, thank you very much for that, and... I'm going to let you go to enjoy your paradise island for the rest of the day, OK? Take care of yourself, mate.Gaël Duez: Take care.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing, it helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser.Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

Host Chris Adams is joined by executive director of the Green Software Foundation, Asim Hussain as they dive into another mailbag session, bringing you the unanswered questions from the recent live virtual event on World Environment Day that was hosted by the Green Software Foundation on June 5 2023. Asim and Chris start with a discussion on the complexities of capturing energy consumed by memory, I/O operations, and network calls in the SCI. They explore real examples of measuring SCI on pipelines of CI/CD, showcasing projects like Green Metrics Tool and the Google Summer of Code Wagtail project. The conversation shifts to the carbon efficiency of GPUs and their environmental impact, touching on the tech industry's increasing hardware demands. They also address the potential for reusing cooling water from data centers, considering various cooling designs and their impact on water consumption.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterQuestions:SCI is not capturing energy consumed by Memory , I/O operation, network calls etc. So what is your take on it? [3:27]Does the GSF have any real examples of measuring SCI on pipelines of CI/CD? [7:15]What is the carbon efficiency (or otherwise) of GPUs, say, onerous compute vector search? Is that good for the environment? [23:40]Can the cooling water for data centers be reused? [36:28]Resources:Software Carbon Intensity Specification | Green Software Foundation [4:14]CO2.js | The Green Web Foundation [6:20]Wagtail CMS | wagtail.org [9:57] Green Metrics Tool | Green Coding Berlin [11:09]Eco CI | Green Coding Berlin [11:56]Wagtail 5.1 gets a bit greener and leaner [16:06] Kubernetes Power Manager | Intel -  Marlow Weston [19:47]Intel Power Optimization Library | Intel - Marlow Weston [20:59]Reducing the Carbon Impact of Generative AI Inference (today and in 2035) | Hot Carbon [27:53]Beyond ChatGPT: The Future of Generative AI for Enterprises | Gartner Report [35:01]  The AI startup outperforming Google Translate in Ethiopian languages | Lesan [35:36]With Google as My Neighbor, Will There Still Be Water? | AlgorithmWatch [42:30]The mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI | Sasha Luccione | Ars Technica [43:27] Branch Magazine New Edition [43:51]Green Software Foundations Discussions on GitHub [44:50] 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: We couldn't have done this two years ago. I feel like so many pieces of the puzzle are now coming into place, where people can really very easily, with an hour's worth of work, measure the emissions of a piece of software. Basically, the dream world I have is in six months time, thousands of open source repos all over the world just drop a configuration file into the root of their repo, add a GitHub action, and they're measuring an SCI score for their product.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 a special Mailbag episode of Environment Variables. This is our second installment of the format, where we bring you some of the questions that came up during the recent virtual event hosted by the Green Software Foundation on World Environment Day back in June. If you missed our first episode from this mailbag format, feel free to jump back when you'll see some of the other questions that came up and some of our eloquent and possibly not quite so eloquent answers as we ran through that. Today, we're going to run through a few more questions. And as ever, I'm joined by Asim Hussain, Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation.Hi, Asim!Asim Hussain: Hi Chris, how are you doing?Chris Adams: I'm not too bad. A bit grey outside over here in Berlin, but otherwise not too bad really. Okay, before we dive into this, the questions we'll run through. If you're new to environment variables, every time we record one of these, we show extensive show notes with all the links to the papers and the sources and the things that we do have.So if any of this has piqued your interest, there will be a link that you can jump into to basically continue your nerding out about this particular subject. And I think that's pretty much it. But before that, actually, maybe we should introduce ourselves, actually. Asim, I've introduced you as the executive director, but I suspect you might want to say a bit more about the Green Software Foundation, what else you do when you're not working at the GSF?Asim Hussain: Thanks. Yes, I'm the Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the Chairperson of the Green Software Foundation, so I hold both roles right now. Yeah, I've basically been thinking about software and sustainability as Chris for quite a few years. Outside of the GSF, I'm also the Director of Green Software at Intel, where I try and work through an Intel strategy regarding, you know, greening of software and helping there.Because, you know, the only people who buy stuff from Intel are people who run software.Chris Adams: Thank you very much for that. We'll have this and better revelations and more insightful revelations coming ahead.Asim Hussain: It gets better than this, Chris Adams: Yeah. Yeah, my name is Chris Adams. It's a little bit Monday this morning, it seems. I work at the Green Web Foundation, which is a non profit based in the Netherlands, focusing on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. And I'm also a maintainer of a library called CO2.js, as well as being one of the chairs of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the regular host of this podcast specifically. Should we dive into these questions for the mailbag? All right. Asim Hussain: Let's go for it.Chris Adams: All right.So the first question that came through was one about the SCI. The question is, this SCI is not capturing energy consumed by memory, IO operation, network calls, etc. What is your take on it? This is a question from the World Environment Day thing. This might be a chance to explain what the SCI is, because as I understood it, it does capturesome of that stuff, Asim Hussain: yeah, my answer on the day would have been like, huh? Yeah, it does. Or something a lot more eloquent than that. But yeah, this is Software Carbon Intensity is a specification being built by the Standards Working Group in the Green Software Foundation. It is almost in ISO. That is our goal for this year is to really go through that process.Chris Adams: And just to jump in, ISO is the International Standards Organization.Asim Hussain: Yes, that's the one. Yep. And what it is, let me just very quickly say what it is. It is a method of measuring software carbon intensity, which is a rate. If you listen to a podcast, it'll probably be carbon per minute of the listen. It's a rate rather than a total. Other kind of really in a standout aspects of it are that it's been designed very much by people who build software.And so it's been designed by people who actually build and measure software to act as a good metric to drive reduction. So make sure that inside it is included aspects so that if you did things like move your compute to a greener region, or you move your compute to time when it's greener, or things like that actually would be recognized in the calculation.Whereas, for instance, if you use the GHG protocol, oftentimes stuff like that isn't factored in and you can do carbon air computing to the, to the cows come home but it wouldn't really affect your GHG score. That's some of the aspects of the SCIs, very much built that way. Now, what I will say is if you actually look at the SCI equation, it's very simple.You basically per hour, so it's always what we call per hour, so per minute might be the hour. Or per user, user might be the hour. So per hour, you have to figure out how much energy Is consumed. You have to figure out how much, what we call embodied carbon, so how much hardware is being used and if you're, if it's per minute, then you figure out how much energy consumed per minute.If it's per minute, you just try and figure out how long is this piece of hardware normally used for and divide it by and obviously you get per minute. Then the other thing you also factor in is thing called I, which is the grid emissions factor. So how clean ditch is your electricity, any factoring or what?Whatever it is for that period of time with electricity. And the key thing there is that's it, and so therefore, It includes everything. It doesn't exclude memory, or I/O, or network, because it's just energy, hardware, and grid emissions, and so as long as you've got some values for that, for your memory, for your I/O, for other things, you can do it. What I will say to answer, I think maybe, I don't think this was in the spirit of the question, but I think it's clear to it, measuring is hard. It's really hard. Like Chris, you've got co2.js And that does a great job of kind of network, but even then you have like multiple flags if you wanna use it in this mode or this model or this assumption.Like, I love, I use it all the time these days. What did you say, like, all models are bad, some are useful? Yes, I do think that calculating an SCI score, which includes memory, IO, network calls, all the other factors in software is challenging, and I will acknowledge that, but it's also something that a lot of people are working on, and I think we're working on that with things like the impact engine in the foundation, and Chris, you're working on it with the co2.js.Arne is working on it from Green Coding with those models. Yeah.Chris Adams: with GMT, the Green Metrics Tool.All right, Asim Hussain: metrics, oh yeah, yep.Chris Adams: Hopefully that should give plenty to refer to. I'll add a couple of links to what this SCI is to make that a little bit clearer, so for people to understand what that might be for that question. Should we jump on to the next question actually, Asim?Asim Hussain: Yeah, sure, Chris Adams: Does the GSF have any real examples measuring the SCI on pipelines of CI/CD? That's a soup of different letters there, but as I understand it, the GSF being the Green Software Foundation, SCI being the Software Carbon Intensity is a way to measure the carbon footprint, and CI/CD being continuous integration, continuous delivery, like automating the process of getting software out for people to use, allAsim Hussain: mm hmm, yep,Chris Adams: All right, so now that we've explained what the question meant and unpacked some of those, all those TLAs, three letter algorithms, do you want to have a go at this one? Because I can add a little bit myself with some recent work that we've been doing in my day job.Asim Hussain: Yeah, so definitely, I'd say there's two things, is that A, a lot of work that goes on is also just behind closed doors as well, and that's one of the things that I find interesting about this space is that sometimes you'll just never hear of it. So, in terms of real examples of measuring SCIs, so there's a project called the SCI Guide, which has a number of case studies inside them, where organizations are really trying to document what they're doing and revealing the numbers.Revealing numbers is very challenging for a lot of organizations, I can attest to it. You have to go through so many levels of approval to reveal your number. So there's, we've only got a couple of examples of those, but there's definitely tooling that we're building to make this a lot easier. So we're building something called the impact engine framework, which is a framework, which is what CarbonQL is now called the impact engine framework.So if you've heard me say the word CarbonQL, it's now called the impact engine framework, and it's a tool with a manifest file and you can use it to calculate the emissions. And you can say, I wanna use co2.js I wanna use cloud carbon footprint, I want to use green metrics, and you wanna use whatever.And it helps you measure an SCI score. And where we're starting to think now is we'd like to get to the point where, there is a GitHub Action, basically, the dream world I have is in six months time, thousands of open source repos all over the world, just drop a configuration file into the root of their repo, add a GitHub Action, and they're measuring an SCI score for their product.It's been two years now in the making of even the specification. We couldn't have done this two years ago. I feel like so many pieces of the puzzle are now coming into place where people can really, very easily, with an hour's worth of work, measure the emissions of a piece of software, and that's where, so yeah, the CI/CD thing is coming, I would say, in six months time, at least from our side.And it sounds like you've already got some work anyway from the green coding, green coding landscape, Chris Adams: yeah,I actually didn't know about the impact engine. That's, that's new to me as well,Asim Hussain: yeah.Chris Adams: The thing that we've been using, so with my day job, one thing we've been doing with a open source project called Wagtail, we've been working with some of the core developers there, and on the Google Summer of Code, a couple of early career technologists who have basically been, who I've been mentoring to introduce some of Essentially like green coding features into Wagtail itself.Now, the last release of Wagtail came out, uh, in beginning of August, actually the end of July. Now, Wagtail is a content management system, a bit like WordPress, but unlike WordPress, it's written in Python and it's actually written on top of a, a, a software library called. Django, Which is what our own platform uses. Flagtel was used by a number of websites with NASA. If you visit the NHS website, you're using a Wagtail website. There's a number of ones that it's in using. And what we've been doing is we've actually We got chatting to the folks at Green Coding Berlin, which is pretty self explanatory, what they do, they do green coding, and they live in Berlin, we got chatting with them about this, because we were trying to understand, okay, if we're going to make some changes, are we going to be able to understand the environmental impact of, are we making progress? They also have a very literally named tool called The Green Metrics Tool. Can you guess what the Green Metrics Tool does, Asim?Asim Hussain: I don't know, man, it's hard with these, these terms. Does it, does it generate green metrics in a tool?Chris Adams: Oh, dude, it's so German. I live in Germany. This is like, to seeAsim Hussain: What's it say in German? Say it in German.Chris Adams: no, I should, we don't actually have,it's, it's, you know, the Green Metrics Tool is what it is inAsim Hussain: Okay, all right, Chris Adams: So, I think GMT is what we end up referring to it,Asim Hussain: Oh, that's quite funny. Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich Mean Time as well, yeah, yeah.Chris Adams: We've been using that and. The thing that I think is quite interesting about what, uh, the folks at Green Coding Berlin have been doing is they've realized that, okay, there's a bunch of open source tools, op open source software in the world. So they've been basically forking a bunch of open source tools running this.And then whenever there's a kind of CI run, they've been measuring some of this and, uh, they've actually got a project called Eco CI, which basically is like a GitHub action that fig, that measures the power used when you do a kind of, run as it were, a CI run to, to test something. So they've got some of these figures here and the thing that they've been doing, which we found quite useful as well, is they've been using a tool which allows us to run through common scenarios.Like I go to a website, I browse through a few places. I search for something, I submit a form, I upload, something like that. We've got a set of journeys that we follow and we're using those as the kind of sample ones to as our kind of baseline to see. Is the work that myself and Aman, the student I've been working with the most, is the work that we've been doing there, has it been helping or has it been not helping? Because the particular piece of work that we've done recently is introduce a support for a new image file format. Called A V I F instead of just using like JPEGs and massively reduces the typically halves the size of any, any of the images that you do use. But there is a bit of a spike in energy usage compared to what you would normally would use both on the server or on the browser.So we're now actually trying to run this in various scenarios to see is this actually an improvement on this? Because even though it results in a nicer experience, we're trying to make sure that we're going in the right direction. So that's one of the things we have. There's a couple of things we have going on as well.But that's the kind of most concrete example that I might refer to. And there's a couple of links to both the output from this, but also the open source projects, because you can mess around with some of this stuff. Pretty much right after this podcast, if you really decided.Asim Hussain: So this is the stuff that is using direct measurement. So you're forking it, running it on like a special rig that is like measuring it. Yeah, I think that's, it's interesting. I feel like this is like something that's been in discussion with the SCI as well, but we never landed on some good terminology for it.I think we use measurement versus calculation. And we try to say the word measurement like direct, like what's happening in green coding, like direct measurement uh, something from counters or from a power meter or something like that, whereas we use a calculation is when you are just taking some sort of, we, we call it now the impact observation.You take some observations about the system and you're passing into a model and getting an estimate of emissions. So I think we, I think the language here has gotta get a little bit more specific. I remember on the calls we were even asking, academics, whether there was like specific language around this and it wasn't.Maybe the, maybe one of the listeners can say, actually ask him what you're describing is the word for calculation is X and the word for measurement is Y. This is, this is where we're getting to, and I think this is where the conversation is in this kind of generally metrics area. One of the reasons I'm exploring modeling is actually for a very interesting use case, which is once you model, you can simulate.So once you've got a model, you can then tweak the model and say things like, so one of the things we're exploring is like, what if you were to change some aspects of the system, you've got a model, so can you then model that change, and then estimate the emissions reductions. And that's where like modeling has an advantage or modeling has a real disadvantage In the fact that it's a model and you're not really going to get a great actual measure.So I'm not too sure, we don't have the answers. I just think this is an interesting question. It's like measurement versus calculation and I haven't fully formed my thoughts on this yet as well. But I think it's going to be an active bit of discussion for a while. Maybe it has been an active bit of discussion.Maybe I'm just really late to the conversation.Chris Adams: I'm not sure myself, to be honest, but we'll need to see. The thing I think should be relevant, so when we were using this to figure out whether we're making things worse or better inside Wagtail, I asked Arne about some of this, okay, how are you actually coming up with these numbers? And they basically do things.Yes, they have a rig, they've got like a bunch of machines that they have where they're reading the data directly from that. But they've also been doing a bunch of work with some of the underlying data that's published by various chip manufacturers. Something called the Spec Co. TheAsim Hussain: Best spec power? Yeah, Chris Adams: yeah, And the, I've shared a link which basically goes into stultifying amounts of detail about what they do. They've talked, spoken about, okay, this is the tool that's used by green pixie, by cloud, carbon footprint, by TEEDS, like a French advertising company who've been trying to figure this stuff out, and they've. Basically share their modeling of it, which could presumably be consumed by Kepler as well. So they're trying to build these models because they don't have access to the underlying data. And this is something we spoke about in the last episode and the previous episode before that, about why it's a real challenge to get these numbers from especially large hyperscaler providers who. Basically, we'd really like to have much more control over the language. And in many cases, they give honestly quite good reasons for saying, look, share these figures. They are citing reasons like commercial confidentiality or an attack vector. This is why I'm quite excited about the Realtime Carbon project, because it's a chance to finally Asim Hussain: the values.Chris Adams: of that.So you can actually have some meaningful numbers. So you can say, are we making it better? Or are we making it worse? Because even now, in 2023. Getting these figures is a real challenge if you're not running your own hardware.And I guess, I assume, now that you're working at a company that makes the hardware, or makes much more of the hardware, that's a different change for you now, you see more of it from the other side, right?Asim Hussain: Yeah, I do get and I speak to a lot of people now. And in fact, actually, one of the things that maybe would be useful to have a deep dive on spec power, if you want to have an episode, I can definitely bring some people is one of the people in my team, she's been spending a lot of time really getting into the weeds.And it's fascinating working with people who build CPUs their entire life, because it's a different like, You think, Chris, we just write some variables in a Visual Studio code every now and again and claim to understand technology. Once you really get under the seat, there's a lot going on. That we are so abstracted away from and like one of the conversations happens all the time inside Intel is like how do we close that gap between what developers are doing versus what the hardware can do to be more efficient.And I think there's the, there just sounds like there is just this chasm of opportunity here, which we're just not taking advantage of. A lot of the stuff that's happening on the intel side of the equation is just making people optimize their code. That just, but like using standard kind of optimizations that have been available for ages and a lot, there's a lot of just understanding that I don't even understand how a CPU works sometimes, like the energy curves just do not make any, any sense to me.I'm not going to go into depth as to my lack of knowledge of what CPU is, but I could definitely bring people in who are much more knowledgeable than me. And then maybe let's have a deep dive into that. I'd be fascinating conversation, like really get into a chip. Chris Adams: Yeah, because the thing that we've, the thing we're seeing from the outside, or the thing I've noticed from the outside, and I've seen other people also referring to, is the fact that- do you know how we had this thing back a few years ago where engines had like defeat devices where if they're tested, they're gonna work a certain way and they really are. It turns out that you often see some patterns a bit like that whenever you have benchmarks. 'cause if you design for a benchmark, you might not, it might not be designed. You, you could, there are scenarios where a chip will work a certain way that will make it look really good in the benchmark. Uh, and that might not necessarily be how it actually works in the. In the real world basically. You've got that happening a lot, lots of cases. I would really love to deep dive into that because this is the thing we struggle with and it's weird that say most chips are most efficient, like at two thirds capacity between two thirds and three quarters, right? Rather than, so you might think like you got, if I turn it all the way down, that will turn all the power down. No it doesn't work that.Asim Hussain: It doesn't. Yeah.Chris Adams: And there's all these other incentives about where you move computing jobs as a result, which has this kind of knock on effect. Alright, we've. Asim Hussain: There's actually really interesting work around like when we talk about moving compute around different parts of the world, there's actually a really great project being open source project run through Marlow Weston, who's one of my colleagues at Intel, and she's also one of the chairs of the CNCF environmental tag and I'm going to get the name of our open source project wrong. I think it's Kubernetes Power Mode. And what it does is it does like load shifting across cores on the same CPU. So normally when you, like, you want to max out one core before allocating work to the other cores. That's the most efficient way to go up the curve.But most like allocators will just allocate them across all the cores on average. And so she's built this kind of, uh, Kubernetes, uh, scheduler, which basically will max that one core at a time. So you get to the top.Chris Adams: Wow, I didn't know that was possible. That's a bit like how cars, so certain cars would be, if you've got a car with maybe a V8 inside it, there are some cars which will basically just run on four of the eight engines, eight cylinders firing all eight for fuel efficiency. That sounds like the kind of cloudy equivalent to that idea. Asim Hussain: But there's also, but she's, she's actually got a second Kubernetes project I'll get the link to, which allows you, to change the clock frequency of your chip at the application level, so with the intention of; if you can change people overclocking, you can actually underclock, and underclock actually does this amazing thing where you get much more efficient from an energy perspective because everybody's looking at like reporting what is the like peak level efficiency but if you can just say look i'm willing to run at 20 less clock speed you actually gain more than 20 energy efficiency improvements but you lose that on the performance.So if you can dynamically change the clock frequency, which happens a lot on like laptops and mobile devices, it does not happen on the cloud space. It has lots of negative consequences as well. Lots, yeah. You really can't just do it without knowing like how an entire stack works top to bottom. It's a very advanced piece of thing, but if you can take advantage of that as additional efficiencies again, reducing that chasm between what we developers think we know about tech and the hardware versus what hardware actually does is I think one of the frontiers of this space.Chris Adams: This was actually something Arne explained to me, he was looking at why some of the figures that say, we spoke about a project called Scaphandre last week, he says that one of the reasons that, one of the things that's difficult about this is that, yeah, like you said, the clock speed can go up and down, and he, the kind of mental model that I ended, left the conversation with was a bit like, revolutions per minute in an engine, so you can have it red lining to go load really, really fast.But if you scale it right back down, then you can be somewhat more efficient, but there's going to be impacts. I didn't realise that you had that kind of control with a software level itself. Actually, you could deliberately- I thought you could only just ask the CPU for work to be done rather than say, can you do a bit, cus that's that's not like nicing something. That's a different level ofAsim Hussain: That's a whole different level. Nicing is probably... No, it's not like nicing something. It's a very different level of hardware control. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right. Wow, we went really deep. Not expected enough. Okay. Okay. Bye. Okay, so hopefully that should help the question that asked,are there Asim Hussain: even the question? What was even the question? Chris Adams: there examples of measuring the SCI in pipelines?Asim Hussain: We went off! Chris Adams: Yes, there are examples of it. There's lots in the open. The work from Green Coding Berlin is probably some of the stuff that's really in the open. But there's also work done behind various corporate firewalls that you might not be able to see, or you might probably can't see unless you employ all kinds of industrial espionage, which I suspect you're probably not going to do that if you are good at that. Anyway, okay, let's move on to the next question, it seems because we're burning through our time.Next question was about the carbon efficiency of GPUs. This seemed to be a question of basically saying what's the carbon efficiency or otherwise of GPUs when they're used for like owner respect search and stuff like this, and is this good for the environment? This is the question that I got, and I assume this was a response to people talking about the fact that with this new world of generative AI and LLMs, you use lots and lots of specialized chips, often, which look like GPUs or sound like GPUs. Do you want to have a quick go at this assume, and then I could probablybounce on some of this, because I just, yeah.Asim Hussain: Let me say two things. A, If you're using the generalized CPU, which is specifically for generalized and for anything else, so it will be more efficient on an energy basis. I would say the point though is when you start using GPUs and you start using specialized hardware, each of them has an idle power amount.And so if you've got a GPU and you've got a whole series of them, or all this is the specialized hardware and you're not using them, that's actually bad. And so it's very important when you have this specialized hardware, like you're thinking through and you're thinking, I've got it, I'm using it. That's why I've got it.Obviously, if you're in the cloud, it's a different equation, right? Maybe not, actually, if you can just order a GPU and not really use it. And the other thing I would say is, is, and I've seen this conversation go a little bit wonky as well is when oftentimes the total power of a system increases. 'cause a GPU consumes more power, and then people just say, oh, it's just, it's less efficient, it's consuming more power without factoring in that like a job will run faster and therefore the total energy will be less.If that makes sense. I've seen conversations get into confusing territory and people have confused energy and power. 'cause power is like just the Watts per second, whereas the total energy, so if you're using so that, that's another way Chris Adams: You're Asim Hussain: about carbon efficient. Yeah. Was,Chris Adams: being that you might have a GPU, a graphics processing unit, which is extremely energy intensive, but it runs a job for a short period of time and therefore it could be turned off or could be scaled back down. Right? That's the thinking. That's what you're saying, right?Asim Hussain: I dunno if they can be turned off, but I think they're always on, aren't they? I don't know. Actually. I have no idea. But yeah. Are the ones that turn off?Chris Adams: You can see there is there, there's a definite, uh, impact between something running a hundred percent and running and when it's idling, there is a change.But I'll be honest, I'm outta my depth when it comes to figuring out how many compute, how many people who run data centers switch them off on a regular basis.I suspect the number is very low.So, Asim Hussain: close to zero.Chris Adams: yeah, I was actually going to answer this differently.Asim Hussain: Oh, go on then. Yeah.Chris Adams: say that if you're asking, if you want to talk about the carbon efficiency of GPUs compared to like CPUs or something like that, it's worth understanding that the emissions will come from two places when you're thinking about this.There's emissions created from making the actual computer, and there's emissions from running the computer. And when you make something which is specialized for the GPU, for example, that's going to be pretty energy intensive. And in many cases, you have a bit of a trade off, right, where if you, if you basically had a bunch of CPUs compared to GPUs, if the GPUs are more energy intensive to make, then if you don't use the machines very much, then you don't have much usage to amortize the kind of cost.So that, so in that case, GPUs are going to be pretty inefficient, they're going to be pretty carbon inefficient. But for the most part, because these things are so incredibly expensive, they tend to get used a lot or there is an incentive to use them as much as possible. And even if you're not doing them, to make them available for free, uh, for people to use these or at least try, try and grow a market.And that's what you see right now with, um, things like, uh, various tools like chat GPT and stuff like that, which lots of us are not paying for. The use of that results to a massive amount because you want to re receive a to achieve a certain amount of utilization, so you can actually get any kind of return on this.The thing that I would actually draw your attention to or thing that might be worth looking at is recently we had the conference Hot Carbon, and there was a really cool paper which was specifically called, which addressed this, the title of the paper was called Reducing the Carbon Impact of Generative AI Inference. There's a number of people who are named on this. So Andrew A. Chien from University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Hai Nguyen, Varsha Rao, Tristan Sharma, Rajini Wijayawardana from the University of Chicago, and Liuzixuan Lin, I think, right? This was a really interesting talk. I think because it was basically looking at the environmental impact of tools like, say, AI, and saying, okay, we've got this whole kind of trend of employing LLMs, and large language models, and generative AI in searches and things like that.What does the impact look like? And they basically looked at, say, the usage figures that were published for ChatGPT in March 2023 and that was like 1. 6 billion, like users. And then based on that, they, they they modelled the likely inference cost, which is the cost from using it, and the training cost.And the thing, there was a few kind of takeaways. First of all, we often talk about the training cost as the big thing to be aware of. And they said no, like the training was 10 times the impact. And they said if you were to scale this up to say, Google's usage, then even if you had a training cost of about, that's going to have a ginormous impact basically. So we should be really thinking about the inference part, and in this case here, having something like a dedicated fast machine that does the inference, compared to a bunch of CPUs, for example, is really cool for a bunch of other reasons. Asim Hussain: Yeah, and I just want to say, I think two things with the increased adoption, interest, usefulness of AI. Influence is going to go through the roof, as you said, it's on and the only place it's going to go is higher. The interest is going to go as higher as the years go on. As I've said before, nobody invests billions of dollars into AI if there's not a growth sector.People aren't going to use it and more people are going to use it. That's inference. That's why inference is very interesting. That's going really high. I just want to say, I just completely forgot about the Hot Carbon Conference this year. I watched every single talk in the Hot Carbon Conference last year.And let's put it in the show notes because I think last year's program was amazing. I watched every single video. I made copious notes on all of the, all of the talks, and I'm, I'm looking forward to going through it again this year and doing what you did. Sales and just listening to all of 'em.Chris Adams: Yeah dude we had some of the people, we've had the speakers from the previous talks because there've been so many really good ones. The thing that I really liked, I just wanna come back to this one because I think there's some really nice things that came from this. This talk in particular in this paper. One of the key, key things was, is basically saying, let's assume you're gonna have this massive increase in usage. And I think the comparison was, they said if you were to scale the usage of chat GPT up to the kind of modeled usage, In, in this paper for sayAsim Hussain: Oh, Chris Adams: mainstream search engine, a 55 times increase in use. If you were to scale it up that way, you might think, oh, crapes, that's 55 times usage. Assuming this is like in 2030, and then ev this, they basically tried to project this forward into 2030 and say, well, okay, what would the look, would it be that in 2030 we would've 55 times a carbon footprint if you did this? They basically projected, they took some trends and extrapolated them forwards. One of them was that you're probably going to see an increase in energy inefficiency over time because we have seen in moore's Asim Hussain: sorry, you said energy inefficiency, did Chris Adams: So energy efficiency. So they basically said, let's assume between now and 2030, you see a 10 times improvement inference, and that's based on what we've seen so far in terms of things keeping, keeping getting more efficient. Let's look at the carbon intensity of the grid will also be decarbonizing over time and they took some from current trends and what's actually especially been coming in with changes in policy and they basically said with these numbers is it possible to do something about these figures and what would the figures be if you were looking at this in 2030 in the next six and a half years and they basically modeled some of this and they modeled- they, they did this as a way to figure out the actual savings possible by using things like carbon aware programming, and one of the key things they said was that because inference isn't super latency sensitive, because of the actual on the machine in the actual chips in some distance, say machine doing a bunch of inference, then piping the results to you. It's not so latency sensitive and that means that you can quite easily run this in lots and lots of greener regions, even if you're accessing it from a place where the energy is not so green, let's say. Using this versus what we have right now. They, they we're probably not gonna have a massive increase with, I think the figures that I sawAsim Hussain: Oh, so they, Chris Adams: versus, yeah.they basically said, based on this, if we were to employ, let's say we, let's assume you're gonna have machines becoming more efficient anyway, and you scale up this much usage, if you were able to carefully run the inference and serve the requestsAsim Hussain: Oh.Chris Adams: the greenest regions.Asim Hussain: But that's the assumption. The assumption is that you have to actually be green, do green software to decarbonize a software. If you actively, so it sounds like if we did everything we're asking you to do, we'll be flat. Do they have a number for what if people didn't do?Chris Adams: Yeah they basically said, assuming if you didn't have any energy efficiency improvements, they said 55 times load will be 55 times a footprint. They said if assuming you have the efficiency improvements increasing at the same rate as they have been, you're looking at maybe With an uplift of 55 times the usage, you'd probably be looking at 2.6, two and a half times theenergy usage, I mean, of the emissions from the grid, right? But they said, if you were to actually use the learn,Asim Hussain: Carbon Chris Adams: programming like this, they brought it down to like, the ideal scenario would be you're looking at 1.2, which Asim Hussain: But that, Chris Adams: kind of mind blowing... Asim Hussain: well, it's mind blowing, but I think it shows how important the work that we're talking about is. It's like, actually, it's one of the really great talks from last year's Hot Carbon, which I loved, which was, I've forgotten, I've got to apologize. I'm not going to remember which one it was.But it was talking about how projecting forward kind of compute growth and how green software was a way of being able to handle the additional usage and load of the cloud without actually having to build more servers, because fundamentally we are constrained at the rate with which we can actually increase the cloud, but the growth is growing significantly as well, so like being more efficient actually allows you to deal with growth. You have to be green, you have to use green software if you want a realistic chance of generative AI being as ubiquitous as you want it to be.Chris Adams: I mean, the other thing is, you don't have to assume that they have to be there, like, yeah, you don't, maybe, like, the option is, don't, you just don't need to buy all this equipment in the first place. These will never be a replacement for actually having better data.Asim Hussain: What if they're just humans in a building that's answering your question? Is that more efficient? There was a Gartner thing I saw recently which is that the total amount of energy used by AI by 2025, so Gartner report, will be higher than the total amount of energy used by the entire human workforce in the world.Chris Adams: I, I, I, I would, I don't know enough about that. And I feel a little bit worried about referring to that. But the point I was going to get to was the fact that you're seeing examples where Actually, just having good domain knowledge, it turns out to be much, much more effective than having loads and loads of compute.And the good example that I've linked to here is actually, there's a company called Lesan, they're based in Berlin, and they do machine learning specifically for Ethiopian languages. And they outperform Google Translate, they outperform some of the large providers, because they've just got access to the actual benchmark data sets from the first place. This is the thing, having quite high quality data is another way to reduce the amount of compute used. And this comes up Asim Hussain: true. Yeah, very good point. yeah,Chris Adams: and this is also when you bear in mind that even just the whole tokenization that you have when you're, it's based around English language and so even another language is gonna have, we're gonna gonna need more tokens for the same amount of sentences. So there's a whole bunch of issues there that we might refer to.Alright, so we, we dived quite far into an efficiency of GPUs and we might think about that. I think we've got time for maybe one more question left before we have to wrap up Mr. Hussain.Asim Hussain: Okay. You pick it.Chris Adams: Okay, so this one is, this is a question about water usage. Can the cooling water for data centers be reused? And this is a question because people...Yeah, actually, I think one of the worries is that people actually... In many cases it just gets pumped back into rivers when the water is that much hotter, you're basically just cooking the fish, which is not...Asim Hussain: Sorry. Chris Adams: not very helpful.IAsim Hussain: it depends if you like eating, I suppose it depends if you like eating fish, Chris Adams: don't think it's good. I don't think the fish enjoy this, right, but basically there is- that's one of the issues, but I think this is more actually a case of this is speaking to the fact that in many cases, 1 of the big things that's come up is basically people talking about the water usage with compute, and in particular data centers where, which are very heavy on, uh, generative AI and things like that. And there's a really good example that we might refer to that I learned about, which is Google and some of their data centers in Chile over the last few years. There was a whole thing where you. So in Europe, for example, where there's lots and lots of water, you don't necessarily, or there's parts of North and Western Europe where if they're cold, and they already have lots of water around them and lots of rainfall, then it's not so much of an issue.But if you were to put a data center where there's loads of drought that uses lots and lots of water, the examples, there's a company called Algorithm, organization called Algorithm, which we spoke about some of this, because you see protests against data centers. One of the key things was You find some data centers using something in the region of 169 liters per second. Now, if you run that in a place which has drought, maybe not the most equitable use of a scarce resource, especially for the people who rely on that water to live and survive. There are other examples where large companies have come in where they've ended up using significant amounts of water. The thing that was interesting about Chile was that Google wanted to deliver a deployed data center here. They had a bunch of pushback, but then they ended up choosing to use much, much less water intensive technology as a result, like I think it's adiabatic cooling, which is essentially a kind of closed loop system, which doesn't rely on evaporating water than getting rid of the water as a way to cool things down. This is one thing that came up and I've I have added a couple of links to both Algorithm Watch talking about this, as well as the actual organisation, the activists in Chile, talking about ok, we had a victory for this. The fact that, yeah, they are issues around it, but it's also a case of companies, they can make these choices, but a lot of the time, they might not choose to, because it's a little bit more expensive and here you feel like if companies could be making a huge amount of money, and Google spent 60 billion on share by buying its own shares last year, they're going to have fairly efficient, less water intensive cooling in a place where there's that's suffering from drought. This seems a fair thing, like these things we should be asking for and should be setting as a norm. There are other organizations doing this too.Asim Hussain: What do you think, one of the things, I've got nothing to back up, one of the things that was hinted to me the other day, I think it was Sarah Bergman who might have mentioned on Twitter, that there might be situations where it's mutually the opposite. Being more carbon efficient might actually make you more water intensive.Like for instance, doing things that reduce carbon emissions might require more water consumption, and which is why I think it's exciting that we're actually all starting to have this conversation right now, because I think we're so focused on carbon, and we're optimizing for carbon, but actually, the landscape is much more complicated.It's much more of a surface where you're trying to minimize the environmental impacts of your choices. And you might have to make trade offs versus one versus the other. If there's a water scarcity right now, you might have to increase your carbon emissions. I'm excited that this is where the conversation is evolving to.Thank you. Because once we add water to the mix, we can add other things.Chris Adams: You see a trade off for sure, but in also, lots of these, ultimately, it comes down to capital expenditure.Lots of the Asim Hussain: it can be an AndChris Adams: very, like, yeah,like, Asim Hussain: an and. Yeah, yeah.Chris Adams: you are seeing this, but it's also worth bearing in mind that when you're looking at this, impact comes from the energy generation in the first place, because let's say you're going to burn a bunch of coal to heat up a bunch of water to turn to, to generate some electric is a huge amount of water being used there.In fact, freshwater usage in energy generation, I believe it is actually the number one source of water usage in America. So we, when we talk about this, it's also worth thinking about the entire supply chain. Yes, there are absolute things you can do at the data center level. Also, if you look through the supply chain, there's also other areas, but typically with data centers, it tends to be very localized. So there may be water being used, but if it's water being used in a place where that people are depending on for drinking water in the same town.You can understand why people are a bit miffed, basically.Asim Hussain: it's like, we don't really think of data centers like coal power plants, but like, it's almost just the same. Like we treat, we treat, we treat, we treat them as very different. But at the end of the day, like water is a, is in this, in this case, could be a pollutant.Chris Adams: Yeah. Asim Hussain: If you're pumping hot water out, I don't know, I do not know enough.Please don't quote me. I don't know exactly what happens here. I do not think that data centers are like, maybe they are like squirting like hot streams of water into rivers or something like that. But I'm just pointing out that you often feel like some things are like abstracted away from a mission so much you don't really associate it with the entity.But like with a coal power plant, we just so associate it with emissions that we know what to think about it, how to think about it. But like a data center in a way is it generates emissions. I'm sorry if it is. Putting like hot water into rivers and streams. Isn't that a pollutant?Chris Adams: Well, yeah. THere's all kinds of pollutants that you have. There's noise pollution as well.There's very, that you might need to take into account when someone's citing big pieces of infrastructure because this is industrial infrastructure.That's the Asim Hussain: is. Yeah.Chris Adams: Like there are cases of the. people having a really hard time with just the wiring and the noise pollution from data centers crypto mining rigs Asim Hussain: really, you can you hear, if you live now, you'd be able to hear whirring Chris Adams: I'll share a link to an example from um there there's there's an interesting case with amazon uh specifically where there's a there's a bunch of people who are basically complaining about the noise pollution um in i believe it's I think it might be West Virginia,who are, Asim Hussain: Yeah. There's semi Chris Adams: where they basically hear this because it's loud enough, but you also see this with cryptocurrency mining in New York State, there's been lots of cases where you have typically the really quiet, serene places, where the calm has basically been punctured by the incessant whirring of,Asim Hussain: like Chris Adams: of all these things, yeah, exactly, so there's various dimensions that you would need to take into account that go beyond just thinking about carbon and carbon tunnel vision, but let's be honest dude, like, Most of the time, organizations struggle with just thinking about carbon as well as cash, right? So it's, itAsim Hussain: Let's add water and noise to it though, Chris. Let's give, let's give him everything. Yeah.Chris Adams: and the, what I'll do, I'll add another link, because there's some really fast, fantastic work by Sasha Luccioni, who's the climate lead at Hugging face. She wrote a really good piece in Ars Technica, talking about all the various things you need to take into account with the environmental and social impacts technology and specifically, um, AI. It's a really nice way in. And, oh, I should actually share, um, my organization brought, published a new thing, uh, this week, A new issue of Branch has come out and it's got a bunch of stuff talking about this from a, from a Tamara Kneese. She wrote some, she wrote about some of this, but also Dr. Theodora Dryer, she, she wrote a piece about's, also an expert in. We'll show a link to that 'cause that that would be fun for some, for some people as well.Oh, blindly. We've gone way over actually Asim.Asim Hussain: That's good. That's good. Great episode.Chris Adams: We answered those questions, or at least we've peppered this, uh, these show notes with huge amounts of links to people who might wanna learn more about this and hopefully we've get add added some tantalizing hints. Asim, I think we're actually at our time, we've got through four questions this time around. I think there are some more, but in the meantime, I think I'm gonna have to say, Thank you for coming on and wandering through this with me. Yeah, this was fun, man.Asim Hussain: Yeah. It's good to see you guys. I love these, I love these mailbag episodes. Let's do more of them.Chris Adams: Yes, I want to ask you a bit more about the Impact Engine next time as well, because I didn't know about that. Asim Hussain: Give us, give us a month and I'll, and I'll, and I'll be able to get into a lot more detail about it with you. Yeah,Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Also, if anyone who's listened to this is curious and has questions of their own, please feel free to at us in various places or even come to the new discussions. The new Green Software Discussions website. I might ask you to point to this because otherwise I'm going to podcast.greensoftware.foundation Asim Hussain: We'll put it in.Chris Adams: address that we normally use. Is it visible? Is there Asim Hussain: do you know we should create a short link? We, we should create a short link, but there isn't, if you actually go to our GitHub organization, there's just a tab called discussions. But you're right. We'll, we'll put it on our website and we'll make sure it's more prominent in the future here.Chris Adams: Okay, in the meantime, go to https://podcast.greensoftware.foundation. Most recent discussions where you can ask some questions and then we may if we can fit them in the list, we'll add all of them so we can add other things coming through.All right, that was us. Lovely seeing you again. Hope the mushrooms are well, and yeah, see you on the flip side, okay?Asim Hussain: See you then, buddy. Bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of TWiGS we delve into the intricate world of measuring software energy consumption, a topic vital for reducing our carbon footprint. Despite the strides in greening software, knowing how much energy software consumes remains a challenging puzzle, especially in the cloud computing era. Joining host Chris Adams are guests, Aditya Manglik and Hongyu Hè, graduate students from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. With their expertise in improving energy efficiency in systems, particularly operating systems, microarchitecture, and machine learning, we embark on a captivating journey to understand why quantifying software energy usage is intricate and what innovative solutions are emerging. Stay tuned as we amplify the geek factor to 11 and uncover the complexities of this critical field.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteHongyu Hè: LinkedIn / WebsiteAditya Manglik: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterTopics:Tracking Energy Consumption and Why it is Important [4:09]Tools for monitoring Linux energy consumption [19:49]How to monitor energy consumption in a virtual environment [24:06]Adrian Cockcroft’s Proposal for a Specification for Real Time Carbon Intensity | Green Software Foundation [30:12]Monitoring the energy consumption of data centers [33:34]Resources:EnergAt: Fine-Grained Energy Attribution for Multi-Tenancy | Hongyu Hè HotCarbon [3:18]Measuring Carbon Footprint of Personal Computing | Aditya Manglik LFE Summit [3:29]Measuring Your Application Power and Carbon Impact (Part 1) - Sustainable Software | Scott Chamberlin [5:09] PowerTOP | Linux [20:24] Scaphandre | GitHub [20:57]Cobbler | GitHub [24:48] EnergAt | GitHub [41:40]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:Aditya Manglik: At the end of the day, what we want to tell people is, okay, computing is great, but we have to be sustainable. And right now, data centers consume 3% of all global electricity. This number is only going to grow, right? Especially after COVID, we have had a massive increase in Digitalization, and now with the large language models coming in, like ChatGPT, it's going to grow exponentially.So we have to be sustainable, and the first step to being sustainable about energy use is to understand where is the energy going.