On this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain as they dive into a mailbag session, bringing you the most burning 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 will tackle your questions on the environmental impact of AI computation, the challenges of location shifting, the importance of low-carbon modes, and how to shift the tech mindset from "more is more" (Jevons Paradox). Chock-full of stories about projects implementing green software practices, and valuable resources, listen now to have your thirst for curiosity quenched!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 in the show:What computation is needed for AI, the explosive use, and what impact will that have on the environment? [7:17] Regarding location shifting - is the foundation concerned that when everyone time shifts to the same location or the same greener grids, that can increase the demand of those grid's energy, which could increase fossil fuel burning to meet said new demand? [18:50]Why not just run low-carbon mode all the time, not just when the carbon intensity is high on “dirty electricity”? [34:35]Given the Jevons’ Paradox, how do we change the thought pattern that more is more in tech? [38:15]Are there any notable examples of organizations or projects that have successfully implemented green software practices? What can we learn from them? [49:00]Resources:Peeling The Onion’s Layers - Large Language Models Search Architecture And Cost | Semi Analysis [8:51]Simon Willison: LLMs on personal devices | [12:40]2023: These Are the World’s 12 Largest Hyperscalers | Data Center Knowledge [13:13]  Energy Market Trends at the Layer Below the Internet Stack | Chris Adams [20:55] Carbon Intensity API | Carbonintensity.org.uk [25:05] Don’t follow the sun: Scheduling compute workloads to chase green energy can be counter-productive | Adrian Cockcroft [27:15]Ecovisor: A Virtual Energy System for Carbon-Efficient Applications  | Abel Souza, Noman Bashir [30:06]Branch Magazine | climateaction.tech [35:08]Green software requires a holistic approach | State of Green Software Report [38:46]  ICT industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 | International Telecommunication Union (ITU) [45:35]Windows Update is now carbon aware | Microsoft [49:24]Xbox Is Now the First Carbon Aware Console, Update Rolling Out to Everyone Soon | Microsoft Xbox [49:37]Sentry plugin for Grafana | Sentry Computing [51:55]Storj [52:58]   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're talking about a cultural change that will take generations is I think what it would really take. I don't think this is gonna happen in our lifetimes. I think the world that you've described is a beautiful world. I hope to, I hope my dream it will exist, and I think it'll only exist if the culture changes and the culture changes worldwide and dramatically.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 a special mailbag episode of Environment Variables. We're thrilled to bring you the most anticipated questions that arose during a recent live virtual event hosted by the Green Software Foundation on World Environment Day on the 5th of June with over 200 passionate practitioners participating from all around the world, the event featured an expert panel consisting of influential voices in the green software movement.Our panelists at the time included Asim Hussain, who's here today. Hey, Asim.Asim Hussain: Heya.Chris Adams: We also had Anne Currie, the Greentech advocate at Container Solutions and Community Chair at the GSF. We also had Tamara Kneese, the UX research leader and strategist and lead researcher of the State of Green Software Report, as well as Pindy Bhullar, the ESG Chief Tech Technology Officer at the bank, UBS and the PhD in her own right. During the event, they introduced the Green Software Foundation, and unveiled all kinds of insights from the recently published state of Green software report, which sparked all kinds of engaging discussions. But we didn't really have enough time to cover all the questions that were coming in from the people who are asking there.So you can think of today as a bit of a kind of roundup of some of the questions that seemed particularly interesting and felt like they probably need a bit more time to actually delve into them properly. So that's the plan for today. We're gonna look into some of the questions that we didn't have time to answer or I wasn't actually there so I didn't have a time to answer, but that's what we're doing.So today it's myself, Chris Adams of the policy chair at the Green Software Foundation, and I'm joined by Asim Hussein, the chair and executive director of the Green Software Foundation and lover and grower of mushrooms. And Asim. I'll live some space for you if you wanna talk about anything in particular, cuz I have some interesting mushroomy factoids I'll share with you after this.Asim Hussain: It's just the way you said lover of mushrooms was a little bit, um, risque. But yeah, I only love them cuz I like to eat them. But yeah, labro, I, I am a mycologist. I grow mushrooms and currently actually very desperately trying to rescue two bags of a lion's mane mushrooms, which I think I've let rot in our bags a bit too long.So hopefully I'll have some lion's manes mushrooms this time next week.Chris Adams: That sounds cool. Can I share my fact about mycelium, which I think is really cool. So I listened to a podcast called Catalyst with Shayle Kann, and he recently did an episode where he was talking to one of these researchers in South Africa who published some research about what I referred to as Microrisal-uh, The fungus. Basically it's the kind of fungus that you can think of being attached or interfacing with the roots of a tree. And they did some research for the first time to get an idea of how much CO2, how much carbon is actually sequestered by this. Cuz there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between this particular kind of fungi and the trees.So basically the trees they. They make sugars and stuff like that, whereas the fungi are really good at leeching out all these other kind of nutrients, and they have a kind of, they're basically swap basically. So the mushrooms give the trees all the kind of nutrients, and the trees give sugar to the mushrooms by comparison.And as a result of this, that answer meaning that there's a bunch of CO2, which basically is drawn into the trees and then fed to the mushrooms and the figure that they calculated for the amount of extra carbon that's stored in the soil. It was something like 13 gigatons, which is a third of all of the carbon dioxide that's emitted by all us burning fossil fuels.This was so cool. I had no idea that shrooms were basically doing all that extra work under the ground, and it made me think of you Asim. I thought, yeah, as he would like, he would be proud of his little guys. When heard about this,Asim Hussain: I am proud of my little guys. Yeah. No, read the same. I don't think I, I didn't listen to the podcast. I actually didn't dig into it that deeply. But yeah, I read the similar article recently and it's mycrorrhizal.Chris Adams: Thank you. Yeah. Sorry.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Mycra is a mushroom or the fungal component. Rhiza means root. Basically a type of fungal relationship where it works in symbiotically with roots and yeah, there's a really good book called Wood Wide Web, which talks about this wonderful relationship between trees and just everything around you actually. And they've actually even shown that kind of mushrooms and the kind of, these networks are really large and they actually act as not evenChris Adams: a network.Asim Hussain: like a network, but also like a controlling network.So you can have two competing trees. But, and if one's not surviving well, the microrrhizal network will then force that negotiation for sugar, for carbon in a way that benefits one of the trees, because actually, like a break in the canopy is really harmful for everything. So it's like, there's lots of really intelligent stuff like that happening and um, yeah, it's really, really clever.Chris Adams: That's kind of cool. I had this idea that they're a bit like the kind of shroomternet, but didn't realize there was this kind of extra, almost what diplomat, I see your diplomat role you're playing as well to get various real entities to play nice with each other. Wow. That's cool.Asim Hussain: really cool. And there's just li- for the listeners. There's a really interesting guy out there called Paul Stamets, and if you've not heard of him, just look at, look him up on online. And he does some really, he's been in this space for a long time now. He's an amateur mycologist who became famous and he is been really pushing this world and he's got really lots of great TED talks on why mushrooms are all kind of a sustainability solution. It's got books written on it. And if you're actually a fan of Star Trek,Chris Adams: I knew we were gonnaAsim Hussain: you're even gonna head there. So there's a new Star Trek series called Star, star Trek En, no, hang on. What's it called? It's just called Enterprise actually. And the lead engineer is called Stamets and it's actually based off of this Paul Stamets. And the engine they have is called the Spore Drive, and it can travel to anywhere in the universe through a spore network of stuff. And I just thought it was amazing that even my one, my favorite Star Trek, even that has been mushrooms have integrated even into my favorite sci-fi show, which I just love.Chris Adams: Oh wow. Is it Enterprise or is it Discovery?Asim Hussain: DIscovery. Sorry. You're right. It'sChris Adams: that was theAsim Hussain: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Enterprise was that other one that didn't.Chris Adams: Oh my word. We've gone full nerd already. Oh. At least. That's hopefully a kind of entertaining kind of what's segue before we dive into the mailbag. All right. Okay. Should we start with a mailbag then? Asim. See what the first question is.All right. Okay. I, I watched the recorded World Environment Day kind of panel that you had and we'll share a link to that. So there will be some things that we're not gonna cover because they've already been covered in that recording. Okay. So the first one touches on at LMMs and things like that. So the question as I read here was what computation is needed for ai, this explosive use, and what impact will that have on the environment?That seems to be the question. Asim, I'll put this to you and then we can have a bit of a, kind of take it and turns on responding with that one actually, if that sounds good to you.Asim Hussain: Yeah, sure. So I think obviously AI has come up quite a lot even on this podcast. Many times I think the. There, there's been couple of papers. Now there's been one, I forgot what, I think it was about five times. I think that the, we, we'll make sure we quote the, the actual paper in the thing. There's one original one when the, when ChatGPT three came out, which suggested that the energy consumption of a Google Bing chat, uh, search ChatGPT search was five times more. Am I getting that right? Does that sound familiar, Chris? Five times more than, than a normal one, which I'm, now I'm starting to wonder even if that was a, a understatement because actually like. You have multiple chat conversa because there's a few, a further paper which talked about the water consumption, uh, from a chat.And that one was interesting cause that talked about the whole conversation. Not one question to ChatGPT, but like the series of conversations you have to get to an answer. Then that got to half a liter of water. And I'm not too sure if that original paper was talking about one individual question or the series of questions you've gotta get to to get to your answer, and there's lots of kind of evidence.I don't, I'm not too sure. I think there's a significant amount of compute being used in LLMs and there's not a lot of transparency on it right now.Chris Adams: This is actually one of the problems that we do have. Right? So the thing that I might share for you is like you could do a kind of bottom up get based on a look at this by looking at, say what a Nvidia H100 is. Make an assumption of how many might be in a given data center and work out okay if a H100 from Nvidia kind of graphics card or ML card specific pulls this much, then that times this number gives you some kind of number.And you do see it particularly. Big figures like you see people throwing figures around in the kind of hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts of power, particularly in America right now, for example, you do see figures like this, but I've actually struggled to find particular like specific figures on this cuz.It's also worth sparing in mind that right now the thing that we could actually point to is some of the existing research that you see from some of the kind of cloud providers right now. There is a company that called Vantage, I believe, and they do cloud billing analysis, and they recently shared some information about, okay, what proportion of spending is actually coming from, say, is being allocated to GPUs versus CPUs and stuff like that.And I'll share the link in a document for us. But the general argument is that yes, AI is large. I think that the figures on the front page that for their most recent report, shows that you've got something like what you might qualify as AI in this compared to as a share of what people spend on typical cloud like Amazon, elastic Compute Cloud, E C two, and the figures are between.Six and 8% of all E C two spending is now going towards this, but it's growing extremely quickly. That's the thing that we are seeing for this. And uh, I'll share a link to this cause I suspect there'll be a new version of this clo- cloud cost report, which gives us some numbers about what people are using on billing.But this is not the same as what kind of forward investments people will be making for this. And one of the problems that we see is that, you basically are running up against the limits of the grid right now because compute, cause data centers are such dense uses of electricity. You have scenarios where a data center full of these kind of cards will use more power than a grid is able to actually deliver to it.So you're constricting factor right now is the capacity of the grid to feed into the data center more than anything else. And that's one of the key problems that we're seeing come up again and again at the moment.Asim Hussain: I hear all the arguments and again, like I think there's a real lack of data right now to really get clear answer, but I think I. Then, then you have to look at other kind of economic and proxy arguments. And I think there's one factor which no one can ignore, which is the amount of interest and investment which is heading into LLMs and AIs in this space is outstripped anything that existed before. And that could not be true if this was not a at least perceived as a massive growth opportunity for organizations, which I think that there would be like a knock on effect in kind of emissions and something like that. Whether that's right now is a good point.Whether it's right now or whether it's like everybody's seeing that this is the future and this is what the putting effort into, which means that this is gonna be a big growth error in the future as well. I think that's this aspect of this, that it's just true and we can't ignore, there's a lot of interest in this space, so I think that's the thing to think about as well.Chris Adams: So there's one thing that it might be worth bearing in mind, is that I don't think it's related to the fact that in many places, that people are constrained on the supply, being able to actually meet this demand for it. You are seeing a real kind of, crop of new, smaller, much more efficient LLMs being created specifically because there is an interest in being able to not be dependent on either a singular provider of this or just being able to run this on, say, your own hardware, for example.So I'll share a link to a really nice post by Simon Willison, who's been talking about some of the most recent open models that are designed to basically run on a laptop that can in many cases give you results which are comparable, if not indistinguishable from some of the really expensive LLMs and expensive generative models that you see right now.So there is a kind of shift for this, and I actually dunno what direction you're gonna see because like you said before, because we don't have access to what kind of percentage the AI is really making up right now in terms of future investment. We don't really know. And like when I've, I've seen what I've done.I've shared a link in the show notes to. This chart from data center knowledge, it basically gives an idea of projected growth by hyperscalers over the coming few years. And we can see figures of maybe say Google like 3000 megawatts of assumed capacity right now, Microsoft at similar figures around the 2000 megawatt mart.And same with Google. And you see that there's projections to double that over the coming few years. And I dunno if these are before or after the decisions that people have been making for this, because you've gotta remember that.Asim Hussain: right.Chris Adams: We've only just seen in less than a year did you see the Nvidia H1 being released and not just that Now AMD have come out with their own ex, the equivalent, they're competitor to this.So you now see many more things available. So the question is, where are these gonna go and how are they gonna be powered? Like the worst scenario would be that people end up. Basically setting up data centers and then finding non-G grid ways of generating power to actually run these machines, like using diesel and stuff like that.I'd really hope that doesn't happen, but I can imagine scenarios doing things like that or I. Possibly opening up some of the existing generation people that have shut down from cryptocurrencies. And since we saw this crypto collapse, and this is one thing that Tamara mentioned, she said it's worth looking at the role that LLMs are placing in the kind of public discourse.They're very much filling that same role that the Metaverse was supposed to fill in or the other NFTs were supposed to fill maybe a year ago, for example. It's worth saying is that yes, we know that this is being seen as a drive of demand. Whether there are actual numbers that are reliable right now is another matter, and like we can point to various figures for demand and what people are looking at.But at best, these are all currently like trailing indicators, like the Vantage report, which shows these figures. That's only based on what's already been set up. And that doesn't really tell us a story about are people stuck with buildings full of graphics cards that they can't plug in and sell AI for right now.Because they can't get this stuff connected to the grid, for example.Asim Hussain: I just also think that we just can't ignore the fact about the amount of money that is flowing into this space. And I hear the arguments for open source models and my heart really wants them to win out, but when it costs like a hundred million dollars to train up something like GPT three, which I think was the estimate.And the real benefits come when you like compute even more and more. I just don't know if, if the open source models will win out because obviously people are spending money because there's an advantage to doing so. People wouldn't normally be able to peel off a billion dollars from a company just for no reason.So it's, I think that there's lots of data we don't have. That's the data we do have, and that's telling us I something at least that there's a lot of,Chris Adams: Yeah, I guess this is one thing that you currently do not have. Again, it's really hard to get a decent number about where things are going with this, for example, because I think I'm in the kind of camp where actually there is a lot of interesting stuff happening with open models where people are basically defining where they're gonna compete and try and come up with alternatives to this.Like when you look at some of the purchases being made by companies which aren't just Microsoft and Facebook and Google, right. I think the example of Databricks is a really good example in my view, Databricks. They published a bunch of open data specifically to help build this competing ecosystem, and they recently purchased a company called Mosaic ML.They published two in openly licensed LLMs. One's called MPT 30 B, and the other one called MPT seven B. These are the ones that you can run on our laptop right now. And they're large, like 19 gigabytes in size and you need a relatively chunky laptop, but you are seeing this and they are, if not comparable, you do see, I think there is, you do see a bit of an arms race right now, and it's interesting where things will go because we've linked to this whole Google has no moat. Sorry. Open AI has no moat and neither do we memo that I shared from Google before, but right now we're not quite sure. I don't know if it's a function of organizations just having loads of access to cheap money and doing this, or people seeing it like, oh, this isn't actually defensive in the long term.Because now you see all these open models coming out. It might be comparable. It might be the case that if you can just get to the workloads already or get to the workflows, people are not gonna care that much in the same way that you know how loads of us end up using, sorry, loads of people end up using Microsoft Teams, not necessarily because it offersAsim Hussain: about it recently.Chris Adams: offers.The best user experience as someone trying to join a video call. Right. It's more the case that there's a workflow that people have, or there's a way to bundle some of this in. I wonder if that's where some of these network effects are actually more important than essentially the training staff and all and it's, and that's where the levers are more. So, yes, AI is interesting and cool, but it's actually much more about market structure, antitrust and stuff like that. That's probably gonna be more of the drivers perhaps.Asim Hussain: Oh, interesting. I see. It's not how powerful your model is, it's how you can integrate it into your existing business models take how can mon, how you can monetizing or even don't even monetize it, how you can use it to strategically win versus your competitors. And that might not even necessarily be like anything really to do with the raw power of the model.Chris Adams: We've gone a bit off the initial question, but Yeah. But yeah,Asim Hussain: chance, that's, that's a risk you have when you ask an AI question to this, to this podcast.Chris Adams: Yes to people who with possibly questionable data access to information. Should we move on to questions? So for the next ones, these might be ones which are more solid footings for us. Okay. So the next question was one about basically time and space, location shifting and time shifting when people are talking about the idea of carbon aware software.And the question is basically regarding location shifting, is the Green Software Foundation concerned that when everyone time shifts, To the same location or to the same greener grids that can increase the demand on the grid's energy, which should increase fossil fuel burning to meet said new demand.Now, Asim, you might need to unpack this, first of all, for people to understand what happens with the whole merit order for that, because it's not immediately obvious if you're not familiar with grid workings. Why lots of people using computing in one part of the world will lead to more fossil fuels burning other than literally just it's a part of fossil fuels, for example.Asim Hussain: That would be, let's say, if you had a frictionless capability to move your compute to anywhere in the world at any given moment in time, and you just picked. And every, and everybody in the world had exactly the same capability of frictionally moving their computer. Whatever's the greenness right now, it's probably gonna be France or somewhere in the Nordics.And then what would happen is, let's say in the next hour, it's France. There's the greenness in the world. Every single bit of compute in the entire world would just move to France. Then those data centers would then, or if they can theoretically handle that load, will then suck up all that green energy, which made them kind of the greenest grids.And those grids still need to make an energy for the people in France to boil their kettles and do all the other things they need to do. And so all they can do at that moment is burn stuff, typically burn stuff, you know, coal and gas and these things. Those are batteries. Those are chemical batteries. So you, they're the things that you can spin up.Gas, especially stuff you can spin up very quickly and so effectively that just burns more fossil fuels. And so that's basically, that's what would theoretically, this is very theoretical, that would theoretically happen, um, is if you did, if everybody did just move all their compute over to, let's say France, France would be forced at that moment in time to burn more coal and gas.Have I explained that correctly? Have I missed something out, Chris, or?Chris Adams: I think that's about right. The thing it might be worth us talking about or sharing in the show notes is an article I put together called Understanding Energy Trends. At the layer below the internet stack, which talks about this, there is a kind of really nerdy techno concept called like merit order.With the idea being that different kinds of energy have different costs, so things like solar and wind, once you've installed them, because you are getting the fuel from the sun, you don't have to purchase that extra sun to run it. So essentially the costs are almost free. So that's very low, right? Now there's other things which are designed to work, which are really redesigned, which are again, expensive to install.But once they're installed, the fuel is relatively cheap for the amount of power they get out. And like nuclear in a good example of this, where you can get loads out that way. Now you have other kinds of fuel like say coal and gas and so on. But broadly speaking, the higher the cost of the fuel you, you have a trade off where things can respond more quickly in response to demand, but they're usually dirtier.So the idea, that's the kind of the idea behind this, and I think the argument being made here is that if everyone moved all their computing to one part of the world, we would in induce all this extra demand, which could only be met. By things responding to the extra load on the electricity grid, which would usually be met by people spinning up really dirty, gas fired power stations or extra coal or stuff like that.I think that's the argument and that's essentially the question. Now that we've actually understood, explained the premise, I should ask you what is the kind of official response to this? Let's, is that likely to happen? Is this the thing we should be aware of and how do we respond to that then?Asim Hussain: My answer to this one is always, have you ever watched the TV series called The Wire? So watchChris Adams: Yes.Asim Hussain: watch The Wire.Chris Adams: not sure. I'm not sure where we're going, but go with this. All right? Yeah.Asim Hussain: with this. It's about gangs and police like in New York City, but there was one of the latest seasons, there's a gangster called, I think it's Marlo Stanfield. I remember one of the episodes, like one of his workers is telling him something.He turns around and goes, that's one of them good problems. And that's what I think about this thing. So someone's telling me a problem and I'm like, this is a good problem to have. If we are ever even remotely getting to the point where demand shifting is affecting a grid, that is a level of achievement, which is excellent.Yes. Okay. Yes, there are negative consequences to that approach, but we are not even remotely there right now. So worrying about that is I think, a little bit too hyperbolic at the moment. You shouldn't do something because if you take that thing to the absolute extreme, it will be negative, I think is.What I would say to this argument, I would say demand shifting is never going to be the one solution you have in your pocket to reduce your emissions of your application, your architecture, I always describe it as one of the things that you can do. It's one of the easier things to do. It gets you started on the much more challenging journey of energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, reducing the amount of energy you use, reduce the amount of compute you use.But it gets you there. And I think that's why a lot of people have been interested in carbon air computing. I always say it's not going to be the solution that solves climate change. It's nowhere near gonna be that solution, but it's a stepping stone on the journey there.Chris Adams: I think I would've asked that slightly differently actually. Now see, because when I see this question being asked, it's essentially will this demand cause people to do this? I think this has some assumption that people who are basically trying to move computing here, they're doing it because they're looking for kind of greener energy right? Now, I think there is one way that you can solve this purely from a just information point of view, and if you are looking for the lowest carbon intensity and you can see that the carbon intensity is increasing, thenAsim Hussain: I see. Yeah. Yeah.Chris Adams: you would just choose to not run it there. Right. So this is somewhat dependent on organizations having some of this information published and visible for people, but I think that's actually something that can be done.And the i e, even in places where this is not public information right now. So for example, in the uk this information is visible on a really clear basis right now, like the UK there is, I think there's a website called carbonintensity.org.uk, which publishes things on a very permissive license for this.France already has its data available that you can pull out, so if you're gonna do this, then I think you would just look before you deploy something, or you would build some software to check if you're gonna, if you're gonna make it worse. That feels like that would be one of the solutions there, but that feels like a thing that is something that will be made available to people in a number of different ways.Asim Hussain: You reminded me of a very interesting conversation I had with somebody from Google, cuz it created a service, started with v something and you pumped into that service. What then? I think it was the next day. So the next hour's workloads were going to look like. And then what the next, I'm gonna say tomorrow I think it's gonna be, I think it's day by day? But what tomorrow's carbon intense, the grid's carbon test is going to look like. And you actually pulled lots. You pulled, you didn't just. Didn't just like where's those carbon intensity? Push it there. You actually had a thought. You actually need to run quite a lot and I can't push it all in that one place.Let's, let me be more intelligent on where I put it. And the idea was thrown out there. What if this service like existed? What if we all collaborated? What if we all said tomorrow, and this is not an unlikely to happen, but what if you all like was so open that we said, do you know what I'm going to submit to this online database that I'm need to run this much compute?I need to run it tomorrow. I want to run in the greenest region, and it's scheduled it for everybody. And so you run in France, you run in Germany, you run in Norway, and we get it all together. That kind of openness, the data, I think would solve this problem as well, but I don't see anybody, any corporation being that open regarding their workload, future workload.Chris Adams: The thing that you just described there, Asim, was essentially how energy markets work, right?Asim Hussain: Oh,Chris Adams: And they're regulated markets where there is not one owner. You don't, where you, rather than just having only the Amazon Cloud or the Microsoft cloud, you have multiple things, right? So in order for that to be possible, you would need to have a.Kind of different structure or you need to have people who played a part in actually making sure things can be dispatched to the kind of correct actors in the role you'd need, like a feed in tariff for compute or stuff like that. I feel this is actually quite a nice chance to draw people's attention to a really interesting proposal that I felt from Adrian Cockcroft actually, who a, he's written a piece about why the whole kind of idea of trying to schedule workloads can be counterproductive, which I'm not totally sure. I agree with all of it because I think that whether you actually can see people shifting, creating that demand is another. I'm not sure if we have seen that, but I understand the kind of thrust of his argument.But the kind of real time carbon footprint standard that he's proposing feels like it'll go a long way to actually providing the numbers that people would actually have access to or need access to realize, am I gonna really doing this? But the other thing you could do is to just actually like price carbon into the cost of cloud, right?We already have spot markets. If you had in your spot markets, there was a spot plus, which basically had the cost of carbon at say a hundred Euros, a ton or a hundred dollars a ton, and you looked at that, then that would actually be a really, in my view, a fairly simple way to make sure you're not shifting all the compute to the worst places.For example, like again, like if you're gonna go like totally neoliberal and price based, then yeah, that's how you can do this stuff. But the other thing you can do is literally just go totally whacky, just have massive batteries and data centers the way people look like they're doing for other significant drawers of electricity.So for example, if you're looking at say, electric car charging stations, lots of them now have lots and lots of onsite storage to deal with the fact that car driving. It's really spiky, so most of the time it's not being used, but then people come to it and they need to pour a huge amount of power very quickly.Likewise, like high-end induction hobs, which have their own batteries inside it, to again, deal with this big spike in use. There's lots of kind of strategies you can use, which don't meet mean that you don't need to actually burn fossil fuels for this. It does involve nerding out about the grid, and that's one thing which is new to a lot of actual people who are working with this.So to an extent, I don't see it in the same way that you might see it. For example, Asim Cause I feel this is actually one that can be addressed using various techniques, people using other sectors which aren't technology, for example.Asim Hussain: I will just say it's probably clouded from having many conversations with people about carbon aware computing being shut down because of versions of this question. Yes, car- we like the, but if it was to be taken to the extreme, then it would destroy our whole infrastructure, which I think for me, I've had this question and in phrase as a response to me as a reason for why we can't even entertain looking at carbon aware computing.So that's where I, you've probably triggered my default defense mechanism against this question, but I, there's, I think there's a very nuanced, very important topic. I think it's important for you and me to have different opinions cause that's how we get or share all this important knowledge, uh, with the world.Yeah.Chris Adams: All right. Oh, there's one thing I should actually go add a bit of a kind of plug for. So there's some really interesting work from, I think it's Abel Souza and Noman Bashir. They've been publishing some fantastic papers talking about specifically the likely impacts of carbon air computing, what the savings could possibly be.And it is a kind of quite a technical paper. Actually, when I read, I was like, oh wow, there's a lot of numbers in these charts. But it's really good. I found it one of the most useful ones for informing my opinion about where this goes, and I'll make sure that we share some links to this cause I think it'll actually add some extra nuance to this conversation.The other thing to bear in mind is that if you just have this, then. Literally, it's not like large Hyperscale companies are not making enough money to buy batteries, right? If they're able to spend 70 billion on share buybacks in a given year, they can probably afford that. Buy is literally hundreds of megawatts of extra capacity.You could just have five or six hours of local battery storage so that you wouldn't even need to touch the grid. You just run it locally if you want it to be sure that your power is green, but that's a separate discussion. So I'm just gonna park that once again cuz this is a, I'm worried about sound like a bit of a broken record on this one.Asim Hussain: You do. I don't know where all this money is cause it doesn't find itself into my, into my budgets. But yeah.Chris Adams: There was a report from the Rocky Mountain Institute who were doing some analysis on green Bitcoin and things, and they'd said, with 115 billion US dollars, you could buy up every single coal fired power plant on Earth and replace it with renewables and.Asim Hussain: 115 billion?Chris Adams: 115. Yeah. Last year, the combined share buyback, so the money made by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as in they had so much money that they just thought, oh, I'm just gonna buy my own shares.That was more than $125 billion. So single handedly. That could solve it in a single year, but we've decided to spend it on, do you know the problem with climate change? Shareholders aren't getting enough money back. I feel that this is the thing that we need to be talking about. If when we're talking about green software, it's like where is this money going?Cuz we clearly have the money for this. It's just a case of priorities and we could be moving faster if we really wanted to. But that's again, I'll stop now because I'm a little bit ranty. I'm a bit worried. Sorry about that.Asim Hussain: I want, I want everybody to know that the entire time I worked for Microsoft Chris. Adams would always type whenever he is talking to me on chat, would always type m dollar sign, always m dollar sign for Microsoft. But I dunno why you don't do, I'm an intel now I suppose. I suppose there's no, there's, could you euro you could do in Intel, but I don't know, I dunno.Maybe there's another, maybe there's a reason why you don't put Euro, a euro signal into there for Intel. But anyway.Chris Adams: think it's, cuz this was actually something that I, when I used to read The Register, when I used to, when I first came into technology and they used to call, I think IBM was called Big Blue and it was, there was another one with the beast from somewhere. And uh, yeah, Microsoft wears M dollar. LikeAsim Hussain: What was it? SoChris Adams: because they made so much cash.Yeah. It wasn't me being smart, it was like, oh, total second hand whim, mate. Yeah. They are very effective at basicallyAsim Hussain: very, they, yeah. They'veChris Adams: shed-loads of money. Absolutely.Asim Hussain: yeah. That's what com, that's what corporations are there for.Chris Adams: Do you know what? In India, right, I didn't realize this, but in India, every large company as a condition of working inside India, which most populous nation in on earth, something like 20% of all the profits of all have to be like by law in invested in what India considers like priority areas. So specifically into renewables straight away, right?So there are all these mechanisms that people actually do that mean that we can direct funding to places to speed up action on climate. And if we're talking about technology and talking about carbon awareness and stuff like this, then we really need to be prepared to think about and have conversations about how much in the way of resources do we really wanna allocate towards what the science is spelling out and how much do we need to make sure that share price goes up, because yeah, okay. It's nice that people have like pensions and things and all that, but also it would be nice to have a livable world and having just this much money available feels, come on, let's like get this sorted.Literally one year would solve it, but that's another discussion. Anyway. Let's move to the next question because I think people listen to, if they're trying to here to learn about code, not about economics.Asim Hussain: we've turned into a, we started off with opinions on ai. We turned into an energy podcast, and now we're talking about capitalism. So let's just go, let's turn into a politics podcast. Let's just do it.Chris Adams: I guess it's everywhere. Let's move to, okay, next question.Asim Hussain: next question.Chris Adams: Okay. The question, this was one about this idea of some machines and some software running in a low carbon mode, and the question basically came out saying, why not just run low carbon mode all the time? Not just when the carbon intensity is high on dirty electricity for bits of software.This is essentially one of the questions that came from this. And I think, uh, this might be a reference to like things like Branch Magazine or even with your CarbonHack thing. One of the winning designs was, uh, software kit that would show different kinds of versions depending on how dirty the electricity was to stay inside a carbon budget.Asim over to you.Asim Hussain: It's an interesting question. Well, a, the user, I presume I, the way I've always imagined and the way you, in fact, you can use Branch Magazine. You can just go on Branch Magazine and say low, assume it's high. I dunno how the terminology, sorry, but low carbon mode all the time. I've always imagined these kind of UI modes in your system as something you can select if you wanted to or something we should auto select based upon that aspect of how, how carbon it is. So I, I've always imagined it's, it is user driven and I suppose if you've got a product and they, and you force yours into low carbon and the competitors doesn't, and all your users move over to competitors, then you've gotta factor that in as well.But I also think, Chris, is there like an argument here about, does that stop money from going into renew? I don't think it does. I think the money will go to renewables.Chris Adams: No, this basically, this isn't really about, uh, I don't think thisAsim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it was finance. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay, so the way that we designed this in Branch Magazine, cuz we were like playing around with this idea, we basically made it a thing that was user definable so they could choose to override this, but we would set a default to kind of. It was as much an education piece as anything else because for a lot of the time people aren't even aware that most of the time you don't even think about where the power comes from. So the idea that this is being foregrounded and the materiality is being exposed to you was the new idea for us. That was why we were doing it, to really emphasize this, because we thought this is a nice way to park back to some of the ideals of threat being something that's supposed to be open for everyone accessible and everything like that. So we figured if you design a low carbon mode, that kind of emphasizes the fact that the grid changes, but also at the same time emphasizes the fact that when you're using something, it should be accessible for people who cannot be who, who may be partially sighted or stuff like that.Then you can embed some of these other values in how you build things to communicate different kind of sensibility. So I think the general answer is a lot of the time people do quite enjoy having quite rich experiences and having a kind of sober or monkish experience all the time might not be particularly compelling for lots of people.And I, I think that's okay to actually be explicit about some of that right? You, I don't think it's realistic to think everyone only you ever wants to see some of this stuff or even make all those decisions for someone else. I think that might be a little bit too paternalistic, but that was my kind of take for it.But there are things you could do to kinda hide this. You could possibly design it so that. When you build something, there's certain things, there are ways to provide a rich experience whilst reducing the kind of resource impact in the same way that you can refactor code whilst reducing the amount of computation it needs to consume to do something.And I think that's the thing for it. But I figure like the thing you should probably do is just put it into the user agent or if you're look at, using a browser so you can have like a user agent of change where they decide this stuff themselves. You already have, do not track low bandwidth please. Stuff I think, stuff like that I think would be cool, but we don't have any browsers doing that yet, but this may be early days.Asim Hussain: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right, question four. This question is about Jevons Paradox. All right, so this basically says the question is given Jevons paradox insight number four in the state of green software report, how do we change the thought pattern that more is more in technology?Now, it might be worth just briefly explaining what Jevons Paradox is. Before we dive into this question, Asim, I could probably do it, have a go at talking about Jevons Paradox, if you wanna get ready for answering this particularly thorny question. Should I do that?Asim Hussain: you do it? Yeah. You do a better explanation of it.Chris Adams: Okay, so first of all, I'm gonna point people to the fact that this is the fourth insight in the report to buy some time.But basically, Jevons Paradox is a name given to the phenomena where when you increase the re the efficiency of a particular resource, using any resource, you can increase the absolute use, even though individually it's more efficient. So this initially came from hundreds of years ago when William Stanley Jones noticed that making coal fired steam engines more efficient meant that more people used coal fired steam engines in new places, which would lead to an increase in the absolute use of coal.And he was so worried about this that he thought we would run out of coal. So he started writing all these papers about, please could we not do this? This is terrifying. We're we are gonna stop progress if we make everything too efficient and hundreds of years later. This kind of applies with things like cloud computing and stuff like that, or it's often used as a way to say, you can't just talk about efficiency, you need to talk about absolute figures.So if you make something more efficient, you just result in more use. And the common example is cloud. So by making hyperscalers talk about cloud being much more efficient. But the flip side of that is because it's suddenly more efficient, more and more people have access to it, which increases the absolute usage of this.And we have seen absolute increases in just kind of technology and compute use. And I think that's one of the things that. Is what's inspiring this. But you also see it in things like ride sharing and stuff. There are examples of Uber and Lyft and other kinds of companies. When you make it really easy to hail a ride, you result in more people driving.You increase the miles driven in a given city because it's so much more convenient. It's also subsidized by venture capital as well, which makes it e uh, which makes it cheaper than other options, but that's one of the impacts you have. But broadly speaking, making things more efficient is said to have a kind of rebound, which can increase the total use.So that's it.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I just think it's, part of it is really just, it's about resource constraint. You're, cause we were talking about earlier on, weren't we? I remember what the context was, but we were talking about if you're resource constrained, you have to make different decisions and you don't use that resource as much just cause it's just, I think it was AI, just cuz it's not there.And so if you're resource constrained, if there's only 10 of something in the world, you'll just make choices that only use 10 of something in the world. But then if you make it 10 times more efficient, you'll still use all of the resources that you had and just use more of it. So I think that the argument here is as you're making things more efficient, that natural resource constraint, which was forcing you to make these trade offs and be not wasteful, at the very least, disappear.Then you can just, you just start being wasteful. So I think the solution here is there has to be a constraint some way of, it's not, you're not gonna stop. I don't think we're gonna stop Jevons power. We don't think there's any way we can really force the world not to make things more efficient, just because that's what we're just absolutely engineered to do.But what we need to do is to enact constraints, whether they're artificial, whether they're regulatory, whether they're some other aspect of it. We need to enforce that constraint and that's how we do it. Like for instance, when organizations set carbon targets and another kind of like targets to achieve.Right now we have this kind of, it's okay, you can, we just, we'll just carry on increasing. It's okay for now, but there needs to be a real extra constraint, which forces you into those actions is, I think that's the only way. That we're really going to deal with this cause I, I see it right now, even with ai, like as AI gets more and more efficient, we're just gonna use it more and more to solve problems.Inefficiently, but to, but conveniently. Yeah. Yeah. That's my answer.Chris Adams: Okay.Asim Hussain: Do I win?Chris Adams: I think so I'm gonna ho, I'm gonna wait for the jury to be out and we'll put that to the listeners. That's what we should do. So basically, I think the main thing I'm getting from what you said there is that you do need to be prepared to talk about absolute figures here, and that's one of the key things, soAsim Hussain: Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily agree with absolutes. I would just say there needs to be another for, or not even just one, multiple other forcing functions to force your usage down, whatever that is. I don't know what it is.Chris Adams: Oh, okay. I guess this is a little bit like when people talk about carbon budgets on websites or carbon budgets on services you've got, that's a decision that people have made to go for that. I have a bit of a struggle with this term because when people talk about Jevons paradox, it's often used as a kind of way to say it doesn't matter that you're, you are talking about efficiency because you, you are just gonna make it back.And there is a kind of subtext which basically says, why are you even trying? It does feel a bit kind of "okay doomer" and if we look at the last say, couple of decades, yeah, we have seen. If we follow like the IEA, the International Energy Agency, what the energy people who look at how much power is being used by stuff.They basically say that over the last, say 10 years or so, we've seen, we've seen a massive increase in the use of computing. But if you just look at the energy usage, we have not seen the corresponding at the same increase in the energy being used so that we use more computing. But the energy's been more or less level. Now, you can take up issues with those numbers because when you look at numbers that include, say China and stuff, like the numbers look quite a bit higher than what were from the IEA, but that's not peer reviewed and we can't really use those numbers yet. So they, there is some contention there, but I feel this also just ignores the fact that people have been moving faster than Jevons Paradox to keep things better than they otherwise would've been.And I feel like when this is rolled out, a lot of the time it's not rolled out in a way that says, is there a 10% impact? Is it, do you get 10% of rebound? So if you're doing 20% of savings, there's a net saving here. And like without these kinds of numbers, I think it's actually, if it ends up being quite an academic and difficult thing to engage with and like, I think that's one of the struggles I have when we talk about some of this, because it's often used to either disincentivize people trying to make like honest and effective changes in the efficiency of stuff, or it's being used to, I know almost as a bit of a gotcha to say it's still so it's still doing this and I feel like, oh, congratulations. Oh, I'm really glad you told me that. We should be thinking in absolute terms about the climate, right?I'm like, okay, yeah, surely we've established this years ago. So that's the thing. But this doesn't actually answer the question of how do we change the thought pattern that more is more in tech? I suspect what you said Asim was this idea like, I don't know. My assumption would be that you do need to actually be prepared to think about absolute figures and how do you stay inside those and you consider those a constraint in the same way that you might design something that has to be accessible. You say it has to be staying inside these kind of targets that need to be improving each year. That's what the ITU, which is the International Telecommunications Union and the Science-Based Targets Initiative. All these folks are basically saying, Yeah, the absolute carbon emissions of the ICD sector has to be halved by 2030.And I think that's one of the things you might need to do is actually have some narrative that says, oh yeah, we're gonna halve our emissions by this much, and then how do we fit that into how we work outside of technology? There are ways to talk about some of this, cuz this is essentially, this is a little bit edging into the whole discussion about do you need to, is it growth first or is it, do we have to, do we target growth so we can have nice things or can we just aim for nice things automatically, directly.Yeah, because there's things like, yeah, donut, economic, there is like typical kind of economic thinking, which is the thing we need to do is get really rich. And we might poison ourselves along the way and endure all this damage, but because we're so rich, we can then undo all that damage and somehow, I'm not sure that somehow unmake the extinct, all these things which we made extinct along the way.That's one of the arguments around growth. So you have enough wealth that should pay for things, but schools have thought like donut economics and so on, and they basically say there's a social foundation of things everyone should have access to. There's certain kind of overshoot and like we can target making sure that everyone has enough of a social foundation.By while staying inside this zone, if we just target that stuff first, if we think about the things you want to have immediately, so rather than just focusing on get rich first, we can focus on, let's make sure everyone has access to shelter, has access to healthcare, stuff like that. But again, it's like using needs is what you might think about it.Like what user needs can you meet here that you're targeting first, rather than trying to grow for something large there but,Asim Hussain: Yeah, I agree with you, but I just think it falls into that same bucket of arguing, which is, here's a bunch of ways the world could be better, and if we did it this way, wouldn't it be amazing? We would just have all these issues would be solved, and I'm always like nodding my head and going, that sounds beautiful, Chris.I would love that world to exist. I just have. Absolutely no idea how it's even remotely possible to get there, given the way the current engine works. Actually, the only way, I'll tell you, the only way I think this will ever work, and this is the only way, and I think I, and I do think this is not gonna be something that happens by 2030.I think this is something maybe our children might be able to, we'll be dead. We'll be dead by the time this, this can change. We're talking about like changing the Overton window, talking about changing the Overton window, like we are talking about A cultural change that will take generations is I think what it would really take.I don't think this is gonna happen in our lifetimes. I think the world that you've described is a beautiful world. My dream, it will exist and I think it'll only exist if the culture changes and the culture changes worldwide and dramatically, and it'll only change if every generation comes along and like just shifts it a little bit and say, I'm of the generation, it was all the money for us, so everybody just wanted money.It was like, what job gets you the most money? Okay, let's take that job. And I think hopefully I'm gonna raise my children to be a little bit different, to think different, to think what is the most positive impact you can have on this role? How can you be a better custodian of the planet? I think these kind of changes to drive, I think it's gonna take generations.I really do. And I think it's something we actually do have to do,Chris Adams: Or hand power to people who are not optimizing for the things that we, you and me might have been optimizing for, perhaps. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Christ, I've gone into politics again.Asim Hussain: Yeah. We've done it again!Chris Adams: All right. All right. This is our last question in the mailbag, and I think we might have to have another episode to answer some of these questions if there's interest.We don't know if there will be. So are there any notable examples of organizations or projects that have successfully implemented green software practices? What can we learn from them? That's the question. And Asim, I'll put this one to you cuz I suspect you've had a few conversations with people doing some of this.Asim Hussain: Yeah. I think that in terms of things that have been published and have got large enough to have significant impact, there's some of the stuff that happened at Microsoft, so the Carbon Aware Windows is I think one of the bigger implementations of carbon aware computing and I would, now that's a direct line between carbon aware windows to carbon aware Xbox.I can draw that line for, oh, we need, still need to get those people onto the podcast if we can. So I think those are really great examples. And I, and I was actually Scott Chamberlain, who's my lead now at Intel, he's the one that was driving a lot of the carbon aware. Windows work for ages until he got that out.And so that's like Windows now does carbon aware updates. I know sounds small, but updates like the type of workloads are very carbon aware and shiftable. So I think that's a really good example. Again, like very similar carbon aware work from Google, like earlier on. That was almost like two, three years ago now.They did similar stuff with their data center workloads. I think the rest of the work that's happening in this space, there's a lot of work still happening right now in the measurement space. I know there's smaller bits of consultancy work that's going on with the larger companies. I don't know the specifics of, I don't think there's anything that we could re talk about publicly and also that would wow people, cause it's just the, the guts of people, organizations, and the work they do.But I think to me, those are always two of the big wins in use cases. And it's always interesting me that those are both carbon aware examples because the investment you need to implement carbon awareness on the scale of which you could reach with it in a very short period of time is very impressive.Chris Adams: Okay. Alright. Thank you Asim. Alright, so that's carbon aware programming. So there are examples that you can point to using carbon aware programming that create measurable figures from this. And that's like ones which are not particularly latency aware, but are convenient that happened in the background, which don't result in a kind of poor user experience, but still deliver some carbon savings, yeah?Asim Hussain: The one thing I'll add to that I think is that what will drive more of the work in energy efficiency and kind of hardware efficiency in all these other spaces, I think is measurement. I think is ubiquitous, making these things very easy to function. I think though, I think the work that you've done with Co2.js And really making the ability to measure this stuff very, very easy is what's gonna drive a lot of the kind of the next generation of changes, and it probably already has, I just dunno any of the success stories there yet.There's probably the loads of websites. Yeah. But,Chris Adams: So actually this is a nice way to talk about, or a nice segue for what I think is interesting and there's, there's some work by company called Sentry Computing. So a talk at Grafana Con about basically how us tracking all the metrics for compute usage meant that we were able to reduce our own usage by X percent.That was a cool thing in my view. But the reason I'm talking about this is not only has he shared some of that stuff, But he also ended up proposing a kind of proposed, a new HTTP response header specifically to the IETF as an RFC to basically say, this is how HTTP should work. We should bundle these numbers into HTTP so that there is a header for like carbon emissions, like Scope two or something like that.Now, whether that's the correct number to use is another matter. But I think that's one of the examples of focusing on the efficiency part and the kind of resource usage and energy level. If we use the Green Software Foundation way of thinking about this, which is carbon, uh, and it's hardware efficiency, energy efficiency, those are the things I, I think the ones that are worth looking at.There's also this other thing that, I dunno if the numbers are big yet, and I would love to get a second opinion, but there's a company called Storj. Which is S T O R J. They are basically making claims about massively reducing the hardware footprint of providing object storage, like S3 style object storage by using loads and loads of unused capacity in data center storage.Just the same way that Airbnb can use unused capacity in houses and hotels and things like that. And they're basically doing this.Asim Hussain: unused if they're using it?Chris Adams: So the idea is that let's say you've got a bun, a loads of service, and they have free space on hard discs, which aren't being used by anyone right now. So they do that and they use this technique called erasure encoding.So you take it to file, you split it up enough points so that you don't have to replicate the same file like five times if you just replicate enough of the overlapping shards of it. And are they, I'll share the link for that. Cause I think it's interesting. I don't know enough about the, what kind of peer review have you seen for the numbers, but I think it's extremely clever and it's one of the few examples I've seen of people doing something on the hardware efficiency part of green software that I think is cool and it ends up being sub substantially cheaper than using object storage from some of the big providers, for example. So it's, we're talking like around 20% of the price and the figures they say is it's maybe 70% lower carbon footprint for storing a terabyte of data over a year compared to some of the big providers or a data center.So that's the stuff that I think is interesting, but I need to caveat that with that. I don't have any independent verification of that stuff yet, even though I think it's super duper cool. All right.Asim Hussain: Chris Adams, always a scientist looking for peer, reviewing his statements; Asim Hussain always like shoots from the hip, whatever stat comes to his mind. There you go.Chris Adams: Alright, Asim, I think this has taken us till the end of our time. We have allotted for our mailbag episode. I really enjoyed this. So thank you very much for coming on and, uh, we should probably wrap it up and say thank you to everyone for listening and we'll have more of the regular programming with interviews with for more experts coming up in the coming weeks.All right.Asim Hussain: Alright,Chris Adams: Thanks mate. Take care of yourself. Have a lovely week and everyone enjoy. For those of you who do celebrate it in America, happy free from us Brits tomorrow here.Asim Hussain: Commiserations to the Brits. Go back.Chris Adams: Alright, leave it like that. Torah. 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 Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode. 

Join us for a special episode of Environment Variables as we celebrate over a year of bringing you the best insights on Green Software! From open source's role in reducing software emissions to making green changes in organizations, carbon-aware computing, and more, we revisit the most captivating moments from our top 10 most popular episodes. Listen to snippets from our discussions with industry experts and dive into the world of Green Software, as we reflect on our journey, share valuable knowledge from our guests and hosts, and continue to raise awareness about the importance of Green Software. Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterEpisodes:How can Open Source Help Reduce Software Emissions? | Ep 4 [1:40]How do we make Green Changes in Organisations? | Ep 3The Week in Green Software: Green Software Legislation | Ep 15The Week in Green Software: Calculating Software Emissions with Navveen Balani & Srini Rakhunathan | Ep 20 Carbon Aware Computing | Ep 2 Fact Check: Sara Bergman & Software Carbon Intensity | Ep 13 Amazon's Customer Carbon Footprint Tool | Ep 1From Carbon Aware to Carbon Intelligent | Ep 9 Green Networks | Ep 10 Community Clouds and Energy Islands with Dawn Nafus and Laura Watts | Ep 14Resources:Building Green Software Book Pre-Release | Anne Currie, Sara Hsu & Sara Bergman. State of Green Software Survey Report | GSFIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!TRANSCRIPT BELOW:Chris Skipper: Hello and welcome to this special episode of Environment Variables. For those of you who don't know, it's been just over year since the Environment Variables podcast was released, and we thought we would take a look back at the best moments over our first year. This podcast started off as an idea from Asim Hussain.The director of the Green Software Foundation and has blossomed into a beacon for green software awareness on the internet. Now, just as a disclaimer, you may not have heard my voice before. I am Chris Skipper, and I am the producer of Environment Variables. I don't often get in front of the microphone and would say, I started this journey not knowing a lot about software or its effect on the environment.However, I now have accumulated this assumed knowledge or full knowledge of a lot of the facts and terminology that surround green software, which has benefited my day-to-day life in the way that I use computers and the internet as a quote unquote layperson. It has also made me a great addition to any pub quiz team, but that's enough about me.In this episode, we will be looking at the moments of our top 10 most popular episodes of Environment Variables, which started in April of 2022. This is purely based on listener stats, so we thought it would be nice to revisit some of these tidbits For your listening pleasure, as always, links to each of the episodes will be down in the show notes below, or if you want to listen to all of the episodes of Environment Variables.You can as always visit https://podcast.greensoftware.foundation, preferably after this episode. So to kick us off, our first moment we're going to look at was from an episode entitled, How Can Open Source Help Reduce Software Emissions? Where Asim was joined by Chris Lloyd-Jones, affectionately known as CLJ, or sealjay as is his Twitter handle.Head of open technologies at Avenade and co-chair of the open source working group at the Green Software Foundation. And Dan Lewis-Toakley Green Cloud Lead at ThoughtWorks and the other co-chair of the open source working group at the Green Software Foundation. Now, in this episode, they discussed the benefits of open source versus closed source, what opensource tools are out there, and how they can help reduce software emissions.This was the fourth episode of Environment Variables, and the quote here features both of our guests. But with a particular tone of impending doom from CLJ himself.Dan Lewis-Toakley: It's about engaging the community and growing adoption of this tool and similar tools rather than necessarily holding it tight to our chest and trying to have the secret source that, you know, that we want to provide to our clients or to partners.So that was a, that's sort of a, a key aspect. Different license types, more restrictive ones can often be a deal breaker for some companies and organizations. To adopt software.Chris Lloyd-Jones: Yeah. I dunno about you, but sometimes it can also feel like, you know, when you've got a toddler or a child is holding a suite and you have to kind of pry their fingers off it at times for an organization, it can be quite hard to make that decision.And I say that because we, we've contributed some code as Avenade, the Green Software Foundation, to start that CICD pipeline tooling. But one of the reasons why I push for that is because I also think if you keep that secret source close to your heart, you run the risk of people, first of all, jumping over you because they just want to get things done.They want to get things done quickly. What you do becoming out of date and stale, then you've invested a whole load of time in something which isn't compatible with what people are now using. You can also just look like a, a bad actor, particularly in fields like this where we're not, I don't know, making a search tool and comparison to like, you know, the whole open, open search, elastic search for raw rate.We're trying to actually solve a problem here where fundamentally, if the world doesn't go a zero, we might all die in a massive heat test. There's good reasons to do it.Chris Skipper: Moving on to something a bit lighter in tone, these next two snippets come from our third episode of Environment Variables, which has the title, How Do We Make Green Changes in Organizations? This was the first time EV regular Anne Currie joined us on the podcast. Anne is a tech ethicist at Container Solutions and one of the organizational leads at the Green Software Foundation.Not only that, but she is a sci-fi author and a non-fiction author who is currently co-writing the new O'Reilly book, Building Green Software with other GSF members, Sara Hsu and Sara Bergman, which is currently in pre-release via the publisher's page, linked below in the show notes. In episode three, Asim and Anne talked about what are the real factors that drive organizations choices around increasing efficiency within their organization?What needs to happen for senior leaders to make sacrifices for sustainability and can regulation push for real change inside organizations? They also discussed their love of ops people, developers, and the role of middle managers, which is what this first quote from Anne is about.Anne Currie: There's been quite a lot of psychological thinking, organizational thinking about how do you make changes in organizations and because a lot of it came from changing the finance industry.Cause it had to really change, uh, after the, after the big crash in 2008, 2009, and they did loads and loads of psychological research and organizational psychological research. And what they found was that really unless middle managers decided to do it, it all stopped. You know, they would stop it going up and they stop it going down, which is where I think the tech conferences are very good because they tend to be attended by people in the middle managers, senior architects.If you can get them on board, then that's all that's really required. Top down, get stopped by them. Bottom up, get stopped by them.Chris Skipper: I also wanted to include this next snippet from Asim, as it includes one of his key beliefs about green software, which is that it can only take a few people to make changes within an organization to set them on the right path to making green changes and green choices in relation to software-based decisions.Asim Hussain: The first time I got the hint that this might not be the right direction or there might be a different direction, was when I, we started talking about regulation, when there starts to be hints of regulation on the horizon. And one thing I realized, I mean, just the conversation, just the thread of regulation opens more doors than anything else. Like for instance, one of the things I'd learned early in my years at, at Microsoft was that you really do have to find customers. You can't just like be waving around going, Hey, I'm really passionate about technology and I know my area and, and you know, like if we were to build this feature, you know, I, I, trust me, trust me, a lot of people would love it that no one's paying attention.You've gotta come in with like, I've got five customers. They all want this feature. This is how much money they wanna spend. If they get this feature, we should prioritize this. Let's get this prioritized and be, okay. Look, let's, let's do this. That regulation surpassed that, opened the doors, surpassing that fear.I, I, I used to work in investment banking. And one of the lessons I learned leaving investment banking was there's only two things people really care about. And that's fear, fear and greed. Fear about fear, I think is greater. I think fear and regulation is greater than greed of, of, of money. So I think that's a direction that would really help us out a lot is more regulation in this space.Chris Skipper: Now leading on to a very serendipitous segue here. Our next snippet comes from an episode titled The Week in Green Software: Green Software Legislation. This was one of our first episodes of a newer format called The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS, which is a news and events roundup of everything going on in the world of green software.On this episode, Ismael Velasco, who was one of the researchers that helped out with the recent 2023 State of Green Software survey again, links in the show notes below, talks about the dense legislative landscape around green software and technology and energy regulations. Everything from France's Digital environmental footprint reduction legislation to the UK's greening government ICT, and digital services strategy. This quote is about green public purchasing.Ismael Velasco: The regulatory movement at institutions are driving extends also to what is known as sustainable public procurement, or green public procurement, or green public purchasing, or sustainable public purchasing. And it's the idea that more and more governments are choosing to develop environmental standards for purchasing products, and that movement toward environmental informed procurement is rapidly accelerated around software specifically, and this matters again, how governments choose to purchase counts. Governments around the world spend an estimated 11 trillion in public contracts every year representing approximately 12% of global GDP.At a national level, this varies even more. So some governments will spend no more than two or 3% of GDP, but other governments purchasing represents up to 57% of GDP in some countries, so how governments choose to purchase has a significant impact.Chris Skipper: This next quote comes from an episode that featured Navveen Balani of Accenture, also part of the steering committee of the Green Software Foundation and Srini Rakhunathan of Microsoft. Titled The Week in Green Software Calculating Software Emissions. Asim sat down with our guests to take a deep dive into the process behind Accenture's use of the Green Software Foundation software carbon intensity specification to calculate a measure to track and ultimately reduce the carbon emissions of one of its internal reference applications.If you would like to learn more about the GSF's SCI specification, we have a whole Environment Variables episode on it linked in the show notes below. In this snippet, Srini talks about the use and value of the SCI specification. Srini Rakhunathan: It's gonna change the way we look at carbon value, or how are we systemically capturing monitoring data? The intent of the project is to be able to provide a value, a carbon emissions value, which you can use. It's more for action for you to continuously iterate and figure out where are you at a particular milestone after you have taken some of the measures provided as part of the SCI specs. Which is around making it more carbon aware, making it more efficient or energy efficient or all of it.So you need a way to tell whether you have progressively made it past your different milestones, whether you're continuously reducing or you're stagnant, or you're increasing because it's always possible that you need to pull all these parameters to make sure, because we are not building applications just to make it sustainable, right? We are building applications to make money for your business.Asim Hussain: Add value to the world, let's put it that way.Srini Rakhunathan: Exactly. And so you need a way to easily calculate across your different hosting infrastructure, whether you do it on the cloud or on-prem. You host your app on your laptop. The project aims to tap into the different