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. Welcome back to The Week in Green Software on 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 greening software, a lot of the time we talk about how much energy we use, because even in 2023, more than half of the electricity we use globally is still generated by burning fossil fuels. And we've spoken before in other episodes about how you can make the electricity you use greener, but sometimes you just need to be able to use less electricity in the first place. And to do that, it helps to know how much energy software is using in the first place. This sounds simple, right? In a world of cloud computing, this turns out to be surprisingly hard, and today we're turning up the geek factor all the way to 11 to figure out why this is hard and what the state of the art looks like. Helping with this journey today, we have two special guests from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, whose work we featured in earlier episodes, and we'll see how far we can get in the time we have today. So with us today, we have Aditya. Hey Aditya!Aditya Manglik: Hi Chris, please feel free to call me Adi. It's a pleasure to be here on this podcast. And, yeah, I'm a longtime listener of this podcast, so it's very exciting to be here. I'm a graduate student at ETH, where I work on improving the energy efficiency of systems, especially operating systems and microarchitecture.And I previously worked on building a very nice, very complex energy attribution system in Linux as a Google Summer of Code student with the GNOME Foundation.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Adi. And in addition, we have Hongyu also. Hongyu, I'll give the floor for you to introduce yourself as well.Hongyu Hè : Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much for having me on, Chris. And thanks for inviting me, Adi. So yeah, I'm also a graduate student in computer science at ETH. My research includes both software and hardware. And I'm currently interning at Apple, working on machine learning research.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Hongyu. So for those who are interested, we featured both of, uh, the work from both of these two researchers. In the last episode, we spoke a little bit about Hongyu's, uh, uh, paper, uh, what one of the papers Hongyu was a contributor on at the Hot Carbon Conference. And we'll share a link to the talk presented there.And we've also shared a link to Adi's talk at the Linux Foundation Energy Summit in Paris earlier on in June. If you're new to this episode, to this podcast, my name is Chris, I'm the Executive Director of the Green Web Foundation, and I'm the Chair of the Policy Working Group at the Green Software Foundation, and as a final reminder, we're going to cover a fair few papers and links and resources, and what we'll do is we'll add all of these to the show notes so that you can do your own research later on as you run through this. All right then, I think we're all sitting comfortably, so shall we begin, fellas?Aditya Manglik: Yeah, I look forward to it,Chris Adams: All right. Okay. Adi, I think I might start with you first. We've spoken a little bit about tracking energy consumption and why it's an important thing. Maybe you could just give a bit of a kind of overview about why this is important, what the state of play is in the different systems, because we know that computers run on, say, Linux. Lots and lots of machines run on Linux, but we also know computers use Windows and macOS. Maybe you could provide a bit of background, then we could talk about what the options are for people using these systems.Aditya Manglik: absolutely. I've been working on this problem since almost five to six years now and it's an absolute pleasure to be talking about it. Well, I often like to say that you cannot improve what you cannot measure and that is where the problem starts. We don't know how to measure the energy consumption of our systems.For example, if I ask you, how much energy does WhatsApp use? Or when you send a WhatsApp text to your friend, how many CO2 emissions did that message take? Learn Can you give me an answer? No, that's what makes me so excited to get out of the bed every morning and then try to figure out, okay, how much energy is WhatsApp using?So it turns out that people at Microsoft, Apple, Google also care about this and they really tried to solve this problem and Microsoft has this very interesting kernel system called the Windows Energy Estimation Engine. It is running on all Windows devices. Android has a very interesting service called PowerMetrics.You can think of it like a daemon. A daemon is a magical service that runs in the background of your system that does all the stuff for you and you don't know that it exists. PowerMetrics on macOS also collects all possible data about the energy consumption of your applications. Now, what about Linux, right, we are, we love open source, and Linux is a very important operating system, right, all servers in this world are, majority of them are running Linux, but we don't know how to measure the energy consumption of these servers, especially from the software, right, people often think to measure energy you need these hardware devices, or you need these electrical engineers to come in and plug monitors and then tell you, oh, this consumed 5,000 joules.No, we want to solve it using the tools that we have, and I think we can solve it. I believe we can solve it. And that's what I'm working on.Chris Adams: Okay, so you just mentioned two things, first of all. So one, first of all, you said that if you're using a Windows machine, there's existing tools that you can tap into and get readings from. And if you're using an Apple machine, you've got access to those kind of figures. But it's a somewhat murkier situation with Linux right now, there isn't a kind of common tool that is actually universally used.That's One of the key takeaways I'm getting. And Hongyu, I believe this is what you've been finding as well, and you've been looking into some of this as well,Hongyu Hè : Yeah, exactly. I think there are tools, but there is no common thing that everyone uses. And the standards of those tools are varying quite a lot. That's also, as you said, one of the reasons why we contacted the research in the first place.Chris Adams: Okay, alright, so if I understand this, given that the majority of servers are now running Linux, basically not having some tools for the most common kind of operating system is one of the things which makes it difficult to come up with some of these numbers. That's what I think I'm understanding from here. We're naming this episode Green Kernels, and I figure it might be worth actually just talking about this idea, because this sounds like a relatively low level thing that's built into systems themselves, actually. Adi, could you maybe talk a little bit about this part here? Because I think that you've spent a bunch of time looking at this low level part of an operating system like Linux, like this kernel part. And before we dive into that, maybe you could actually explain what a kernel is and why that might be somewhere that you actually track some of this. 'cause not everyone may know what a kernel is when you're thinking about computers in the first place.Aditya Manglik: Chris, first of all, I love the name Green Kernels, like when you talked about, to me, talked about this podcast and when you named it Green Kernels, I was like, yes, I came to the right place. Okay. And yeah, what are the kernels? I think our audience is really smart and even smart people sometimes just need to quickly jog their memories.So what we're going to do is quickly jog their memories. A kernel is the core of an operating system. What does that mean? Okay, so for us a computer is just a computer on which we log in and do something, but what we do is an application, we use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, these are all applications, and Windows that is running these things is the operating system, and operating system comprises broadly two parts, a kernel, which is the core, that you don't see, which handles everything for you and the user space, which is what you interact with.So you know that start button, that you click that is part of the user space and that start button goes behind the curtains and does some interesting stuff that comes back to you and yeah, you see the effect of your action. So the kernel is the primary response, primary entity in any operating system that is responsible for managing the hardware, the applications, the processes.Chris Adams: Alright, so this kernel part is the thing that. So far, for Windows machines and for Apple machines, there's something in there, but for Linux machines, you don't have that same ability to read information yet. And this is some of the work that you've been doing to look into to basically make some of that readable.Is that the case?Aditya Manglik: That's a great question, Chris. So, energy is typically thought of as an electrical engineering topic. And it's difficult and it's fancy. No, people typically don't include energy monitors and systems. That is the fundamental reason why we are trying to do this. You can measure the performance of your programs.You can measure how much time it took and this is possible because your system tells you how much time your program took. Your CPU tells you how many clock cycles your program executed for. But if you ask it, okay, how much power it consumed or how much energy it consumed, I think things fall apart. And that's why you need to do a lot of modeling and build entire systems to figure out this information.Now, Linux also has this information, but the models, right, so you can have all the data in the world, but until you know how to make sense of that data, it is useless, right, and that is what the model does for you, and these models don't exist in Linux, they exist in Windows, they exist in Mac OS, Android, iOS, But I'm not so sure if they are existent or if they're good enough for Linux.That's what I think, but if you know about it, let me know. I would be very happy to know.Chris Adams: All right, and when you're talking about a model here, maybe you could just elaborate on that, because I'm not sure I quite follow when you talk about something being a model like this. If I'm, let's say, you mentioned the example of WhatsApp, for example. How would I go about figuring out how much energy is actually attributable to, say, WhatsApp, for example, on a computer or something like that?Maybe if we were to look at that example there, then we can say, okay, we could talk about some of that, then we could see how that becomes more difficult if you're thinking about things like cloud computing, because, as I understand it, The assumptions you might make when thinking about a desktop computer might not be the same as working with a cluster of computers, for example, and I believe this is some of the work that Hongyu you've done most recently and spoke about at HotCarbon.Aditya Manglik: That's another great question, Chris. Okay, let me quickly dive into it. Imagine this as a car, okay? You are driving a car. Now, you decide where you're going to go. but its the engine that burns the fuel right? you're not burning the fuel, you're simply deciding oh I want to drive to London but your engine is what's going to consume the fuel now when you want to send a message to whatsapp what you do is you write out a message and you hit the send button and behind the scenes what the kernel does or what is actually happening is the kernel converts your message to a bunch of packets And it sends these packets over the network and along this way of converting this message into packets and sending it, you are using your device's CPU, memory, storage, network, screen, maybe the Wi Fi interface, right?So, you see all of these hardware devices are immediately turned on as soon as you hit that send button, and that's where the energy consumption comes from. And what would a model look like to build such a model? What you would do is you would take in the amount of power of the CPU and multiply it by the time that the CPU was running.Similarly, you take the amount of power for the, for the network interface, that would be the wifi card, and you multiply it by the time, by the amount of time that it was running, and then you accumulate all of these data points. And that gives you the energy of sending a WhatsApp message on your device.Okay, we're not even talking about the energy that the servers consume, the energy that your friend's device consumes.Chris Adams: Is that giving some pointers? And so the idea would be that if you can't get the figures from each of these pieces of equipment themselves, like this, like a CPU, like a screen or something like that, you might use a model tocome up with some numbers for that. Okay.Aditya Manglik: Yes.Chris Adams: All right. And that is based on the assumption when you're looking at a single machine, using a single program.Now, on you, I think when you are, I think it's somewhat different with, there's assumptions might not always hold true. So maybe Hongyu, you could explain how this gets a bit more complicated in the cloud, or some of the parts there, perhaps.Hongyu Hè : Thanks for the question, Chris. Yeah, I think Adi brought up a really good point about hardware and the model. One thing I'd like to add on at this point is the key reason why we need a model. Adi has introduced the concept of kernel. So kernel is basically a cushion, if you like, between users and underlying hardware. And the hardware is ugly, because they have different interfaces, it's really hard to interact with directly, so there are multiple challenges, and one crucial challenge that we have been facing is the lack of support from hardware, so if the energy attribution is there, so if I'm using WhatsApp and the hardware is telling me, okay, WhatsApp is using this amount of energy.Then why don't those kernel, the cushion reports this to me, right? That's the key point. So here we don't have the crucial hardware support that we need. That's why we need the model to collect, uh, if you like, the proxy data, like utilization, the time you're using to calculate, uh, the amount of energy from the user side instead of relying on solely from the hardware. And speaking of like classic computing, I think also Adi mentioned a great point about multiple hardware, different devices that really makes the life more difficult. Because we need to take into account different kinds of devices, especially in the cloud, we have heterogeneous devices, CPU, DRAM, GPU, etc. Yeah, it makes things more challenging and much harder to calculate the energy consumption because of the distributed nature as well.Chris Adams: So if I understand what you've been saying here, so there's one issue, which is a case of attributing the energy to a particular program, for example. And then one of the other issues is basically the fact that across all the different kinds of computers, not every single And Device that draws power will have a consistent way of reporting how much power it's drawing. So if I understand it, there are some tools that we do this. So lots of intel processes have a thing called running average power limit, for example. But it may be the case that if you're using maybe. If we were to step away from our WhatsApp example and say, I'm doing a really big machine learning job using a bunch of very powerful graphics cards, they might not expose the same information about how much power they're using.So you would need to either model that or you would need to have some other way of getting that information back. Is that the case?Hongyu Hè : Yeah, that's a very accurate summary. Thanks, Chris.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So that gives us some pointers here. And I'll just ask you one thing about this as well, because this is something you touched on in your paper. The example that Adi gave was being in a single computer, where you can be relatively confident that the hard drive is attached to the same computer and the screen is attached to the same computer, like a laptop, everything's in one place. This assumption might not be true when you're looking at cloud computing. Again, I understand it's a little bit more complicated. Is that the case?Hongyu Hè : Yes, indeed. Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So in a cloud, for example, computing resources like CPU memory that we've been talking about are increasingly shared among many tenants or users, or, you know, for example, the organization like a university or company are using a class of servers. And this really makes The attributing of energy consumption really hard. And also this is quite a sensitive topic as well, because we don't want to point fingers arbitrarily without a very precise model there.Chris Adams: All right, Adi, I assume this is similar to some of the work that you've been finding as well, because I understand your research has been focusing on the desktop part more than the cloud computing part, right? That's where some of your research has been, or have you been looking at the wider, somewhat more wider than that, for example?Aditya Manglik: I've been focusing on the desktop for now, but I agree with Hongyu that it's tricky to correctly point fingers at people for consuming the energy that they're using. Yeah, so at the end of the day, what we want to tell people is, okay, computing is great, but we have to be sustainable. And right now, data centers consume 3% of all global electricity.This number is only going to grow, right? Especially after COVID, we have had a massive increase in digitalization, and now with the large language models coming in, like ChatGPT, it's going to grow exponentially. So we have to be sustainable, and the first step to being sustainable about energy use is to understand where is the energy going.And, yeah, this problem becomes more tricky because with the growth of cloud, you don't know who exactly is consuming how much. I'm very curious, and I keep talking to Hongyu about his work. He's doing fantastic work in this direction. Yeah, let's just say that we are both very curious about this.Chris Adams: Okay, so if I understand it, it's a bit easier to get some of the numbers from a computer you have yourself. Right, when it's on your own computer, but, because increasingly we're moving computing workloads away from just the desktop into a kind of wider set, it ends up going from other places. So maybe you could actually talk a little bit, let's say that you do want to actually start measuring this, or you do want to start understanding what role you could play or what, or how you're able to at least measure this so you can start optimising it. Let's say you're working with servers right now and you're using a bunch of Linux computers. What are your options at now? So Ade, I'll start with you actually. I'm on a Linux machine, it's just one machine, and I want to understand the environmental impact of a particular service, or a machine learning job, or any kind of thing I'm about to do. Maybe you could just talk to me about what my options are right now, for the most part.Aditya Manglik: Yeah, sure. There are a bunch of tools that I know about. The first tool that comes to my mind is something that I've looked at quite some time back, but it's a tool called PowerTOP. Just like you have the top utility in Linux based systems, this tool is called PowerTOP, and I think it is It used to be supported by Intel, and what this tool does is it tells you how much power each process is consuming on your system at any given point of time.Now, sometimes those numbers are a little shaky. But it does a decent job. Post PowerTOP, I came to know about this interesting tool called Scaphandre. Scaphandre actually goes in and gets you the energy consumption. So Scaphandre monitors, I think Scaphandre has built some high level models for taking in all the information that we talked about in the earlier questions and actually calculating.The energy consumption for a process. But the problem is that we assume that all of this is okay, is that if you talk about a desktop machine, it is not virtualized. We assume that all the number that you, the numbers that you see, they can be accounted to a single entity. Whereas if we go to the cloud, you have multiple entities running on the same hardware.That's the fundamental premise of cloud, right? You want to reduce hardware costs by sharing the workloads. And that's where things get murky because we simply don't know how to separate out the energy for each entity. I think Hongyu would be able to shed more light on this.Hongyu Hè : Yeah. Thank, thanks, Ali. I think those are really great points, especially you mentioned a tool called Scaphandre. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but yeah, that's, that was one of the baselines of our paper. And indeed, as Chris has mentioned, there are tools available on Linux, it's not a thing people can use. There are tools and, for example, PowerTOP. But the models they have are coarse grained, meaning that, yeah, they are not computing by a fine grained energy attribution per user, per thread even, and we can talk about that, why that's important later, but in the cloud, as Adi has said, virtualization is a crucial technique, if not the most important technique, that enables users to share resources, but for energy attribution, actually, It's a key enemy, I have to say, because in order to get accurate energy attribution, we need to get access to hardware counters that tell us the statistics, the runtime statistics we need for our model to calculate the energy attribution. And that's, yeah, as Adi said, makes things much trickier.Chris Adams: So if I can just take a step back for a second. So we spoke about, you've got a machine running, and, a machine will be running a series of, we might call them programs, but you might refer to them as processes, and within a given process, there might be a series of threads that's running, that kind of granularity is quite difficult, so if it's just my own machine, and it's just me using a computer, then you can attribute all of the figures to me, essentially, but when there's multiple processes or multiple programs for multiple people, working out who to share the kind of responsibility for the emissions, that's the difficult, that's the part that gets more complicated.Hongyu Hè : Exactly, yeah, that's a fair summary. Thank you, Chris.Chris Adams: Okay, we were talking about some of the tools available, so, and Adi, you were talking about Scaphandre as one of the tools which has become quite popular for this, for tracking some of this, but I understand, Hongyu, some of the research you did was, you've been using some other tools to help address some of the problems that you've come up against this when you're looking at basically working in a cloud like environment, for example, where you don't have absolute access to the computer yourself, for example. This was my understanding of some of the work that you're presenting at Hot Carbon, correct?Hongyu Hè : Yes and no. Yes, it's because we are looking at how to accurately attribute energy in a multi tenant environment. And no, it's because attributing energy consumption in a virtualized environment is still an open question and we haven't solved it yet. And it will be very interesting to see future solutions to that. But indeed, we've compared with multiple tools like Scaphandre, and also the famous Cobbler, for example, but we explicitly Compared with those tools that run that target non-virtualized environment because in a virtualized environment, I think it's a fair game and no one knows exactly the wrong truth. What we found that is that existing tools are too course grain, meaning that when we use them to measure the energy of your application, for example, they will. Also mix in the consumption of other applications that run on the same server as your application does, which is a very common scenario. And we found that this could really lead to about 50% overestimation and over 90% underestimation.Yes, in our paper, the main objective is really to measure the energy consumption of your application and only your application as precisely as possible and exclude the consumption of other applications.Chris Adams: I can't help asking, when we start talking about these tools, is there an overhead from measuring your own footprint when you're trying to do this? Because as I understand it, this was This is one thing that has come up a few times, is that, for example, Scaphandre is written in Rust, so it's designed to be a very small, fast, lightweight program, which has some overhead, but I understand that there is going to be an overhead from tracking some of this in the first place, correct?Hongyu Hè : Yes, that's a really great point. Thanks for bringing it up, Chris. Indeed, as you said, Scaphandre is written in Rust, and Rust is really an efficient language compared to, for example, Python and the mingle of energy attribution is to really have the precise knowledge of the energy efficiency of application so that we can improve and optimize our code accordingly. But as you said, yes indeed, there's a inherent trade off between the preciseness or how fine-grained our model is and the cost right in both terms of performance and and energy. And so our model takes into account, for example, the underlying hardware and to collect a more fine grain stati runtime statistics in our model.But indeed, the overhead could be larger and mitigate the overhead we use conditional probability to do reasonable estimation whenever applicable, instead of trying to capture every single event per millisecond, so to speak. So that would be really costly. This part is a bit, you know, intricate, and we have more detailed mathematical formulation available in our paper.But yeah, that's that's the high level idea.Chris Adams: Okay, if I understand what you've been saying so far, so there's one option, which is to use like a fast programming language, which moves quite quickly, or there's another approach, which is to take A kind of sampling approach so that you are not having to, if you are using something which is maybe a little bit slower, like Python, you don't read quite so much.And another option is to basically use something which is even closer to the metal, like in kind of the kernel space rather than in user space. And Adi, this is what I think you were talking about when you were talking about kernels. Is that, is that the case?Aditya Manglik: Yes, that is the case. I think there's a very interesting data point that I read in some blog by Microsoft and what they told is basically, so there's three ways to measure energy. First is that your hardware directly tells you that, okay, I used X amount of joules and that would be a 98% accurate number.It's not, it's still not 100%, right? Because of thermodynamics, but you still have 98% accuracy that, okay, this is the energy that this particular hardware device consumed. The next best step after that would be a kernel level measurement and a kernel level measurement would be, if I remember correctly, they pointed as 85% accurate.And that is why it would be great to have something in the kernel, and that is why MacOs and Windows put these systems in the kernel to monitor the energy consumption. And finally, if you have something from the user space, now, it's not that accurate simply because it has visibility into a very small subset of the information that you need to get high in enough accuracy, and I completely agree with your point, that the more accurate you want, the more measurements you make, the more energy you are going to consume, right? So it's like a, it's like a catch 