data sets available and, abstract away the calculation algorithm and just provide you a value, most intelligent value. That's what we would say when we were kickstarted it, and I think it's going good. We should probably have something really cool coming out of this.Chris Skipper: Now, this next episode definitely increased my green software vocabulary with a particular focus on terms such as time shifting, location shifting, curtailment, and many other terms related to carbon aware computing, which happens to be the title of said episode. Here, Asim sat down with guests, Scott Chamberlain, formerly of Microsoft and Henry Richardson, of Watttime they talked about how we can build sustainable software that reduces the impact on the environment and how these decisions may just lie in the hands of the developers instead of the CSR teams.So if you were as confused about those terms as I was, I suggest you listen to this episode in full. But to give you a slice of just how these work, here's a snippet from our guests.Henry Richardson: So this is a really interesting disconnect that we're seeing right now. And as especially in the near future, load flexibility will have a lot of emission savings potential cause we'll be able to shift out of those dirty periods into the curtailment periods.But once we eventually attain those a hundred percent or near a hundred percent clean grids, the flexibility won't be saving emissions directly, but it will be enabling a hundred percent clean grid because you'll be following wind and solar. And if we didn't have that flexibility, we would have to do fossil resources. So like it's an essential piece of a clean future grid. But it's gonna be harder to quantify the benefit of it in the future.Scott Chamberlin: That, that's a great way of putting it, Henry. It's, it's, we get to clean grids faster the more we have carbon awareness, because carbon awareness allows us to maximize the use of our renewables, whereas today, we're already curtailing them.Right. I think that's, that's an excellent way of putting that.Henry Richardson: Exactly.Chris Skipper: And just over the halfway point, speak of the devil. Our next quote comes from that SCI episode. It's an episode of Fact Check with Sara Bergman and Software Carbon Intensity. Fact check is another format of episode on Environment Variables, where we take a deeper dive into the bigger questions in a one-to-one discussion with a special guest.In this instance, Sara Bergman, senior software engineer at Microsoft and an individual contributor to the green software foundation's software, carbon intensity project discusses not only her own green software journey, but the software carbon intensity ISO standard, why it excludes carbon offsets and fact checking what that tells us about offset based green software claims from Google to blockchain.Sara Bergman: In an ideal world, elimination and offsetting would be the same. We are not in an ideal world where in we don't have perfect technology, so they are not the same. If you eliminate something, it means you never emitted it. It stays in the ground, doesn't go up in the atmosphere. However, if you offset, there are several different ways of doing that. One's most talked about is forestation. So you plant trees, which in itself is great. It's good for biodiversity as well. It's good for oxygen that we breathe, uh, but there are a number of problems surrounding this. There has been reports of projects where trees were planted, for example, and then later they were deforested anyway. There are also other studies that should suggest that there isn't enough space to plant the amount of trees we would need to offset all of the emissions considering the rate emissions are growing at.So there are a bunch of questions there. Same with something that more talked about recently as the carbon captures. It's like a giant vacuum that sort of sucks carbon directly out of the atmosphere. There are very few functioning examples of this, and they are extremely costly and it is betting our future on a technology which isn't really mature enough to hold up to this promise. I mean, hopefully it will be, but I think it's a dangerous bet.Chris Skipper: We now go all the way back to April 11th, 2022 when our very first episode of EV was published. Amazon's customer carbon footprint tool. In this episode, Asim was joined by guests Chris Adams, now host of Environment Variables, Sara Bergman, and Danielle Erickson. As they discuss the impact that Amazon's customer carbon footprint tool is having on the green software landscape, how do services like AWS affect climate change and what are the effects on the environment of these huge data centers?We also learned about how you can use your heat from greenhouses to grow tomatoes. In this particular snippet, we actually have a link to our last quote about the SCI standard, as Asim talks about how the open source nature of Amazon's customer carbon footprint tool relates to this.Asim Hussain: And I especially like the fact that because cloud carbon footprint is open source, not only is your methodology public, but your data.And the, the underlying data assumptions at a very low granular level are public. I can see what is the energy consum if I'm using this particular server, this particular load, that data is public and we're actually using that in the foundation, in the software carbon intensity standard. Where, where you leveraging that data cuz it helps engineers kind of calculate the carbon emissions of, you know, processes or estimate the carbon emissions of processes so they can then make those kinds of decisions. So it's kind of the openness of the data is I think, also missing with these tools. But I've also heard it's extremely difficult for Amazon and Google and Microsoft to make this data public.And it's not only revealing competitive information. There might also be legal constraints. You know, if you reveal some of this information, you, the SEC might come after you because you're revealing proprietary information. There's actually lots of complications around that from what I've heard.Chris Skipper: Next up, we have a pair of quotes from episode nine of Environment Variables titled From Carbon Aware to Carbon Intelligent. In this episode, Chris Adams is joined by Colleen Josephson of VMware Philipp Wiesner of TU Berlin, and EV regular Sara Bergman, as they discuss the opportunities with making first carbon aware and then carbon intelligent computing. This episode featured a true plethora of terms, variability, curtailment, disaggregation, 5g, 6g, delay tolerant networks, intermittent computing, IoT, and even a short segue about Raspberry Pi's, or make an appearance in this action packed episode. In this first quote, Philipp explains variability.Philipp Wiesner: Variability can be quite dramatic. So in France for example, they have clean, not clean maybe, but like low-carbon energy because of all the nuclear power they are deploying throughout the day. So there you have barely any potential. But then there's regions like Germany for example, which are very interesting because they're super variable like Germany employees comparably much wind power as well as solar power. So at many times of the day, they manage to have large fractions of the grid provided by green energy. But if neither sand nor wind available, we burn brown coal, which is pretty much the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. This is why variability is really crazy. Like within a normal day, you can expect twice or like 50% fluctuations.That could be that one kilowatt hour that you consume now is twice as dirty if you consume the same kilowatt hour a few hours later and within a few days, you can even see like the difference between the min and the max can be factor four or something. So one kilowatt hour can really vary from 100 grams CO2 up to 400 grams or or more 500 grams. Yeah.Chris Skipper: And following up, we have one of the most memorable quotes from Colleen.Colleen Josephson: The same thing comes in with upgrades. So if you look at upgrading hardware in data centers or telecommunications hardware, so 5G I think, got some bad press for how much power the base stations consume. But what's actually true about it is that the power consumed per bit transmitted has gone down significantly. So there's a good advantage to upgrading your hardware, but then you know, what about this hardware you're getting rid of everything that we produce has this concept of embodied emissions. It takes resources and carbon to produce this hardware, so you have to really carefully look at that sort of trade off.It turns out that keeping our devices, especially smaller devices in use for as long as possible, is one of the greenest things that we can do.Chris Skipper: Yes, so keeping smaller devices in use for as long as possible is one of the greenest things we can do as individuals. But what about bigger entities, corporations, organizations, or even networks?That's where our next quote comes from In an episode entitled Green Networks, episode 10 of Environment Variables. Host Chris is joined by Eve Schooler, principal engineer and director of Emerging IoT Networks at Intel and Romain Jacob of ETH Zurich. They discuss how can we reduce the energy produced by networks? How could we leverage current research to make the internet more energy efficient? Two very big questions of which one answer is provided in this next snippet from our guests.Romain Jacob: What if we were to redesign indeed those wired networks? So that reliability is not something we get rid of, but we modulate the requirements we set there and say, reliability is just one objective.How much performance degradation are we willing to tolerate in order to save on energy? To give a very concrete and simple example, most traffic on the internet is driven by human activity, right? And human activity has a very serious seasonal pattern. We use the networks more at certain time of the day than not at others.It's very easy to think that we could turn off part of this networks for certain parts of the day, because we don't need that much bandwidth, and if we do, we might be able to tolerate a bit more delay than at peak hours. It's very similar to turning off the public lights on the streets, you know, at night when nobody's driving.Right. It's the same principle.Eve Schooler: Or even in your home, right? The analogy of one's parents growing up, don't forget to turn off the lights. It's exactly the same analogy.Romain Jacob: Yeah. It's the same idea, right? And there is no reason this cannot be done. We know we can do it. The question is how far can we push it? One limitation factor, one blocking factor at the moment is how quickly we can turn things on and off, right? Because switching on a router or switch takes as of today in the orders of several minutes, right? So it's not something that you can just do multiple times for hours or so. Because essentially your network will be completely inoperable. It can be changed. If we were to change the hardware, if we want to change the operating systems we run on those machines, we could improve on that. How far can we go? This is kind of an open research question at the moment.Chris Skipper: We have come to our final episode on this list, which is Community Clouds and Energy Islands. In this episode, host Chris is joined by Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of the University of Edinburgh. As they explore community clouds, data centers, energy regulation, and projects on the Islands of Orkney.One of the key talking points in this episode was how we've moved from a more decentralized internet running on centralized power to a more centralized internet, running on more decentralized power. Is this the only computing model of the future? What could a decentralized internet running on decentralized power look like?We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also the edge of the grid, which is what this first quote from Dawn is about.Dawn Nafus: One of the things that's really been heating up right now on social media, you might imagine is with the recent changes, shall we say to Twitter. There are a lot of folks like myself who have moved over to Mastodon.On Mastodon, we've been having a rip roaring conversation about what would it take to actually stand up a Mastodon server in a place like Orkney where stuff is in fact community run and where there actually is community benefit to how the energy actually works and how it's organized. And there are a million challenges to that that we can talk about, but that's that next step where, once you get beyond scheduling right, you can start to think about all these other social implications that are far deeper than just, you know, writing some scheduling code.Chris Skipper: I also wanted to include this quote about regulations from Laura.Laura Watts: Regulation is one of the biggest challenges to what we're talking about for energy and data, and thinking about how we do things like the ecovisor, and that is manage assets because you need to be able to have permission from the regulator to basically switch these things on and off or be able to have any impact on the grid because keeping the lights on is an absolute commitment. So if you are going to start changing the load, your data's gonna get into this space and thinking, how do we write code for using different amounts of energy sources that's gonna change the load on the grid?And that starts getting into regulatory issues. And it seems like a dull thing, but actually it's a really important space to start talking about, because we can have huge impacts on what the grid looks like. What does a data electricity grid combined look like in the future? That's a regulatory and governance question. As much as it is a technical, how do we shov the data about and change what the software looks like?Chris Skipper: So we have come to the end of this episode of Environment Variables. I hope you enjoyed this year roundup. So what have we learned from the first year of the Environment Variables podcast? Well, it is safe to say that when we started this podcast, there weren't that many stories on mainstream news sites that mentioned green software.However, we are now able to produce not only a weekly episode that covers news topics related to green software. But we have a fantastic newsletter with amazing resources that will keep you up to date with the latest and greatest regarding green software that goes out weekly. Link in the show notes below.We also learned that despite all the real and heavy facts regarding carbon emissions of software, there is even realer and heavier optimism in the community. So here's a great big thank you to you, the listener, for continuing to support this podcast. As I mentioned before, you can find links to all the shows in this episode below or alternatively, you can visit https://podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to all of the episodes of Environment Variables. You can also find out more about the Green Software Foundation, including resources and tools related to green software at https://greensoftware.foundation, that's https://greensoftware.foundation In any browser.Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode when we'll be having a very special episode of Environment Variables again. So keep an eye out for that. Bye for now.

In this episode of Environment Variables, we cover the State of Green Software Report with the Green Software Foundation’s very own lead researcher Tamara Kneese. She and host Chris Adams delve into the insights from the report including key topics such as the carbon footprint of crypto mining, regulations for generative AI, and the role of consulting firms in shaping emerging technologies. They also discuss how the results highlighted the impact of the tech industry, AI sustainability, and the need for responsible innovation. To find out just how interesting the results of the survey have been and everything in between tune in now!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteTamara Kneese: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterKey Talking Points:State of Green Software Survey Report | GSF [3:28]Measuring carbon emissions is crucial for scaling sustainable AI | SOGS Survey Report [15:15]Web3 rings alarm for green software practitioners | SOGS Survey Report [23:13]Software legislation has quadrupled in the last decade  | SOGS Survey Report [32:32]New Green Software Developments in the US | Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights | OSTP | The White House [37:15]Resources:Responsible AI is green AI | SOGS Survey Report [13:43] Decarbonization alone cannot make software green | SOGS Survey Report [13:43]Trustworthy and Responsible AI | National Institute for Standards and Technology [37:58]Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox | Yale Law Journal [38:54]Amazon workers press company on climate change response after Pakistan floods | NBC [39:05] 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:Tamara Kneese: I think there's much more of a sense of urgency from policymakers, from advocates, from activists, from researchers, scientists who are looking at the numbers and looking at the data and thinking, we really need to do something now. And I think it's all part of the same general wave of really trying to find a way to live with tech in a way that is more sustainable, in a holistic sense, in a way that is actually good for people and for the planet.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, the podcast where we explore the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and today we have a fascinating conversation lined up for you. Joining us today is Tamara Kneese, the lead researcher at the Green Software Foundation.And today we'll be diving deep into her involvement in the groundbreaking state of green software report and at the Green Software survey for 2023. This survey aims to shed light on the current landscape of green software and the challenges and opportunities it presents. In this episode, we'll explore tomorrow's role in designing the survey, her research findings, and the implications for the future of sustainable software development.We'll dive into the various insights provided by the survey that includes in identification of specialist green software tools, the progress made in decarbonizing software, and the potential of software to contribute to renewable energy infrastructure. So whether you're a software developer or an environmental enthusiast, or simply curious about the role of technology in shaping our planet's future, this episode is for you.So that's me being talking for a while. Let's welcome Tamara Kneese to Environment Variables. Tamara, the floor is yours. Please introduce yourself.Tamara Kneese: Thank you, Chris. So I'm Tamara Kneese and I'm the lead researcher at the Green Software Foundation. Very excited to be here with you. I'm an academic with a background in media studies, science and technology studies and gender studies. And now I'm about to start a new role as the project director of Data and Society's newly launched Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab.Chris Adams: Wow. Congrats. That's a new development. This is how I spoke and that's, oh, I'm really glad to hear that actually.Tamara Kneese: Thank you.Chris Adams: Cool. You're welcome. Yeah. Okay. So if you have not listened to this podcast before, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director at the Green Web Foundation, and I work at the Green Software Foundation as the co-chair of the policy working group, which is where I met Tamara, and where we end up seeing each other on a more or less biweekly net basis. All right. Thank you for introducing yourself, Tamara. Before we dive into the State of Green software survey, I just wanna check anything we talk about will do our best to share links in the show notes like we do on a regular basis. And I think with that, we should probably go get into it, shall we Tamara?Tamara Kneese: Yeah.Chris Adams: All right. Okay, so the first thing, for people who've who are new to the whole Green Software report and the accompanying survey, could you maybe just give us an overview of the survey and the objectives please?Tamara Kneese: Yeah, so I think it's worth noting that the entire process was actually quite lengthy. So we started doing preliminary survey design and other kind of necessary background research and work in Q3 of 2022. And we really were collaborating across companies and fields of expertise and knowledge. So basically a group of us who were part of the policy working group at Green Software Foundation came up with 25 questions that we thought captured really key information like demographics and other data to understand the level of awareness and adoption, points of friction, and also green software enablers from the perspective of software developers. So we were trying to go beyond the the surveys that are out there already of C-Suite and venture capitalists, and we were really trying to understand what was happening on the ground.Because in order to make green software successful and scalable, we have to meet developers where they are. And we also wanted to leave some room for developer feedback, and I personally found this to be the most exciting and fascinating part of our findings because developers wrote in their own ideas and their own experiences and even frustrations, and through their feedback, we can really better understand the gaps between leadership or corporate goals and what developers are actually seeing and doing on the ground, and hopefully we can help to bridge that gap.Chris Adams: And as I understand it, there was a fairly decent size chunk of the survey, went out to quite a few people and you had a substantial number of responses. That's my understanding of it, right?Tamara Kneese: Yeah, so we had over 2000 responses in total and people from all over the world, which is great. And we also heard from developers from a broad range of companies. So we heard from people from the large companies like Microsoft and Intel and also from smaller companies and startups, and we actually reached a few people who are outside of our own core membership of Green Software Foundation.We reached people through LinkedIn and through social media, even through Mastodon, which is lovely. So, And so people found us in a variety of different ways. So we really had a great range. And in order to kind of contextualize the survey findings, we did a lot of background research. And so while a lot of the insights are prompted by the survey results, I was also looking at the latest research reports from firms like McKinsey.And also at leading academic journals, really sifting through what is the cutting edge kind of research on green software in the present moment. And we also did some background interviews and conversations with thought leaders from across the green software space.Chris Adams: Okay, so I remember this being quite an undertaking actually, and uh, there was a number of people involved in this actually, who was, who involved, I remember being on a series of the week of the weeks, maybe it might be a nice time to just quickly name check some of the people. I think it was Zane who was involved on some of this and I believe shout out to Ismael as well, who's also doing some work as one of the researchers on some of this as well as basically various other people inside the policy working group. You said something interesting about the fact that you had like a decent number of people. That's a lot of free text to be like wading through, right? For all the kind of questions you had from there surely?I.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, so that was really quite interesting because analyzing the survey results, particularly when you have a lot of write-in material to wade through for 2000 people and clearly not everybody wrote in lengthy comments. Some people just filled out the survey questions and left sections blank, but it was still quite a bit of material and it was really interesting because it provided more sort of nuance and context that kind of, and some people actually almost included a meta commentary on why they filled in results the way they did. And they were like, I'm answering this question with my organization's priorities, not necessarily my own. Just to really provide a little bit more insight into why people were answering questions the way that they were.And yeah, it, this was also, like I said, deeply collaborative. So Zane was my graduate intern at Intel and he helped with the survey design. Ismael was very much involved with carrying out a lot of the desk research and also with the survey design process. And I believe that he also did interview a number of green software thought leaders as well.And then we had feedback from a number of people on who were part of the policy working group. Chris, you were there, and Lisa and Elise, and of course Asim and many others was providing feedback all along the way.Chris Adams: Okay, thank you. And maybe it's briefly worth just talking a little bit about the goals, what we were trying to achieve for this, cuz it does seem a little bit contrived to me asking this cuz I remember writing one of the proposals to try and get some of this involved. But I know that this was something that you had to take and run with quite a lot actually.So maybe if you just might expand on some of the particular things we were trying to shoot for this, then I might be able to chime in on some of it before we start jumping into the meat of the report and some of the real particular interesting insights.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the main goals was really to raise the profile of green software, and I was really interested to see the percentage of developers who actually had some degree of awareness. And so it makes sense that a lot of the people who filled out our survey already were somewhat aware and already interested.Although there were a number of people who replied in the comments that this was the very first time they had been exposed to green software. And so by putting out this public report that can be taken up by the press, that can be taken up by policymakers, that can be taken up by academic researchers.It is a way of really, getting the word out about green software, thinking about the report as a mechanism for evangelizing green software is really part of what we wanted to do. And we also wanted to understand after knowing that 92% of developers we surveyed said that they were concerned about climate change and wanna do something about it.So what do they need to actually make that happen? What resources, tools, and other forms of support do they need to take action? And another key element of this is reaching out to ICT industry leaders to the C-Suite who really wanna know how and why they should make green software part of their organization.And really trying to emphasize the business case for green software from their perspective was another really key part of this survey.Chris Adams: Yeah, I remember actually that being one of the things that we were speaking about, cuz one, one of the kind of key. The reasons that we would try to actually get some funding and add a time and money to actually do this research was that it just made it we want to make it quite a bit easier to have conversations with people or give something just a few links that you can use when you're making an argument and like you can see some of this manifest in the shape of the report.So typically when you might have a report, you might have maybe 20 to maybe a hundred pages that you might like slap on someone's table or something, but whether people actually read that or actually engage with the content is another matter. And this is probably reflected in the design, the fact that rather than having a long narrative that you'd run people through, it was made up of a series of like smaller insights that you could share for this.And this is one thing that was, I think it was, it was a decision made quite early on, but it's still quite a lot of content. Like for 30 insights, that was quite a high word count by the looks of things. Maybe you could expand on that part there before we dive into one or two of the insights that caught your eye and my eye.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, at some point I started doing a word count assessment looking at all of our various Google Doc collection that we had created. And yeah, in total there were around 13,000 words, which is a pretty substantial report and pretty much equivalent to what a standard sort of report would be from something like McKinsey.And I think the trick was that we really wanted it to be digestible. And so breaking it up into smaller segments and making the website a bit more interactive, which was as them's idea, by the way. And also huge shout out to Osama, the Web developer and also our project managers for keeping track of all of this.So both Anita and Oleg did a huge amount of work and is managing expectations and making sure that we were able to get all of this content into segments that were understandable. And Namrata also had a huge hand in editing the insights to make them more public facing. So she had a really great eye for figuring out how to frame particular insights to make them appealing to different kinds of audiences.So for trying to reach somebody in the tech press, if we're trying to really appeal to C-Suite, if we're trying to reach developers, versus academics. What are the kind of key words and terms of phrase that really appeal to different groups? So we were thinking very much about audience as we designed this as well, so,Chris Adams: Okay, cool. For anyone who is curious, you can visit it at https://stateof.greensoftware.foundation. But don't do that just yet. Cause we're about to jump into talking about some of the particular. Insights so you can hear about it directly from the source, as it were. All right, Tamara, if there's a particular insight that you would direct people to first, which one would you suggest or which one is like the ones that you found found most interesting to, to look into, for example,Tamara Kneese: So I thought the ones that we included around both responsible AI and about the need for measuring carbon emissions as part of scaling sustainable AI, and then also finally our insight around decarbonization not being enough and really thinking about environmental impacts and social impacts and tandem with decarbonization goals is something that I thought was really important.And it's worth noting that when we created this survey and when we sent it out, it was right on the cusp of ChatGPT and all of the hype around generative AI. So we, we didn't have any questions directly asking people about that, but from the comments you could see it beginning to percolate and there were a few references also to Web three and blockchain.What has been really interesting for me is watching as AI has really come to replace crypto in a lot of the discourses around the environmental toll of information technology and a lot of the conversations that we heard about NFTs and their environmental impact. Now we're hearing about the environmental impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI.Chris Adams: And you see the same patterns with influencers in LinkedIn. Everyone's just switched. I'm an expert in metaverse and crypto to, I'm an expert in AI now. Yeah, so you do see that actually. Okay. Maybe we could dive into one of the particular insights here, the insight that that was a takeaway, and I'll just link specifically to the URL in the show notes.Measuring carbon emissions is crucial for scaling sustainable AI. Now this one here, we, you were talking about the fact that the world has moved. You know, a lot has happened since we saw this, and I couldn't help notice that your new role is actually to look at a bunch of this stuff. Are there any things that you, dr- what, what do you think has been the biggest change since the initial research and what you're seeing maybe in. June, 2023. Cuz in my view there's a few, there's a number of really significant changes. We've spoke about how this influx of open source models has come in, but also there's a real push for transparency in a way that there hasn't been.But also you see some of this regulat regulation like taking place or kind of taking shape. Now maybe you could like elaborate on some of that stuff actually.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, so clearly we have regulation coming out of the EU especially, uh, that is very much looking at things like the carbon footprint of different models, but also thinking about social factors and relationship to things like emissions or water use. And what's funny is, so in one of the insights, the one that you just pointed to reference research by Hugging Face, and they were looking at.The life cycle analysis of their bloom model, which by the way is still way less impactful from a carbon perspective than other models. But really thinking about it, not just in terms of training and the emissions connected to the training itself, which is often how this is calculated, but also looking at all of the emissions tied to the manufacturing process for the equipment.Uh, that facilitates the training and production of AI and also thinking about deployment. What are the emissions connected to use in the real world? And I think that this is going to become more of a standard. So as regulation catches up to where innovation and technological production are going, I think we'll see much more of a demand both on the part of regulatory bodies, but also from consumers, and presumably also from developers that really want to know the numbers and who want to know what the true impact of these technologies will be.Chris Adams: I'm really late to the party and I just spent this weekend looking at some of these, look at some of these tools for the first time in a while. I know that Hugging Face, they have got their own kind of equivalent. Something like ChatGPT with the idea being that you can swap in different models. But the thing that I realized, and I figured it, My, I could ask, while you're here I'm gonna ask you. I really don't know what to, what even units I would use when talking about this. Like for example, when you talk about a website, people talk about maybe the carbon footprint per gi- megabytes sent over the wire and that has all kinds of issues in its own right. But I dunno what I would even use when I'm talking about this.For things like say AI, right? Do people measure carbon on a per token basis or per question basis? This is something that I'm out at sea right now cause it feels, I dunno if it's well understood enough to even have a unit yet or something representing this functional unit that you might use to talk about this.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, I, I haven't seen anyone come up with a sort of industry-wide standard yet for how to even talk about measuring uh, impact in this way. And so that will actually be quite interesting to see if the regulatory push forces the industry to come up with better standards because that, that's been the way things have worked in general in terms of calculating emissions and thinking about scope three emissions and all the things that were always tricky and very hard to measure. And I think especially because we don't fully know how generative AI will be used. So obviously there's been a lot of sort of movement towards incorporating different models into things like search engines,Chris Adams: Yeah. Okay.Tamara Kneese: um, and so, yeah.Chris Adams: alright, so with that, so maybe we don't end up with a particular unit, we just see like an uplift in the same way that, let's say you've got like a coal fired power station and you're gonna make that carbon capture and storage using like a third of it. You just have a multiplier. Maybe it's something like that cuz this is one thing that I believe was referenced pre previously. The idea that, let's say, and like you just mentioned just now, about integrating LLMs into search. The fact that I'm just speaking to a robot rather than actually seeing the underlying sources, that is, that changes my relationship to the data that I'm actually able to access, for example.But there is often an uplift in, for example, if I'm using say, an LLM Enabled search compared to a regular search, there's gonna be a multiply of maybe 1, 2, 3, some kind of figure. I know that I think the wide has an article that we've linked, which has a fivefold increase, but it could be, yeah. We basically don't have the numbers for this yet.Maybe that's the way we talk about it. Hm.Tamara Kneese: Yeah. And that I, yeah, the, that is the number that I believe we even linked to it in one of the insights as well. But it is interesting when we start trying to quantify these things, and that's another interesting connection to what was happening with figuring out, say, Bitcoin emissions, where you would often find articles saying the Bitcoin mining industry is equivalent to all of the emissions of X country or Y country and really trying to figure out what the true number is can be, can be a bit tricky. And, and then there's also maybe a point at which nobody even cares anymore. Does calculating the exact number, does it help in terms of, uh, making people, yeah.Chris Adams: is it good or bad? Because this is, you're right, this is the thing that comes up again and again when you've seen numbers used, I don't know, I've done this and I've done, and it's created 10 tons of impact. That does beg the question. So what is the acceptable amount of impact that you do want to actually have in order to actually, uh, benefit from whatever is being provided here?And that question there is seemed to be a very difficult question that. I think it's very hard to engage with when you see these discussions a lot of the time, cuz a lot of the time we don't necessarily have the literacy outside of technology to even make a comparison.