22 situation. I want to calculate something, but in the process of calculating it, I'm increasing the load on the system, and by increasing the load on the system, I am increasing the energy consumption.You need to find out a good balance. between hardware and software based measurement mechanics.Hongyu Hè : I think Adi mentioned a really great point, so I think the trade off is not necessarily in the programming language itself, but it lies in the model itself. So as Adi has said, the more fine grained your model is, the more costly it's likely to be. And I think we really need to strike a balance between how detailed you want your measurements to be and yeah, the cost it comes with it.Chris Adams: I see, okay, and maybe this is a chance for us to zoom out a bit because, as I'm aware, one of the projects that the Green Software Foundation is currently involved with is this project called the Real Time Carbon Standard, the idea of creating some of this as something like a way to report these kinds of figures. As I understand it, one of the tools it seems to be standardizing on, and this is a project which is led by Adrian Cockcroft, who is a former VP of Sustainability and Cloud at Amazon and has basically a 20 plus year background working in this field, I believe they're settling on one tool called Kepler, specifically which ties into kernels to provide some of these numbers, but even then there is an ongoing discussion about, okay, how do you make sure that you have access to, how do you report numbers that are actionable, that developers or designers can use? Without actually disclosing too much information that might be a, a possible source of attack, like a kind of side channel attack, for example, and also what kind of resolution is necessary. Now, as I understand it, I think one of the things that people are pushing for there is the idea of going for minute level resolution rather than millisecond level resolution.So at cloud level, that would al already be way further than what we have right now, but that might in theory, give you enough to then get an idea about what kind of impact you choosing to use, say, a computing job in one place might be compared to another, or at least give you something to optimize for carbon at that point. This idea of actually exposing the energy being used at this kind of level, I think there's a term that was mentioned in one of your papers about Energy Aware Computing or Energy Aware Cloud Computing? I'll ask you a little bit about this because I know that this was something I had to take away from you, but Adi, I'll come to you on this afterwards actually, because I think this is something that you've actually been speaking about at the LF Energy Core Forum as well actually. So. Maybe you could actually explain this idea of one energy aware cloud environment might actually be Hongyu.Hongyu Hè : Yeah. As you mentioned that there's a great tool called Kepler. And I think, yeah, this kind of tools is very instrumental. as to, um, what kind of information they can give to both the users and the cloud. operators. And by Energy Aware or even Energy Intelligence, which is another level, is that we can make our decision based on, for example, the energy statistics we collected, for example, using those coupler or energy altogether tools to make decisions that optimize for, not only for performance but also for energy efficiency. And the reason for that is because data centers itself, or even networking, has huge potentials and they have great, you know, energy flexibility and we can use this kind of elasticity to do great things. For example, using data centers as energy storage or energy power bank for the smart grid. Yeah, I think that's one of the ideas, but there are, definitely a huge number of challenges we are facing in order to achieve this kind of energy aware cloud or energy intelligence cloud.Chris Adams: All right, that feels like it's going in a somewhat different direction. So that's basically, but all that is necessary, in order for that to be possible, you can't be driving blind if you want to have this kind of awareness of what the grid's doing right? That's one of the ideas behind that. Okay, so maybe we should touch on why are we doing this in the first place? Because we spoke a bit more about yes, energy is coming from burning fossil fuels. We're not going to entirely transition our fossil fuels tomorrow so as long as we're burning fossil fuels to provide power there are going to be carbon emissions associated with this.Adi I'd just like to speak to you about why you got involved in this, why you got excited about this in the first place or why you did do this? Because there must have been some process before you decided to try presenting a, like an energy conference and talk about personal computing in the first place.I, I was quite surprised to see it, but I was very pleased to see someone actually talk about this and talk, talk about making some of this measurable.Aditya Manglik: Chris, it's a personal story. It goes a long way back when I was an undergrad and in my undergrad, in my, I think, junior year, I had a laptop, which was not the best, and my battery had started to die out. I had exams to prepare for and my battery was acting up and I could not figure out I just charged in the morning why is it dead in 30 minutes so as a very simple minded engineering student my mind immediately went to the problem okay the battery is working good what is consuming energy let me kill off the applications that are consuming energy and that's how I got into the question Okay, I need to figure out which applications are consuming energy in order to kill them correctly, right?And that's where the entire journey started. I could not figure out. And then it grew on me that, oh, how do we figure out? Because if we can figure this out... We can do a lot more very interesting things. So for instance, I think Hongyu mentioned really great points about energy aware scheduling in data centers, and I see a lot of effort from these hyperscalers to schedule workloads when renewable energy is available.So when you talk about solar or wind energy, one of the key characteristics of these sources is that they're not 24 7 available. They're available in abundance. At a fixed point in time, and then they fluctuate a bit. So what you would want to do is you would want to maximize the utilization of these green sources when they are available. And if you can schedule your workloads at the right point in time, you can really decrease your carbon emissions. You can really decrease your utilization of fossil fuels while also maintaining your service level agreements with your customers. And that's a win situation for everyone.You see how this simple problem of not being able to find out the energy consuming applications on my system turned into trying to save the world by reducing the energy consumption of data centers? I don't know. Yeah, so it's been a fascinating journey and I would love to keep going on this. But yeah, thanks for the question.Chris Adams: Alright. Okay. So there is, um, I think what you might be referring to here is this notion of carbon intensity changing, depending on how abundant renewables are on the grid, for example. Is this something that you touched on as well when you were doing the work for your research on what you were presenting at Hot Carbon?Hongyu Hè : Yeah, thanks for asking Chris. It's a great point that as we've discussed like how to use data centers as a utility or power bank, but I think our work is mainly targeting a user level optimization. And as you previously said, I really echo with The concerns from AWS so you know, the amount of information you're exposed to the user and the security concerns that, uh, come with it. And I think we need, really need to strike a balance, uh, between the two because users really need the information to optimize for energy efficiency. But on the other hand, you can't really, you know, expose too much information to the users because of the potential security concerns. And that's really, you know, a, a base, the, um, the virtualize the goal of virtualization, for example.So it's tricky. But yeah, I think we need, uh, at least get something out for the user to optimize for energy efficiency.Chris Adams: Okay, all right, so this is where some of this kind of cloud computing might be actually heading towards. Adi, you mentioned something about this idea of being able to control or adjust the carbon intensity of electricity by choosing certain times of day when there's an abundance of power in the grid. As I understand that, that's basically one of the reasons why you might do that, is because is that because there is the assumption there's more power than can be used. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how timing power, timing your usage when there's more renewables on the grid actually does help. Maybe you could expand a little bit on that because I know there was some useful research and I'm trying to find a link for it to bring into this, because there's a really nice model that's actually written in Python that actually demonstrates this and I found some pretty eye opening figures for it, but I figured maybe you might expand on or touch on some of this yourself because it seems to be something that you have an interest in as well.Aditya Manglik: Absolutely. Let's take a look at two points and I think that would really help make this clear. Majority of us are working in the day, right? We go to our offices and we go back to homes. So majority of us use our devices during the day. And that's when we introduce a lot of work for the servers, right? So the data center operators like to call these patterns as diurnal patterns in which the usage spikes during the day and then dips during the night because people are sleeping.And let's take a look at the second point. Second point would be, for example, the availability of solar energy. So solar energy, as you can guess, would be much more plentiful during the noon. and let's say less available during the evening. So what you want to do is you want to maximize the use of solar energy when it hits the peak.But it turns out that people often maximize the usage of these devices after lunch, right? So what you do is if you have a surplus of energy available, you use it to schedule batch jobs. What do we mean by batch jobs? These are long running jobs. For example, training neural networks. During the time when solar is available, and you also keep serving your users and your customers using different sources of energy as and when they're available.I really hope this example drives home the fact that careful balancing of our work as well as the availability of energy to do that work well, it really makes things happen for everyone.Hongyu Hè : Yeah, so one quick point I have regarding what Adi has just mentioned is that actually I've done my bachelor thesis on energy procurement and modeling of energy in data centers. Actually it's quite surprising that loads of green energy is being dumped. And actually, uh, the, the, the smart grid is rejecting those green energies because, as you said, some parts of the world, uh, have a lot more excessive green energy than other places, for example, uh, Virginia, and, and I think it's a two-way bridge. By exposing more information to the users, on the other hand, cloud providers can also get more information about their workloads. And this can also benefit to their operation as to how they operate their data centers more efficiently and to participate more in the energy grid.Chris Adams: I'm just gonna round up for the last few minutes. And I was just going to ask, if the people are interested in this kind of work and this kind of projects, how do they start, or what kind of tools would you suggest we look at? For example, if I start with you, Hongyu, then Adi, I'll come to you next. Hongyu, let's say someone, they've got some servers, or they're running some computing, and they want to start experimenting with these figures here. Where do they find out more about this? Is there a project that you would draw people's attention to, to look at on GitHub, or is there a thing you can pip install, for example, if you're running a computer, something like that?Hongyu Hè : Actually, we implemented a prototype for our theoretical model called EnergAt, which is available on GitHub. Because we want to evaluate, uh, our theoretical model, uh, experimentally. And yeah, it provides users with both a command line interface and a Python API. So you can just download it by, uh, just pseudo pip install EnergAt, so E N E R. G A T. And sudo is very important here because we need the root permissions and it's being validated so you can find the details of our experiments in our paper, but in a nutshell, it can really precisely measure the energy consumption of our applications, even in a multi tenant environment. But it's not perfect.As Chris has mentioned, If you want to contribute, there are plenty of opportunities. So, for example, we need a secure and efficient hardware software interface for energy reporting. And also, attributing energy in a virtualized environment is still an open question. And we might want to support more devices and more fine grained accounting as well. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you, Hongyu. And Adi, I think I'll leave the last word with you. If there's any projects or links you would direct people to, if they have an interest in any of this and would like to learn more.Aditya Manglik: I think that's a very good question because people need to be aware of this. I think our audience would be using diverse devices. So please go to your device. If you have a Windows device, do pseudo parametrics and see what you get. If you have a Mac OS, go to the activity monitor and see the energy impact, okay?Just, just see how much each process is impacting your battery. If you have Linux, please download Scaphandre and see how much Chrome or Firefox is using. And if you're really technical, please come and talk to me and Hongyu and we would love to dive deeper into more and more tools and help you solve your problems.I really hope that gets people started. You can also look into Android and iOS because both of them report really good data about what these processes are using in terms of a battery. And once we build up enough awareness, I think then we can go deeper into. How to make these models better and how to reduce it, right?Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for that, Adi. All right, so we've got options across all of the tools you might have there. And there's at least one thing people can start playing with. All right. Okay, gents, I think that takes us up to the time that we have available. And, yeah, thank you very much for coming on. And I quite enjoyed nerding out, plumbing the depths of finding out how to actually understand the energy used by various parts of our computing. Alright, cheers folks, thank you very much for your time, and yeah, I'll see you on one of the future episodes, alright? Take care folks, thanks.Aditya Manglik: The pleasure was all ours, Chris. Thank you for having us on this call. I really enjoyed it.Hongyu Hè : Thank you very much, Chris.Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

Host Chris Adams is joined by Niki Manoledaki of Grafana and Ross Fairbanks of Flatpeak in this edition of TWiGS focused on Carbon Aware Spatial Shifting. They dive into Amazon's 2022 Sustainability Report, highlighting 19 AWS regions powered by 100% renewable energy, and explore videos from the Linux Foundation energy summit (links below). They also discover the importance of measuring carbon footprints in personal computing and IT, and learn about Kepler Power Estimation and the PLATYPUS Attack. Plus, they share some exciting upcoming events from the CNCF and some interesting Barbenheimer inspired portmanteaus from the world of Green Software!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteRoss Fairbanks: LinkedIn / WebsiteNiki Manoledaki: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Amazon 2022 Sustainability Report — 19 AWS Regions are 100% renewable | Adrian Cockcroft [4:38]Videos are out from the Linux Foundation energy summit - a selection [9:12]HTTP Response Header Field: Carbon-Emissions-Scope-2 | IETF [21:28] Resources:Boavizta Project | GitHub [6:44]Data insight: Heavy industry gains ground in Europe's corporate renewable PPA market | Energymonitor.ai 8:00] Measuring Carbon Footprint of Personal Computing | Aditya Manglik LFE Summit [9:30]Measuring IT Carbon Footprint: What is the Current Status Actually? | Tom Kennes [11:18]Kepler Power Estimation [17:47]PLATYPUS Attack [20:12]  Utilization is Virtually Useless as a Metric! | Adrian Cockcfoft [20:56]    Reducing data center energy usage with Grafana: A green IT success story | Bertrand Martin, GrafanaCon 2023 [22:21]Optimizing Full-Stack Sustainability in a Real World Data...- Chen Wang, Hua Ye & Fan Jing Meng | GrafanaCon 2023 [23:15]HotCarbon’23: Bringing Carbon Awareness to Multi-cloud Application Delivery | Dityaroop Maji [28:10]Join Cloud Native Computing Foundation on Slack [37:01]Climate Action Tech [37:31] Events:CNCF Global Week of Cloud Native Sustainability October 2023New Working Group in the TAG: Green Reviews August 2nd 2023If 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:Niki Manoledaki: When you have that kind of data at your disposal that you didn't previously have, it can really tell a story that you can show to someone else and say, Hey, look at this dashboard that you just see how the energy consumption and temperature and CPU usage correlate with each other. And I think it's fascinating, and I hope we see more of these visualizations.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 back to the Week in Green Software on Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Today, we're diving into Amazon's 2022 sustainability report. And we'll be exploring Carbon Aware Spatial Shifting with Karmada, Kubernetes, and a new real time carbon footprint standard.And we'll also be covering a few future events with Green Software. But before we dive in, let me introduce my guests for this episode of This Week in Green Software. With us today, we have Niki Manolodaki. Hi, Niki.Niki Manoledaki: Hi, it's so nice to be on this podcast. I'm a long time listener, so I'm very excited to be here.Chris Adams: And we also have Ross Fairbanks. Hey, Ross.Ross Fairbanks: Hi everyone, I'm also another long term listener, so yeah, excited to be here.Chris Adams: Cool. All right, before we start, I guess maybe we should do a quick round of introductions for what we do and what we work on, and then we'll just get right into the format of running through some of the news stories that caught our eyes and sharing a few kind of lukewarm to hot takes, depending on how we're feeling.Okay, Niki, are you okay with me just handing over to you first?Niki Manoledaki: Yep, so hi, I'm a software engineer at Grafana Labs and I'm working on also the back end of Grafana itself. I was previously at Weaver. It's where I did work on EKSCTL, the CLI for Elastic Kubernetes service. So excited to talk about um, the progress with AWS today, and I'm also a maintainer of Kepler, which we'll talk about very soon as well, and part of the CNCF TAG, the Technical Advisory Group of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for Environmental Sustainability.So we have a couple of things coming up there as well. We have the global week of sustainability in the second week of October where we'll have a bunch of local meetups on the world during the same week to talk about sustainability in cloud computing and we have a new working group in the TAG. That's we'll talk about as well.Chris Adams: Cool, exciting. Alright, thank you for coming on then, Niki. And Ross, I know that we've worked together a few times, but for listeners who have not been tracking the repos that we end up messing around in, maybe you can introduce yourself and provide some background as well.Ross Fairbanks: Yes, yeah, I'm a developer at Flatpeak Energy currently, but I've also worked with Chris at Green Web Foundation on various projects there. The main ones really would be Grid Intensity Go, which is a Go library for carbon density metrics, and also has a Prometheus exporter. I've also worked a bit on Scaphandre as well, which I think we're going to talk a bit about later as well, on some of the Kubernetes integration there. I'm trying to learn some Kepler Kepler to learn it from Niki back there.Chris Adams: Cool, I guess learning from the horse's mouth, as it were, or whatever animal metaphor we're going to use for this. Okay, folks. For, if you've never listened to this podcast before, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. And I'm also the policy chair for the Green Software Foundation.I'm also one of the maintainers of co2.js, a library for calculating the environmental impact of digital services. I help organize an online community called ClimateAction.tech, where a number of climate aware techies tend to hang out. So if you haven't listened to this podcast before, the general format is we run through some of the stories that have caught our eye over the last week or so. And sometimes this will be suggestions from the actual guests themselves.And, uh, I think we're just going to start off with one of the big ones, which has made some news in the last week or so, is the Amazon 2022 sustainability report.So this, this was released a week or two ago. And, uh, there's a few kind of relatively large like, findings from the report that comes out each year. And what we've linked to is a summary of a blog post by the previous VP of Cloud and VP of Sustainability there, Adrian Cockcroft. There's a few highlights.One of the key things is that Amazon are now claiming that 19 of their regions are running on 100% renewable energy, which is a increase. a significant increase from the 13 from the year before. They've also done something interesting in that they are now being much, much clearer about which regions are running on what they count as 100% versus over 95%.You can see a few new regions in both India and China, which is a real shift and we've got one in Spain as well now actually as well. So Spain and Zurich. The other thing that it might be worth sharing is when you look through this report, this is the first time that you've actually seen Amazon show a reduction in emissions year on year.So this is It's actually one of the largest companies in the world shifting. So this is actually a really significant view here. Now, the other thing that it might be worth talking a little bit about is that when we talk about renewable energy here, Amazon is using this market based method and the blog post we've linked to talks a little bit about how there are different ways of measuring the environmental impact of electricity, whether something is location based, where you look at the energy.from the grid specifically, or you use a market based approach, which takes into account that you have seen significant investments in renewable energy by various organizations to speed up a transition. Ross, I know that you've had a chance to skim over there, and in the context of working with Scaphandra and trying to expose metrics.Is there anything that caught your eye here?Ross Fairbanks: Yeah, so what I find interesting was the part about as we will use more renewable energy, the scope 3 emissions become more important and how it's really hard to get data for that. And I think it's really interesting to what the Bovista project are doing, where they're producing an open data set of the embodied carbon in devices, using the data they get from the manufacturers kind of cryosourcing information. And I think as scope 3 emissions become more important, these sort of projects will become increasingly important.Chris Adams: Okay, so you've used a couple of words that I think we might need to just break down when we talk about this. So we spoke about scope three emissions here, and these might be considered like supply chain inside something. So while there's a carbon footprint from obviously burning fossil fuels to generate power, to generate electricity, you might consider that scope two here, or if you have to burn, say, fossil fuels to run a generator, then that might be scope one in this scenario.And actually this is one thing that is mentioned in this report is a shift to using biofuels rather than fossil fuels for running backup generators. Scope three, if I, as I understand it is all the supply chain. So that's all the emissions caused from making a server in the first place. That's what you're referring to in this case.Yeah.Ross Fairbanks: Yes, so it's scaling the emissions for those hardware devices.