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, totally. And then that was another interesting question that came up too, in terms of balancing different kinds of considerations, especially when it comes to things like AI that might take a massive amount of energy, but also a massive amount of water. How, if you're trying to optimize for less water usage, it might actually conflict with your attempt to optimize for less energyChris Adams: and carbon. Yeah.Tamara Kneese: And how do you balance that and how do you make a call about what should actually be prioritized?Chris Adams: This is especially the case when you think about the supply chain, right? Because let's say your example here, I'm going to not use something which is using water locally, and as a result, I'm gonna use a lot more energy to actually account for that because for basically the largest use of water in most countries is actually coming from cooling.It's actually from the actual thermal generation, like burning fossil fuels to heat up water, to turn a turbine, to actually generate the power. You end up in many cases, just moving some of the wa- usage into other places. This is one of the things that is, one of the takeaways I found was actually it's very much about the locality of where it's taking place.So if you are in a city and you have a data center which is ha- is using lots and lots of water and it's pulling from an aquifer that everyone is drinking from. Yes, that's gonna have an impact in the same way that it's gonna impact, say the cost of electricity, or it can impact the cost of electricity compared to something happening further out.If you're bringing in power from say, across a national border or something like that. This is why, I guess it's, in many cases it can be quite complicated and why I'm glad there is an actual report exploring some of this. So maybe I wanna ask you, we spoke a little bit about AI and I suspect we might come back to that again cuz it's the topic du jour.There was also another insight here talking about Web three rings, the alarm for green software practitioners. Now I figured it'd be good to ask you about this cuz you have done a lot of research and this, so you authored another report around this. So you've got like some form and some, some background on this.So maybe you could explain, maybe expand on this one here cuz this one caught my eye and I think there's a few interesting talking points in this one too.Tamara Kneese: Yeah. And with crypto we did see a lot of legislation that was very much concerned about the carbon impact of Bitcoin mining particularly, but also of crypto mining in general. And it is interesting that with Ethereum, the shift to proof of stake and really lessening the carbon impact by over 99%. This was prompted, of course, by a lot of the public opinion and news stories about the harmful effects of NFTs on the environment and how can you claim to be creating this kind of technology for good that will lead to empowerment of marginalized communities and decentralized payment structures if you're also responsible for, all of these carbon emissions? And what's interesting is that as certain countries or states banned crypto mining, the crypto industry moved into different locations, they found workarounds. They partnered with existing energy companies and infrastructures. And so with generative AI in particular, it will be very interesting to see what effects the new wave of regulation has on practices. So how will companies find workarounds? How will, how will they change their practices to accommodate new laws and regulations?But will it change the landscape of how, you know, development is happening?Chris Adams: That's a good point actually, cuz when you think about, just like from a really kind of operational level, one of the reasons people have been talking about some kind of proof of work, cryptocurrency, like proof of work mining was the idea that yes, it loads of uses lots and lots of power. But I can turn it off and it's really plausible.That's the idea. And there are lots and lots of parallels to essentially the extensive machine learning you might use for training. That's not something which is particularly latency sensitive. So you can see a lot of the same ideas being applied to this. So maybe you do see something like this. Maybe that is actually a new role we have for, I guess like may, maybe you can end up seeing AI just move directly into that kind of slot as you suggest actually.And I guess maybe it might be worth actually talking about the role that consulting firms play in the role of this. Cuz if 12 months ago we had the whole thing about how the Metaverse and Web three were gonna be like the next big thing, then they turn out not to be the next thing thing. And now they are.And now they're not. And then maybe this is one thing that's, we might. Look into the roles for this, cuz like you said, there was a real push now and I wonder if we're going to see a flip again now that we've seen like Apple release, another take on something which might be like a metaverse after we've seen Facebook burn through literally tens of billions of dollars on this stuff.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I think it's really interesting that McKinsey in particular had these reports on the metaverse and also on crypto more generally, and how they would transform the industry and they would be worth between. X trillion and y trillion dollars. You know, it was, it's always in the trillion range and nobody really knows how these numbers are calculated or where they come from, but there's a lot of enthusiasm and I do think it creates the environment for a lot of kind of poorly thought out businesses, decisions to be made.And so what I noticed with Web three, particularly among a lot of large tech companies, is that they were all trying to keep up with each other in connection to crypto, and they were like, we don't really totally understand this thing. But we think it might be important. There is clearly a lot of money in it, and so how do we follow the headwinds and make sure that we are keeping up on this new crypto thing as much as possible?How do we talk about Web three or decentralization within the context of the enterprise? Then suddenly after the crypto crash and all the various scandals, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there's a moment of disavow or denial like, ah, we're done with that. Toss it out. We don't need to invest in that anymore.And you know, that's not great if you're in business decisions based on McKinsey's honestly, very dubious speculations about how much money a particular industry will be worth in the future. I think we were all hit over the head with the metaverse as a trend that we should all really pay attention to and care about, despite the fact that it was really just meta pushing this very particular vision of what the metaverse would be.And maybe I'm speaking too frankly here, but I do think the problem that I'm seeing right now with the AI landscape is that companies are doing the same thing, and so they're all trying to out compete each other and make sure that they're hiring a lot of people who are AI experts and really making a push for AI to be the next big thing.McKinsey also agrees that AI will be the next big thing, but we don't know yet what the uptake will actually be or what it will look like in practice. And I think with Web three, one of the largest issues is that there were just weren't very many use cases that made a lot of sense. And things like the carbon offset market, or one place where Web three really had a hold and as we saw from various news reports and studies,Chris Adams: There wasn't much there. There.Tamara Kneese: There that was all fluff too. And most of those offsets were not valid and even attempts to create standards in the space did not necessarily protect against fraud. And so the worry is that with some of the potential uses for generative ai, perhaps.They will not play out as McKinsey or other consultancy firms are saying right now. And perhaps there's a different way that they will be used, but we don't yet know. And so I think a lot of the kind of push towards financial speculation and investment could lead companies down a bad road if they overinvest in things that are actually not going to pan out.Whereas we do know that regulation is on the horizon. We do know that. Things like ESG are really prompting, not just consumers, but also investors and shareholders to take more activist stances on things like the environment and so I think paying attention to the things that are real is actually more important than trying to imagine some sort of speculative future.Chris Adams: So more science and less tech bro FOMO, right? Yeah. Okay, great. That's actually, that's a, that's, thank you for sharing that actually, cuz this is a nice segue into, I was, did wanna have a go whole discussion and point everyone to this piece about McKinsey and company and AI and the, there's a really fantastic piece by Ted Chiang Chiang who spokes about talking about the idea of essentially AI as the next, as taking, filling in the same role that a management consulting firm might actually come in.So you'll come in to help you in many ways justify some of the decisions you might be making anyway, or to help pro help support some of your priors that you might actually have. So if you have tech mo, tech bro FOMO about LLMs, then there's, it's really helpful to find someone to say, yeah, that's gonna be the case.Cuz if you, cuz we can see some of these elsewhere, but I feel that some of the things with LLMs and should we just call it applied statistics? Cuz in many ways that's how a lot of it does actually feel like it's, do you know how like you have like autocorrect on your type on your phone and you just press buttons randomly you'll come up with sentences? I don't wanna call it ice spicy or a spicy autocorrect. Cause that feels like it's, that's not particularly fair, but I think there is some truth between these two things of having this being this biblical new techno technology and something which is somewhere else. And you spoke a little about regulation coming in, cuz this feels like it's one of the big drivers right now and this is one thing that was actually touched on in the report, a particular thing we're saying legislation is quadrupled in the last decade. So like this big swell of new laws and I guess a new enthusiasm for civil society to be part of this discussion rather than it being just accepting what's coming in.Maybe you could expand on that a bit more actually tomorrow.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, I think in general the tech industry, obviously really benefited from the pandemic and a lot of, so companies that were already doing really well started to do even better. But for a long time now, the tech industry has really dominated the economy in a lot of ways. They. Tech dominates the stock market.They have an outsized impact on the economy and they've become a major seat of political power. But regulation really has not matched the pace of change within the tech industry and how quickly the tech industry has really become a very powerful entity in a global context and I think that what we're seeing with regulation right now is an attempt to rebalance and figure out how can we keep the things that we like about what technology affords us, but how do we make sure that it's not doing anything really harmful that wasn't really anticipated when these companies started? And so thinking about one obvious example would be Meta's influence on political elections and the spread of propaganda that can lead also to violence. And so beyond misinformation or disinformation, but also thinking about real world effects.Chris Adams: referring to Burma and Rohingya people. Some, some of the, the violence. Yeah. Okay. I see.Tamara Kneese: Yeah. And so thinking about the ways that companies that are built for one particular purpose then have an effect in ways that were not really an intended output of the technology itself. And so, I think what we're seeing right now is a way of attempting to mitigate harm and the environmental toll has become a focus in light of the climate catastrophe that we see unfolding all around us and with new reports from the IPC and thinking about the very short window that we have in which to act.And I think there's much more of a sense of urgency from policymakers, from advocates, from activists, from researchers, scientists who are looking at the numbers and looking at the data and thinking, we really need to do something now. And I think it's all part of the same general wave of really trying to find a way to live with tech in a way that is more sustainable, in a holistic sense in a way that is actually good for people and for the planet.Chris Adams: So hopefully finding a way to avoid a second gilded age and avoid to go from there straight into a burning age. Yeah, if you've, okay. All right. So that's one. So that's one thing we've looked into, and I suspect, I know that we've covered this on pre previous episodes before about how we're seeing some changes with, in Europe, like the corporate sustainability reporting directive. Actually that's one of them. And some of the recent laws there about basically getting organizations to disclose energy usage and disclose their resource footprint in a way they haven't had to before. You do see this kind of in this shift here actually, which is not something that we've seen something before, but, and I dunno if we have enough time to really talk about things like the role of like antitrust and organizations moving in and talking about, okay, if you have these large organizations, where are we actually redirecting all of the surplus?Given them that we're in the middle of a literal emergency in some cases actually. So maybe this is one thing we could briefly just like close clo close out on actually, because you mentioned that there is dry, there is interest from a number of organizations or there's a number of different places you said there's pressure from staff, there's pressure from investors and you, and there's pressure from the regulators. Alright, Tamara, so we spoke a bit about regulation and. I'm a European, despite sounding like someone who isn't a European anymore. But one of the key things that we see, or comes up again and again is how you really see this appetite in Europe and to a lesser extent, the UK with things like the competition and markets authority, talking about getting organizations to be a bit more explicit about green claims, but we don't really hear that much about what's happening in America. And I know there, there have been some changes from the investor level, like the SCC and organizations wanting to be somewhat aware of their climate exposure, which is why you might wanna where you find CIOs being asked about digital footprint and stuff. But I wonder if there's anything else that you've seen on the horizon in America that might also suggest that yeah, there's actually there are changes coming down in America that people might wanna prepare for if they're technologists and like thinking about how this new world impacts the world of software, possibly even AI cuz that's one of your special, your areas now?Tamara Kneese: Yeah, it's a great question and I, I think certainly quite a bit of movement in the US. And I think it is in part an attempt to catch up with regulation that's been happening in Europe. And everyone I know who's in the AI policy space here in the US is certainly paying attention to everything that's happening in the EU right now.But one sort of development was back in October, The Biden administration and Alondra Nelson, who was working for the Biden administration, put out a blueprint for an AI bill of rights. And so really thinking about what it means to assess the impact of algorithms on civil rights. We also have a, a new sort of report and area of inquiry from the National Institute for Standards and Technology.And they're looking at trustworthy and responsible AI, and they're assessing AI based on a number of different factors, including things like reliability, safety, security, and resiliency, accountability, privacy, fairness. And what's been interesting is that sustainability isn't always mentioned in a lot of these different policy recommendations for responsible ai, and I would argue that is something that we definitely need to have on horizon, is really being able to talk about the impact of AI on marginalized communities in a climate context as well. And that's something that another sort of beyond the policy kind of landscape.Another interesting development would be groups like Amazon employees for climate justice which the seat of power for that is largely in Seattle and in the US in general, but these Amazon employees who were really pushing for Amazon to pay reparations to Pakistan for all of the devastating flooding there because of Amazon's role in climate change, and also making a connection between Pakistani American workers who are on H1B visas and really thinking about precarity in a labor context in conjunction with the catastrophic effects of climate change on people in the majority world. And I think we're going to see more activism like that probably from people with tech companies who are working with climate activists, environmental justice groups, people who are really being impacted by technology, and that is something that I'm certainly seeing even in academic communities.So there are a number of kind of academic conferences, or even at places like Mozilla Festival where you have academic researchers and people at different sort of AI related nonprofits and policy think tanks who are bringing workers into conversation or bringing marginalized folks into their research conversations and treating them really as co-authors, as co-researchers, not as like subjects.And so thinking about having people who participate in Amazon Mechanical Turk and other forms of micro labor on platforms. Actually bringing them into academic panels and having them carry out research on their own, that can also be taken up and used to influence policy as well. So really working from a really bottom up understanding.And I think that's what we were attempting to do also with our SOGS report, is think about including a more bottom up perspective. So instead of just listening to what McKinsey's saying, or just listening to what venture capitalists or a C-suite or saying, also really taking a hard look at what the pain points are for people who are either building these technologies or interacting with them on a daily basis.Chris Adams: Okay. Wow. God, there. I thought there's gonna be a lot to take into account for future Green software reports. And when we talk about where the boundary of influence might actually be for this, rather, not just the operational impacts, but the other things that it might be enabling. Okay. I think we've, just taking us up to a time here, before I say thank you, I just wanna ask, there are 30 different insights in this report and we've covered a bunch of these things.If there is one thing that you'd ask people to start with, which one would it be and why?Tamara Kneese: So I, I think the responsible AI is green AI insight is very,Chris Adams: one. Yeah.Tamara Kneese: Yeah, and you know, because it really gets at this need for a much more holistic understanding of what green could be, and I think it really gets at the need for a lifecycle analysis and an examination of entire supply chains and the effects of technology supply chains on marginalized communities. And that's something that I think many of us at Green Software Foundation at Green Web Foundation, we talk about these things, but how do we prioritize working with communities and that kind of collaboration in the kind of work that we do, even within our own organizations, within our own companies? And that's something that I think really could use a lot of attention.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you for that. That's a definite food for thought and I, this is, I really hope we do get to look into some of that more in future reports that come out from this. Tamara, thank you so much for giving us the time, uh, on what ended up being a public holiday. I really appreciate you doing this, and next time we'll make sure we don't actually have it booked up.Booked up for this quick break. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode are in this show description below, and you can visit podcast dot Green Software Foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. Tamara, thank you very much for that.I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us. I wish you a lovely rest of the day and yeah, have a lovely week. Take care, Tamara. Bye.Tamara Kneese: Thank you, Chris.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit https://greensoftware.foundation. That's https://greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Joining host Chris Adams on this episode of TWiGS is Nina Jabłońska, operations coordinator at Energy Tag and a master's student in sustainable energy systems. In this episode, we'll explore insights from the Linux Foundation Energy Summit in Paris, including Microsoft's urgent call for green coding and real-life examples of reducing computing emissions through cloud carbon footprint analysis. We'll also touch on employee activism at AWS, where tech workers stood up for climate action and better work-from-home conditions. Nina also tells us why sometimes she goes by Nina Jab%o%ska, and why Cara Delevingne and Keanu Reeves are the ultimate “carbon-free couple!”Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteNina Jabłońska: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Carbon-aware software is central to decarbonization | State of Green Software Survey | The Green Software Foundation [3:01]Reducing cloud emissions by 60% | ThoughtWorks [24:26]Microsoft Issues Code Green Alert | Analytics India Mag [27:09]Corporate Amazon workers protest company’s climate impact and return-to-office mandate in walkout | AP News [34:43] Resources:Green Software Principles and Embedding Carbon Awareness in Your Applications | Dan Benitah & Szymon Duchniewicz, Avanade | LF Energy Summit [4:12]Technical Research Fueling NextGen Actions | Hallie Cramer & Ana Radovanovic, Google; Iegor Riepin, Technical University of Berlin; Gailin Pease, Singularity Energy | PyPSA | LF Energy Summit [8:55]GitHub - PyPSA/247-cfe: Explore the impacts of 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy PPAs [8:55] The politics of data centers | The Green Web Foundation [19:27] Cara Delevingne sprays industrial wastewater on her face in her latest beauty campaign | Vattenfall [38:20]Sad Keanu | Know Your Meme [40:07] 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:Nina Jablonska: So it's just a matter of really wrapping your head around how you want to do it and what concrete actions you want to you want to undertake. But in the end, I think it just pays off to be green, and I hope it will only go in this direction.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello, and welcome to 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 have some insights from the recent Linux Foundation Energy Summit in Paris, Microsoft issuing a code red for green coding, concrete examples of using cloud carbon footprint to reduce computing emissions. Before we dive in though, let me introduce my guest today for this episode of this Week in Green Software. Today we have Nina Jabłońska of Energy Tag. Nina, I'll hand over the floor to you to introduce yourself and say what you do.Go for it.Nina Jablonska: Hello. So I'm Nina Jabłońska. Nice to hear you Chris again. So I am the operations coordinator at Energy Tag. Super happy to be here. So privately, apart from working at Energy Tag, which is a nonprofit organization, I am also actually finalizing my master's studies in sustainable energy systems, which is why I am currently placed in Stockholm.And recently I have actually taken up Spanish classes, which makes a lot of senseChris Adams: Wow, bueno!Nina Jablonska: Yeah, my, my masters, the first year I spent actually in Barcelona and I started learning. A bit of Spanish just to be able to do my groceries, and since I found that in Stockholm, everybody speaks English.So I figured I would just continue this journey of learning a third language online with, with a, um, with a teacher. But it's pretty exciting, a very nice thing to, to do some extra brain exercising in a bit different way than studying and working.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Thank you for that, Nina, and I should probably introduce myself as well. My name is Chris Adams. I am the the co-chair of the Policy working group in the Green Software Foundation, and I'm also the executive director at the Green Web Foundation, another nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030.If you are new to this show, the format is as follows. We basically have some people come onto the show. We look at some stories in the news that caught arise, and we just talk about them and share some notes and reckons basically. That's largely it, and we have a few stories ahead of us that I've foreshadowed already.We're gonna start with the first story we have here, a one from the green software report. So what I've been doing for the last few weeks is I've been inviting guests to pick an insight that caught their eye. And Nina, you are no different today. I'm gonna give you an idea of anything that you, that caught your eye when you're looking at this, and it may or may not be related to what you do at work.So yeah, I'll hand over to you. What looked interesting when you were looking at this?Nina Jablonska: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It so happens that one of the stories is actually a bit related to what we do at Energy Tag, and that's the fact that the carbon aware software, so a software that would operate in the time and place where the grid carbon intensity is low, or it would optimize its work based on the grid carbon intensity is super important to, to enable further decarbonization. And we also heard a very diff, very interesting presentation from Avanade on this during the LF Energy Summit. I think the whole conversation around having software that really can optimize and choose when and where to operate, depending on what kind of sources are available in the grid is very important.Chris Adams: It's about, yeah, the underlying kind of how dirty or green the energy is. Okay, so one thing from the actual conference we're both at the LF Energy Summit, was this talk by Dan Bonita and Szymon of- Nina, I think I might need you to help me with this, cuz it's a long polish name that I'm gonna struggle with.Could you maybe help me with this? It's, is it Szymon Duchniewicz maybe? Okay. One more time, please? Duchniewicz. Okay, great. Szymon, so Szymon that from Avanade, that was the other deck we can share a link to that has them explaining some of the work they were doing and what they were using there. Okay, thank you. That was the only thing. I just wanted to make sure I got it pronounced properly and it sounds better from you than it does from me,Nina Jablonska: The Polish surnames are, he doesn't have the weird, the weird letters though. You, forChris Adams: Diacritics and things.Nina Jablonska: Exactly. You turned mine into just the regular l and n I can see here, but for example, on my Spanish student id, they just turned that into a percentage sign. initial student Id said that. My name is Nina. Jab.Percentage sign, o, percentage sign, ska.Chris Adams: Okay. This is why people should be using Unicode as much as possible instead of Ascii, yeah. Nina. Ya percentage nska is not the correct name. The, the.Nina Jablonska: It is definitely not, but imagine going to a bar with my friends and they would check the IDs and I would just show my student ID because it was the first card that I got out of my wallet and the guy was just like, are you Elon Musk's daughter? And I just, yeah, I should learn to make a robotic sound of my voice and just try to like say back something funny in Spanish, but I could not just, it was.Chris Adams: That's, that's probably gonna be easier than explain the problems associated with Unicode and Ascii code and stuff in the middle of a bar. You've mentioned that you're in Stockholm right now, right? So that's in Sweden? Yeah. And that's a relatively green grid by comparison, right? Because that's usually a hydro or wind.What would it be?Nina Jablonska: Yeah, yeah. The northern parts of Sweden especially are very clean. They're mostly based on hydro power, as you mentioned. In the south. There is still a bit of. Challenging situation with a bit of leftover gas generation and so on. But overall, yeah, overall Swedish grid is really one of the cleanest ones, which is why most of the challenges present in other countries are not really discussed here so much.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Whereas,Nina Jablonska: could be a good, could be a bad thing, but they're really moving at the forefront of decarbonization every of every single sector, including transport, et cetera.Chris Adams: I see. Okay. And so I'm in Berlin, so right next to the border, relatively close to the border of Poland. And you know, you are originally from Poland as well, right?Nina Jablonska: I am hence my complicated surname.Chris Adams: Ah, I see. Yeah, so that's an example of grid, which is relatively cold, heavy, and somewhat dirty. So the same program run in maybe say Sweden compared to say, uh, Warsaw or somewhere might be much dirtier depending on how you would run that.Although that may be changing over time because opponent turns out to be one of the fastest decarbonizing countries as of last year. That was one of the stories that I learned of which I was surprised to hear from, given how coal heavy that grid is, for example.Nina Jablonska: Yeah, it could be surprising, but it could also make a lot of sense just given the fact that decarbonizing the first 10, 20, 30% is way easier than decarbonizing the last. 30, 20 or 10% of energy demand. Of course, a lot of challenges come with balancing the grid supply, with introducing the technologies needed to cover the last really couple of kilowatt megawatt hours of demand in various hours.So I think it is a good sign. Of course, I wrote from my country, I would love to see coal as soon as possible, but I also think there is still a lot to be done. Partly, it's also nice that maybe the technological development needed to really cover this last piece of demand is going to happen abroad. So let's say maybe people from other countries and the grid operators from other countries will figure it out for ourselves and we will just follow their example in this sense.But,Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So that's one of the examples from here. So we spoke a little bit about the difference. The carbon intensity can be different, and this was one of the ideas behind. And kind of carbon wear computing, for example. I guess it's one thing that. It might be worth asking is like, how do we know this is really the case?And this is something that I found quite interesting that when we were both at the Linux Energy Foundation Summit, there was actually people talking about, okay, this is how you can build open models of understanding what kind of interventions you kind can actually make. This might be a kind of jump off point cuz one of the panels that we saw was specifically related to this.There was a number of large companies, but there was also some work from, I believe, I think you might know Igor's surname, Dr. Igor. Do you remember? Can you help me with his surname? Yes. So he was talking about some work that the technical University of Berlin had been doing with Google to basically model a kind of way to decarbonize all of their infrastructure between now and 2030.And the thing that kind of caught my eye was, The use of an open source modeling tool called PyPSA Python Power Systems Analysis. I think that was it. I think that's something you might be a bit more familiar with than I was. And uh, this is the first I've heard of this and maybe you might be able to shed some light on this cuz I didn't know that much about it before coming to this event, this conference.And I thought the idea that you could essentially talk about this stuff in Python, it was cool actually. Yeah. I'll hand over to you because this is something that I think you mentioned that you've been doing a bit of work with as well yourself. Right.Nina Jablonska: Yeah. Yeah, so I, as I mentioned, I am also still finalizing my master's degree. And of course, as the last part, I do need to deliver some thesis, some piece of my own work. And I actually decided to do it based on this open software and this openly available piece of code that guys from TU Berlin have written and come up with.And this is indeed part of a bigger study that they perform, which is studying the effects of 24 7, carbon free electricity procurement on the system level emissions, but also on the emissions for those customers who decide to follow this 24 7 carbon free procurement strategy. And then also on the cost premium of doing this, instead of following the business as usual, let's say energy attribute certificate system.So of course, the way companies and big consumers source clean energy from the grid is through buying those annual certificates where they match their annual energy consumption with the same amount of energy in those attribute certificates that are coming from, let's say, solar power plants or wind power plants.And why this system doesn't work, obviously is because it doesn't really send these precise signals. As we mentioned, also, with the carbon aware software, it doesn't really tell you in which time and location. The grid actually has a higher carbon intensity when it has lower carbon intensity, and it also doesn't reflect probably most importantly, the actual cost and the actual effort that you have to put in decarbonizing every single hour of your electricity consumption.So the study developed by the TU Berlin lab is essentially doing this, assuming that some companies follow this strategy of sourcing electricity in every single hour, but also from deliverable location, meaning for example, from the same country or for the same bidding zone. And also that this energy is going to come from additional assets.So for example, from newly built solar power plants, instead of competing with the other grid users for the existing assets. And they essentially see how that would impact the grid and the great outcome of the entire LF Energy conference as well. For me, and the great thing that I could do is to meet Igor, who is one of the authors of the study and who has helped me greatly with using their piece of code for my own thesis.And I just think it's so great, really, that it is available openly and we can just download it literally on our personal computers. I am not even a, an energy system modeler. I never created. Any model similar insights to this one may be a small one during some classes at university. So I think it's really a great thing that anybody could just download it and it is very much, I think, encouraged also to just provide them with feedback to challenge their assumptions, which is essentially what I'm doing for my thesis.So yeah, it is very nice for me to combine this data and software openness that we discussed also with many other people, both of us, definitely at LF Energy Summit and this kind of new generation of clean energy procurement that is proposed.Chris Adams: So there's one, there are two things that I found quite interesting when I spoke to Iegor about this. When he gave, when he spoke on this panel, he said one of the ideas from the work that was going on is yes. You can get an idea that basically moving from maybe an annual approach to, to an hourly approach helps address some of the existing problems people have and some of the accusations of kind of greenwash related to green energy wind.People will say, I'm running all my infrastructure on all my servers on solar power, and they're saying this. Happens at night,Nina Jablonska: Mm-hmm.Chris Adams: may be somewhat inconsistent with how most of us understand solar panels to be working, for example. There's some stuff like that. But one thing that caught my eye was he was actually saying that, yeah, by doing this, we're actually ma able to model the impact of whether we can make the infrastructure itself responsive.So rather than just having to make sure that we've got enough wind and solar or hydro or stuff to do this. They were talking about how they could model reductions in demand to need so much in the first place. And the same if you have maybe 10% of all the compute that's flexible, then you need less generation, which then will impact the kind of cost of actually us moving away from what we currently have right now, which is lots and lots of fossil fuels to something which is greener and more humane on the grid.So that was cool. But you said something quite interesting just now about like location, like local and deliverable and what was is additional, is that other thing you just mentioned? Yeah.Nina Jablonska: Yeah. Basically, if we want to put it in short words, hourly matching is not enough. So the entire study, and I think the first concept that comes into mind and that's discussed is how we want to match the supply of clean energy at an hourly basis with the demand. And as you mentioned, what's impossible in the real world to consume solar energy at night if you don't have a battery?So hourly is the first pillar that we, we now call them the three pillars of carbon free energy. But the other two is, are actually equally as important as it turns out. The second one being the fact that you need to make sure that this electricity is deliverable, which means you not only have an existing interconnection between point of generation and point of consumption, but also that there is enough interconnection capacity to actually allow this electricity to flow instinctively. It doesn't make sense to import electricity when you're in Sweden from, for example, Portugal. The likelihood ofChris Adams: I see.Nina Jablonska: of your electrons flowing from a solar power plant in Portugal and actually reaching your, for example, my house in Sweden, if I had one, are extremely low.And we actually talked to some people who are modeling this as well on l F Energy Summit. I think there's going to be a, a summer of many interesting reports coming. And the third pillar then, is the additionality. So really seeing how it's not only enough if you match hourly and location, but also you need to make sure that if you introduce especially new additional demand, you do need to make sure that you have additional assets to meet this.And that is a huge thing, for example, with hydrogen, since hydrogen, especially with the ambitious goals that both the EU and the US have right now. It's really. An amount of electricity that you cannot just forget about in the eu. If we want to meet the goals for hydrogen generation by 2030, I think we will need somewhere around the equivalent of the annual consumption of France.Chris Adams: Okay.Nina Jablonska: So it's something.Chris Adams: New generation, like new clean generation that would be coming in,Nina Jablonska: Exactly, and then exactly nuclear generation. So that's the question. How do you ensure that, that this is actually clean and that it contributes to decarbonization? A