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. Thank you for clearing that up. All right. Okay. There's one other thing that I just might draw your attention to that really caught my eye on this is, this is not Amazon's report specifically. There's a kind of corresponding link from this for, from a website called energymonitor.ai and, uh, they're basically quantifying the amount of renewable energy being purchased in various sectors. And for the last, say, 10 years, one of the big things has been that technology firms themselves have been basically the largest investor in renewables. But we've seen another shift in the last year in that we've actually seen heavy industry moving to actually eclipse this.But even now, despite that. Between 2023 and 2022, Amazon is still making up for like 20% of all the renewable energy being bought in 2020. And this is the figure that kind of blew my mind was two thirds of all the investments in renewable power right now is coming from Amazon. And this complicates the matter somewhat because for a long time we've generally seen Amazon as being one of the kind of laggards here.But one thing we see from here is basically that it's more a function of the size because they're so large and there's so much to be moving they can still be investing a significant amount and still not be as moving proportionally as far as some of the other companies that gives you an idea the size of the change we need to actually be making.And we spoke a little bit about Kepler and Scaphandre and stuff like that and I wanted to just just see if we can jump into the next story from this actually. So we spoke a little bit about We've mentioned at previous, uh, episodes, we've spoken about the Linux Foundation Energy Summit. And, uh, there was a bunch of really interesting talks given there.But the recordings of these talks are now online for people to see. And, uh, there was one talk, which is a particular reference, which is one from, uh, person called Aditya Manglik at ETH Zurich. He was talking measuring the carbon footprint of personal computing. Now, I don't know if you've actually seen any of this, but this one really caught my eye because this was someone basically saying, look, we need to have ways of reporting the environmental impact of software at a kind of computing level.He was talking about okay, Windows has all these tools, and OS X has all these tools, but what we really need is something to run that path for all the servers in the world. And when I spoke to him, he didn't know that much about Kepler at the time, but that was a new thing for him. He's now looking into this.And I figured this might be something that might be in your wheelhouses, folks, because, as I understand it, Kepler is one of the projects which this person was actually essentially calling for. What we need is something that works at Linux's level to actually start reporting these numbers. And, uh, Niki, is that somewhat related to what Kepler does?Niki Manoledaki: So what Kepler does is it leverages EBPF to look at the kernel level syscalls and performance counts and it's attributes of those with Kubernetes resources. So looking at the energy processes, for example, in RAPL in the kernel is not something that is necessarily new and there are other tools such as Scaphandre that also do this.What's new with Kepler is that this attribution of the energy consumption with workloads running in a container. So that's really what's changing things for at least in the cloud native ecosystem is this part and to add to this, I would like to mention this one really interesting study called Measuring IT Carbon Footprints What is the Current Status Actually? Which came out in June of 2023 on Tom Kennes' sorry. I mispronounced your last name, Tom, but he's very active in the TAG for environmental sustainability and what is interesting to notice what we just discussed previously with reporting carbon through AWS is a top down carbon monitoring, whereas what Kepler does and what the talk that you just mentioned, what it focuses on is bottom up carbon monitoring or energy monitoring first, because that would be the first step infrastructure.So that bottom up approach to energy and by accent carbon monitoring is much more useful for engineers. So it's really talking about the persona in observability of who are those metrics for and what are they used for. So we see top down carbon reports useful for carbon accounting for the center operators for perhaps CFOs or whoever is reporting, whoever is using those reports, but for engineers who are optimizing low level software, Kepler is much more useful in those use cases.So, Okay, cool. Thank you for this. And I just want to ask, Kepler, yeah, that's a reference to the astronomer from a few hundred years ago, but Kepler is also an acronym, right? I can never remember what it is. Is it Kubernetes? Yeah, help me here, Niki, because I always, it always sounds cool when I hear it. It's super nerdy, butyes, it's a great acronym. It's the Kubernetes based efficient power level exporter. So it exports the data to Prometheus. So you can then visualize those data, that data on uh, Grafana dashboard. And there are some talks out there and there are some really interesting data visualizations that you can gather that way.It's a really interesting setup and you can really tell a story through that data. And that's, again, coming to the point on personas of who is this data useful for and for what? Is it for like a platform team that is doing cost and performance optimizations? Is it for SREs? Is it for software developers themselves who want to monitor the energy consumption of their software, like on a release, from one release to another, and how these have changed?So really thinking about the persona in the story.Chris Adams: okay, cool. And Ross, I understand that you've done a bit of work with Kepler as well, right? And you've also done, you've contributed some code to Scaphandre and some of the other ones here.Ross Fairbanks: I've looked at it from that angle. I haven't looked at Kepler yet. But I think because the REPL measurements are at the CPU socket level, being able to assign those, well, first to the process, and then to the container, and especially in Kubernetes, namespace, then, like Niki says, you can provide much more context on what is this process actually doing. It's also one of the challenging parts as well because with Scaphandre and I think with Kepler as well, we have the individual process, but then we need to use the secret file system, um, to then work out which container was this and then can get up to the pod level. So that kind of mapping is quite difficult, but that extra context is really useful in those situations I think.Chris Adams: So I can't code Rust, but I try to at least write the documentation for how some of this works. And if I understand what the two of you are saying is that tools like Scaphandre or tools like Kepler, they essentially allow you to figure out what share of a machine's usage should be attributable to a particular program.If it's using half the power, then you can say half of it should go to that and that's how you might track it across a fleet of computers. And I think you folks also used this term REPL or RAPL. And I forget, this is a reference to the fact that certain computers, some have chips on them, which will basically share information about the actual energy being used.So if you know that, say, the computer is using maybe 40 watts of power, and it's using half of it, you might allocate half of that 40 to one program. Is that the general idea that these things use? Or that's the kind of approach they tend to take?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, yeah. RAPL is an Intel technology, and so that's the most commonly used. I think with Cloud Protocol, there's also an estimation model that can be used in cloud settings. This is one of the strange things where actually it's easier to do this on bare metal because then you can access RAPL, whereas doing it in the cloud because you haven't got access to the physical machine, it starts to get a little harder.Chris Adams: Ah, okay. All right. Thanks for the sharing the extra nuance. I didn't know that Kepler could do that. That's really cool, to actually do that without having access to the computer under the hood. Okay, so, Ross, you mentioned, so I know that you've done a bit of work with Scaphandre and other tools like this, and I've been trying to understand how some of this works as well, and I think, as I understand it, these tools will basically, you've got two kind of parts here.You have one part which essentially measures how much of a. machine is being used for a particular process, a particular program, and then there's this combination with this thing you mentioned before, RAPL, which I think is it running average power limit or something like that, and that essentially tells you what power is being used.So if you know that a process is using half the compute in a computer, and you know it's using maybe 100 watts of power, then half of that 100 would be 50 watts, so over maybe a couple of hours, you would attribute half of the power to it like that. That's how RAPL works. And Nikki, you mentioned that Kepler does something like this, but it also has a model as well.Niki Manoledaki: It has a model and I think also because RAPL is not accessible in a lot of cloud platforms in most of the workload types. For example, on AWS, most Institute instances don't give access to RAPL, and only the bare metal instances do, which also, side note, bare metal instances on AWS are more expensive than other easy to instances.So there is a little bit of a catch there. And the Kepler power estimation model helps to limit some of that and estimate some of the power consumption. And we'll dig some of this documentation in episode notes.Chris Adams: it. Okay, so that's how I understand the role that these two things play. And now that we understand that there's been an issue about actually having access to the power usage, because you might have an idea of some of these tools will tell you we're using 100% or 50%. But if you don't know what the actual number is, you're like, 50% of what?Or something like that. That's one of the things we're struggling with. And as I understand it, this is probably some of the impetus behind some of this new work that we've seen with the real time compute standard from Adrian Cockcroft, where he's basically been saying, look, if we don't have the concrete numbers for electricity, it's gonna be really hard for us to work out the footprint of any of these tools.And therefore, we need to have something like this. And this seems to be one of the new projects that was based around Kepler for this. That's, I believe that's my understanding, but Nikki, I wanted to ask if you've been exposed to any of this because I think there have been some conversations with people in the Kepler community about some of this or about figuring out where to go, is that correct?Niki Manoledaki: I'm wondering if this is we have a demo from I think it's a scene from the Green Software Foundation on the 2nd of August. In the CNCF TAG, and we're going to be talking about Specification. I wonder if it's going to be about this because I haven't heard of it until now.Ross Fairbanks: Yes, one of the things we can talk about with Kepler in there, the plan is I think to use Kepler for the attribution part. This part we were talking before about how we can go from the socket level to process and then to container and then up to pod. To use Kepler for that, because it's already performing that task when it's getting the metrics from RAPL. I also found it really interesting from the proposal because it goes into some of the security parts on why it's blocked on a lot of the cloud providers. And it's because if you can get very accurate energy measurements for like decryption algorithms, you can start to break the decryption. But I think the proposal has a really elegant solution, which is to expose all the metrics at one minute intervals, and if you've got per minute data, that's fine for doing carbon awareness, but people can't use it as like an attack vector.Chris Adams: Okay, and coming from someone who's basically worked for Amazon for the last N years or Netflix, you would assume that there's some weight carried behind that, saying, yes, it is okay to provide minute level things, you're not going to get everyone hacked, yes, it's okay to use these tools.Niki Manoledaki: I think it's called the platypus attack where some secrets can be inferred from power metrics. It's the platypus attack, if I'm not mistaken. Great name.Chris Adams: Sounds about right, yeah. So yeah, there's a bunch of these as well, actually. I know there's one where people realize that you could actually use the flashing light on a disk access drive on a computer as a, if you know when it's flashing, that's an indication of when you're reading from a disk. And that is actually, that has been enough for people to carry out some attacks to break some encryption before.So you can see why someone is going to be a bit reticent of this, but to actually then have someone say, I understand about security. One minute resolution is sufficient for us to keep people safe while still allowing people to report on meaningful figures is actually a big thing. And bear in mind that when this is coming from someone like, we'll share a link to a link, I think from 2007, where Adrian's writing about this, he's writing, there's a paper called Utilization is Virtually Useless as a Metric, talking about all the different things you need to take into account with cloud back in 2007.So if almost at least 10 years later, we've actually got someone talking about this. That suggests that it has some substance to it, and we've actually got a real chance to come up with some meaningful metrics for this. Alright, we went down a massive nerd rabbit hole there, I think, folks. The next story proposed here was actually, this... There's some work in the IETF for people who are looking, who are curious about this. So the IETF, I believe it's the International Engineering Task Force. There's a current RFC, which is basically a proposal for creating a kind of carbon footprint header in HTTP requests. So this is currently being discussed.And as I understand it, this was also an idea that was proposed. And there was even a talk. By at the Grafana Con recently, Nikki, I haven't seen this, but I wondered if you might know anything about this or if this has come up on your radar, because I know that Grafana ends up being used as the defacto dashboard in lots of places here.Niki Manoledaki: This is the HTTP header that containing CO2 emissions has been on my radar for a while. And I only just realized that it was connected to Sentry software. So Bertrand Martin did a talk at GrafanaCon on reducing data center energy usage with Grafana. And so that's a really interesting use case. Again, looking at data center as a whole, where you have access to RAPL, you're not in a public cloud provider, you do have access to all of the data is at your disposal, and so there was, I think they reduced that at the data centers electricity usage by 15%.Also, yeah, the temperature was increased from 18 degrees Celsius to 27 degrees and a lot of The power savings were achieved through this, and it's a really interesting use case. There was another talk that was featured at GrafanaCon, which was a talk by Chen Wang at IBM. She's also in the TAG. They were using Kepler to measure some of the workload's energy consumption.And they also achieve, if I'm not mistaken, 75% power savings in their data center, some incredible numbers. And what both of these talks have in common, they do use Grafana dashboards to visualize those metrics. So I think there's a really interesting book on the power of storytelling. When you have that kind of data at your disposal that you didn't previously have, It can really tell a story that you can show to someone else and say, Hey, look at this dashboard that you just see how the energy consumption and temperature and CPU usage correlate with each other.And I think it's fascinating, and I hope we see more of these visualizations.Ross Fairbanks: I think just the part on cooling I think is really interesting. I went to actually talk at one of the KubeCons where there was someone, I think from the Open Compute Foundation was looking at it. Because also for waste heat as well, I think there's lots of potential things we can use for waste heat, for like district heating, those type of things as well. I think like heating, cooling as well as water usage, a couple of things that aren't sometimes looked at, we focus a lot on energy consumption. But there's other aspects as well I think are really important.Chris Adams: Okay. That's quite a nice graceful link moving through to the fact that, okay, you can talk about energy efficiency all day long and uh, it sounds like there are ways to actually get access to this. And we've seen examples of talks about, okay, these are the things I can do by reducing the energy usage from this.But there are other levers specifically around, effecting the carbon intensity of electricity if we're only going to look at carbon intensity without before looking at like changing the life cycle of hardware and stuff and Ross I think the next one is actually it's a link to a post that you shared here that I think helped explain some of the differences between the approaches people are currently taking when they do try to shift the carbon intensity of computing by either moving it through time or or moving it through space.And you've been doing some work with a tool called Karmada that might not be that well known because most of the work happens outside of, there's a very significant community in China or other parts of the world, right?Ross Fairbanks: So Karmada is a CNCF project, um, that does multi multi cluster scheduling for Kubernetes. So it's effectively a federation. So you have one Kubernetes cluster that's your control plane cluster, and then you can join multiple member clusters to it. And those, especially for carbon intensity, those member clusters could be in different regions, using different electricity grids. And they could be different cloud providers. And so the work that I was doing was creating a Kubernetes operator called the Carbon Aware Karmada Operator that gets a list of the clusters that are available and gets the carbon intensity for each of those locations. And it actually uses a Liquid Intensity Go project that you and I have worked on at the Green Web Foundation to get the metrics primarily from electricity maps that are used in their free tier. And then once you have the carbon intensity of those clusters, It then looks at the workloads, and you can say, I want to run these workloads in the two clusters, say out of three or four, that have the lowest carbon intensity. So that's the kind of high level of how Karmada works, and the operation of just adding carbon intensity onto what Karmada can already do.Chris Adams: Okay, and I am aware there's another operator that was published by Microsoft which focused on moving things through time, not moving things through space. Is that correct?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, this is what kind of referred to as temporal shifting rather than spatial shifting. And that's, temporal shifting is something I've been interested in for a long time. It's for jobs you have that aren't time sensitive. So the classic example of it is when you upload like a YouTube video, Google needs to transcode the recording, but it doesn't need to happen straight away, unless there's people actually waiting for it.You can actually delay that, maybe even up to 24 hours, and people won't actually notice. And what the Carbon Aware Keda Operator does is it gets the carbon intensity forecast for an area, and then it sets the maximum number of replicas. So it's actually doing demand shaping. It's saying, depending on the carbon intensity, we want to run more or less of this workload.Chris Adams: Okay, so that's one. And Karmada is doing space now. Now this sounds a little bit sci fi. Are we already doing time and space at the same time, or is this like the next frontier as it were?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, this is the for the next frontier and the current for the work I'm doing with Karmada. It's a very simple kind of scheduling algorithm. It just uses the lowest carbon intensity. But what you could do is look at the forecast and say, actually, for the next two hours, I know the carbon test is going to be low, so I'll move this thing here. Whereas if you know from the forecast, the carbon density is about to increase. Maybe this isn't the right region. You can put it in another area. So I think as we get more into this topic, people will start doing more sophisticated scheduling.Chris Adams: Okay, maybe this is a nice time to just jump into or refer to some of the things we saw in HotCarbon in that case Because I believe you shared a link to some work by the recent HotCarbon conference, which has its videos now visible I think there was a person called Dityaroop Maji this was related to the VMware stuff.Maybe you could just expand on this one here, because there's a couple of other really nice talks from HotCarbon that it'd be nice to just refer to.Ross Fairbanks: Yeah, so this is doing spatial shifting, but just applying it at a different layer. Yes, so this paper is from a team that were looking at the VMware global load balancer. And what they were looking at was, by default, the load balancer will route traffic to the closest data center. But they were also adding a carbon intensity module to say, can we actually reduce the emissions by routing it to a different data center? What's nice is the algorithm they're using also considers the location. If actually you're moving the data too far and it's going to impact performance, it takes into effect both carbon density and the location, which I really liked. And it's similar to areas we've been looking at, but just applying a different layer in the networking stack.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. So, I've got a request coming in to visit a web page. Please generate the web page, but whoever's the greenest and closest to do this, so I can do it within a time limit, right? So it doesn't look like I'm slowing everything down. That's the general idea that it's doing it, right?Ross Fairbanks: So you can include kind of the distance to pack acid travel as well, and I think considering the performance but also reducing emissions, and I think it was about 21% they found in the paper they could reduce the emissions by introducing this module.Chris Adams: Without having any impact on, basically, people's endu- So it's essentially a free, in terms of user experience, there's no perceivable change, and you reduce emissions by 20%. That's the idea, in the paper.Ross Fairbanks: Yes, yeah, although I should just include the caveat, it's a kind of a prototype that they're working on at the moment, but I think there's a lot of potential to use it in this area.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. So this talk here is the first time I've seen someone speaking about getting rid of the assumption that you're looking at one computer and it might be that the actual resources you're using, like a disk or memory, might be physically a machine somewhere else because you've got a kind of disaggregated approach to data centers these days, rather than just having a single variant of a kind of desktop machine.That's the key thing that I saw from it. Okay, so that concludes our deep dive into the wonders of cloud computing and Kubernetes. And if you have made it this way through, thank you for staying with us. We're just going to do a quick roundup of coming events that may be interesting to technologists who are looking at this.Niki, I know there's a couple of events that you mentioned on the radar for you. Any chance you could refer to those or just give it add a quick reminder for people for these ones here?Niki Manoledaki: There are a few events that we are organizing in the CNCF TAG. One of the main ones that we're preparing for at the moment is in October. We're planning the Global Week of Sustainability. So that's going to be events all over the world. I think we have a couple dozen cities represented at the moment.Happening in the second week of October, I'll be talking about cloud native environmental sustainability in our local meetup groups, that's the CNCF meetup groups and yeah, find one near you or feel free to organize an event. We have a guide for local meetup organizers and that's very exciting. Another thing that is coming up is, uh, we do have demos and talks in the CNCF TAG, Environmental Sustainability Regular Meeting. So that's on every first and third Wednesday of the month at 5 p. m. Central European Time. And we do have a talk on the 2nd of August. By Asim [Hussain] from the Green Software Foundation, and we're going to be talking about some of the specifications and around measurements for carbon during that meeting.And lastly, we do have a new working group for brain reviews that I wanted to give a shout out for and we're going to be meeting every second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Those meetings are open to everyone and in this working group we're going to be looking at evaluating the sustainability of various projects.So Karmada and KEDA that Ross mentioned, for example. And so we're going to be looking at how to use Kepler on infrastructure that is available through the CNCF and how to set up those pipelines for measuring the carbon intensity of cloud native software and doing those assessments of cloud native tooling.So that's very exciting.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for sharing that. I will be showing links specifically to this so that if this is caught in one's eye, they'll see where to go to next. All right, so we've covered some of the events. We've gone into a super nerdy deep dive into the wonders of cloud computing, Kubernetes, and all the various ways you might measure that.I think we just have to round up with some of the closing questions now. Chris, our producer, he throws these curveballs every single week. And this week there's been a bunch of hype in the news about the term Barbenheimer, this kind of portmanteau between Barbie and Oppenheimer, releasing on the same day.Now, we've seen a few other portmanteaus, I know that Adrian Cockcroft has been pushing for DevSusOps, and if you look at the sustainable web movement, there's this term SustiWeb that's floating around. I wanted to see if either of you have any portmanteaus that you either love or hate in this field that might be worth sharing with others while we're here.And I know there's at least one that's been shared here, so i'm not sure whose creation this one is, but maybe one of you might explain what hemigration is perhaps?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, that would be me, yes. Staying in this rabbit hole we've been in today. Hemigration is moving applications between hemispheres. This is actually an idea that's in the GSF Carbon Awareness Docs, and it's about moving your applications to the hemisphere that has the most daylight hours to make the most of the solar power that's available.And yeah, if you can move your workload to move it, I just like the idea of this, your applications moving with the seasons.Chris Adams: Of course, it's like the opposite of chasing the moon, which is what people were talking about 10 years ago because we figured Because it's colder at night, you won't need so much heating. So the flip side now is, yes, it's warmer, but because there's more sun, the energy is going to be cleaner, right?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, exactly, that's it.Chris Adams: Okay, cool.And I see another one which is Green Ops from... Okay, Niki, this is your suggestion, right?Niki Manoledaki: Yeah, I don't know how common GreenOps is as a term. I haven't really heard this term be mentioned in the podcast. So far, correct me if I'm wrong, but GreenOps takes its name from DevOps and FinOps. So operations related to development or operations related to cost optimization. And the idea is to apply some of the strategies.of FinOps for optimizing around carbon emissions and energy consumption. So that's GreenOps. It's a very loosely defined term in terms of what GreenOps looks like, what practices exist. Usually the idea is that if you reduce your resource utilization and if you implement FinOps practices you may be reducing the carbon that you emit through your infrastructure.Chris Adams: That's your one, yeah? Yours is Green Ops. Okay, I think as I understand it, Google and ThoughtWorks are big proponents of this Green Ops term, and you'll see it in a bunch of their marketing, and their writing literature. I'm afraid I actually don't have a really good one myself, and I think, now that we actually have Fetch, I can't even make a joke about making Fetch happen.I think I'll spare you, any of my particular kind of dad joke puns for day. But I, what I will say is thank you so much for coming onto this. I really enjoyed diving really into the depths of some of the specifics about how different tools make it possible to understand and optimize for carbon and optimize for energy use, like you mentioned here.So yeah, thank you so much for coming on you two. I guess I'll see you folks in either the working groups or in the Slacks or in various other places. So just before I do go, I just want to check if people were interested in any of the things that you've discussed, Niki, where would you suggest people go?Is there, if people want to find out more of the stuff you're doing, is there like one or two links that you would really draw people's attention to?Niki Manoledaki: I would love to see people join the CNCF Slack channel for the TAG for environmental sustainability. That's where we have most of the communication. And we post a lot of links and blog posts that Ross shared and we organize through that channel. So that's our main form of communication.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. And Ross, if there's anything that you would point people to, what would you point direct people's eyeballs to for this?Ross Fairbanks: Yes, yeah. I direct them at the climateaction.tech Community, which I think Chris and I, you're both, we're both there as well. Especially the Green Room for Channel, which gets a lot of these kind of discussions, and it has, I use it, I find it really useful for researching these topics as well.Chris Adams: Brilliant. I think that takes us to the end. This has been really fun. Thank you one more time. And that's all for this episode of the Week in Green Software. For all the resources in this episode, you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables and see all the links that we mentioned and all the sites that we found.See you in the next episode. Thanks a lot and bye for now.Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.