study from Princeton University who are performing, we can call them sister studies, to the ones from to Berlin from Europe. So Princeton did a study where they analyzed what would happen if you didn't ensure hourly deliverable and additional electricity, and what they found is that the hydrogen you would end up producing would be twice as intense, twice as high in emissions as the one produced right now using gas.Chris Adams: So that would be the opposite of what you wanna have. So basically if you, so if I, let me just check if I understand those two things, cuz at the idea of hourly, we kind of understand, like when people say they're running on green energy and they say they're running on power and they're running a server at night, that's very intuitive, easy to understand.The deliverable thing that was like, When people say, oh, I am running green. I'm running my say websites or running a server on Green Energy. And what they're really doing is they, are basically running it on a normal grid, but they're buying some certificates from somewhere else in the world and then saying, yeah, because I've bought these certificates that my energy is green.And the example might be if I was to buy the green certificates from Spain, but I was running servers in the Netherlands or Germany, then it's quite difficult to actually shift electricity all the way across that. So it's a bit of a kind of porky pie to say that's a bit, that's green energy, right? Exactly. Okay, cool.And the final thing was about additionality. This is this idea that when someone's going to be saying they're running on green energy, they need to make sure it's adding new power to the grid. Cuz if they're not doing that, maybe you could expand on that one, because this is one thing that I think is.Interesting in the world of technology for us, because it looks like the whole discussions about massive new amounts of demand, like AI and stuff like that, it seems somewhat comparable to the discussions people are having about saying, one thing we need to do to replace fossil fuels is have a way to make hydrogen from say, solar or wind, or stuff like that.And you're saying that you need to be really careful that the power is coming from clean sources. Cause if you just pull it from the grid at certain times, it can be almost worse than basically getting hydrogen in the usual way, which is usually coming from methane gas or something. Is that what you're saying?Nina Jablonska: Methane reforming. Yeah. Which is a, a process which I, I am not a chemical engineer or hydrogen expert, but this is basically a process where you directly use natural gas to produce hydrogen, which should not be the case anymore. We should really try to use electrolyzers. But if they are grid connected electrolyzers that are going to draw this clean power from the grid. Again, if we allowed them to, in a way, fight or compete with the current consumers in the grid for the clean power that is currently available, that would be a disaster because we wouldn't end up not increasing the clean capacity. We would end up in a way forcing the order grid users to report that their carbonChris Adams: there, there is dirty air compared to what they have. I see. Okay, so there's a concrete example I think of that we've seen. So one example this makes me think of is in the Netherlands we saw a bunch of new Microsoft wind turbines installed with some new data centers and you saw quite a lot of pushback from locals because there's this idea that, oh wow, there are these cool wind turbines that are in our neighborhood now does that mean we're gonna be run using green energy?And if I understand it, that power, it was additional, but it was all additional going just to the data center. So it wasn't materially changing the kind of. Maybe the, uh, the carbon intensity of the power that you could trace to that organization, for example, even though it's forming into the grid, that was one of the things that was, can lead this kind of gap in perception essentially, that people were saying, I thought those wind turbines meant that my use of power is greener.But no, that's not how it's actually being presented right?Nina Jablonska: Yeah, that depends on which framework you use because there's, there's essentially two ways of reporting or accounting for the emissions of your electricity consumption. One of them is market based and. The other is location based. If you simply use the location based, you literally only look at the location where you're based and you take the average emission factor.And then if you do have some additional wind turbines producing clean power, then of course you're going to lower your average emission factor, which is great. But would a lot of companies do, and actually many would argue that it's a good system to implement, is the market based one where. Through the use of those contractual instruments, such as, for example, clean energy certificate, energy attribute certificates, or other -miliar similar instruments in the market, you can buy them in order to influence the amount of carbon emissions that you report, which on one hand, again, allows you to reach 100% renewable or zero emission reporting with the use of annual certificates coming from no matter what, no matter when, no matter from which kind of assets. But on the other hand, this actually does drive additional installations and additional capacity of solar and wind. It's enough to even see what the energy attribute certificates that are existing right now, what they did to the grids they actually did when they were established.Over two decades ago, they actually did encourage a lot of additions in wind and solar capacity all over the world in, in Europe, in the US and in many other parts. So I don't think we should cancel this entire system, but there is definitely a need right now to do the same, to provide the same extra financial incentive and to provide this extra something that's going to capture the cleanlinessChris Adams: Get their recognition right?Nina Jablonska: Exactly. And that's why we would need, for example, the certificates. That would be issued on an hourly basis in order to incentivize energy storage or in order to incentivize other clean firm technologies that are dispatchable, like geothermal, for example, or demand site management. Again, coming back to the carbon aware software, we need a tool that is going to capture the fact that if you choose to not consume one kilowatt hour at night when grid carbon intensity is very high, but you choose to consume the same kilowatt hour during the day when for example, this avoids curtailment of solar power, then that's a great thing to do and you should aim to do so. That's it.Chris Adams: Oh, why? Okay. Wow. There's a lot to it then. So if I understand that correctly, in the example here, say maybe having giant company. It set up some wind turbines near me. On a location based basis, it might look a little bit greener, but from a market based basis, it might make the electricity that I get to say I get to claim as being somewhat less green while the other organization gets to say, because we've spent a bunch of money to deploying this, we are gonna claim some of the greenness of it.Okay. That does explain the two different ways of thinking about this andNina Jablonska: Then again, just important thing to say is that of course we want the additional capacity, and of course it's going to do good globally for the emissions. That's also important to track what are the global emissions and emissions in the zone, for example, in the country and. It's important also to remember that if a data center purchases, let's say some wind power and additionally some storage, in order to make sure that they have this 24 7 hourly available clean energy, this extra power that's generated by this wind turbine is also going to be injected in the grid.And then if they would report their carbon emissions at an hourly basis, they would basically. Sell this extra generation to the grid, so that would also globally decrease the emission. So there is a lot of really aspects to consider here. Of course, it's not easy to predict it, but yeah, definitely it's worth to keep in mind that the market and location based systems work a bit differently.They can trigger different behaviors and trigger different results, and I think it's worth looking at both and really taking the time to understand what they mean and what, what are the rules behind them and what are the equations behind the numbers basically.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thank you for that. We've gone really deep into the rabbit holeNina Jablonska: We did.Chris Adams: of carbon intensity here, so should we look at the next story then, Nina? This one here was about cloud carbon footprint, about a, this is ThoughtWorks talking about how they've been able to use this tool themselves to basically reduce the emissions across a number of services by around, I think 60%.And that more or less worked out to be around a saving of 46% in terms of actual cash money costs. And that seems largely I think the phrase they're using is identify zombie workloads and switch things off. So like we spoke about before, there's literally just a case of switching things off here, but I think there is some, there's a couple of things that kind of interesting here that might be worth diving into.There's something about Scope three. Did, did that surprise you as well, Nina?Nina Jablonska: Yeah, it is very interesting because. Scope three emissions are one of the, I would say, most challenging to track and try to estimate. So I would definitely say it's interesting to, to take a look at the methodology that they took to calculate this since the emissions that we were discussing mainly so far are scope two, so directly from the use of electricity that you consume, but scope three emissions are really the emissions around the final use of your products.And then the final upstream and downstream activities around this. So I think it is really extremely difficult to, first of all, set targets, but then of course, measure your progress towards these targets. Most companies, when they do have some emission reduction targets, they are focused around scopeChris Adams: Mm-hmm.Nina Jablonska: So definitely anything that they, that they use in order to track those and to measure how their net zero goals could be achieved would be very interesting to, to look into.Chris Adams: Cool. Now, one thing that's also interesting from with my green software hat on right now is that. The cloud carbon footprint has typically used one form of measuring carbon intensity called average carbon intensity rather than just marginal carbon intensity. Cuz the Green Software Foundation has a standard called the software carbon intensity standard, up until recently was primarily just focused on marginal carbon intensity and it's, we probably don't have the time to dive into marginal versus average here cause that's quite a complicated thing.But essentially the key thing that caught my eye when I was looking at this was that, oh, you've got tools like cloud carbon, footprints. Theoretically, you should be able to use these tools to work out S SCI scores now for particular applications so that you can start tracking some of these and comparing them to each other, for example, in the same way that you might say share like an efficiency score or grading or things like that.That's one thing that we've got some scope to move towards now for some of this stuff. Okay. Should we look at the next story then? Nina?Nina Jablonska: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. The next one is about carbon again.Chris Adams: This is, yeah, Microsoft issuing code green alert. So this one here is, there's two things that are interesting here, really. So one of these was basically about this idea of Microsoft's making a big thing about. Not using water so much in its data centers are trying to move away from this and shifting to this exotic way of calling called adiabatic cooling. And this is interesting in my view because a lot of, there's been a real pushback recently about AI models, not just in terms of carbon, but also about in terms of like water usage as well here. And one thing that surprised me with this is like, There. There was one thing which is hidden away basically saying, yes, Microsoft has its claim to be carbon negative, which is zero waste and be water positive by 2030.And these were all made before there was a whole discussion about this cut and sudden craze in generative AI and large language models and things like that. And there's a question now like there's suddenly all this new demand coming onto the grid on all these other new discussions, and it feels very similar to the additionality stuff you just mentioned before about, okay, where do we go with this?How do we fit this in?Nina Jablonska: Yeah, there is a very interesting analogy between this extra demand from the AI related processes and hydrogen in the regular grid because both of these have this extra feature in them, and again, if we don't account for the extra demand that the data centers will have, I'm not talking about water, but electricity since I'm not an expert on water use here, but this really again, boils down to ensuring that this extra demand, no matter how big it is, which again, how do we estimate this and how do we even predict how much it can blow up in the future?It is really crucial that it will be covered with clean electricity, and again, the three pillars of hourly deliverability and additionality of these assets will be really important. Again, to not turn this extra demand into a carbon bomb that's just going to blow up in our faces. Because the stakes are really high.We, as we've seen with, with hydrogen demand, and I think AI and data center uses. Data centers use how much of global electricity right now?Chris Adams: We can look up the state of carbon waste software to see what figures they have for that. That might be the best way to do it.Nina Jablonska: it's around 1% maybe, but it's still a lot.Chris Adams: Yes. That's still gonna be, so that's like half of aviation is the figure spec I've heard people use specifically just for data centers, not the rest of the infrastructure. I'll say networks and things like that. So that's still. That that's a medium sized European country, basically. So that's about uk for example, the UK is about 1% more or less.Alright. So yeah, that's the kind of ballpark you're looking at basically.Nina Jablonska: Yeah, so again, if we, if this is the base consumption right now and with AI, we don't really know where it's gonna go and how big it's going to be. And the pace edit at which it has been growing recently is really beyond any estimates and any guesses. So I think we may see a similar discussion actually coming up.We've had this discussion about hydrogen. We do have the delegated act already requiring these three pillars in the European Union for the definition of in order to produce clean hydrogen and to define hydrogen as green and carbon free, we need to ensure hourly new asset, uh, no more than three year old asset than the electrolyzer, and then also the same bidding zone.The same discussion right now is happening in the US and there is more and more discussion moving towards. Also implementing those three pillars in the requirements there for the tax credit. And I think we may maybe in a couple of months hear the very same discussion on how to ensure that the data centers and that AI is powered by clean power only.Chris Adams: You actually raised a good point, Nina, because a few weeks back we looked at one of the stories of reports, uh, by amongst the authors was one, uh, woman, Sasha Luccione. And she was actually in the report that, so in the paper that she shared that we'll share a link to, there was this idea of saying, if you're gonna run AI or if you're gonna have these models, Then what you should probably be doing is actually figure out how many hours are you gonna be using this for, and then find a way to attract that because these are kinds of models which are not latency sensitive this way other the way other things might be.So if we're gonna have a model that's gonna use this much power then and we realize it's gonna create this much value, then yes, we should find ways to make sure we can run that on an hourly basis. For example, always using green energy and because these kind of things are plausible. There are scenarios where if you are gonna take maybe 20,000 hours of compute to use this, you could plausibly put them at certain times where.The sun's in the sky, or there's really easy access to green energy so that you can work out what the cumulative carbon footprint of that might actually be. That's quite similar to what you just said actually about the whole hourly thing that you mentioned with hydrogen there. I guess the question that we might have when we look at these two things is that.With hydrogen, there's a whole discussion about we need to get our fossil fuels, so we're gonna need to have this much hydrogen. But we haven't really had that discussion about saying, do we need to have this much ai or do we need to, how much compute is enough for this?Nina Jablonska: How much AI do we need?Chris Adams: yeah, because there is, there's gonna be all these assumptions about do we just need to do less or do we need to meet these massive targets that we might actually have?Cuz the ones you mentioned before was for hydrogen was what a another France worth of electricity, for example.Nina Jablonska: Yeah, around around 500 terrawatt hours of electricity, which is more or less the annual consumption of France.Chris Adams: Okay. That's a significant amount. Wow. All right, so that's, I guess we need to have maybe some of those discussions with data centers and talk about how some of that work, how, what the priorities might be for some of that then as well. Okay.Nina Jablonska: Exactly. And also one more thing that just popped into my mind is I remember there were some people even pushing against the development of AI, and I remember one of the ideas was to tax AI companies like 98% or something from the revenues. In order to just really limit, I'm sorry, I don't remember who exactly said that, but there was an idea that if AI is going to really develop at this pace and gain so much revenue, then maybe they should just pay ridiculously high tax in order to limit this in a way. And this gets me to think that if AI is going to be a business where you can make a lot of money, why don't you make sure that this money actually goes in a good place and in this sense, and the same conversation again, goes into hydrogen. With hydrogen, you are going to have subsidies. You're not going to just generate hydrogen and pay 100% of the price on your own.There is going to be large subsidies in both EU and US, and therefore there really is no excuse to not make sure that you have this additional deliverable, hourly clean power, and that you really don't use only clean power from the grid because you have the money, you have the technology. The technologies are available largely.We do have, we do know how to do it. So the question is, yeah, where is theChris Adams: priorities that you want to have for this?Nina Jablonska: and where either the legislation or the push maybe from the society is going to be to really make sure that it's doing way more good than it's going to do bad.Chris Adams: I see. So that's like a discussion about, okay, if there is all the value being created, how is that distributed? That's the discussion that you, that needs to be happening there. Okay. Alright. Speaking of this, we've just got one more story I think to look into before we wrap up with a couple of, with a, the little question here.This is actually a story from AP News about actually staff. This was happened last week actually. This says Amazon work workers. Basically they did a walkout about the company's climate impact and the return to office mandate for the walkout. This is the follow one from us having a discussion about employee activism last week.I, I think it's interesting because we see a lot of the impact and lots of the action from large firms coming from employees a lot of the time.Nina Jablonska: I think it's, I think it's an extremely interesting conversation in general, not only about remote or at in the office work, but also of the impact of both the pandemic and the climate crisis and how of the new generation of workers coming to the job market. I think the reality of what you're looking for in a job has changed so much, so much over the past two or three years,Chris Adams: mm.Nina Jablonska: and there there is power in the people.I think main outcome of this is just really, if you want to keep your employees satisfied, it's not only enough anymore to pay them well. In fact, some people are willing. There was also studies done on this that people are willing to be paid less if they know that their companies are. Extremely climate aware and sustainable yeah.Chris Adams: I agree with you. This one is actually this one thing that there's a particular quote. Okay. Today looks like it might be the start of a new chapter in Amazon's history when tech workers coming outta the pandemic stood up and said, We still wanna stay in this company and the direction of this company.This is from Eliza Pan, a former employee and a co-founder of Amazon employees for Climate Justice. These are some of the people who have really been pushing for Amazon to be moving faster. And as an organization, which is as large as it is, this is a real significant driver. That's a lot of leverage that we'd actually have there.And you see this in a number of places, and I, I think it's worth paying attention to some of this stuff here because, power, leverage and pressure comes from lots and lots of places, and today as we learn more and more about the state that we're in, I think as much pressure as possible will help us accelerate and get to where we need to be, especially for 2030 on this one.Nina Jablonska: And also not to mention that sometimes I would. Even say, usually if you do the climate consciousness part right of your business, you may up even saving money, not only spending more, so it's just a matter of really wrapping your head around how you want to do it and what concrete actions you want to you want to undertake.But in the end, I think it just pays off to be green, and I hope it will only go in this direction.Chris Adams: So this has been interesting with AM Amazon specifically because they are already. The largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world now and last year, I think they've already spent something in the region of $60 billion on infrastructure already. And this gives you an idea of the kind of scale that we need to be moving at.So this is the largest one saying you need to be moving even faster than this in order to do this. And I think it's, for many of us, it's difficult to get ahead around just the scale of these numbers and the change that we might actually be needing to do. Like you mentioned, another France worth of, of of electricity, for example, to replace fossil fuels in certain areas.It's a dizzying times to be in, that's what I can say.Nina Jablonska: Definitely super interesting.Chris Adams: Okay, so we've covered through this, we spoke about the some of the green coding stuff from Microsoft. We spoke a little bit about the carbon oil sdk. I think the last question we have now is just a final question that we have. This one is, I think this is one from Chris, our producer.If you could have any celebrity become an ambassador for green software, who would it be and why?Nina Jablonska: Is it a question coming from the Cara Delevingne, maybe.Chris Adams: Oh, that's a good one. Actually. I hadn't actually thought about that, but you might wanted to explain that one because if you, I'm not sure how many people know about this stuff. Actually, it's worth just explaining some of this.Nina Jablonska: It is so good. Of course it has it's many haters, but haters gonna hate. Basically, Cara Delevingne participated in a, in advertisement from Vattenfall, which is a huge company here, a huge energy company here in in Sweden and in other countries as well, where she promoted an emission free face mist or perfume. I don't exactly remember what it was, which was basically a campaign targeted at advertising.The fact that waterfall is moving towards carbon neutrality and they're going to, uh, create, oh, I don't remember actually if it was hydrogen or if it was just industry clean water. Anyway, it was a campaign that was aimed to raise awareness about the climate goals of Vattenfall and the way they're moving forward with with all of this, but I wouldn't pick Cara Delevingne for green software. I think for green software, and I'm so bad at names of actors and actresses, but the guy who played in Matrix?Chris Adams: Keanu Reeves.Nina Jablonska: yeah. Yeah. Because the software, the zeros and the ones in the background, they were running like green. It.Chris Adams: also green as well.Nina Jablonska: So I think he would like to the back move and avoid some carbon emissions and then, and then have these zeros and ones in the back.And it's all green software.Chris Adams: So it's literally green software against a black screen. Okay. So that's your person.Nina Jablonska: For Keanu Reeves.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. And also when builds, when things aren't working so well, we can always roll out the sad Keanu meme. So it's, it works out on low all these levels. Excellent. All right. Okay, so Cara Delevingne for Energy and Keanu Reeves for software.Nina Jablonska: Carbon free couple,Chris Adams: Carbon free car. Yes, indeed. Alright, that takes us to the end. I think that's all we have time for this episode of this Week in Green Software. All the resources in this episode are gonna be in the show notes as we normally do. You can also visit https://podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables.And, uh, finally, I wanna say huge thank you, Nina. Thank you so much for coming on for this. I enjoyed hanging out and chatting with you, and I wish you the best with messing around with Python Power Systems analysis.Nina Jablonska: Thank you. I'll need some of that for the next month or so. But thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun. A nice way to start the week.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. Take care yourself, Nina, and everyone else. Thank you very much and see you on the next episode, tara!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.

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital, to bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. They discuss insights from The State of Green Software report, the cost reduction strategy of Amazon's Prime Video, Atlassian's sustainability program, Wholegrain Digital's Employee Activism Policy, the open-source Falcon LLM, and the innovative approach of heating swimming pools with servers. They also highlight upcoming events like the GSF’s UN World Environment Day Event (today!) and the London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup. Tune in for a deep dive into the intersection of technology and sustainability.TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital, to bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. They discuss insights from The State of Green Software report, the cost reduction strategy of Amazon's Prime Video, Atlassian's sustainability program, Wholegrain Digital's Employee Activism Policy, the open-source Falcon LLM, and the innovative approach of heating swimming pools with servers. They also highlight upcoming events like the GSF’s UN World Environment Day Event (today!) and the London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup. Tune in for a deep dive into the intersection of technology and sustainability.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteTom Greenwood: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:State of Green Software | Green Software Foundation [2:54]Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% | Prime Video Tech [09:04]Don't F&*% the planet. | Atlassian  [17:58]Activism Policy - Wholegrain Granary | Wholegrain Digital [18:47]UAE's Falcon 40B is now Royalty Free | Technology Innovation Institute [26:28]New data centre turns waste heat into warm water for swimming pools | TheNextWeb [29:17]Events:UN World Environment Day: The Green Software Revolution (Virtual Event) - Monday June 5th [31:27]London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup | June 14 2023 [32:15]Resources:Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131) | Linux Foundation Training [7:10]From Carbon Aware to Carbon Intelligent  | Environment Variables episode with Luis Cruz at TU Delft [8:03]So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story | Adrian Cockcroft [11:09]Grok Ventures | Mike Cannon-Brookes [15:42]Blueprint for climate activism policy | Business Declares [22:49]Climate Clauses | Chancery Lane Project [23:36]Learn About the Salesforce Sustainability Exhibit Unit | Salesforce [25:38]tiiuae (Technology Innovation Institute) | HuggingFace [28:51] W3C Web Community Group [34:44]Curiously Green Newsletter | Wholegrain Digital [36:30]Oxymoron Newsletter | Tom GreenwoodIf 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:Tom Greenwood: There's no point people wasting time and money and energy, like reinventing the wheel. Somebody's doing something that might be useful to others. Put it out there, share it, and then we can all stand on each other's shoulders and go a lot further, a lot faster. I think.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, and in this episode we'll be talking about a few insights from the recent State of Green Software Report. A brief survey of developments of the environmental impact of large language models, unexpected news about monolith versus serverless for green coding, employee activism, policies for the workplace, and finally some events and opportunities for development from the world of green software.But before we dive into this, let me introduce my special guest from Wholegrain Digital for this episode of this week in Green software. With us today, we have Tom Greenwood. Hi Tom. Why not introduce yourself from here?Tom Greenwood: Hi, Chris. Yeah, I'm Tom and I'm co-founder of Wholegrain Digital and been the big proponent of sustainable Web design for a number of years. I wrote the book. Sustainable Web design and yeah, into all things sustainable business and sustainable technology. Really so keen to be here.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Also the website Carbon Guy asTom Greenwood: Not the website carbon guy. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yes.Tom Greenwood: Not many people know that I'm involved in that. I sometimes, I'm walking around in like tech conferences and I hear somebody talking about this website, carbon calculator, and I'm like, yeah,Chris Adams: Yeah,Tom Greenwood: I was involved in that. Right? Yeah.Chris Adams: And for folks, and if you are not used to, if this is your first episode, my name is Chris. As I mentioned before, I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation and the policy chair for the Green Software Foundation. I'm one of the maintainers of a software library called CO2 js, and we also work at the Green Web Foundation, where we run various checkers and tools and open source software for we're understanding the environmental impact of green software.So if you are new to this show, the general format is that it's a roundup of some new stories that we've seen this week that we thought were worth talking about. So what we'll do is we'll share a link, have a bit of a chat about each of these, and then run through until we run out of time. Should we have a look at the first one together then?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, sure. Let's dive in.Chris Adams: Okay, so the first one here is a new report that was released last week, which is called The State of Green Software released by the Green Software Foundation. This has been a bit of a labor of love for the last. Me nearly a year trying to get some of this together. And, uh, it went live last week. And if you go to https://stateof.greensoftware.foundation/, you can see the report and all of the findings in there, hyperlinked glory.Tom, there's a couple of things that caught your eyes on here. What, what should we talk about first in this one?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, sure. First of all, someone's been very busy doing all this research, which is fantastic, and I was really excited to see that there was so much in it, which is a big change from several years back where there was not a lot going on in this space. And the thing that jumped out at me specifically on that level was one of the items around they'd found 2000 specialized software tools related to green software, which is a huge number, does that, to think that there are that many projects going on, however big or small it might be, it means there's a lot of people interested and are starting to actually work in this space.Chris Adams: That's true, and if you think there's maybe what, and a few million developers. That's actually a surprisingly high proportion of developers and projects. Assume you have a one-to-one and there's not no one person making a hundred of them. That's actually pretty impressive, actually. I think the research that we have here.Let's have a quick look. Cause I can't remember if this is just looking at GitHub or if there's been a look across all of the different tools. Yeah, this is mainly looking at GitHub actually. So given there's been a kind of explosion of other tools like GitLab or giti or other things like that, there may be more like you folks used GitLab as well,Tom Greenwood: We use GitLab. Yes. So we are not included in the statistic. Yeah. So that'sChris Adams: be more than that case.Tom Greenwood: it could be, yeah. And they've been quite cautious in their numbers, I think, in the way that they've laid it out. So actually, if anything, it could be more.Chris Adams: So we have some forks, but including the forks, it's at least 2000, which is a number which is significantly higher than zero, which probably what it was maybe five years ago. So that's encouraging. Alright, anything else catch your eye on this one actually, Tom?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, the other one was around it, what was called decarbonization alone Cannot make green software, and it was basically an article around the fact that we just need to think about more than just using renewable energy and making things energy efficient. There are obviously two really important components, but there are other environmental factors from digital technology, basically they focus specifically on water. But I think like the message is really, let's think more holistically about the environmental impact of digital technology rather than just being about like energy, weather and carbon emissions. And I think that's really important because like water is obviously like a key resource fundamental to human life, especially clean drinking water.And it's limited, but it also gets, if you take this more holistic mindset, then you also think about things like electronic waste as well and how these things factor. Um, I'm really glad that they've highlighted that. Cause I think that. When we're talking about these things, we do tend to focus, be a bit tunnel visioned on the kind of the energy piece.Chris Adams: You used that spec specific term, a tunnel visioned on the carbon. We'll have to share a link to that diagram of the person's eyes. You know the one I'm talking about where someone's only. Looking at carbon and missing all of the other kind of parts of this big circular forms of impact that we actually have.Okay, cool. I'm glad you mentioned that. Well, we work at the Green, Web Foundation. We talk about the environmental impact of software in a number of ways. We talk about efficiency, which is one thing we are used to, but we talk about intensity of which carbon is one, and you can also have water in intensity and.Various other minerals being drawn out the worth and also toxicity and things like that. So yeah, this is absolutely a place to be looking at. All right. There's, can I give, can I share one, because thereTom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah, goChris Adams: my eye. So this one here was this idea that developers want to have a positive impact.And there was one really nice study or stat from this goes from according to this survey, which is over, I think it's just under 3000 developers took place in the survey from this, 35% of the practitioners shared they and their organization never measure the environmental impact of software. They said that they really want to though.So they found that say only 8.5% have actually taken any green software training, although more than half of them are looking for stuff. So this suggests that there is an unpinned demand and or an unmet demand for this stuff. And I guess the thing we should probably do at this point with my hat on is basically say that or share a link to the fact that the Linux Foundation does actually have some free training that can give you, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to call it accredited or certified, but there is some form of recognition that lawyers allow you to use the note word for that.Let you say that you've done this and get a bit of a grounding on this. We'll share a link to that because it's actually quite useful. And it was based around the Principles Green website from a couple of years back that Asim worked onTom Greenwood: that's brilliant here. It's obviously disappointing in a way that like people haven't been able to necessarily do the training or find the training that they want, but the fact that like more than half of software practitioners would like to. Is amazing cuz it's just a matter of time. Then before they do find it and they do take that training and they start to embed it into their works.That's exciting.Chris Adams: There is also scope and hope in my view for things when people are just starting to come into the industry. So previously we did a podcast interview with Luis Cruz at TU Technical University Delft, where he was talking about an open source syllabus that he was working on for students doing a master's at his course.And last week I went to South Southern Germany to Frey Borg to, for the first ever software engineering course, which was specifically aimed at sustainability first ahead of the actual software engineering part, which I really enjoyed. It was really cool, and it was a project run by the European Commission where they basically issued something like 20 scholarships to all these young students from say, Bangladesh or Nigeria or Germany or Indonesia.Lots and lots of places which are outside of just the North America and Western Europe where people who are often, many cases you would associate with the people on the sharp end of a, lots of the changes of climate. You had a bunch of those people coming along and learning and talking about, okay, yeah, this is how I wanna build this into my work when I graduate.It was really exciting and really inspiring. I'll have to share some more links to that one as well.Tom Greenwood: That is amazing.Chris Adams: All right. Let's look at the next story then. So this is one about, I think it's called Scaling Up the Prime Audio Video Monitoring Service, and Reducing Cost by 90%. It's a bit, it is a pretty, pretty dull title, but basically the thrust of this story is that it did arou, it did the rounds.Recently Amazon shared a blog post, uh, about their Amazon Prime video service. And a lot of us are used to this idea of serverless software being the kind of trendy thing that turns itself off and it's seen as one of the most efficient ways to run infrastructure. The key thing from this was the team at Amazon basically saying we moved away from using serverless to using boring, old and busted monolithic parts of the infrastructure and we saved 90% of our infrastructure costs by doing this. This caused an explosion of hot takes across the internet with everyone saying, oh, monoliths versus serverless, everything like that. And I find it interesting in my view, cuz this goes against the narrative that we typically do have where everything has to scale down to zero and everything like that.Anything that catches your eye on this one, Tom?