In this episode of Environment Variables Chris Adams is joined by Fershad Irani, an independent web sustainability consultant and maintainer of CO2.js. They discuss topics like open data on the greenness of power, the wonders of HotCarbon, new projects from the cloud native computing foundation and the Green Software Foundation, and gzip.ai. Fershad shares his experiences working with the Green Web Foundation and the growth of the open-source carbon estimation library, CO2.js and there’s a cameo from Fershad’s cat!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteFershad Irani: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Electricity Maps Open Data [4:02]HotCarbon 2023: 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems | HotCarbon [9:27] Articles by Assaad Razzouk | Thought Leader Renewable Energy | Angry Clean Energy Guy [17:51] Quinbrook pops up in Grok’s camp at Sun Cable, deal close | Financial Review [19:05] Adrian Cockcroft’s Proposal for a Specification for Real Time Carbon Intensity | Green Software Foundation [20:55]Data centres & networks | IEA [25:14]Graduated and Incubating Projects | Green Reviews Project | Cloud Native Computing Foundation [28:36]Announcements:The Green Software Foundation is Hiring [30:45]Resources:Observable [6:10] The Internet of Tomorrow Must Sleep More and Grow Old | Romain Jacob [10:10]Green Networks | Environment Variables episode with Romain Jacob [11:12] OVH weathermap [12:21] 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:Fershad Irani: Pardon the pun, but this turns the heat up on those or has the potential to turn the heat up on those big cloud providers and gives people a chance to, like you say, compare them on their carbon footprint, they might even need to start competing on carbon footprint because that's going to be important in the future.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 The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In today's episode, we're looking at open data about how green the power we use is, the wonders of HotCarbon, some cool new projects from the cloud native computing foundation and the Green Software Foundation, and a really cool technology called gzip.ai. Finally, we have some fantastic opportunities for you to be part of the Green Software Foundation because they're hiring. But before we dive in, let me introduce my guest today, Fershad Irani, an independent web sustainability consultant and maintainer of CO2. js. Fershad, I'll hand over to you to introduce yourself, if that's okay.Fershad Irani: Cheers, Chris. Thanks, man. I know you've been trying to get me on this podcast for a while, so it's exciting to be finally here. Yeah. Hi folks. As Chris mentioned, my name is Fershad Irani. I'm a web sustainability consultant and I live in Taipei, Taiwan. Most of the time I spend these days is working with Chris and a bunch of other amazing people at the Green Web Foundation.I think I've been over... It's over a year now, hasn't it, since I've been there, Chris? Or close to.Chris Adams: I think it has been indeed. Yeah.Fershad Irani: Yeah, during that time, we've, we've done a heck of a lot, I think, um, doing a bit of writing and a bit of coding. Chris did mention co2.js, which is where I've spent a big chunk of the last year. It's an open source carbon estimation library.I think Chris has mentioned it once or twice on this podcast, just snuck it in there. It's been really cool watching that project grow over the year and now it's being picked up by some other quite large projects itself, such as the Mozilla Firefox browser and web page test, which is just mind blowing to think that some code I've written is in those projects.But outside of web sustainability, I do have a bit of a life. I help organize and play in a local touch rugby, or touch football for all the Aussies out there. We have a group here in Taiwan and we play weekly and try and send teams internationally whenever we can.Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks. Thanks, Fish. Oh, and I'm calling just for context when we work together, Fershad said Chris, you can call me Fish instead of Fershad. So if I call Fershad Fish at any point, it's, it's basically just, uh, a, a shortened version of the, of his name that he's comfortable with us using. All right.So that's who I'm referring to when I ask. What do you think, Fish? I do not have any actual Fish in, uh, the podcast today.Fershad Irani: Cat's out of the bag.Chris Adams: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, is the cat also in the room as well? Like we, we gonna have a incursion from her today.Fershad Irani: She likes her video calls, so she might jump in on this one. Eventually, it's food time at the moment.Chris Adams: All right. So we may have a third guest as we record today. All right. I should just briefly introduce myself before we start. I mentioned my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director at the Green Web Foundation, which is one of the member organizations of the Green Software Foundation. The Green Software Foundation, I work there at, as the chair of the policy working group, and that's basically the thing I'd probably share with you now, actually.So I think Fish. I guess we should probably start looking through, you're familiar with the format. So should we do the usual thing of running through some of the stories that caught our eye and then basically share a bit of context for them?Fershad Irani: Let's go, mate.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. So I think what's the first story that we have here was actually a story from Electricity Maps.They're one of, they're another member of the Green Software Foundation. And earlier on this month, they released some open data and like a significant amount of open data, actually. Fish, I might let you start on this one because there's, I think it's worth people understanding why this is interesting and it might be worth you sharing some of this because you've worked with a number of different providers of carbon intensity data now.Fershad Irani: Yeah, this data that Electricity Maps has released is just a huge data dump from 2021 2022. You have almost 55 countries in their data set and it's just such an awesome amount of historical data with so much granularity, not only yearly data, which we're used to working with most of the time, but now to have monthly, daily, hourly historical data available for free.That's something that's really going to be handy for a lot of people building out tools and analysis around carbon emissions and all that type of stuff. Yeah. Until now, for the most part, we have been working with annual. grid intensities, like the data that we've got from EMBA and we've put that into co2.js in the last year.I can't wait to play around with, with this data set and see, um, what we can get in there in the future from monthly, daily, even hourly figures if we're able to. They do say that they are going to release 2023's data. I'm not too sure when.Chris Adams: So as I understand, this is basically a push to essentially increase the floor of data quality that is available in the public domain for people to use so they can, Oh, there's our cat coming in. Yep. The goal is to increase the level of data quality as a floor so that rather than only having to use annual data, which often occludes and hide some of the information to provide a much higher resolution. So for example, you can see if you're going to like decide to move computing jobs to different parts of the world at different times, you can see the impact of this. The other thing that's also interesting about this is that it's actually released using the open database license, which means that you're able to build on this commercially or use it in all kinds of projects.Now, what I have done when I found out about this is I had a go at this and I've used a tool called Observable, which makes it really easy to build little tools, little exploratory notebooks. And we've got a couple of links to essentially the hourly carbon intensity data for a series of countries that we found.So we've got one for Germany and Finland, but basically they have one for almost every single sub grid in America, which is what people might refer to as balancing authorities in America. And this is cool because I think one of the things that I realized when I started playing with this data is that this lets me see, okay, if I did a bit of, if I had a computing job last year, where else could I run at the same time?Or where could I move that to? over the whole kind of geographic space and time last year to see how I could have reduced the emissions for that. That's something that I haven't really been able to do before. And it's nice to see this. The other thing that is worth bearing in mind is that this, there is a commitment from the organization, Electricity Maps to publish on a yearly basis every time going forward.So at the end of 2023, they'll be publishing the data from 2023 as open data for anyone to use. And you're able to use the data real time from them. Basically as a commercial product, right? And that's essentially what you can see this being used for. It's a way to increase the data quality used for the last year.But if you want to do something real time, then you may need to use electricity maps or what time or some of the other tools, depending on what your specific use cases, but this being out is a really cool thing. I'm really happy to see it.Fershad Irani: And just on that last point, like, we do need more of this and as much of it as possible to be open source in terms of monthly, daily, hourly emissions data. And if that can come from governments or from other private entities, that just helps all of us in this space. Like it, it helps drive decisions like you were saying about.Carbon aware computing and stuff like that that also helps improve the accuracy and transparency of the carbon estimates that we're producing it that we're going to start relying on for reporting and other legislation that comes in the future.Chris Adams: Yeah, like, I feel this is quite useful because this publication, if you're looking at the carbon intensity of anything you did last year, you've basically gone from, essentially you made something 8, 760 times more accurate because you've actually got hourly figures for this stuff, which has been really hard or really expensive to get access to previously in this kind of way.So that's cool. I don't think that's worth bearing in mind is that you have to ask yourself, how many times do you need to pay for this data? Because you may not be familiar with how kind of literature grids work, but in many parts of the world, there is a small levee that's put on to that's built into the kind of basically hourly rate you pay for any power is usually between 20 to 10%, a lot of the time, which is essentially allocated to potentially funding a transition to renewables for this stuff. And this information is collected anyway for this. So the idea that it's actually visible and that it's available in the public domain is a really good thing and really long overdue. So it's nice to see this. So yeah, good news story. We've shared a link to the data portal and it's free for anyone to use and fetch the data from. And hopefully we should see this turning up in places like the CarbonAware SDK and any other tools like CodeCarbon and so on, so you can start making more responsible decisions about when and where. You run any kind of computing jobs.Let's look at the next story. The next story is about HotCarbon, which is a online conference, online and hybrid conference that's initially based in America, but the cool news is that it's basically sustainability, ICT, nerd Christmas, there's a bunch of really good papers that have been released, and there's also now the recorded videos of all the talks from this.And if you are trying to find out what the state of the art is. in discussions around digital sustainability. This is one of the places to look for the kind of technical discussions about this. And there's a couple of talks that I think both Fish and myself have really caught our eye. Fish, I'll let you go first.And then I'll come in with my one actually, because I think there's one that you. Quite liked, right?Fershad Irani: Yeah, my one's actually from last year's HotCarbon. There's actually a paper from Romain Jacob and Laurent Vanbever, both from ETH in Zurich. And in last year's HotCarbon, they published this paper, which is just, it's got just a beautiful name, if anything else, The Internet of Tomorrow Must Sleep and Grow Old.And that was, I think the very, probably the first, if not one of the first times that I've personally really started thinking about with the data transfer is the best proxy for website carbon emissions and how we calculate them that kind of began a rabbit hole for me and I'm still going down that rabbit hole as I think a lot of us are. But it was really interesting and presented some of the the ways that networks operate and function presented that really clearly and the video for that is is a really good short 20 25 minute watch I think it is but they've also got a paper this year with kind of a less pretty sounding name, but Chris, you want to talk to that one?Chris Adams: Yeah. So first of all, before I talk about this one in particular, I'll just let people know that last year we did an interview specifically with Romain Jacob about the paper that he shared last time. So we will share a link to that to go into more detail about it. But the general thrust of the paper from last year.Was that the internet is basically provisioned in its current state for availability above all else, which means there's lots and lots of the time we've massively over provisioned for it. So big, it's like having the biggest possible computer you can imagine just for when most of the time it isn't actually used that much.This time, he's actually, Romain Jacob is the, one of the lead authors, along with Jackie Lim and Laurent Venbever, I think, from ETH Zurich. They're talking about, are there ways to do something about this? And it's not such a poetic name. But the general thrust of this paper is that given that we know that most of the time we're not using the entire capacity of the internet, is it possible to kind of power down parts of it as it were, is it possible to make parts of the internet sleep so that you can make meaningful reductions in the energy usage and as a result, the carbon footprint of this stuff.And the argument basically is that yes, you can do some things like this. There are savings in the order of tons based on looking at a open data set from OVH called the weather map data set where OVH, which is another cloud provider have basically shared the traffic that they have running inside their own networks.And they basically explored this and said, given what we know about how the internet is used and what kind of usage patterns we have, is it plausible to selectively power down parts of the internet and still maintain like the same level of quality of service basically. And it's super nerdy. But it's a really nice cool paper and it's a fun read.It's one of the first times I've seen people actually work with real data from a real organization, because one of the thrill struggles you have is actually having access to this information. So this is really cool to see this. There are other more ones. There are many more papers as well, but I think what we might need to do is run through the list and see if we can get some of the people from HotCarbon at 2023 to speak about this, because there was a number of really exciting looking papers and there is 20 videos and 20 papers to read through.So if you want to. Basically see what's happening at the real cutting edge. That's a place to look.Fershad Irani: Just to be sure that HotCarbon's already happened, right?Chris Adams: Yeah, it happened a couple of weeks ago, but the videos were literally published. I think last night or two nights ago or something like that. So there's a bunch of, that's the place to look.Fershad Irani: So hot off the press.Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely. HotCarbon, hot off the press indeed. And if you want something even hotter, there is a mailing list called the E Impact mailing list, which I'll share a link to, where there are ongoing and robust conversations about all this stuff here.So Fish, you spoke to this idea about, okay, is data transfer a good proxy for understanding website carbon emissions or anything like that? That's the place that I am usually following to see what the conversations are, going back and forth on that stuff. And it's a really useful place to learn from essentially world experts for free about what's happening there.Fershad Irani: Do you want to do a spicy take and give an answer to that one? Is data transfer the best proxy for website carbon emissions? Chris Adams.Chris Adams: I'm not going to have a spicy take on this one yet, because I'm still trying to figure this one out. Because I feel that there's lots and lots of evidence that basically shows that the network part doesn't change all that much based on what you send over the wire. So you can make the argument, rather than thinking about it like a kind of road and cars driving, it might be more useful to think about networks as like a cycle lane where you have people using it.So. You know, if you in aggregate, look to all the people cycling on a cycle lane, you might see a small change in usage, but you're not going to see a massive changes if you had like loads of cars driving along it. And I think this is an issue of us having mental models or not the correct mental model when we think about this stuff.That's about as spicy as I can really take. Cause I don't think I know enough about it, but Fish, we should probably share a link to your piece, because this is one thing that we've had. Bunch of time talking about with both implementing the sustainable web design model in co2.js, but also because there's a whole separate discussion about this, both at a regulatory level, but also in inside industry with actually the sustainable web design model specifically, there's a whole bunch of work going on there that I suspect you might have some reckons on or something you could share on there actually.Fershad Irani: Yeah. And I think it's also worth noting that there are other methodologies for estimating website carbon emissions or digital carbon emissions out there that don't use data transfer necessarily as their proxy. And they use other things like time on device or they try to measure the actual usage of a device, which is something that you can also do these days in.The Firefox web browser, which is super cool. And I'm with you. It's something that we're all learning as we go. And there's more research coming out about it for now. Data transfer is the best we have, but with what's in Firefox, hopefully other browsers can implement that type of technology as well. We can start to see some real world data that we can then base some of our estimates and assumptions off.And we can then work with that.Chris Adams: There is one thing that I would wish for, if we could see something like this for HotCarbon 2024, this whole paper here is based on the willingness of one organization to share some data about how a network is working so that it can form basically a public understanding of where the real impactful decisions and interventions are possible can be made when we think about greening software, right?We know that browser makers like Firefox and Chrome and Microsoft Edge, they have all this telemetry information about how their browsers are being used because they use it to improve the products, right? If there was a way to share a suitably safely prepared data set, which was a representative sample of how websites and things were used, it will be so useful for us to actually understand this.And now that we've done a bit of work with say Firefox, for example, we understand that these numbers, they can be collected and they can be used because. If you're using Firefox now, you can basically turn on the Firefox kind of profile and you can see right down to the process or thread level, what the energy impact of various parts of the page are.And we know that some of this stuff is essentially presented in telemetry to inform product decisions. If you had organizations sharing some open data around this, it would be such a help for understanding what the things are. What the most effective interventions would be for impacting website for carbon figures but right now we don't have that yet, but it's the thing we could hope for. And who knows, there's a year now for it. So fingers crossed, eh?Fershad Irani: HotCarbon 2024.Chris Adams: Yes. All right. Should we move to the next story fish?Fershad Irani: Let's go.Chris Adams: This one is a story from a character, someone called Assaad Razzouk, who is, I think he's actually based in Singapore.And he's one person who runs a podcast called the Angry Clean Energy Guy, but he's actually has a background working in this field. I basically wanted to share this cause I found this really interesting specifically because when you speak to people who are thought leaders in the kind of world of cloud and sustainability in cloud, one of the recommendations that you'll hear people say is, please don't run things in Southeast Asia right now.Because the energy is really dirty and it's really hard to do that and because it's so hot, it also means that even the computing that you do run, there's going to be a massive amount spent to keep the computers from glowing red and overheating rather than actually doing your computing. And this is the first time I've seen where someone saying, no, there's actually some changes taking place there's been massive investments, particularly from Singapore in some of the surrounding areas, to make some changes to this. So while we've seen the energy transition move quite quickly in China and to an extent, Europe and America specifically with the IEA, you're now seeing some signs of this in Southeast Asia as well, which hopefully means that computing will be getting greener over time.And Fish, I know that you initially came from Australia. So I figured I'd share this link here from Grok Ventures and Quinbrook, basically the story about connecting Australia to Singapore to provide a punch of clean energy through this actually.Fershad Irani: Yeah, I'll, I'll be a bit cynical, as any good Aussie should, and um, just say, this is something that I've heard mumblings of doing something like this for, I think, over 10 years? Since, yeah, before I moved here to Taiwan, and for the last 25, 30 years people have been talking about high speed rail along the east coast of Australia, and that's still not there.This is a really cool idea, and something definitely that, when you look at a place like Singapore,Chris Adams: Hmm.Fershad Irani: It's small, they've got land constraints, they can't just suddenly put up a whole bunch of solar, they can't really put up a whole bunch of wind because it's a major shipping channel and a lot of planes come through there as well.They need to be looking outside to import energy, and they've got Indonesia, Malaysia pretty close by. It's good to see that Singapore is doing some investment outside of their own borders in clean energy. As someone who lives there, Asia, has got a way to go in terms of being green. But the potential is there. We sit on this thing called the Ring of Fire, and it's an active geothermal hotbed. I've got hot springs 20 minutes by car from my place. There's potential there for, for geothermal beyond just using solar and, and wind. So Asia does have that possibility of being a, a green hub for digital sometime in the future.Chris Adams: Do you know what I actually totally forgot about the whole Pacific Rim Ring of Fire stuff, because there was an announcement, I think two weeks ago or last week from Microsoft, them basically breaking ground on a massive geothermal project for some of the data centers in New Zealand, specifically for this.So yeah, that's actually a useful, interesting perspective. I didn't think about that actually.Fershad Irani: Let's move on to the next story, which is from the Green Software Foundation and one of the brainchilds of Adrian Cockcroft. It's about introducing a specification for real time carbon intensity. Chris, I think you'll be able to speak a bit more to this, but from my understanding, what this is all about is aiming to set a common way for data centers to report on energy and emissions, preferably in real time.And I think that's something that would be useful for a tool like Cloud Carbon Footprint, wouldn't it?Chris Adams: Yeah, first of all, it's really cool to see this proposal go ahead because essentially one of the struggles you have is even if you're using, say, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, you're running, you're trying to run the same computing load between these three, it's almost impossible to have any kind of meaningful comparison between these things because they all measure carbon in slightly different ways and include different things, whereas other ones don't now, what It's basically been proposed here is there's actually two things.So first of all, there are different ways of measuring. And also the figures that you see are not particularly actionable a lot of the time. So the resolute, the information you will usually come a few months later rather than in real time or anything, or even the same half hour, basically. Now what's been proposed here is essentially a way to talk about minute by minute metrics that a cloud provider would make available so that you can actually make informed decisions about when and where, or what kind of computing jobs you choose to schedule, or even which providers you're going to choose to use compared to other ones. Now I've read through the proposal and it's really well thought through and one of the reasons that people have said that they can't share this information before is that cloud providers basically will usually will say. We can't share this data because there's a security issue related to this. And Fish do you remember when we did some work with Firefox, we had something like this because one thing we learned when we were trying to get some high resolution figures for the browser, one of the solutions was we could get these figures, but you would need to run Firefox as root, which might not be a good idea for people to be doing that.And essentially what the thrust of this points to is that if you keep the resolution at minute by minute level. Then you're no longer disclosing any kind of dangerous information that might help an attacker, but it also provides sufficient resolution for you to make much more informed scheduling decisions as an operator.But also you actually get some consistent ways to make comparisons between different providers of these services. So this is my view is something that is really overdue and to see someone who's actually fleshed it out quite well, and actually thought about lots of the issues and how this relates to some of the weird aspects of how people count energy is green with certificates and so on.There's really good news and it's also. Interesting to see that you've got groups like the cloud native computing foundation getting involved or have it expressing interest as well. I think this is long overdue and you're right. Tools like cloud carbon footprint could presumably could in theory consume this kind of information if it was exposed by the providers, because right now they have to use models and guesswork based on the billing data, which is much less useful than getting direct figures.It also means that any other cloud provider who, which is not the big three could also share this information. So you could finally have some meaningful ways to make meaningful comparisons between them.Fershad Irani: And that's something I didn't think about when I first read it, but it actually really good like pardon the pun, but this turns the heat up on those or has the potential to turn the heat up on those big cloud providers and gives people a chance to, like you say, compare them on their carbon footprint.They might even need to start competing on carbon footprint because that's going to be important in the future.Chris Adams: This is exactly it. This makes some of this possible. And it also means that new entrants can actually start sharing these numbers. So you could compete on transparency to provide these numbers as a way to help customers make the responsible decisions that are currently really difficult to do. Or you could even plausibly build this into some of the tooling so that it's just part of how Kubernetes works or part of how maybe even Docker might work for example. This is actually, in my view, really exciting. And I'm really curious to see where it goes next, actually. All right. I think we've spoken about that quite a lot.Should we look at the next one. This is the IEA. So the IEA, Fish, I'll let you speak a bit about this one here. Cause this is the International Energy Agency.They've updated their data set, their, their information about data centers for 2023, this, this is the resource that is almost always cited as the authoritative figures on what the environmental impact of the tech sector is or how much energy it uses. And if you want to cite any numbers, these are peer reviewed and generally pretty reliable numbers you can refer to.They're safe ones to use. And yeah, they're pretty eyeopening. Aren't they Fish?Fershad Irani: Yeah. Firstly, it's good to see this data being updated. It's not so good to see some of the figures that are coming out of it. But like talking about data centers, the big three plus plus Meta. One of the things that struck me from this report was that from 2017 to 2021. So that encompasses some of the COVID years.The report says that there was a doubling in the amount of energy consumed by those four providers. It also then goes on to say that it expects there to be moderate growth for the next few years. I really hope that their definition of quote unquote moderate isn't another doubling because then we're going to be in serious trouble on the data center front because that's a lot of energy to be consuming.I think in the report it says somewhere around 1. 3% of total global like energy use or something. And that's without including cryptocurrencies, which is a whole other ball game. I think they've steered clear of it in this report.Chris Adams: Yeah. As I understand it was broken out separately because it's generally considered not part of the existing economy for this part. And also we're not going to talk about cryptocurrencies on this because the less said about them, the better. But generally speaking, this is one of the first times you've seen these figures broken out like that, because typically what you've had people talking about is the actual energy usage staying more or less about level for the last, say, 10 years or so, but what this really highlights is that this has stayed level because we've had a massive concentration of usage to a very small number of providers, as opposed to having a large number of maybe less efficient providers.There are some good signs of that in terms of in absolute terms, the figures are not growing as much as they could be, but it also means that we've got this massive concentration of, we've got all this consolidation, which has other impacts in terms of, okay, how easy is it to then pass all kinds of policy as a result for this, to move things away from being level to going down rather than going up.And this is the thing that we'll see coming forward, basically.Fershad Irani: And I think on that thing, just like one thing that I can't possibly see it going down in the future is like just the amount of volume, the amount of internet traffic that is there. There's a number in that report for 4.4 zettabytes of internet traffic in 2022, which is, I don't even know what that number is, man.Like it's just mind bogglingly big.Chris Adams: a zettabyte, right? I'm just, if I can find the figures for that, it's. Good Lord. So there's 21 zeros behind it. Yeah. If a million is like three, six, that's seven. So yeah, that's 20. That's a. A very large number. That's an incomprehensibly large number, butFershad Irani: That's mental.Chris Adams: yeah, that's one of the issues that we struggle with.Okay. So this at least gives you an idea of where the most recent current data is that you might refer to. Okay.There's maybe one more story. Then we'll look at what else is going on in terms of jobs and things going out there. Fish, this is one I just want to point people to, because I've seen quite an interest in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.There's a new thing called the Green Reviews Project, which has come up. And, uh, I'll just read the kind of blurb on this because this, in my view, looks cool. Basically, the Green Reviews Working Group helps CNCF projects assess and improve the cloud native sustainability footprint. So the idea of this, as I understand, is to start integrating sustainability reviews into how projects are maintained and run so that you get an idea of just bringing up the floor of competency on projects.So people have some way to talk about this and think about it. And essentially consider these as requirements in the same way that you might look at other things as requirements. This is interesting in my view. I was quite excited to see something like this. And there's a couple of links of what this looks like in practice with, I believe, the Falco project.And a couple of other ones there. So yeah, interesting to actually see something like this happening. This looks like it's going to be merged in the next week or two and a working group, the kind of technical architecture working group for this. And yeah, I was quite excited to see this actually land.Fershad Irani: And that's a really good way of making sustainability or sustainability considerations a regular part of a process and a way of doing things. That's rather than it being its own separate silo that might get looked at, might not get looked at. If it is part of the regular process that everyone has to go through, you're going to see more traction, more movement in the right direction, which is good to hear.Chris Adams: Yeah, I think it'd be really useful to actually have a chat with some of the CNCF folks on this, maybe they can come on the podcast and talk about a, how this happened and what this looks like, because we are now seeing various open source projects or groups starting to essentially start, create their own groups for this.So WordPress has one, Wagtail has one. This is one, which is, seems to be across some, a number of all the projects in the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So there's a bunch of stuff going on there. So yeah, this, in my view, this is quite exciting, actually.All So the final thing, this is a little bit like we shared last week. If you are looking for work, the Green Software Foundation is actually hiring for a technical project manager and a content project manager. So these are funded positions that are available. You look at and it's, and you can apply with links that they have there.So there's, that's what's going on there. Okay, so we're just coming up to the hour for this show, and, uh, we normally have a kind of easy question to round this off. Now, Fish, I know that you've been doing a bit of travel away from Taipei and you've just come back, so I figured I'd ask, what's the first place you, you try to go to, to get some food you can't get anywhere else or as good as anywhere else when you are back in Taipei?What's your first place you're thinking ofFershad Irani: We got dumplings. We had dumplings the first time, first night we got back, which is quintessential Taiwan. I adid find myself that when I was on the road, I was traveling through Australia, mostly where I grew up. And I did find myself craving instant noodles, which is a bit weird, but there's just a dearth of choice.There's hardly any choice in Australia for instant noodles. And then you come back here and you've got mind blowingChris Adams: cornucopia of ramen in packets?Fershad Irani: Oh yeah. Yeah, so it was dumplings first and instant noodles a very close second.Chris Adams: I was not expecting that second answer. I'll be I'll be real. Okay for me when I come back to Berlin It's all about falafel for me There's a really good place called Lausanne when you come back to Kreuzberg and it's probably the best falafel in at least five square kilometers if you're going in anywhere near Kreuzberg. So that's all for this episode.All the resources and links will be shared in this podcast episode, and you can visit podcast. greensoftwarefoundation to look at some of the previous episodes that we've actually referred to a few times. And finally, Fish, thanks for coming on. Really, I really enjoyed hanging out and chatting with you again.So everyone else, see you on the episode and Fish, bye for now, I suppose.Fershad Irani: See you folks.Chris Adams: Cheers, Fish. 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.

This episode of The Week in Green Software, features guest Stani Borisová; Expert in Life Cycle Management at IVL and former researcher at RISE Sweden. Host Chris quizzes her on her expertise in data center LCA and they discuss interesting news tidbits to share from a global tour of Singapore, Norway, Germany, and America. They discuss how data centers might be unnecessarily using too much heat to cool themselves down, how Germany’s Energy Efficiency Act has perhaps not gone far enough and how Norway’s investment into oil and gas affects renewable energy resources for data centers. Finally we have some fantastic opportunities for you to be part of the Green Software Foundation!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteStanislava Borisová: LinkedIn Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:"Continue AI development – for the sake of the environment" | Journal of Extracts (extrakt.se) [9:49]IMDA Launches Sustainability Standard for Tropical Climate Data Centres | Data Center Storage ASEAN [15:14]Germany to pass Energy Efficiency Act, demanding heat reuse in data centers | Data Centre Dynamics [19:01]Government Norway approves 15 Billion Euro Investment in Oil and Gas Industry | Datacenter Forum [23:02]Fairphone 4—the repairable, sustainable smartphone—is coming to the US | Ars Technica [28:11]Announcements:The Green Software Foundation is Hiring [39:31]Resources:Open-source solutions are essential to greening software and ICT | SOGS Report [5:39]Carbon Aware SDK | Green Software Foundation [7:27]Digital does not equal green | SOGS Report  [7:45]Decarbonization alone cannot make software green  | SOGS Report [8:47]Climate Policy Radar  [13:48]Global Stocktake Explorer [14:35]The Week in Green Software: Code Green and Clean Power | Nina Jabłońska | Environment Variables Podcast [22:40]Green Rocks Newsletter [27:27]Mining.com [27:27] Techbuyer [36:22]Optimizing Server Refresh Cycles: The Case for Circular Economy With an Aging Moore's Law | Rabih Bashroush, Nour Rteil, Rich Kenny, Astrid Wynne [37:12]Regenerate! Board Game [40:16]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:Stani Borisová: We talk a lot about CO2 and climate change, and it's very important, but at the same time, there are other aspects of the world, such as, let's say, the water ecosystems or the depletion of minerals and such, and they happen at the same time as climate change happens, so they're inseparable.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.Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In today's episode, we have some interesting news tidbits from a global tour of Singapore, Norway, Germany, and America.Then finally, we have some fantastic opportunities available if you fancy working with the Green Software Foundation, because yes, they're hiring. But before we dive into this, let me introduce my guest today. Today we have Stani Borisová from IVL, Swedish Environmental Research Institute. Stani, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself here.So yeah, the floor is yours and maybe that's if I've mispronounced your name. Please do tell, please do help correct me because I am not sure if I've got it correct.Stani Borisová: Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me here today. So you've pronounced my name very nicely and properly. Uh, and I work as a consultant in Swedish Environmental Institute, as you've mentioned, specifically in the area of LCA or life cycle assessment. I also do life cycle assessment of data centers. And recently I've also been involved in the development of PCR.Uh, which stands for, um, product category rules, or basically a template for a standardized life cycle assessment of electronics. And among other projects, also a heat reuse about mealworm farming from data center excess heat, or an EU project on waste reuse in process industry. It's great to be here.Chris Adams: Cool, thank you. So before we dive into the meat of the show, if you, if this is the first time you ever listen to this podcast, we will share all the links that we, for every article that we discuss and anything else that comes up that's interesting, we'll do our best to share the links to this as well.Okay, so, Stani, you said a couple of things that caught my interest here. I didn't know there was any link whatsoever between mealworm farming and data centers, and I wanted to dive into that a little bit first, actually. Could you maybe expand on what was going on there and what the mealworms were for?Because, yeah, this is the first I've ever heard of it.Stani Borisová: Yeah, of course. This was a project I worked on before at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, where we were focusing on sustainability of data centers and looking into different industrial symbiosis opportunities based on this excess heat. And one of them was a very nice, very circular project where we got in touch with the local brewery and used their spent brewers to actually grow mealworms.And the idea there was to actually feed them to the chicken in a village nearby and basically farm chicken and close the loop and reuse both, both the heat, but also the spent brewers and look into how this excess heat from data center, whether it's. enhances or increases the rate of growth of these mealworms or not.And we're actually just finishing up publishing this article about it, so hopefully you'll be able to read about it soon.Chris Adams: So that's when I can find out if mealworms like the excess heat, if it's good for them, and they enjoy it, or they don't like it very much and they don't grow quite as fast,Stani Borisová: Yes, exactly. But spoiler alert, they do like the heat.Chris Adams: Great. That's interesting, especially in the context of some of the news articles we'll be referring to somewhat later on, actually. Okay. And as I understand it, I think you've done a bit of work with both the OCP, the Open Compute Project, and also with the SDIA, some of those working groups, the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance.You've had some involvement with those over the last couple of years as well, right?Stani Borisová: Yeah, that's correct. To be honest, it's been a, it's been a few months since I've been involved, but previously I have worked in, in these groups, mostly on a life cycle assessment in data centers and especially advocating for data transparency, because I would say that nowadays the biggest problem with data center sustainability is that we know too little to actually know how sustainable or not they are.And the reason for that is that there's just not enough data from these very long value chains. And otherwise I've been trying to get people to look into broader sustainability, not just CO2 emissions, but looking into other impacts that one has on the world, on the environment, because of course, we talk a lot about CO2 and climate change, and it's very important, but at the same time, there are other aspects of the world, such as, let's say, the water ecosystems or the depletion of minerals and such, and they happen at the same time as climate change happens, so they're inseparable.Chris Adams: Okay, so that's a nice link to the State of Green Software report that was published by the Green Software Foundation. I didn't introduce myself before properly. My name is Chris. I work as the policy working group, one of the chairs in that working group. And one thing that we did over the last year was get a report commissioned to make it easier for people to start basically getting into this field and understanding that yes, there is an environmental impact associated with software from this.And one thing we've been doing with various guests has been sharing this report ahead of time and asking them which of the insights, which of the 30 insights the report is comprised of, seemed of interest to them that they might want to talk a bit about. And Stani, you've identified three of these here, open source solutions, essential to greening software.Digital doesn't equal green and decarbonization alone cannot make software green. Is there any of those that you might want to start on just to touch, just to see what, just to share why you found them interesting so other people who are coming to this might get an idea of what kind of content there might be in here.Stani Borisová: Sure. I think maybe we can start with the first one. The open source solutions are essential to greening of software and ICT. And the reason for that, at least in my opinion, is that you need to be able to understand what you're dealing with in order to evaluate it and then identify the hotspots and then improve whatever the issue seems to be.So without the proper understanding, Which can only be achieved by seeing and getting the data and information. You can't really improve anything. You can be hoping and blindly aiming at something, but more is needed.Chris Adams: Okay, I think I could go with you on that as well. With my green Software Foundation hat on, there's a bunch of open source tools specifically for this. Uh, so there's things like the Carbon Aware SDK, a software development kit specifically designed to make some of this available. But also with another hat on, the non profit I work for pretty much everything we do is open source specifically for this reason, because you need to be clear about some of the assumptions you're making if you want people to trust in the stuff you're doing. So I very much agree with you on that. And this second one, digital does not equal green. Maybe this is worth talking about from your perspective here as a life cycle assessment specialist.So maybe if we could just briefly touch on that one as well.Stani Borisová: Yeah, actually, I would say that there has been a lot of movement for switching to digital, especially during the pandemic, because people suddenly started talking about the benefits of not having to commute and not having to potentially rent office buildings and so forth. And just assuming that switching to digital would always be better, but that's not necessarily true to a certain extent, digitalization can make things much better, but of course we need to understand what it means to become digital and especially with certain things such as cloud services, I think lots of people don't understand that those aren't really located somewhere in the sky, they are actually somewhere on the ground in an actual physical location and that also has impact.Chris Adams: And that is probably a nice segue to the next one. So decarbonization alone not making, cannot make software green as an LCA specialist. This is one thing that we do while we look at carbon a lot. You've just mentioned both water and depletion of natural resources. I'd like to get your take on this one because there's a couple of other stories where we speak about that in a bit more detail actually.Stani Borisová: Decarbonization, it's an interesting name, but it very much depends what you imagine as decarbonization. You could say that You have your software, which produces emissions, for instance, CO2 emissions, and then you just purchase some credits and offset these emissions, which could make you, for instance, net zero or carbon neutral, but it would not make you green.Green would assume that you're doing something good for the environment, and that is not just then the climate change aspect. The environment, as I mentioned before, are so many more topics. So. Yeah, I think we need to look at things with a broader perspective.Chris Adams: More than just carbon, then. Okay, and should we jump into the news now? Alright, so the first story that you shared was actually one that was initially in Swedish, I believe. And I'll be honest, my Swedish isn't brilliant, but I was able to just pass it through some automatic translators to get the general gist of this.And the key thing that I found interesting was... This kind of quote that came from, and I'm not sure if as someone who can speak Swedish, maybe you can tell me if I've got it more or less, but essentially the kind of thrust of this article that you shared the link to was basically saying, AI experts and business leaders were seeing people talk from like open AI and organizations saying, we've got to stop doing any development on, on AI.And we're going to have to like, make sure we do, we bring in regulation, but. For, for way in the future, nothing to do with what we have right now, all right? There's this idea of pausing development to keep things as they are. Now, there's a researcher at KTH, which I, as I understand, it's an institution in Sweden with a decent, with quite well known for actually pioneering work in sustainability and digital, digital for the last 10 years at least.They're basically saying, no, we don't need to stop doing this. We should actually be using this because there's a bunch of. Places where this actually is very helpful and there's a number of specific use cases for this. I might ask you to maybe help provide a bit more on this because I realized I haven't actually described what KTH is and I forgot what the K in the TH is.So maybe you can help me there and then we can talk about some of this.Stani Borisová: So the KTH in English is basically Royal Institute of Technology. It's a university located in Stockholm. K stands for Kunglig, I think, which means the royal. And yes, it's a very surprising news. I myself was pretty surprised to find this in my newsletter because just talking with colleagues during coffee breaks, you hear lots of concern about privacy and where all of this could happen.We've been testing chat GPT at work and playing, seeing what we can do with it. And it's very impressive, but also very scary. So I understand this. Impulse to want to stop things, to want to put it on ice and take a break. So I've been reading a book recently called the best of times, the worst of times futures from the frontiers of climate change.And some of the issues that it discusses are actually these models that we as humans make, for instance, for climate change. And lots of these models are based on our economic models, even though these are very different issues, the environment. That we're dealing with rather than economic issues that we are so used to tackling.And one of the the biggest problems that this author identifies is that in the economic models one tends to discount time. So basically time is money or what happens later in the future is worth more than what happens now but that's basically the exact opposite for, for the environmental problems, because we need to tackle them now, since in the future they will become much more serious.And that is one of the biggest pitfalls of the current models that humans are developing, especially if they're taking some simplistic way of modeling based on economics. So, I think that what these researchers from KTH are suggesting, to basically let AI take... A look from all these different viewpoints and design something better could really help us tackle something that we alone cannot because we're very, we have our subjective opinions and we see things through our own filters and potentially AI could get some more objective view.But of course, one could also polemize how objective AI can be when it's very much modeled based on our own opinions and what we feed it.Chris Adams: Thank you for that. So following on from this one thing that may be of interest because when I was reading through some of this initially there was this idea that yes there are all these use cases where it does make sense to put it in the hands of a wider set of people. One example I think it's actually worth people paying attention to is Climate Policy Radar.It was a nonprofit that was launched maybe a couple of years ago. What they've been doing is they've been basically taking all of the existing climate policy all around the world to put into a single model, to see what some of the kind of features of policy that gets passed in one place has, or what some of the kind of good practices might be regardless of the language.So with the idea being that when you're at events, say COP 27, 28, or something like that, people are able to essentially compare some of the policies that have worked in certain places and see where the actual practices are able to be used regard, without having to actually speak that particular language, because we're aware that there are absolutely language barriers here. And these are some of the tools that people have been using.There's also in this year 2023, there's a recent thing that's come out from the same organization who've been doing some work with something called, I think it's the, the stock, the Global Stocktake Explorer, which again is taking this information, which has thousands of pages of different policy of essential all the countries have been doing.to meet their own kind of climate goals and then put it into a tool which makes it possible to skim through this and actually pull out some of this information because expecting any single person to read thousands upon thousands of pages is a bit of a tall order, right? This is more like an example of this stuff.Stani Borisová: Exactly.Chris Adams: Okay, all right, that sounds pretty cool. We'll add some links to that. That's a nice link for the next part. So this is a story from, I think, the Infocom Media Development Authority. So basically this is a story about green software in Singapore, actually. Singapore have started to create some actual