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, I get asked this question a lot, people asking me like, oh, shouldn't everything be serverless and I'm not gonna claim that I'm an expert in this but, but my answer is always, it depends like everything. And I think my view has always been that we shouldn't be dogmatic about technology. Like it's all about context and what you're trying to do with it.And every technology has a really valuable use case, but equally, every technology has its flaws that mean that the wrong. Application is not necessarily the best thing. And I think this is really interesting cuz they basically, they've started off, they've used the hot trendy thing and it has been the right thing to build a prototype and get it going and.Like an MVP to demonstrate the principle, but then they found that actually we wanna scale this. We wanna make it really robust and efficient over the long term. Then actually the sort of monolith approach is actually really what we need. And I think it breaks down some of the dogma and I think it just just demonstrates actually we need to just assess each use case on its merits rather than being dogmatic and allying ourselves to one solution for everything.Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree with you on this. What we'll do is we'll share a link to a really nice piece from Adrian Cockcroft. Basically, it's called So Many Bad Takes. What is there to learn from the Prime video microservices to monolith story, which expands on this in a bit more detail. Also, just for context, Tom, you folks use WordPress and PHP as like one of the main things that you folks use, right?Tom Greenwood: We do. Yeah, that gets a lot of criticism.Chris Adams: This is the thing that is, in my view, entertaining because the actual programming model for PHP, if you think about the things that people like about serverless, like you run something and it scales back down to zero. The actual programming model used for PHP, where you just load a script. Bootstrap everything, server response, and then go back to, to nothing Again.That's basically how things like PHP tend to work and how they're designed to work. This is how the whole shed hosting thing, for which it may be maligned, but this kind of approach has been essentially the mainstay for a bunch of infrastructure for 20 years. So when you actually think about this, if you squint basically WordPress and bhp, a bunch of this stuff can look kind of serverless in this way.So yeah, that's the thing that I just have, I'll share with all of you. Okay. Should we look at the next story from this one?Tom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right, so I'm not sure I'm allowed to say this without ruining the language on this, so I'm gonna just spell it out the, there's a really nice piece from Atlassian called Don't F Sharp at bang percent the planet.I think it might be don't, I'm not sure that's whatTom Greenwood: Yeah, we know what to say.Chris Adams: in, yeah, exactly. So I was born in Australia and Australians can be known for colorful language, and this is a. Quite an Australian way to talk about don't f the planet. Basically, this is Atlassians talking about their most recent work on basically net zero and them sharing an actual report about how they did it, how they went about, what steps they did, what was easy, what was not so hard, and how other organizations can follow this themselves.Have you been following any of these, Tom?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's good to see. Firstly, just that like you've got a big name company in the tech space that's not one of the big three. Going down this path and saying, look, we're taking sustainability seriously and we're taking it seriously on multiple levels and it's not just a marketing thing.But then it's also nice to see how they're laying out really transparently in a way that a lot of the big tech companies are a bit vague. And instead Atlassian has said, look, here's a nice report that tells you like how the journey of like. Why we're doing this, how we got here, where we've got to the things we found difficult, and then obviously they're gonna be reporting on that moving forward, which is really good.One of the things that jumped out at me was the fact that they set themselves this target for 2025 for having everything using a hundred percent renewable energy, but they then found that actually just switching to renewable energy provider and then using credits for the rest is, is like such a low hanging fruit.They did it almost immediately and then the question was like, oh, okay. Like how do we make this more robust now? That's the question moving forwards. But the low hanging fruit was already there and they didn't even know it until they looked into it. So it's nice to see things like that where I think they used the phrase Go fast and then go far, which I think is a really good way of thinking about it.Do something to take it like a step forward and then keep moving forward because there aren't no any fruits. And I think a lot of people are put off by just feeling, oh, I dunno what to do. Especially things like net zero can sound really complicated and scary as like such a, like a big, lofty goal. And I think it's nice to see how the, they've taken this approach of let's just start moving in the right direction as fast as we can and then find the blockers along the way.Chris Adams: Yeah. I have to say I'm a bit of a fan of Atlassian in general, and I, we use Trello at where we work. All right. And I know people have opinions about things like Jira and, and Confluence and things like that, and, but it, it's really nice for an organization to be so transparent about the infrastructure as well.In their report, they're one of the few organizations that basically say, here's a breakdown of all of our infrastructure, how much we're using, and ev every single data center. And they provide this reporting, which is almost impossible to get out of other organizations, so it's really cool to see them doing it.Yeah. The other thing that I think is quite interesting is that there's a kind of stereotype of like tech billionaires being generally terrible people. Right. There's something really interesting that I think from Mike Cannon-Brookes, who's one of the founders of Atlassian. So the funding he's using rather than I know, turning large social media websites into kind of havens for right wing climate denial.One of the key things that he's been doing is basically aggressively buying up the biggest source of carbon emissions in Australia, which is the biggest power station they have. And then finding ways to refinance it so they can shut it down and replace it with wind and solar basically, or primarily solar.So this is what they're doing and that's one of the projects called Grok Ventures that's doing all this stuff. So there's all this stuff here, and then there's like activist investing to accelerate this transition away from fossil fuels. It's like really cool to actually see someone talking about some, something about this and using funds in a kind of, In my view, a very kind of pro-social and progressive way, but also somewhat techy and boring basically, is okay, you will need to do some boring refinancing of this stuff rather than only looking at the shiny things.It's cool.Tom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah. The things like financing can sound really dull, but I think it highlights how typically you'd look at something like sustainability in a business, big tech company, as being like, okay. Yeah, let's do some offsets and we'll reduce our energy consumption and so on. But actually like looking at how that company has resources and influence that it can use more broadly, that actually can have really big impact is super interesting and it's really nice to see that they're pulling that lever.It reminds me a little bit of also, like when I lived in Australia for a bit, there was a company, big mortgage company that was looking at introducing solar powered loans, and the idea was basically that they could refinance people's homes in order for them to buy solar panels and then once they got solar panels, that would generate an income that would actually mean they'd pay up for their mortgage faster than if they hadn't done it.And it's things like that where you think actually, like it sounds really dull when you like about refinancing things for um, sustainability, but then when you actually look at what you could achieve, oh, actually that's pretty clever. It was a bit of financial wizardry.Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely. And uh, really good example in the UK is actually one of the writers of Love Actually. His new thing is actually this thing about divest moving your pensions, basically moving your pension outta fossil fuels into renewables. Cause he basically said there's 51 trillion. Pounds or dollars of money invested in stuff and you can either, by default it's usually invested some chunk of it in fossil fuels.So one of the things you can do is actually just take some of this. You're not having to give any money, you're just making a change. So it's not doing the bad stuff and going into the good stuff. It's really cool. They said like they've run, they started the pro- the campaign just a few years ago, and they talk about how they've been able to redirect something like more than a trillion pounds of investment away from fossil fuels into renewables already, which is gonna make a significant change, right? Yeah. Once you find the leverage point, it's pretty impressive. And this is going back to the hot waste, what we're talking about. This is one of the reasons why it's interesting to work at developer because there aren't that many developers.This is the argument that Asim keeps making. It's basically because there aren't that many developers, if you can impact some of the developers to make changes there, then you can have some relatively high leverage changes that cascade through the actual supply chain, basically. So that's one of the things.But sometimes you do need boring policy things, or not boring, but whole need necessary, but sometimes need to do the work on the policy front for this. And, uh, this is something we spoke about ages ago actually, when you folks published your sustainability policy, and then you released it with creator comments. That was really helpful cuz that was directly relevant for our organization. We ended up essentially using that as a template ourselves for this stuff. And that's probably a nice segue into the next story that we see here.Alright, so this one is about Wholegrain Digital. We've introduced an employee activism policy, so this is talking about some of the other things you can do as a technologist, which aren't just about coding.Cuz while coding is fun, we are also citizens as well as just consumers or. I don't know what's, I don't have a word for a contractor. Yeah. We're more than just contractors and consumers I suppose. Maybe you could talk about a bit about this one, because there's a bunch of thought that's got into this and I was really pleased to see this go live actually.Tom Greenwood: yeah, sure. So it actually came from an event called Good Fest that I attended last year. Good Fest is. Like a, a sort of creative conference for, for making the world better essentially held down in Cornwell every year. It's amazing event. And there was a talk there from a guy at Patagonia and he was talking about how Patagonia in the US and he is like really supportive of their employees taking part in activism.Immediately after that, had a lunch with a guy called Viril who is involved with Just Stop Oil and it was a really interesting conversation where he started talking to me about how actually a lot of the barriers to activism are employment related. Activism can come in many forms, but a lot of people are in.Either nervous to get involved because they're worried that it might reflect badly in terms of what their employer might think of them, or they are struggled to get time off work or they can't afford to get time off work, or they're worried that, like what happens if I get in trouble and like I get arrested or something and then I might lose my job?Or what happens if something happened and maybe I got glued to a. Bus or something. And then I had to miss a day off work and, and people think, oh, I don't really know how I can fit this into my life as an employee in a company where I've got responsibilities and I dunno how the company will look upon it.And so on. And we started chatting in about, surely like companies could introduce things that would basically try to mitigate as much of this as possible. So I said about trying to figure out like what might those things be? And then along the way, Ben Tolhurst from Business Declares, which is like a nonprofit, organization that gets businesses to commit to net zero and playing a role in trying to tackle climate change.He heard that I was working on this, got really interested because he's really interested in the sort of activism side of things himself. And also he's got a lot of connections with people in other businesses that are looking at what they could do from a climate change point of view. So it quickly evolved into Ben helping write the policy as well as hooking in people from other companies who were, who were intrigued by this idea, or maybe this is something that that we might be interested in doing as a company, we then realize that we really need some lawyers to tell us whether we're doing something stupid. So we involved Bates Wells, which is a B Court law firm, and who are basically like a bunch of hippies that have got law degrees. And I'm not sure if they'd like me describing them that way, but I think that's why they're so brilliant.They, they care about the outcome rather than just being like all about risk mitigation andChris Adams: Principled legal professionals who like granola.Tom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, they're great. And they were really helpful in basically going through it and rather than literally tearing all of the heart out of it, which it did get run by another law firm who literally did that and came back and said, just don't do it.Bates Wells came back and they were like, look, here's all the risks we can see. Here's our thoughts on how you can mitigate them. You go decide how much risk you're prepared to take. And so the outcome of that is that we crafted a policy for our company, Wholegrain Digital, which basically means that people can take time off to get involved in various forms of activism. If they do get arrested, they're not gonna get fired. So there's security of employment. If they do get arrested, we'll contribute to the bail money if necessary. So there's some things that we could do that are quite tangible that basically say, look like if you are passionate, we're not gonna tell you to go out and do anything.But if it's this sort of comes intrinsically to you and you feel this is important, it's not just climate change, it might be some other kind of social or environmental issues and you want to go and stand up for it, then. We really wanna back you because we need people in society like that. And here's what we can do.And then in return, it basically says, here's the things we ask of you if you are going to do that, and you want some support from us as a company. And it basically is saying, look, just be careful. Try to keep yourself safe and uh,Chris Adams: have your back. Basically,Tom Greenwood: we have your back. Yeah, exactly. So we published ours and then business declares then published a variant of it, which is open source so that any company can base, and it's got guidance notes in the template as well, including some of these things that the the spoke to us about.So that as a company, you can basically take this template and say, okay, how might this fit for us? How much risk are we prepared to take? And you can craft your own policy. Gonna get your own legal advice, but hopefully more and more companies will see this as a way of lowering the barrier to entry for people who would like to get involved in more activism, but maybe feel like there's some things that are holding them back.Chris Adams: Cool. I'm really glad you shared that, and I really like the approach that you've mentioned about it almost being a kinda like modular approach. So you're able to see how far you're able to go because this somewhat reminiscent of the work. I believe the Chancery Lane in the UK has been doing around writing climate clauses into kind of commercial contracts and things like that.Cuz I know that you folks have spoken about things like having a carbon budget on a consulting project, or if you're building something, you'll do things like that. They have a bunch of existing mechanisms like that, which are easy to put into standard form contracts. So when you are doing some work.These are the things you can include, and I assure you there is a kind of link to WordPress for this, which is why I'm where I'm getting to with this. The way that the people at Chancery Lane explained it to me was basically this idea that in the legal world there's like Lexus Nexus and there's a few organizations which have these kind of standard form pro contracts.They're built like the WordPress of standard commercial contracts that you do this stuff and they realized this and they said, okay. We can take some ideas from open source and we can apply that to the legal kind of world. So there is now a website called Climate Clauses, which is from the Chancery Lane Project, which is, you know how like WordPress plug-ins extend something to carry in new directions.They've basically taken the same approach to standard form contracts that people use for entering business deals with other people. For example, they said, here's how you can include like the module for net zero or the module for a budget or the module for environmental performance clauses. It's really coolTom Greenwood: really good. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, we'll share a link to that as well because when I first heard about that, when I had a lawyer explain it to me and say, yeah, dude, this is basically no, we, we saw what you folks were doing at WordPress, we figure we should have that too. And I thought, wow, that was such a cool idea. Cuz it's so different from, it's very easy as a tech you to just think, oh wow, we are the only people with this special tech spec technique.But it turns out that no other skills and other industries can be inspired by some of the things that we, we are doing here.Tom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah. And like you said earlier about the sustainability policy that, that we shared with you guys. I guess a few years ago. There's no point. People wasting time and money and energy, like reinventing the wheel. Somebody's doing something that might be useful to others. Put it out there, share it, and then we can all stand on each other's shoulders and go a lot further, a lot faster, I think.Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree. And just to round this story off, the example of these contracts, I just came back, there's a project called, there's a contract called the Salesforce Sustainability Exhibit. So Salesforce large company, they basically used this, they used the chance relaying climate clauses as the basis for all their stuff they do with all of their supply chain now.So it just like open source, it always comes up in weird places. So it turns out that a bunch of people working on a side project ended up having some of the basis for one of the largest companies in the world to be, for them to use is their basis for essentially building sustainability and climate awareness into how they do business with pretty much the entire supply chain.Tom Greenwood: That is amazing. Ripple effect, eh?Chris Adams: Yeah, indeed. Alright, so speaking of open source, let's look at the next thing that we have here. So this is Falcon, an entirely open source LLM, which is a large language model you can run on your laptop. Tom, this was, this might feel a little bit left field and uh, I, I'll give the introduction and then I'll let you come in on this one actually.So, We are used to large language models coming from organizations like Facebook or Microsoft or Google, for example, or not necessarily coming from, but us being able to use the results of, and this one here is, okay, weirdly or unexpectedly, United Arab Emirates. Have basically published a entirely open source, royalty free, a machine learning module.And there's a few things which are interesting. In my book, when we looked over the website, they, it's designed to be more efficient than say, GPT three by the significant amount. And it requires maybe a fifth of the computer inference time. So when you've used, once you've trained it, you are using to try to get numbers back when you speak to ChatGPT, is that kind of thing.That's what they're using and this is designed to be open for. Anyone to use. So rather than having to only get it from say, OpenAI or own you from Google, anyone is able to run this even on if your laptop's fast enough, your own laptop here, and I think this is one of the first and largest and highest kind of performing open models for this.And it speaks to the idea that only a few years ago, but only less than six months ago, these were millions of dollars to train and only available from $3 trillion companies, and now you can train and run this stuff on your own hardware for less than a million tens of millions of dollars. Right? Amazing.Right.Tom Greenwood: A huge leap forward and it, yeah, it feels a bit ironic that, that this is not coming from OpenAI. It's coming from coming from the Technology Innovation Institute in the United Arab Emirates as an open source option, which is amazing and brilliant that they're doing that. And it's almost a.Chris Adams: that like open night, it's not open source, it's not really open data, but it has the word open and you not, you don't typically associate open with lots of the kind of news that you might read about the, you about say the UAE for example. Especially when you think about things like say COP 28 and stuff.And yet here you have an open model being released, it gives you an idea of just where the stuff comes from open source. It's really hard to predict basically. So we'll see what happens with this. AndTom Greenwood: is. Yeah.Chris Adams: folks who are curious about this, we've shared a link to Hugging Face, which is a kind of GitHub for machine learning stuff where there is a bunch of really interesting work by, it's one of the only machine learning and companies I know of with a climate lead.Who specializes there and maybe one day we'll get, we'll be able to get them onto the show. Sasha Luccione, she's been creating some really good papers and yeah, this is one of the things that she's been doing actually. So we'll share a link to that for folks to look at. All right. Should we look at that last story then, Tom?Because this one, one that you shared that, I think it's a really nice one actually. So this is Heating Swimming Pools with Service And this one, maybe you can talk about this one actually, Tom, cuz this was the one that you brought, brought along.Tom Greenwood: Yeah, so this one really caught my imagination. About a year ago. There was, there was a company that was in the Netherlands that was building sort of small data centers on farms to heat greenhouses and that. That really caught my imagination as like a great way of doing things. And then suddenly this one popped up in the uk, this company called Deep Green, installing tiny cloud data centers at leisure centers, basically.And it's this beautiful kind of symbiotic relationship between data centers that need cooling and. Swimming pools that need heating and particularly we've got this energy crisis, like energy prices have gone through the roof. A lot of local councils in particular are like really struggling with money.Some swimming pools are being closed down just cuz like cost of heating the things. And then you've got this company that comes along and says, actually, like we could put a little data center in your leisure center and heat your swimming pool essentially for free. We'll pay for the electricity to run the servers and give you the heat.It. It just seems like such a brilliant solution where you've got this huge tank of water that needs to be kept constantly warm, and you've got these servers that need to be kept constantly cool. It's one of those things where when I saw it, I was like, oh my God, how has no one thought of this before?Chris Adams: Yeah, is there's a pleasing circularity to this and a kind of this term called free calling, which is usually around air, and this feels like the same idea. I'm a big fan of this as well. Actually. It also asks questions about what data centers should and shouldn't look like because we're used to data centers being, well not, the common narrative for big data centers or when you hear a data centers machine learning, you're thinking of like a football pitch full of machines, which is almost like a kind of big box out of town Walmart style warehouse full of things, like a bit barn. And this is the further opposite. It's integrating it into the fabric of the urban environment, for example. Yeah, this is a really nice story actually. Thanks for sharing this one.Tom Greenwood: it's okay.Chris Adams: All right, so we're just coming up to the half an hour mark and we are just gonna look at some of the events now, actually. So I guess the thing we should probably share is this is the 5th of June time of recording. And if you aren't aware, today is the UN World Environment Day and uh, today you probably. Us recording this now is probably gonna be a little bit late for people to know about this, but there is an, there is a virtual event taking place later on today, which will be recorded, which is by the Green Software Foundation called Green Software Revolution, where there's a number of people including the.One of the head, the, the chair of the community group, Anne Currie, Asim Hussain, he of Principles Green Pindy Bhullar ubs, the at the bank, who is also a PhD specialist in sustainability. And Tamara Kneese, who was the lead researcher for the State of Green software report. So there's a bunch of stuff there and we've online for people to stream or look afterwards, after this.And what else have you got? They've got this open source infrastructure meetup on in London on June the 14th as well. We have that there. Is there anything that caught your eye on this one, Tom?Tom Greenwood: I guess my curiosity is more to see what's happening in terms of sustainability in this open source world that they're gonna be focusing on AI and deep learning for enterprise, and I guess we're at this space now where the whole AI world is like kicking off in a big way this year and there's, in the sustainability world, I guess the question is just, oh my God, how much energy is gonna be used by these things?I think it's fair to say a lot of us are in this space where we're like, torn with these like amazing, exciting opportunities of the technology as well as some of the potential threats, both from an environmental point of view, from a like societal point of view. So for me, the, I'm just curious to see what the op open source world is bringing to this conversation, because obviously that's where a lot of kind of conversations around tech ethics often happens in the open source world.Chris Adams: Yeah, I'm with you on this as well. It's easy to get really caught up on some of this stuff, especially if you start playing with some of these like chat tools, but, You're right. There is a non-zero footprint associated with this stuff, and even now it's actually quite difficult to find some of the numbers for this.We have shared links to give some estimates of this, and now that you have an entirely open stack, presumably you could start coming up with some numbers, and yet I'm not aware of any services that still provide these numbers on a kind of per request basis yet. Like how Website Carbon has done, or even some of the stuff that we've done with like.co2.js or so on, but it does feel like it's needed. So you are aware of when you're speaking to someone, what the actual impact of that when you're speaking? Not someone, when you're speaking to spicy auto complete, like it's not a person. We've gotta remember that.Tom Greenwood: I, when I've tried these tools, I keep having to tell myself, don't say thank you. It's a slippery slope.Chris Adams: I know what you mean. But if you, British, you're taught to, you're taught to apologize when someone stands on your own foot, let alone saying please. And thank you. SoTom Greenwood: but I feel like saying thank you to ChatGPT, GPT is the slippery slope to ex machina.Chris Adams: Could be. Alright. Alright, Tom, I'm gonna, I'm gonna park that there before we go down that scary rabbit hole, but I'm just gonna, we're just coming up to the end, so I'm just gonna come up with one of the questions. Are there any open source projects that you've seen that you might direct people to or anything that you'd like to direct people's attention to?Whilst I have you here on this call before we head off?Tom Greenwood: I guess the thing that would be great to direct people to is the W3C Web Community Group, which is, to be honest, I haven't been. Anywhere, like as involved as I, I would've liked to have been for personal reasons, but they're doing amazing work as a community, really exploring kind of all of the facets of what goes into creating a more sustainable Web for the benefit of the wider web community and producing some guidelines to help everybody.So it's just something I'd, if you're interested, go and have a look at it. Get involved. There's some exciting stuff happening there.Chris Adams: And W three three is the Worldwide Web Consortium, W3C and SustiWeb is the sustainable Web group.Tom Greenwood: Exactly. Yes.Chris Adams: Yes. Awesome. Okay. I think that one of the few groups who are really good at using Wikipedia or using Wikis to share links and things, cause I think there was a link shared about their massive list of resources that they were working on at the moment.Tom Greenwood: Yeah. Yeah. They're pretty good at docu documentation. It's quite impressive.Chris Adams: All right, we'll share some links for that for anyone who's so interested in that part there. Tom, I think this brings us up to the time that we have and I wanted to say thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed chatting with you again mate, and it's lovely hanging out again because now that I'm no longer in the UK it's much, much harder to come visit you, folk.Come visit you in London, so, or wherever you are now. So, Once again, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast and I wish you the best. And just before I go is, where should people follow you or where should people look if they want to hear? If they like the sound of your voice or found what you had to say?Interesting. Is there a newsletter or a website you would point people to?Tom Greenwood: Yeah, so my company's wholegraindigital.com. You find that you look me up on LinkedIn. There are lots of Tom Greenwoods who run, and some of them run Web design agencies. But if you find the Tom Greenwood that runs Wholegrain Digital, then that's me. And then I've also got two newsletters. So there's the Curiously Green Newsletter, which you can sign up for at www.wholegraindigital.com/curiously-green/, which is a Green Web newsletter covering things that's going on in the world of sustainable Web design, but also Greentech more broadly.And then I have another newsletter on subs called Oxymoron, which is about exploring the confusing world of sustainable business and how we reconcile the aims of creating a more socially, environmentally friendly world with the world of business.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you very much. I'm subscriber to both of those and I really do enjoy them. So thank you for writing them and once again, thank you for coming onto Environment Variables, Tom. Take care mate.Tom Greenwood: Thanks 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 https://greensoftware.foundation/. That's https://greensoftware.foundation/ in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