standards for greener data centers in their regions.Now, this is interesting in my view, because for the longest time, you may have seen say, countries like say Sweden, where you're in, or to an extent, Germany as well, or some parts of say Northern Europe, or even parts of North America, to have a relatively clean grid. Which means that running infrastructure is actually, there are steps you can take.But when it comes to Southeast Asia, it's been actually quite harder and there's been a lot of actual advice basically saying, if you can avoid running infrastructure in Southeast Asia, it's probably worthwhile doing because the grid is so kind of fossil fuel based. It's going to have a greater environmental impact running work over there than other places.This is problematic because there are lots and lots of people in Southeast Asia who need to use this stuff, who need to use services, and why shouldn't they be able to access this too? And this is actually something related to the way that some people are realizing that you can actually run data centers at different temperatures to actually change the kind of cooling you might actually need.Maybe you could come in on this one actually, Stani, because I have never had to run a data center myself, and this sounds interesting in my book.Stani Borisová: Yeah, I think it's also very interesting. So the idea here is that most data centers cool their servers quite a lot to let's say temperature of 22 degrees. And one of the biggest reasons for that is the so called ASHRAE envelope. And the ASHRAE envelope is a combination of, I think, five different factors, which you have to adhere to in order to keep the warranty of your servers.And some of those factors are temperature and humidity and so forth. And what's interesting is that quite a lot of people I would say in the data center world who understand that some of these conditions are very strict. And potentially stricter than they have to be, but at the same time, since all of the manufacturers based their warranty policy on the ASHRAE envelope, no one dares to get out of the envelope and operate differently.So that means that people are unnecessarily cooling their data centers too much, data centers that don't have to be as cold, that could operate just as fine at, let's say, 2, 3, 4 degrees higher temperature. So what's happening in Singapore is that they decided to support the gradual increase in operating temperature to 26 degrees.I think that's fantastic. I'm hoping that this will inspire even other parts of the world where maybe the countries are not so hot. The climate is maybe colder than the Southeast Asia, but still it could be applied throughout the world. And thus they're aiming to potentially save cooling energy up to 2 or 5% for every one degree increase.So yeah, I think it's very exciting news.Chris Adams: Okay. Cool. So, I'm really glad you mentioned the ASHRAE envelope in some of this because I honestly thought when the figures for running datacenters unnecessarily, particularly cold, might just been a human comfort thing rather than a kind of warranty thing or something equally arbitrary if basically this is not actually tied to the actual performance of the servers themselves.I think if you're able to increase the temperature by two or three degrees, and if it's between two and five, that's like 15, 20% savings, which is nothing to be sneezed at given that this is actually a significant draw of both water when it's used to cool it down and also energy to actually cool things down as well, as I'm understanding.Stani Borisová: Yeah.Chris Adams: All right, following on from this, now from Singapore to Germany, where I'm based. So this is another one related to heat reuse as well, actually. This is a story from Data Center Dynamics. Germany surpassed the Energy Efficiency Act, demanding heat reuse in data centers. I wanted to share this with you and get some of your take on it because there was heat reuse, which we've now learned is good for mealworms.But also it's one of the greatest, providing space heating is one of the significant drivers of emissions in Germany. In fact, I think it's one of the largest ones. It looks like it's going to be landing in September. And, uh, there's a few things which caught my eye. First of all, there was this kind of mandatory kind of tightening of efficiency requirements, so that data centers have to be more efficient, uh, and basically use more of their power to actually run service rather, rather than actually just be trying to cool things down through better, better design.But there was also... A few interesting things about a shift to renewable energy. So the idea is that this act would require for the data centers to basically be using 50% renewable energy by 2024, which is pretty soon. And then 100% by 2027. That's impressive, actually. But there's a couple of caveats that I figured might be worth discussing.So yeah, I'd like to hear your take on this one here as well, actually, because it sounds like it's good for the mealworms, definitely. But there's also some other climate implications for some of this.Stani Borisová: Yeah, I think it's an interesting article and I think with these kind of things the devil lies in the details and it sounds very good, I have to say, 50% renewable now. If we assume that some of the data centers in Germany don't use any renewable energy is a great increase. already next year. But as you said, indeed, this can be met using certificates.And additionally, I wonder what's going to happen with renewables as we've seen recently in the EU taxonomy, natural gas being classified as a renewable. That makes me very concerned because basically you could just operate a hundred percent on natural gas and claim that's renewable energy doing us all a very big disfavor.And at the same time, I think This proposed law had a very big potential from my point of view. The idea was to reuse, I think, 40% of the excess heat. But there was so much effort to just keep it easy, start slowly, take our time, that as far as I understood it, next year it's going to only require that 10% of all excess heat is reused, which unfortunately is very little.And if I remember correctly, I've spoken with a previous colleague of mine about this and how we use energy to compute, but of the energy that we use, maybe 99. 9% does not end up being in the compute power, but ends up being heat. So that just tells you. The enormous amount of heat being generated. And it's a real shame to then only reuse such a small proportion.And from what I've seen and heard, lots of data centers are trying to advocate for their placement in the society as potential sources of heat. Obviously we need data centers. They're crucial and we have systems based on their existence. So we can't get rid of them. But at the same time, I feel like the skeptics or the conservatives have won this battle a little bit and made what could have been a really revolutionary step, something very mild instead.Chris Adams: Okay, I really appreciate you giving that extra perspective on this because I did mention there was some of these caveats and for people who've listened to this podcast a couple of episodes ago we had Nina Jablonska from Energy Tag talking specifically about some of the issues related to using credits from other parts of the world to mark energy as green like we said here.Technically this would mean that energy in Norway should No longer be counted as green. But whether that always happens is another matter. But let's just move on to the next story, which I believe you shared here. I was surprised to see this mentioned from a data center publication, actually. So basically, this is the Norway government approving significant investment in the oil and gas industry.Now, I wanted to ask, do you know why this might have showed up in a data center? Publication for this, because it feels like it's an energy story rather than a data center story. And I was a bit lost on this one. So maybe you might be able to shed some light and then we can talk about some of the other things that have been going on in Norway that are also interesting in this kind of transition technology kind of field.Stani Borisová: Sure. Yeah. I was also slightly surprised to see it on, on the data center forum, but the two main reasons I think for this is first of all, data center world, I would say is very energy focused whenever it comes to just talking about sustainability. I would say 99% of the focus is energy and at the same time, what I just mentioned with green natural gas being classified as renewable could suggest that there are some players who then will use natural gas and its abundance and its increased abundance from Norwegian supplies to claim that they are operating on renewable power.Chris Adams: Okay, thank you for sharing that because we touched on this in a previous episode about okay, when you have significant drivers of demand, like when you're building full of servers full of GPU cards, which are extremely energy dense, it may be that the power draw you're needing is actually greater than the grid itself is able to provide, just like we have problems with the transmission of networks, there's also transmission issues related to energy.There's also another kind of investment or a real kind of change that was actually announced in Norway in the last week or two, this massive deposit of phosphate, one of the transition materials that was, it's used for batteries and it's used for fertilizer.And this felt like a kind of in my view, really interesting, because you do see things like oil and gas being a big thing in Norway. While Norway itself uses a very clean grid, it's one of the key places that people point to when they look at the migration to electric cars and things like that. Most of the oil and gas is exported into a massive sovereign wealth fund, which is used to basically, in many ways, provide some kind of base to set things up in the future.Now, this discovery of at least 70 billion tons of phosphate. First of all, this is larger than any other deposit that's ever been discovered of phosphate, which is interesting, which is important for farming, but also transitions, but also it suggests that this is another route away from relying on oil and gas for a sovereign wealth fund.And I wanted to get your perspective on some of this actually, because we do see things like data centers taking on much more batteries and things like this as another way to provide the necessary kind of way to meet the demand for power.Stani Borisová: I thought it was an interesting piece of news. It was very exciting. Indeed, as you mentioned, most of the phosphate rock is used in fertilizers, but there is a proportion being used to produce batteries. So I think this maybe could also help the opposite direction, not just the oil and gas, but instead, as you mentioned, the renewables, maybe some on site power generation with potentially European cheaper batteries.So I find this to be a very optimistic news. What is also important to keep in mind is the mining and the emissions related to that and the health and environmental concerns from that. But it seems like the Noria mining, they keep that in mind. So hopefully they are planning to do the apply carbon capture and sequestering as I, if I remember correctly.And then another maybe important aspect is to make sure that this phosphate is being recirculated and that it's not being emitted somewhere into water because that can actually cause a lot of problems with eutrophication, which basically means this phosphate, which basically is very nice as a fertilizer, ends up in water.Which sounds nice because then plants have more food to eat, but what it does if it happens in two big quantities is that you suddenly get a lot of biomass that is growing and expanding, and as it decomposes, it prevents the ecosystems and the fish from getting their oxygen, so then they die. So there are all these different aspects to look into, but I would say that generally it's exciting and hopefully we'll have some better and more accessible batteries for renewables.Chris Adams: And ideally, no longer needing to export quite so much oil if you have, if there's another massive natural resource that people might be using instead. So I think you just spoke about, I think, is it an algal bloom? The algae growing, using up all the oxygen, then suffocating all the fish. That's the, essentially the runoff effect of phosphate fertilizer there.That's the other kind of flip side of this.Stani Borisová: Exactly. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay, we'll share a link to a really good newsletter called Green Rocks, which is specifically about the environmental aspects of mining. And we'll also share a link to mining.com, which also provides another kind of industry view on what's happening here. All right, we're just coming up to the last story now, actually.So this one, I shared this because... This really caught my eye, and because you have a focus on lifecycle, I figured you'd probably have some opinions about this one here. So this is a story in Ars Technica about the Fairphone coming to America. And I understand that you're familiar with the Fairphone, so maybe it might be useful for you to explain this to the uninitiated who may not have purchased or had to own a Fairphone themselves.Stani Borisová: Sure. So Fairphone is a Dutch company that is selling modular phones. And I would say that they're doing their best to really look into all of the supply chains and reuse as much material as possible. As a coincidence, one of my very good friends works at Fairphone. So I do have a lot of information from them and they are really in touch with the suppliers, even traveling to the local places.Here in Europe we might think that you bring your electronics to the dedicated separation place and therefore everything is fine and everything is solved and you did your part. But in reality, oftentimes these electronics and dangerous parts of them end up somewhere on the streets in Africa where people don't understand which parts are dangerous, which are not, and children are playing there and such.So it's very good that someone has this in mind. And another great thing is that it's a modular phone. So if anything breaks, you can just. Get another piece and keep on using your phone as long as possible. So I think it's a very good news that a Fairphone is coming to the U. S.Chris Adams: So this is one thing that I wanted to ask you about because I owned a version, one of the original Fairphones, which I'll be honest, I loved the idea. The idea of using it was probably better than the experience of the first iteration of the product. And I got the second one as well, which was nice enough to use.And I really did appreciate the modular aspect because I actually was able to eek out the life by literally just upgrading a camera. It cost me 40 euros to swap out. One of the old cameras for new cameras, and the rest of it was still more or less working, actually. And I know that Fairphone was initially set up largely almost like to prove a point, rather than actually be an enterprise initially to set up to make a bunch of money.For example, as I understood it, Fairphone initially came out of organizations who were essentially campaigning for labor rights in electronics and basically said, Look, this needs to be changed. They were so sick of people pushing back saying we can't possibly treat people fairly where they've decided to make a phone themselves just to show that it could actually be done.And I wanted to ask you, have you seen any examples of this being adopted in industry or some of these practices filtering down? Because in my view, at least early on in the industry, before they started growing. It was very much like a kind of demonstrator of a company compared to other things. Just showing that this could be done and to raise some of the bar.And I know that we have some laws coming forward, which seem to be informed by some of what's happening here. But again, I don't get to speak to a life cycle and that assessment specialist all that often. So I figured I'd ask you, have you seen any of this percolating down into other fields or other examples in the industry?Stani Borisová: Maybe not in as much in depth, I would say, but there are lots of different initiatives where companies have to look into their entire supply chain and look also into the social aspects of their business. There are lots of different standards on how it's done. And then there is something called social life cycle assessment, which is a sister of This traditional environmental life cycle assessment, where one really looks into all the different shareholders and stakeholders involved, and even interviews the communities and sees how things are done to once again, point out the hotspots and show what can be improved and how, and potentially even compare that.So I would say that there are some initiatives. Oftentimes it's because of the regulation rather than. because of some extra incentive internally from the company. And hopefully we'll see more of that. What we also see, for instance, the social LCA, that's mostly used in different EU projects. So that's where it's being used quite often.At the moment, I have two colleagues in Portugal where they're part of a social LCA. And they're interviewing local communities about cement production and how that impacts them, but also talking with the workers on site and, and such. And of course, the society should be considered as well when it comes to sustainability.So hopefully we'll see more and more of that.Chris Adams: So not just carbon. So this is one thing I was going to ask you actually, because, so you mentioned before you were working at RISE, which is a research institute, and now, rather than just doing work for the kind of the state as it were, you're working in a company which is essentially helping organizations like maybe corporates understand some of their own responsibilities or what the impact of their products actually have. Is it different when say a researcher asks for data versus a company asking for data in their supply chain? Maybe you could share some of that because we've spoken before about how data is really a real problem and I figured I should ask you about some of this as well.Stani Borisová: Yeah, I think that's a very good question. So indeed, I was working as a researcher before. Now I work as a consultant. The biggest difference I see, for instance, two years ago, I was trying to do a life cycle assessment of a data center in Buden in the north of Sweden, and the project was already at its end and we were asking from the former suppliers, which we had collaborated before with, but it was just not interesting. And at the same time, it felt like we were a research Institute. We didn't really have any purchasing power to leverage, to get some data and potentially buy more in the future. And that's something that is very different now. I would say when I work with private companies and when they are doing their data collection. I would say that they have a much bigger access to data. Of course, you would want to start collecting your data as you're, let's say, building in the initial phase. As you're, as you start with your project, start also with data collection for future sustainability purposes, because of course, once you finished your data center and sold it to someone else, of course, for that new person, it's much harder to then contact people and convince them to send something, but still you are a company that is a potential consumer, potential future consumer that comes back and purchases more. And that really helps getting the data to the consumers. That of course, doesn't make the data open to everyone, but it allows for hopefully some future benchmarking where we know that the results that the companies are presenting to us are really based on the real data and very accurate data.And then instead of comparing PUE, we can start comparing actual data center, let's say climate impact or I don't know, depletion of resources, impact and such and start to understand. What is good and what is not good?Chris Adams: Okay, thank you for this. So, following on from this, I'd like to ask you about the role that software plays at the data center level for this, because we spoke a little bit about the Fairphone, and one thing that I found really interesting about the Fairphone was they have quite a long warranty compared to other places.So they have like between five, some cases even seven years of basically a commitment to have it to support it and uh, we've seen essentially the lack of software support in many cases updates are inducing people to move away from what would otherwise be functioning hardware. Do you see any patterns like this in the data center when people are working with hardware in a data center kind of context?Because my intuition would think yes, but I don't really know enough about it and once again it sounds like maybe this is actually a pattern we see more, uh, occurring in other places as well.Stani Borisová: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, there's a British company called Techbuyer that basically works a lot with refurbishing old hardware. And they've also done some studies on comparing the performance of servers. And let's say taking two generations older servers compared to the new ones refurbished and such, and it can be done and the performance can be almost identical. And at the same time, this allows for immense emission savings in terms of CO2, in terms of everything else. I would say, even if you don't have enough power to influence your energy supply and where it comes from, just reusing the hardware for longer than you would intend to initially can do so much difference.Chris Adams: Ah, okay, I think I know the paper you're talking about, and the nerd in me loves this paper. This was Optimizing Server Refresh Cycles, the Case for a Circular Economy with an Aging Moore's Law. This is by, I think, Rabih Bashroush, Nour Rteil, Rich Kenny, Astrid Wynne. This was a really cool paper, I thought, because there was a really eye catching stat that I remember, like, when I read through it.Yeah. According to this study, From Eureka, which is a research institute. So they did some research of 300 data centers in Europe. And the thing they basically said was 40% of the deployed servers are around older than five years old. And they were consuming 66% of the facility energy, but providing only 7% of the compute capacity, right?Okay. So just flip that around. That means that there's the other half is providing 90 plus percent for using less than half of it so if you wanted to reduce emissions swapping out those obviously would be the thing to do having a kind of cash for clunkers kind of thing would be an immediate climate gain but later on in the paper they do talk about this idea that yes if there would be over more than five years old yes but some of the newer ones They don't need to be that recent to still be quite effective, like you mentioned.This is something that blew my mind when I saw it, to have both of these extremes in one paper, actually.Stani Borisová: Yeah. And I think also the emissions from the energy itself are so dependent on the source of energy. So it could happen that you're located, let's say somewhere in Scandinavia and you're using very clean grid. And in such case you could obviously optimize the energy efficiency, but you could achieve a much bigger impact in that particular situation just by prolonging the service life of your hardware.Chris Adams: cool. All right, we'll share that link to that paper for people. I would actually love to know if there's any more recent studies, because this paper that was published, I think last year, it was based on a study from from 2018, which had these crazy, this wild differentiation between older than five years is terrible.Younger than three years, not so bad, right? And it'd be really interesting to see if that is the case or how the kind of fleet of infrastructure has and what kind of changes you would target if you wanted to reduce the environmental impact from using software for this. All right. Stani, I think we've covered most of the stories here.Normally we do like a set of announcements and the thing I might share is that at the Green Software Foundation, they're currently hiring for a couple of roles. The first one is a kind of technical project manager role. And, uh, a content, uh, project manager role, both of these are available and we'll share some links to that.So if people are interested in working in this field, they, that's an option. But I think the last thing I want to say before I thank you actually is this closing question from our producer, Chris, are there any particularly green games that you've played that have a real kind of focus or message that you would like to share or that you've enjoyed that people might know about?Because we mentioned Doom and stuff before, but there are also other games which might not be quite so violent and might be a bit more, kind of, friendly to mealworms, if nothing else.Stani Borisová: I do have a recommendation, but it's not a recommendation to, uh, Uh, video game, but rather, um, a board game, uh, it's called Regenerate, a cooperative resource management game, where one is trying to regenerate the environment. And what I really like about this game is that if you just go to their website, you can actually print everything out on your own at home, along with all the instructions, all the parts, and just play and enjoy the good feeling about making something good for the environment, at least in the game.Chris Adams: So basically you just, you can just download the PDFs and print all the things that way, right? So it's a bit like a... Ah, open source applied to board games,Stani Borisová: exactly. Yeah.Chris Adams: That's pretty cool. All right. I kind of wanted to say something like SimCity, and I believe there's another game. Is it like Planet Zoo or something that's in this field, which is a little bit like a kind of computer game like SimCity?Stani Borisová: Yeah. Planet Zoo is very fun as well and you really get immersed in this nice good vibes of a good zoo and you're trying to take care of your animals and make them happy and such. Yeah. That's also very fun.Chris Adams: Cool. If people want to be inside to get away from some of the heat this summer, then maybe those are two things to catch people's attention. All right, that's all for this episode of This Week in Green Software. All the resources for the episode will be available in the show description below at https://podcast.greensoftware.foundation And you can see more episodes available for you to peruse and listen to at your leisure. Stani, I've really enjoyed having you on here and I've learned a huge amount and I think some of our listeners probably have as well. So thank you very much. This has been loads and loads of fun, Stani.Thank you.Stani Borisová: Thank you so much as well. It was great to be here.Chris Adams: All right. Take care of yourself and have a lovely day. Ciao, Stani.Stani Borisová: You too. Bye.Chris Adams: Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit https://greensoftware.foundation That's https://greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.