This episode of Fact Check we ask the question, can AI always help us optimise the environmental impact of software? Host Chris Adams is joined by VMWare’s Colleen Josephson and Miguel Ponce de Leon to tackle this from their unique perspectives within the industry. They also talk all things sustainability in virtualization and networking and how this begins with green software. They also give us insight into how VMWare is tackling decarbonization within their own company.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteColleen Josephson: Twitter / WebsiteMiguel Ponce de Leon: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:O-RAN SC Projects | O-RAN [6:34]Deep Cooling Solution in Data Centers | Office of the CTO Blog [19:45]RIC Radio Access Network Intelligence Controller [27:28]Kubernetes used in the O-RAN open source AI/ML Framework | O-RAN [29:32]HotCarbon 2023  [38:06]European Green Digital Coalition [37:26]Evaluating Coupling Models for Cloud Datacenters and Power Grids | Adrien Chien [39:35]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:Miguel Ponce de Leon: And the thing is, we're right in this maelstrom, this tornado of activity that's just got underway and just seeing how they fit together, it's not a perfect fit. I would say there. I couldn't give you, this is exactly the time horizon and this is how it's gonna happen, but I can tell with the level of funding, both from governmental agencies, from companies themselves, from research institutes to lots of public bodies and developers in their own time.It's a great time to be in and around this space of developing software, but specifically for the delivery of green technologies as we see it.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 am your host, Chris Adams.Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we have two very special guests for an episode of fact check on Environmental Variables. From VMware, we have Colleen Josephson, and Miguel Ponce de Leon. Hey guys.Miguel Ponce de Leon: Hey Chris. Hey.Chris Adams: Okay, so for our listeners who are unaware, VMware has been a member of the Green Software Foundation since January, 2022. And we'll be talking a little bit about AI and the environmental impact of cloud. And we figured VMware spent a lot of time working in this field. In fact, they're synonymous with virtualization, but they also work in a number of other fields.One in particular is networking. So this is where our backgrounds come from. Before we dive in, let's just actually give a chance for our guests to introduce themselves properly so they don't, so we know who they are. So I think, Miguel, if you just introduce yourself and what you do, we'll hand over them next to Colleen afterwards.Miguel Ponce de Leon: Very good. So my name is Miguel Ponce de Leon. I'm director of Distributed Edge Intelligence in the office of the CTO here at VMware. So it's very much looking at research and innovation that happens from cloud. Towards enterprises and towards telecommunications. So networking, which is a topic that we're gonna talk about here, and very much looking at what it means and the impact of having the edge of the network and sustainability and connectivity to the cloud have had an impact on our products and services.Chris Adams: Thank you, Miguel and Colleen. I'll give you a bit of space to introduce yourself as well. For folks who missed your inaugural podcast last year.Colleen Josephson: Thank you very much. Yes. I'm Colleen Josephson. I'm a senior research scientist at VMware. I'm on the same team as Miguel, and a bit of news is that I'm actually transitioning to a full-time academic position at UC, Santa Cruz, where I'll be continuing to. To research sustainability, particularly in the space of low power in distributed systems.Last time I was a guest on the podcast, I was the org lead for VMware, and I'm very pleased to share that Miguel, uh, I've passed on the torch to him, so he's very qualified and excellent, so I'm really excited to be doing this podcast today with him.Chris Adams: Thank you, Colleen. All right, so for folks who are new to this format, Fact Check is a kind of format we use where we basically take a statement that people. Put into use in discussions around sustainability and software and we basically dive into it a little bit more to actually examine some of the assumptions because a lot of the time it really helps to really understand what some of the nuances behind this.And today, the fact check statement we are looking at is this one, can AI always help us optimize the environmental impact of software? And Miguel, I might invite you to talk a little bit about this part first actually, because this is something I think you've heard at least one time before.Miguel Ponce de Leon: More than one time, actually, I just as part of the introduction, just again, to say, look, I've been in and around telecommunication systems over the last 25 odd years from analog systems to two G, 3g, 4g, 5g. I know all these Gs that people hear about, but essentially it is and about looking about optimizing the way the networks are going to be deployed and used in the future, and very much we're seeing huge uptick in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help with this optimization, and it is true to say that it can help, but I think there's a number of factors in order to ensure that what you use for putting the model together, for deploying that AI model and that, that you optimize the network, that you are getting the totality and that end-to-end sustainability and energy usage from all of that.I think there's a lot of factors that we need to drop into it when we discuss that.Chris Adams: Okay, so we've got a series of factors here and maybe if we start with one or two dimensions or key things that have an influence here, if we start there, maybe that'll help us frame some of our discussion. So maybe if we start with the first one, what's one of the bigger levers, Colleen, maybe if I hand over to you, if there's one that you would pick, what might, might it be?Colleen Josephson: Training. Training is a very expensive process nowadays. Whether it's in the telco space, cuz again, VMware, as you hinted, we have a long history of virtualization in cloud, but that also has become very relevant to telecommunications. We need to train the models that we use to make these decisions to try and save energy and the process of having so much data.And training it. It can be really power consuming. So I think one of the things that stands out to me is what is your anticipated energy savings once you've deployed this model? How long do you anticipate that this model will be good for? And do you need to retrain it? All of those you wanna have some idea of so that you can calculate whether or not it was worth the energy to train this model in the first place.Miguel, do you have anything to add?Miguel Ponce de Leon: Yeah, just, oh, I absolutely agree when it comes to, to train the model, but what I'd love to really highlight to everybody, even here listening is that these systems are being more open for everybody to get involved, more developers to, to get involved. Again, I talked about all those Gs before, but they were very much closed to certain vendors and certain companies that built it.We now have Open-RAN this open radio access network, which means that we can use. More AI models and people's training of those models within systems and deploy them more readily. But it also means that we have to have newer understandings about, again, when we talk about wireless, we talk about power amplifiers.We talk about controlling power amplifiers with AI models, and again, how it is that we're going to make sure that we efficiently train those systems in an energy efficient way before we even talk about turning on and off those radio head ends to save energy more often than not to save it so that, again, when we don't have so many people within an area, and therefore the radio doesn't need to be pumping out that signal the whole time.Again, immediately you can see what the benefit is. But if we end up spending so much energy trying to train the model in the first place, then again, have we achieved our actual overall goal?Colleen Josephson: For the listeners tuning in who might be less familiar with the structure of wireless networks, it might be worth giving a little bit of background on this power consumption. For telecommunications specifically, the biggest energy challenges are the radio access network or RAN, as Miguel was just talking about, and also data centers.And the way that I like to think of it is that wireless communication is basically shouting energy into the void at high enough power so that the receiver can decode it. It's inherently consuming a lot of energy. So a lot of the challenge in this space is trying to look at how can we use various tactics, whether they're AI informed or not, to save power for this radio access network.And also increasingly data centers.Chris Adams: So there's one thing that you mentioned there, Colleen. So you spoke about most of the kind of areas where people are focusing on are either the data center or the radio access network, but not really the kind of pipes between data centers or the kind of backbone. Is that one thing there where there's already a fair degree of efficiency or where you don't see that much change at that part?Colleen Josephson: I think the pipes between data centers that's inclusive of data centers. I'm sorry if I was not clear of that. Yes, so that the kind of the inter data center communication is definitely a part of the energy consumption end to end system that we need to consider.Chris Adams: Okay, but there's a chunk about radio, but there's one area which is relatively new to us or relatively new, like this radio access network where cuz we've seen so much growth in cellular and things like that, and without growing so fast. This has been one thing that we are now looking to use tools like AI or something to make them work a little bit more efficiently than what people would manually be switching on things on and off or what, what, maybe we could explore some of the levers you actually have here, because it's not clear to me why you might be using AI in the first place for this part specifically.Miguel Ponce de Leon: I might say a little something about that, Chris, because again, what you're gonna find with radio, what you're finding today with 5G, and you'll find it in the future as well, is that there will be more aerials. They will have smaller power outputs, but there'll be more of them. And with more of them, it means that you have to network more of them.And with networking, that many nodes, you're going to have a, an optimization system in order to decide where to place them, when to place them, and when to leave them on and when to actually turn them off. Because if you have less of them, what you're actually gonna do is you're more or less, what's happening is you're leaving the actual radio head ends and the amplifiers, you're leaving them on constantly sucking up all that energy in juice. Now what we have is we have more aerials, lesser coverage, but because you have more, essentially it's more of a complex item than having a, a couple of network engineers monitor them themselves monitoring the issues as they potentially break or they have to be modified.So it's a much wider range of, let's say, input variables that you actually have to, you cover off on.Colleen Josephson: Just adding to your comment, Chris, earlier and Miguel's, absolutely right. We have a lot of input Variables, but. You were talking about kind of data center, network consumption and kind of the back haul, and I think I wanna revisit this topic of radio access network and wireless communication. And it's gonna get a little bit down into the physics of it, but if you have a wire going from one end to the other, fiber optic, those have much less loss.So you can consume much more rapidly, get much more throughput for the same power consumption with a wired network than compared to a wireless network. With wireless you have all sorts of types of loss. The channel conditions are changing drastically all the time. So this wireless aspect is really one of the things that makes it, the radio access part of the network's a higher power consumer because you have this signal that you're sending out into the air as opposed to this little cable that has much more controlled conditions, you're gonna see something they call path loss. When you're going from the transmitter to the receiver, you're gonna see something called multi-path, which is where there are multiple copies of the transmitted signal arriving at the receiver. And these wireless networks have to be designed to overcome some of these challenges, and that's where a lot of kind of the radio access network consuming more power comes from, if that makes sense.Chris Adams: I think that does. So if I was to maybe take a step back for folks who might be familiar with 3G and 4g, when we talk about some of this, if that was a model where you have one or two very large kind of transmitters or receivers, that's a shift to 5G or possibly even six G is many more smaller ones possibly with this.And as a result, you have a kind of explosion of complexity. That's the, that's the thing that you have to manage, that you didn't have to manage before. And maybe the, this other thing I should ask you about then is that, it sounds really basic, but one of the ways when people talk about, say, 5G or six G being potentially more efficient or greener is just because it's easier to turn some of the system off rather than just having things blasting the entire time, 24 7. That's one of the assumptions that you're looking at?Miguel Ponce de Leon: That's exactly it Chris. And just to explain the complexity as well, there is the possibilities. We're looking at them again with next G and six G systems. We'll, we're basically, there'll be a small aerial connected to your home, for example. But again, what you'll want to do is making sure that is controlled efficiently.That it's looked after optimally. So for us, all of that is causing this need to self-organize the network in some way. That's the way we use terminology. There's a self-organization of where you put the frequencies on each one of the antennas and things like that,Chris Adams: Ah, okay.Miguel Ponce de Leon: having that kind of control remotely can be interesting and it could be.For example, that your home aerial today could be with operator number one, we won't name the operators, but you can keep in mind that most, in most countries we have 2, 3, 4 operators in country, but an operator could pay you for that aerial that you've put on your home and could be optimizing it for your six G signal tomorrow.It could be operator B that's using your aerial in some way, shape or form, and they may have a different way of optimizing. That same aerial for the signal that it's producing and sending out there and paying for your time to use it. So again, that's why we see a much more open system, a kind of an open ecosystem of how telecommunications will be actually provided in the future.Colleen Josephson: And adding to that, there's some really great opportunities for, I like to talk about the power of open systems and virtualization, software definition, rapid prototyping. This really gives us an opportunity for that that we haven't had yet quite in this space of the traditional monolithic vendor stacks.By opening it up to more members of the ecosystem, people can prototype these new clever applications, whether they be AI based or otherwise, and deploy them and get much more quick feedback on how much energy are we saving by trying this and rapidly iterate on those sorts of developments.Chris Adams: Ah, okay. I'm really glad you brought it back to the AI part here for the initial fact check. So basically, faced with all this complexity, there's been this assumption that if there's something complex, we're just gonna throw AI at it. Like how Google did when they bought Deep Mind and then threw AI at their own data centers to twiddle the knobs instead of actually having humans do this.And it turns out that maybe that isn't the best way because there's a significant impact. From actually training in the first place, and that may be larger than the inference in this case, for example. That's where the complexity lies in some of this, by the sounds of it.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, definitely.Chris Adams: I think that helps break down some of this actually.The idea being that, yeah, there is an inference that we need to be thinking about and a training part that we need to be aware of. And if you spend your entire energy budget on the training part, then you need a huge amount of use to make up for that saving that you might actually have. And that's something we're not quite sure whether we'd actually see here.And you also mentioned something that was quite interesting Colleen about a kind of decomposition of what might have been a kind of quite monolithic stack into a larger number of small look moving components, for example. So rather than just having one vertically integrated system, there might be a number of different players involved, or some of their work might be done in a cloud somewhere else or something like that?Miguel Ponce de Leon: Yeah, so I will have to say a little something about how the networks are changing towards cloud native, right? So how communication service providers, or telcos, as we might call them as well, are moving towards more, and I'll say something, technologies like containerization, containerizing, the software within those containers, they're actually developed by different entities, by different developers, by different companies.And the integration of them all still provide you with an end-to-end telecommunication system. And what I think is really interesting here, For, and especially for the Green, Software Foundation is around the carbon impact of the software that's developed and how that's tested in a CICD a continuous integration, continuous deployment development environment to see the impact of the overall delivery of these individual players who have been plugged together to provide a communication system as we go towards next G. And this is something, again, a lot of research is going into certainly around communication service providers in Europe, they're saying, okay, I can get vendor A, B, and C. I'll plug them together, I'll put them in a containerized orchestration environment.But they're also asking their question, not just performance, not just security, but what is the sustainability and energy impact? And if B is not written in an efficient software way. The software way is not energy efficient and not secure. Well, I'm afraid vendor B will have to pop out and an alternative to that is, is being looked at how you pop that in.And again, all the factors around performance, security, and sustainability are important factors with these products actually going online. So again, that's the type of research that we're seeing happening at this moment in time is how do you do that? How do you measure the baseline around that, especially in a cloud native world?How do you get the baseline and then how do you take actions Because now that it's so pluggable and playable, like I give the example, I can put A, B, and C, but now I can take out B and put a replacement in. We really have to be cognizant of the delivery of, of that service too.Chris Adams: Okay, so it sounds like you're implying there are for want of a better term, as long as you are honoring a particular contract of an API. The idea would be that if you have a stack of technology, here's a chance to swap out one part of your stack to make, to replace it with a greener part of your stack.And hopefully that will result in a kind of more diverse, healthy ecosystem that you'd be working with here, for example, where there's a kind of chance we would compete on transparency and compete on sustainability in this instead of just actually on performance and cost, for example. Cuz in many cases that's the world we we are living in now, right?Miguel Ponce de Leon: Big time. Big time. And I do know of operators that now are looking at can they provide their clients with a energy sustainable service? Like they'll allow their customers to actually choose. So you can choose your service and it has A, B, and C, or you can choose your service with A, Z and C. One is more green.One is using energy in a more efficient way. And is that what your company decides to do? Then they can offer it in that way. So that's also what I see from a research perspective, what we're seeing at companies and entities around the communication space looking to, to address. But I know Colleen has some examples too, around this, right?Colleen Josephson: Yeah, so bringing back the data center thread, one thing that I thought was really interesting in some of the work that VMware has contributed to is that we saw the data center portion of a network's power consumption double between 4G and 5g, and we're expecting that trend to continue and become even more pronounced going into six G.So that's why we say that the two big things to think about are the radio access network and also the data centers. And that brings to mind one of our data center success stories where it comes to AI and energy savings. One big source of emissions is power that's drawn for data center cooling in particular.And to tackle this, we've actually partnered with Intel and a company called Clark Data on a solution called Deep Cooling. It uses big data and AI to model various physical parameters in large data centers. Things like power load heating, required cooling, and it uses insights gained from this modeling to predict the results of changing computing workloads and then automatically adjusts the equipment parameters to optimize the system cooling, and it's implemented right now in several large Chinese data centers, and it's been effective at helping customers significantly improve power usage effectiveness, and reduce carbon emissions. I think the figures I have here saving 18 to 25% of electricity for cooling.This is one example of kind of an AI success story. But again, you always have to think about when I go to train this model, when I go to use it, what is the story going to be when we consider end to end, not just the immediate usage.Chris Adams: So this maybe might be a chance to talk about some of the metrics you might use with this then, because one thing we spoke about in a previous episode was that there are various researchers who are talking about AI and they're talking about. The idea that you might attract the energy embedded into that model.Just the way we talk about embedded energy in, say, building physical hardware, there might be an idea of like energy embedded into a model before you actually use it, for example, as ways of listing this stuff. And when people talk about that, people talk about, say like the energy usage, but people also talk about the carbon impact of that part as well.And this kind of speaks to the idea there's maybe another lever, not just energy itself. Is that maybe something you might wanna talk a little bit? More about the fact that it's not just energy, it's the kind of energy or how green or dirty the energy might be, or what levers you actually have there to affect that.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, that sounds like it's getting a bit into some of the green load balancing or carbon aware workload migration that we talked about last time, and I'm pleased to share that our work on that has been progressing. It's still very much in the research phase. There's not much new that we can publicly share yet.What I can say is that the calculations from the Mobile World Congress work that we did a year ago, which found that you can have carbon emission savings of up to 50% by more intelligently placing your workload. Depending on where the municipal power is greener or less green, they appear to match our prototype results.So we're preparing to submit some research writings on this work. So stay tuned. Hopefully much more will be publicly available soon. And we also have some exciting collaborations on this front, looking at how carbon wear load balancing interacts with energy grids and making sure that data centers that begin to implement these novel solutions, they remain good energy citizens and don't unintentionally negatively impact our energy systems.Chris Adams: So this sounds like we might be thinking about AI in a few other places then, because there's this phrase that I haven't heard people use that often. Being a good energy citizen as a data center, could you maybe explain that bit more because most of us, we know that data centers use energy, but there's more qualities to the energy than you might have there, and you might not know about the density of demand or load, for example that might be worth explaining.Miguel Ponce de Leon: So one of the things I can mention is that we are working with, uh, grid utility. In Ireland and with that grid utility that also hosts a data center. As it so happens, we're also working with an accelerator program, a program that is helping startups to look at how you can not just link, but actually be able to take the correct measurements from the green sources, the wind farm locations, and the usage within the data center for its workloads. So again, here it's about leveraging, not just the research we'll say, that would come from research performing organizations or from the offices, the CTO of VMware, but also looking at startups and startups within the space and to link this. And that is helping the utilities understand what type of usage.And imagine it's a utility that has their own data center. So it's helping them be a good citizen, even within their own environment. But being able to measure it and then being able to take action on it, right? Because that's the important thing is, okay, you've got your baseline, but what can I change about what I'm delivering within that data center, even down to the containers?How can I move my clusters and pods? Overt and maybe consolidate some of the pods. We're even moving some of that research as well to look at, even with the pods being available, how many of the CPUs are they using within the cluster? So again, it's about being able to help data center owners being good citizens around that space.Chris Adams: Okay, so there's one thing that came out of that. We spoke before about how previously with three and 4G you might have basically a series of very large antennas blasting stuff out all the time, but now you'd be shifting to a lot, a kind of constellation of smaller antennas, which you might have to spend some time coordinating and time and energy in terms of coordination costs to figure out which ones to turn off so you can provide things working quickly, but also things being more geo efficient.It sounds like there's something like that on the data center level as well, like where we might have had data centers, which have been a steady 24 7 load, but there's actually scoped scale it down or up a bit. Is that what you're proposing?Miguel Ponce de Leon: That's exactly it. Chris, you're painting a great picture here of the interconnectivity of it all. But yes, cuz you know, again, as Colleen was saying earlier, we have two main parts to the network. There's the radio side and then there's the core side. And that what we're doing here as part of the VMware team, as well as collaboration with a number of other companies in it, is attacking it from both sides.And again, looking at how you can really look at that end-to-end element of actually delivering those potential energy savings in order to reach some of the goals. As Colleen was saying earlier, I could say the telecommunications world is really looking at reducing by 2030 and even beyond then by a number of factors from where they are today.You need to look at all facets of how that's delivered. So yeah, that's, and that's what you hear from what we talk about when we're looking at the startups. We're looking at how to link both the wind farm energy to the actual data center energy that's used.Chris Adams: Okay, so I can see why people might just say, this is so complicated and there are so many moving parts. I don't wanna think about it. I'm just gonna let AI think about this. And that's why there's this assumption that, yeah, that's gonna be doing the optimizing, but there's an impact in its own right to do that.And there may be other ways of doing this. Maybe we could talk a little bit about some of the projects that are either in the open or in the world that people might point to allow people to start playing around with some of this stuff for experimenting. Cuz Miguel, you mentioned open RAN. So my assumption is there's an open standard or some open source projects that people might play with and I know that we've spoken about in previous episodes, some software or some tools on the kind of data center side. Maybe Miguel, if I spoke to you about some of the open ran style, things like that people could point to and look at, maybe to experiment with themselves. What projects on GitHub or GitLab or things like that might you point people to if they were interested in this kind of very dynamic new network and data network world?Miguel Ponce de Leon: Sure, and I'm sure we can give some links as well. So folks, and it's always the easiest thing, right? We give the show notes and we'll give some links off to it. But there is again, to help control the radio access network, there's a thing called the RIC; the short name for it, but it's radio, the radio access network intelligence controller, and there is an open source version of this.And the RIC uses a thing called, uh, cube flow. So this is a way of being able to host your machine learning model in a way that will be able to interact with the radio network. So there's a couple of open instances there where if you have a Kubernetes cluster, once you have the, uh, open source rig from the ONF the Open Networking Foundation that you can develop, again, some in-house terminology here, but we have what's called the X app and the R app.So the X app is this realtime application that can immediately, uh, basically turn on and off the radio head ends to help with that energy saving. Or we have the near realtime app, which is more or less, you can spend a little bit more time considering, given the complexity of the number of aerials that are out there, about how you'll deploy and which ones you would turn on and off.And that's somewhere, again, a number of easy programs written in Python that if you wanted to get up and running and in doing so, you could have an impact on a future well known operators network in your area. Because the whole system is becoming far more open and the app that's developed on the open source projects I've just mentioned, you could then put them on things like the VMware RIC.We offer a one that's very much telco grade gets deployed in the network, but the app that you've developed in ai, that the model that you've developed can be deployed in the same way. You don't have to wrap it up much more differently than to do so there. There are some relatively easy touch points to, to get involved here.Chris Adams: Okay. And Colleen, we spoke before about junkyard data centers and I think last time you came on we, you were talking about some of the research that you folks are doing with the VMware to start tracking and measuring the savings, the carbon savings before. So if there, are there any kind of data center projects or orchestration projects you might point people to?Because I think I've spoken about things like eco visors and stuff before, but I'd love to know what else is going on here actually,Colleen Josephson: Yeah, I shared some overlap with what Miguel was talking about, to be honest, and I think containerization, Kepler very important project. Yeah, so Kepler is this energy monitoring and tool for Kubernetes containers and you can hook this into some visualization systems. You know, that's one kind of open source project for monitoring data center, energy consumption that I'm aware of.Very important in that area. Not AI specific, but those two areas are a frequent topic of conversation among people who work in cloud and data centers.Chris Adams: Yes, Kubernetes efficient power level exporter. I found the link for it actually. That's what it stands for. There's a project. Where there's actually an ongoing conversation and some of the kind of Green Software Foundation I can't remember which repo it is, specifically where Adrian Cockcroft has been mentioning this idea of Kepler as one of the mechanisms to allow kind of minute by minute reporting at a cloud level so that you can actually get some of the numbers to optimize for carbon or optimize for energy usage.Cuz this is one thing that you don't always have for all your providers, and that's one of the kind of underlying piece of technology used to expose these kind of resources usage figures for each of these kind of pods or clusters of computing and things like that. So we've got about five or six minutes time left, and I did want to leave some space to talk about some of the kind of wackier stuff that we didn't get a chance to talk about last time.Just before. Towards the end of last episode, we spoke a little bit about things like junkyard data centers, which were like data centers made of various end of life computers and things like that. And Colleen you mentioned different kinds of either zero power or low power. Things like soil powered batteries and stuff like that.And seeing as we've gone into all this kind of industrial level stuff, I figured it might be worth an interesting to look at some of the other level, like the really low, ultra low power stuff. Is this what you're gonna be going to study or is this some of this work you've done before? Because I think it's gonna be interesting to some of the crowd here, realizing that things happen at the bottom end of the scale as well.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, yeah. This is the bridging of the two worlds and the data center and these big monolithic or not so monolithic anymore systems are really important to consider, but. We use these telecommunication systems to hook into much smaller devices, tablets, smartphones, and ever increasingly IoT. And what is really interesting about these IoT and smartphone, smaller user devices is they are special because they've been designed to be power efficient.So the carbon footprint for them is significantly larger in the manufacturer phase. Compared to the device use phase. So they, they have a much higher embodied carbon footprint proportionally than the energy consumption that they use. There's some really interesting work going on here for how can we lower the embodied carbon footprint of some of these massively, or we anticipate them to be massively deployed miniature systems.And one of the ways that I've worked on that's out of the box is batteries. So we have some ultra low power communication devices that, you know, we can. Begin to use to do something called simultaneous sensing and communication. And one of the bigger footprint aspects of some of these systems are the batteries, traditionally speaking.So if you can minimize or eliminate the need to have a battery, then you can significantly reduce the embodied carbon footprint. So one of the things that I've looked at is can we actually harvest energy from the soil itself? So this is really early stage research that we're starting to look at UC, Santa Cruz, and it hooks into something called intermittent computing, if you've ever heard of it.And it's this idea of computing systems that don't constantly have power available and the paradigms that the system operates at. We design data centers, we assume that power is always going to be available or we did. And so now if we have to be much more dynamic and on our feet about when power is available, we have to be able to very rapidly save progress.Go into power shave mode and then rapidly spin back up again when there's power available. So the intermittent computing community has been really active at connecting the ultra low power and ultra far edge and hooking it into our core networking and traditional communication systems. I can add, if we're looking for off the wall ideas.Hot Carbon. The first inaugural hot carbon workshop was last year. I'm pleased to share that this year there will be a second iteration of this workshop. One exciting development is that it's tentatively going to be sponsored by ACM Sig Energy this year, in addition to VMware's continued support. So I'm actually working as the publication chair for that workshop.The submission deadline was yesterday, 5 21. The workshop itself will be on July 9th. Just shout out to those of you listening. So tune in for what's sure to be a very interesting cutting edge work in the sustainable software space, and it's going to be a hybrid workshop. The physical location is in Boston Mass, but now if you go to the website, hotcarbon.org, up very soon should be a registration link so that you can sign up to attend virtually or in person if you happen to be in the Boston area.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for sharing that. Colleen, for anyone who is on the fence, I virtually attended Hot Carbon last year and I basically plundered that list of people for guests for this podcast cause there's loads of really interesting projects going on there. There's also some really nice stuff I. Colleen I just wanna ask about this idea of intermittent computing, cuz it sounds like it's like really almost super serverless. So the idea that there's, it's almost like battery-less, basically the idea that you do the things scale right down to zero and you just basically don't really work until you've got energy coming back in again.That's the idea behind that.Colleen Josephson: I think there, there are definite connections to battery-less. An intermittent computing paradigm can work whether there's a battery or not. Trying to work around how charged that battery is and turning off when power is reducing. But yeah, it's a very prominent area of work when you consider battery-less computing and just to connect everything end to end.You might have these very low power sub microwatt, in some cases, devices at the ultra far edge, but you need to have something. That brings that data back to the cloud, and this is where you have more traditional edge computing, like maybe a server that's at a farm or some things that people are starting to think of are edge data centers that are potentially even mounted to drones, or edge 5G that's mounted to drones.So lots of really near edge and far edge paradigms.Chris Adams: Okay, so it sounds like as we have moved from monolithic, gigantic computers to things becoming smaller and more distributed, there is a coordination cost, which is why people often talk about, this is so complicated I'm just gonna hope that AI solves it for me, which is where some of these ideas came from, that of course, you can use AI to automatically work out, erase the environmental impact from computing.I hope that one thing we're taking away from this conversation is that no, it's a bit more complicated than that and, but there's lots of exciting rabbit holes to drive down. Folks, I've really enjoyed this conversation actually, and I think we're coming up to the time that we have here with the la Do you folks, if in the last few minutes that I might actually ask, are there any projects or things you might point people to that we haven't spoken about that you'd like to give a shout out to before we wind up?Miguel Ponce de Leon: Okay, because I'm based in Europe, right? There is a coalition that's working together with a number of working groups, really looking at how all the things that we just talked about, but with more specifics. Cuz I know you, you wanna, do you use the word fact checking around what we're trying to achieve here.So there's a number of working groups in, in Europe where companies are coming together and really looking to do this Now. One of them is the European Green Digital Coalition, right? So the EDGC I'll send you on a link and around it as well. But thi this is a space where, We're having to look at, cuz at the end of the day, we will standardize around what way you're going to measure these changes.What way It's gonna have an impact on business in what way? When you do offer this fantastic green telecommunication service, what you're saying is energy aware. But there's gonna have to be standardization around whether or not that is actually the case. And so there is a good bit of work in and around this.Again, I almost seem to use the word research and it's happening. And the thing is, we're right in this maelstrom, this tornado of activity that's just got underway and just seeing how they fit together, it's not a perfect fit I would say there. I couldn't give you, this is exactly the time horizon and this is how it's gonna happen, but I can tell with the level of funding, both from governmental agencies, from companies themselves, from research institutes to lots of public bodies and developers in their own time. It's a great time to be in and around this space of developing software, but specifically for the delivery of green technologies as we see it.For me, that would be the big pointer, and I'm hoping that someone, one or two of the topics that we've mentioned here, would give Annie developer an opportunity to actually, like you were saying earlier, Chris, have a look at a GitHub project. Have a look at being able to develop a small model, some code, and have somewhere to actually apply it where it will have an effect on your own services in the future.So certainly that's what I'm excited about and why I'm working hand in hand with colleague on this particular topic.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you, Miguel and Colleen. Just as we as we wind out, what would you draw people's attention to apart from hot carbon, of course, which is freaking awesome.Colleen Josephson: Yeah, I've got two, two things. For those of you listening who might be interested in doing a bit of a deeper dive on telco sustainability, here's, there'll be a i, I just shared a link to our VMware Telco sustainability white paper, so that goes, Into more detail on some of the challenges of the radio access network, the RAN and the data center, and then also coming back up the stack to this idea of data center being good energy citizens.I want to name our collaborator Adrien Chen at the University of Chicago. He's been active with us in this area and in some of these collaborations and this paper here. Evaluating coupling models for cloud data centers and power grids, that that work is really great for showing some of the problems of how data centers can disrupt the grid.So I encourage people to go check that out if they're interested in that topic as well.Chris Adams: Cool folks. We began talking a little bit about a fact check. We. I think we've realized that you can't automatically assume that AI will automatically reduce the environmental impact of everything. And we realize there's quite a lot to it. But I've really enjoyed driving down all these rabbit holes with you folks and uh, yeah, thank you so much.We'd love to have you folks come on again. Yeah, folks, have a lovely morning or afternoon wherever you are in the world and yeah, see you around. Take care folks. Tira.Colleen Josephson: Thanks again, Chris.Miguel Ponce de Leon: Thank you ChrisChris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get to your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation In any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Andri Johnston, Digital Sustainable Lead for Cambridge University Press and Assessment as they talk about using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing as well as news from the world of green software concerning one acronym; ESG and one portmanteau; LightSwitchOps. They also cover some upcoming events and we learn about Andri’s love of books!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAndri Johnston: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:ESG as a lever for sustainability impact | Elise Zelechowski Thoughtworks  [2:49]Using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment | Andri Johnston & William Pickett [7:31]How Would the Business Benefit from Your Greener Java Application? | Holly Cummins at Devoxx UK [14:53]Resources:Thoughtworks.com/socialjustice [3:33]ShareAction [6:16]As You Sow [6:43]The True Climate Impact of Streaming | Netflix & Dimpact [8:49]Virtual conference carbon footprint revealed | Cambridge.org [11:23]David Hsu on mastodon.energy [13:53]The Baking Forecast UK [21:20]Effects of Internet-based multiple-site conferences on greenhouse gas emissions | Vlad Coraoma Events:Green Infrastructure Meetup GfK [x] Green Coding Berlin - 31 May 6:30-8:30PM | Green Coding Berlin [23:19]UN World Environment Day: The Green Software Revolution (Virtual Event) - Monday June 5th | GSF [24:02]LF Energy Summit 2023 (June 1 – 2, PARIS & Virtual) | Linux Foundation [24:46] 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:Andri Johnston: We have no control over what device people are using or what energy grid they're using, but we do have control over how we're building our software and making it as energy efficient as possible. And in my experience, the moment we were able to show that those numbers to board execs and that kind of level, it was like, oh, okay, so we actually can do something.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, and in this episode we'll be looking at the news from the world of green software that involves ESG and a portmanteau LightSwitchOps.Not only do we have this, but we'll also have some exciting events for you to attend. As always, we usually try to introduce our guests before we get started, and this week we have Andri Johnson joining us. Andri say hi.Andri Johnston: Hi. Thank you so much for getting me on the podcast. So yeah, I'm Andri Andri Johnson. I am the digital sustainability lead at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. And a little bit about me. I'm a very keen runner and gardener, however, that's taking a backseat right now cuz I am 36 weeks pregnant and I've deep dived into the world of sustainability and babies, which is a very weird world, but really exciting.So, yeah. That's me.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Andri, you seem to be continuing our trend of guests who are just about to have kids before they disappear onto the other one. Yeah. Sara. Sara Bergman who was on before. She was also just coming to the end before she popped a sprog as well. And uh, yeah, uh, nice to hear. I wish you were the best for the second half of this actually.Okay, so for everyone who is, who listened to this first time, this is basically a news roundup show. So what we do is we look at some stories that caught our eyes, we share a couple of records about them, and then. Basically move on from there and if we discuss anything or any links come up that might be interesting.We'll make sure we add it into this show notes, so if there's any acronyms or anything like that, we'll work to point to some either definitions or lists for further reading. Okay. Andri, will that further ado? Should we look at the first of these stories?Andri Johnston: Yeah, sure. Let's go.Chris Adams: Okay, so this first story is ESG as a lever for sustainability impact by Elise Zelechowski at ThoughtWorks.Elise is actually the co-chair of the policy working group, and this is a blog post that she's written about some of the approaches that ThoughtWorks is taking around esg. ESG for the uninitiated stands for environmental, social and Governance, and it's a kind of set of terms or a kind of framework that people use to assess a company's performance in terms of sustainability and across a number of dimensions.ThoughtWorks has been talking about some of this for a while, and they've been probably one of the, in many ways, kind of leaders in this particular field. They've literally got a url, which is thoughtworks.com/socialjustice, to give you an idea of where they stand on a bunch of this stuff. And Andri, Andri, you had to look through this piece.Is there anything you wanna add on this one?Andri Johnston: Yeah, I found it really interesting and I'm really encouraged by the fact that especially on the tech side, more companies are starting to look at ESG. Not just reporting on carbon emissions. So at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, ESG is very important to us because we are linked with the University of Cambridge, we have to comply with a lot of social issues as well.And our environmental team and our EDIB team work very closely together. So for me, this was really interesting that Elise was talking about how companies need to evaluate themselves on all of these factors, and also working with your suppliers and that kind of thing, because that's, that's difficult.Like it's one thing, getting your carbon emissions from them, but really making sure you align with their ethics and it aligns with your ethics. I think that's really important. So I found it really interesting and very encouraging that more companies are starting to do that. Yeah.Chris Adams: I wonder how much might also be tied to, so ThoughtWorks went public this year and uh, there are over the last year or two, you have seen. A real uptick in ESG as a kind of buzzword in investment circles and in particular, say Europe for example, things you might consider kinda like green investments are able to get access to capital in ways that other groups don't.Particularly with something related called the European Taxonomy, which is specifically about saying, okay, these things which are green, Which we have decided society needs more of, get access to lower interest rates so they can borrow cheaper compared to other ones. And, uh, this is, there's a real push from investors asking about this in many ways.Sort of getting an idea of what they're exposed to from a climate point of view, but also from a kind of governance point of view and things like that as well.Andri Johnston: I guess there's also something around how this sits with your employees, because for us, we're technically a not-for-profit and for us, a lot of people come to work. At UP&A because of the ethics around it, the university, a couple of years had to de divest because of connections with big oil companies.And for us, it's the same. Our internal colleagues will ask us questions, who are we partnering with? What's their ethics? How does that align? So I guess there's both the investment part but also thinking about your colleagues internally and how they feel about your sustainability as a whole. So using this as a measure.Chris Adams: Yeah. This is definitely a thing. Actually, there's a few interesting kind of jump off points here that may be going outside the remit of green software, but a problem might be of interest. I know in the UK there's an organization called ShareAction that's been doing a. Bunch of really interesting work on employees and where their money's invested, because a lot of the time if you're working for a company where that you feel that you believe in or you want to be spending some time with, you'd, you'd like the the money that's being put aside for you to also be doing things that you also believe in, rather than propping up fossil fuels or doing things like that.Especially when the science is spelling out that we really need to not be involved in that as well. Okay. And there is also an organization called, I think As You Sow they've done some really interesting work with shareholder activism, specifically about putting shareholder resolutions to get a large organizations to move more quickly on sustainability.There's some really fascinating work that they did with Microsoft actually to basically really push for some more circular electronics. And what we'll do is we'll share a link specifically about how basically some engagement at a kind of shareholder level using the kind of shareholder resolutions mechanism was used to basically say, let's actually look at the environmental impact of say things like, say Microsoft Services lasting longer, and is that actually a net gain for us?And it turns out that it was, it's a really nice and interesting story because yeah, it turns out there are lots of ways that you can push for things rather than just coding. And I think that's gonna be the next thing we might touch on actually, which is the story about using DIMPACT. So DIMPACT. Or maybe you can help, how to pronounce this.What'sAndri Johnston: I think we just say DIMPACT, but yeah, it's digital impact, so it can be either, but yeah, DIMPACT.Chris Adams: All right. Okay, so this is using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. This is a story about the use of DIMPACT, which is a model that was developed by a consortium of different organizations, largely to understand the environmental impact of basically digital services and Andri just before we started the call, you were telling me a little bit about some of the origin stories of this and how some of this came about, and this is some of the work that you've been involved with, right.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah. DIMPACT was created by a consultancy company called Cornerstone based in London, in conjunction with the University of Bristol and their computer engineering department. And it basically, the first kind of version of it came from the BBC wanting to understand what the carbon footprint was of their online advertising.And from there, the tool is built with each different company using different model, and for example, there's a digital publishing module, which we use, but there's also a video streaming module, which Netflix, for example, used last year, Netflix and the Carbon Trust with Cornerstone published a white paper on video streaming, and it was really interesting debunking a lot of the myths around video streaming and where the majority of the carbon emissions lie.But the whole tool is based on the same kind of methodology. It's just different workflows depending on what type of business you're in. Advertising, streaming, or publishing like us. Yeah.Chris Adams: I see, and you spoke about this idea that there's maybe one model that's been published that, that we can, we're gonna link to, this is open for people to look at, but the idea was that get based on the use case, you might want to use a model slightly differently. So streaming might use a digital infrastructure in a different way to publishing, for example, because there's maybe a different environmental impact from watching something or streaming some files compared to dynamically generating a page every single time or something like that.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think what's fascinating and what I find really good about the tool is the granularity it can go into. So on a publishing side we publish the majority of our content online, so all of our customers access our books, our journals, our textbooks online, but there's also a content production kind of side to it, and that's what I find really useful about the tool.It doesn't just look at the hosting and the accessing of your webpage. It also looks at your entire workflow of your content production and storage, which I think is quite unique. And that's why we started using it because it allowed us as publishers to look at our complete workflow from the start of producing your content for book, for example, all the way through, let's see, someone accessing it online.So yeah, that it gives you a very good overview of your complete carbon footprint.Chris Adams: Oh wow. So that's quite a large boundary. So rather than just saying, I'm just gonna look at the website you're talking about, okay, if there's maybe another batch job, or there's another whole edit editing subsystem, you're keeping that inside your kind of boundaries at where, right. Okay.Andri Johnston: Exactly.Chris Adams: All right. Okay.What we'll do, we'll share some links to some of the underlying assumptions and ideas behind how these models work, but there's one thing I also wanted to actually talk about, cuz there's another link inside. This was this idea of using some of these related tools to understand the environmental impact of virtual conferences as well as the publishing part.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah, because we'd partnered with DIMPACT to do the publishing side when I was doing the article that the will link to it was a pilot project that we did in the academic division for at CUP&A and in the academic publishing world conferences are huge and we had a lot of people coming back and saying, no, we should go back to in-person conferences.But at the same time, a lot of pushback and saying, no, we should do it online for environmental reasons. So we actually really wanted to understand what the impact was of a virtual conference. So we partnered with DIMPACT again and they. We're developing a module for virtual conferences. They're similar to the publishing and advertising module.They developed this module for virtual conferences and we took a two day online conference with about a hundred participants per session. We had eight different sessions and we had people from all over the world joining us. We had about 500 participants in total over the whole time. So it was quite big.Um, and we actually found that. Over the two days, the conference emitted between 15 and 20 kilograms of CO2. For the entire conference. We would've had at least 70 to a hundred people fly in from the US to the conference. It was just really fascinating to do that calculation and to see what the impact was and was never to say.In-person events are bad. It's just so you have the tools and you have the knowledge to be able to say, this is what the impact is of our online conference for this specific conference. We made the choice to do it because of this. So yeah, I think it's great to have that knowledge.Chris Adams: Okay, so in this scenario, Streaming is not the new flying. Flying is still the new flying.Andri Johnston: Flying is still the new flying. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. And what, you said 15 to 20 kilos of co2? Right. Okay. So if we assume, typically this is a kind of common factor that I've seen shared, and we'll share a link to. Typically if you have a cappuccino or a cup of coffee, you're looking at maybe between two to 400 grams of co2 just for that cup of coffee here.So basically the coffee break for a hundred people was roughly the same carbon footprint as the entire virtual conference, just for the assumptions are more or less in the same ballpark here. Okay. All right. That's a useful thing to bear in mind when we're looking at some of this then. Wow. Okay. Also, there's one thing I might share related to this, now that you've actually just spoke about this.There's a chap on mastodon.energy, David Hsu. He's done, he's actually been sharing some really interesting work about that's been happening at MIT about their approach with flying and basically academic. The whole kind of idea of, okay, if I'm an academic or I'm doing a bunch of, I'm involved in lots of conferences, where is the environmental impact?We'll share a link to that deck as well. Cause it's really fascinating and it shows a bunch of the ideas that are being used in MIT to basically get handle on the environmental impact from the whole life cycle of creating what we might refer to as knowledge products like this. And you talk about lots of measures, like say, applying an internal carbon levy the way Microsoft does, but they also talk about things like, say literally just public tracking of this stuff. So you get a rough idea of, okay, at a team level, these are the miles flown for this kind of work and things like that to basically make these things more visible so you can create, uh, an awareness of social proof around this stuff. Okay. Thank you, Andri. That was great.Andri Johnston: it sounds fascinating. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right.Should we look at the next story? Okay, so this is Holly Cummins at Devoxx UK. How would you or the business benefit from your greener Java application? So we spoke about a talk by Holly Cummins at Red Hat about greener Java applications. And this is a talk that Holly was speaking about and this is where this notion of LightSwitchOps has come up.I think she's also Holly's on a bit of a roll, cause she's mentioned she's come up with a bunch of really quite memorable terms like cloud zombies and things like that here. Is there anything that kind of caught your eye when you were reading this stuff?Andri Johnston: I think I really liked the idea of making colleagues more aware of greener Java and greener coat because, so taking it back a little bit to the work we did with the DIMPACT tool, as we know in the majority of digital products at the majority of our carbon emissions lie with our end users, and there's still a little bit of a back and forth whether we should be reporting on that, whether we shouldn't, is that part of scope three?But what we realize is that's the one place you can actually start making a difference in the way that you. Build your software and that, and especially the way that you are creating the content and these pages that people access. And I think this is a kind of thing that you need to provide to your teams as a tool to say, we can make a difference in how we're building our website.So for me that was a really easy way to say, here's a tip, here's a small thing that we can do as digital product people to make our websites more energy efficient at the end of the day. So for me that was really good. It's that, found it really interesting. I was like, I definitely wanna share this article with my teams.Yeah.Chris Adams: So I have a question here about borders, cuz I just, before this, Cost. I did a bit of research on the model, and there are various ways of modeling the environmental impact of a digital service. And the actual end user part is often one of the things which is can seen as a kind of stickler. Like for example, Mozilla, when they report on their emissions, 98% of their scope three, their supply chain carbon footprint came from the device of end users of this.And basically, this is an organization which reported their carbon footprint of around 800,000 tons. Where 98% of it came from end users, whereas large other organizations like say Google and Netflix, they haven't included these numbers themselves for some of this, and Digital Impact does, but it includes the usage, not the kind of embodied emissions that went into making theAndri Johnston: Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. But I think something that we need to take into consideration and why, I think for us it's important to report and to calculate those emissions is because, and Holly points to the carbon emissions of different regions for data centers, which is very true. But also carbon emissions are different for different end users depending on where they're based in the world.So we know that over 50% of all our customers are not based in the global south and don't have access to grids that are gonna greenify anytime soon. It's really important to understand that if that's where the majority of our carbon emissions lie, we have no control over what device people are using or what energy grid they're using.But we do have control over how we're building our software and making it as energy efficient as possible. And in my experience, the moment we were able to show that those numbers to board execs and that kind of level, it was like, oh, okay, so we actually can do something. So yeah, I think it's just important to keep that in mind and not just say, we're not gonna report on it because it's not our problem.Because I do think in some ways it's our responsibility too, to still work on it.Chris Adams: Yes. There's also one thing you just mentioned actually just springs to mind how there's actually a paper from, I think the Limits conference a couple of years ago that was, that came up in some of the discussions of the Green Software Foundation. When we're trying to figure out, okay, where should the boundary be for some of this, there are decisions that can be made at publishing level that will basically induce people to upgrade or use one device over another device.We might know this is premature obsolescence, but a lot of the times you might see it when if you use Slack or tools like that, you might see how. You stopped being able to use certain browsers with Slack, for example, or even if you tried to use a browser, like say, Firefox might be the browser that I use by default.I can't use Firefox on some tools because they assume the use of Chrome or certain tools like that. And there's a whole thing about, okay, well how far are you gonna actually be supporting a, and what happens as a result of you choosing to support certain devices over another one? All right. Okay. There's also, the other thing that we're gonna talk about with this was this idea of LightSwitchOps.I really like it. It cuz it feels like it captures, and we've spoken about, there's an idea in tech where people talk about things like serverless, whereas there's an idea of things being switched off that when you stop using them. But the idea that we don't have service is a bit of a kind of, It's a fiction that is cool, but let's be real.We're not really, we know their service still there. Whereas LightSwitchOps, the idea of switching things off, it makes it feel much, much nicer and it feels easier to say than scale to zero. So once I kind of get your take on LightSwitchOps as a kind of low tech and, but a friendly way to talk about some of this stuff here.Andri Johnston: I think that's exactly what it is. It's a friendly way to explain to people how we can build our products and how we can make sure that they're energy efficient. So just to give a bit of background, I don't come from a tech background at all. I come from a publishing background and I taught myself all of these things and I got fascinated by it.And it sometimes gets quite overwhelming when you are talking about, especially things like around cloud hosting and serverless, and it's becomes very techy. But the moment you can simplify it, Then it's almost like you can say, oh, okay, yeah, I can make, I can do this. Anyone can change the way that we're creating our products.So yes, I think that's exactly what it is. It's simplifying tech for everyone to understand and digital sustainability, because it does still seem very farfetched in, in some ways. If you're not super techy.Chris Adams: Yeah, I'm with you on this. Are you familiar with the baking forecast, by the way? Andri. Okay. The baking forecast is the way I talk about carbon intensity to people who are not really already really into this stuff. At the baking forecast, you, I think it still is a Twitter account that basically will tell you, when the electricity is gonna be particularly green in the UK, so if you're gonna bake a delicious cake or loaf of bread or anything like that, it'll be a particularly green cake, which means that you'll feel particularly good about yourself.And as opposed to if it's a really fossil fuel, heavy, heavy moment of the grid, maybe on a wait a little while, probably don't bake today or bake tomorrow, and they just provide little forecast just like we have the shipping forecast, which is a well loved. Institution in the uk you now have the baking forecast to communicate the idea of carbon intensity of electricity.And that seems to be pretty intuitive to a nation that is a fan of the British, the Great British Bake Off or anything like that. It seems like a really nice way in to talk about something which is gonna become more and more of a kind of staple or a regular constant. Uh, and as we move away from a kind of fossil fuel kind of based grid to something which is more in tune with the natural cycles and rhythms that we see of like sunlight and wind and things like that.Andri Johnston: Yeah, it feels more natural in any case, isn't it like to live with nature in that way?Chris Adams: Yeah The approach that I found as well, like when you talk about grids having a kind of cycles, then it's a little bit like really sped up seasonality for food. Uh, that's how I try to explain that to other people as well. Cause once you've. People have some notion like, yeah, okay. Things come into season, there's cycles you can use there.And if you think about grids and electric, that's like the equivalent for people who work in technology is basically like chefs might have seasonality. We have grid intensity for what we do.Andri Johnston: Yeah, that's a really good way to see it. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you. Alright. Should we look at some of the events here to see what we've got coming up?Andri Johnston: Yeah.Chris Adams: All right. Okay, so there is an event that's listed below here. This is the Green Infrastructure Meetup by Green Coding Berlin, and it's about, there's a guy, yeah, Arne Tarara. He, he works at the imaginatively titled Green CodingBerlin. They're basically a a bunch of people in Berlin who really into green coding basically, and they're presenting and running an event that's happening in Berlin on the 31st of May. So that's what's happening there. And there's a, there's some talks that they have, Arne Tarara and his little gang of people, they have a bunch of open source tools, which they make available for everyone to use for free and to basically try using some of this stuff.And the other thing we have is UN World Environment Day. This is on June the fifth as well, actually.Andri Johnston: That looks really interesting. I was looking at that. I was like, oh wow. Like I really want to attend that one.Chris Adams: Yeah, and the people speaking here. So we've got Asim Hussain, who's a regular on this podcast. Anne Currie, she of Space Death Rays and data centers in space. There's Tamara Kneese she's actually one of the lead authors on a report about. Basically cryptocurrencies and the environmental impact of grid cryptocurrencies for the Linux Foundation, but she's also doing a bunch of work with the Green Software Foundation on upcoming green software report and Pindy Bhullar, this CTO for ESG at UBS and a PhD researcher.This is an online event for anyone who's interested on the 5th of June. The other thing they don't have mentioned is the Linux Foundation Energy Summit that's taking place in Paris where it's a two day long conference with a bunch of events that I'm hoping will be shared afterwards because, well, I'll be going there in person to see, and I've seen a bunch of tools and talks coming upcoming, specifically about various kinds of open source tools that you can use to quantify and understand the environmental DIMPACT of the digital services that we use in on a daily basis.Andri Johnston: Sounds really interesting. I have to say, I'm definitely gonna share the UN one, the online one as well, because I am a bit biased towards online events. So having, coming from South Africa, I always had this feeling that there's not enough opportunities to go to things like this. And one thing that I really love is how there's more and more online events like this for people who can't travel all the way.Yeah. So I, I think that's really great to have more of these.Chris Adams: I know what you mean. I'm really with a bit of luck. What I'd love to see as a follow on from some of this stuff, we've seen people understanding the environmental impact of entirely virtual events, and we see a significant amount of information about the impact of in-person events where we see that most of the time, the road to the impact is around 80%.Basically of flying people to and from an event a lot of the time. But this idea of kinda like hub and spoke or kind of hybrid events, I haven't seen that many published reports or things to help us understand if there is a way to have some kind of interim here. Because there is something to be said for high bandwidth interactions with other people, but there is also a significant environmental impact associated with that.And, uh, there have to be some alternatives to this. What we'll do, I'll share a link cuz anyone I know about is a piece by Vlad Coraoma. He's shared a paper about this from a couple of years ago, but beyond that though, ah, Andri something we could, it'd be really nice to see. So if few folks are doing that anytime soon or doing any kind of hybrid events, do please let us know and it'd be really lovely to hear about that.Andri Johnston: Yeah, it's definitely something that we're interested in looking into more, so I'll keep you in the loop.Chris Adams: Cool. All right, Andri, thank you very much for this. We're just coming to the end of this, which is time for the kind of closing question. I suppose you work for one of the most well known publishers in the UK, and I guess I should ask you about books in that case, where do you tend to get your books? Do you buy 'em secondhand in shops or do you read on Kindle, or is there some particular channel you into?What would you recommend?Andri Johnston: I think I am a bit of a book snob. Previously I worked in trade publishing in Penguin, so I'm a little bit of a book snob if I'm just reading something. Quickly, then I get it on my Kobo because I'm also very aware of the actual impact of a physical book on the environment. But when I do buy physical books, I usually go to indie bookstores and buy the hard cover version because I know how much goes into producing it as well.I don't buy that many books, which seems shocking, but working in publishing, but it's just because I've become very mindful of what I do buy. So if it's a quick read, I read it on my Kobo, but if it's, it's like a book I really want in paper, I'll go to a very indie niche little bookstore and support that way.That being said, secondhand, old secondhand book stores that are very dusty are definitely one of my favorite places in the world. So yeah, I'm definitely a little bit of a book snob, but that's to be expected.Chris Adams: That's so good. The problem, I think that's fair. If you work with books all day long, then you get to have opinions about books. All right, Andri, thank you so much for coming on for this little session today and uh, yeah, I've really enjoyed this chat, so thank you for coming on for this week in Green Software and hopefully we'll have you on again sometime soon.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's really great and thank you for the great podcast. I really enjoyed and I always learn a lot, so thank you so much.Chris Adams: Cool, thanks Andri Andri. See you around. Bye.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 the GSF’s Asim Hussain on this episode of The Week in Green Software. They discuss some interesting news about Amazon, AWS and their scope 3 GHG protocol emission data. We also find out how Python has got its Mojo back and we have a very exciting tool from Catchpoint WebpageTest for measuring site’s carbon footprint. Finally, some great green software events that you can be part of! 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 NewsletterNews:AWS confirms Scope 3 GHG emissions data will be made freely available to customers in ‘early 2024’ | Computer Weekly [3:17]Amazon’s SusScanner for CloudFormationTemplates | Charles Roberts on LinkedIn [13:22]Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades | Fast.Ai [16:28]Measure & Improve Your Site's Footprint with Carbon Control from Catchpoint WebPageTest | Catchpoint [22:14]Resources:Picture of Coffee Analogy with GHG Scope Protocols | GHG Protocol [8:24]Survey on Need for GHG Protocol Corporate Standards and Guidance Updates | GHG Protocol [10:25]Adrian Cockcroft’s Monitorama Talk | Vimeo [24:41]Carbon Impact | Dynatrace Hub [24:58]Is data transfer the best proxy for website carbon emissions? | Fershad Irani [28:23]Learn.greensoftware.foundation | GSF [31:55]Events:Ottawa GSF Meetup (May 24 at 9:00 am EDT): | GSF [31:00]SDIA Hackathon on the Environmental Impact of Software (May 24 at 1:00 pm CET, Berlin): | SDIA [32:47]London GSF Meetup - Anniversary Special  (May 25, 6:00 pm BST) | GSF [36:04]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Asim Hussain: I think in an organizational perspective, scope three is turning out to be quite an amazing lever to drive change cuz by calculating the scope three, they're also applying pressure to their suppliers and saying, reduce your scope three, reduce your emissions, reduce effectively your scope one and two and your three or our go to another supplier.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 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, and in this episode we have interesting news about Amazon and AWS. A programming language with a lot of Mojo and some exciting events coming across from the world of green software, as well as some interesting news with WebpageTestbefore we dive in though, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of this week in green software, which we sometimes call TWiGS, today we have Asim Hussain. Hi Asim.Asim Hussain: Hiya. So my name is Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. And most recently, learning about throat singing to go along with your mushroom collection.Asim Hussain: I'm also becoming quite musical, so I've actually bought, I've actually got two flutes since we've met Chris. I've bought two flutes, a guitar, and, wait, what else? Oh, there's another musical instrument I can't quite remember. Anyway, yeah,Chris Adams: That's three musical instrumentsAsim Hussain: my voice. My voice. That was it. I've been taking singing lessons. I knew there was a third I.Chris Adams: that's pretty cool. My wife is a trained musician and she's been teaching me the spoons, so that's basically all I have forgot to go with.Asim Hussain: My wife is also a classically trained musician. She speaks it very hard to be somebody who's learning music inside a house because yeah, anyway, there'sChris Adams: Wow. I did not know.Asim Hussain: yeah, yeah. Both quite musical. Yeah. We've got, our partners are quite musical. There you go.Chris Adams: Okay. And if you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I too am one of the directors of the Green Web Foundation, a small nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. So before we dive into the rest of this show, it's worth sharing. All the links and all the discussion we do, we will share it in show notes with this.And the general format is to basically look at some stories in the news relating to green software and share a few reckons on them. And you're very welcome to come chime in with your comments, uh, afterwards as well. Okay, Asim, should we start?Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's go for it.Chris Adams: Okay, so story number one is AWS Amazon Web service confirms Scope three GHG emissions data will be made freely available to customers in early 2024.This is a story from Computer Weekly, and as Amazon is one of, is basically the largest provider. This feels like a fairly big deal Asim, especially when you bear in mind that this may bring AWS's Customer Carbon Footprint tool up to kind of parity with some of the other providers like Google and Microsoft.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I remember when AWS first came out with their tool. Probably there's a lesson learned here for cloud providers when you come out with carbon measurement tools, make sure it's got scope three in it, because almost all the news are like, great, but where's scope three? Because it's so essential and it's such a large figure cloud providers.I've heard an argument for smaller cloud providers where they don't own, physically own the data centers with which they are providing services, that an argument can be made that it's so much more challenging to obtain the Scope three data there. But when you own your own data centers, the expectation is that you're going to be able to have to provide that, that data.Cause it is such a significant number.Chris Adams: Hi, I'm so sorry, Asim. I realize we've just dived straight into a jargon without even just telling it all what scope one, two, or three might actually be. So I'll just quickly, for those who are new to the subject, or folks who have never heard of the GHG, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, essentially this is a way.The kind of defacto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or any activity. And, uh, you typically split it into three kind of buckets of emissions. And because we are nerds or developers and drink coffee, we can use hot beverages as the mechanism from standing. The difference between scope one, two, and three, you can think of scope one, which is from combusting fossil fuel.That's a bit like. Turning on gas to heat up water so you can have a nice cup of coffee. Alright, scope two. It's like turning on an electric kettle so someone is setting fire. Something to heat up some water somewhere to generate electricity so that you can heat up a kettle. So it's all the emissions associated with electricity that you might purchase, for example.Now Scope three is a little bit like walking into a Starbucks or a third wave coffee shop, and then. Buying a cup of coffee. So you are not involved in actually farming beans or burning anything, but there is definitely a supply chain associated so that you can have coffee. So these are the three kind of scopes, and typically Scope one and two are quite the common ones that organizations tend to report on. But for these, for lots and lots of organizations, scope three can make up 80% plus of the environmental impact. And this is why we've been talking about it as being quite a big deal because if you do not have 80% of your reported numbers, they may look somewhat different to the other providers.Asim Hussain: And I, that's a really great, is the word analogy or metaphor? AChris Adams: Analogy I think is you.Asim Hussain: yeah. And I'm gonna use that as well. That's wonderful. And I also realized, as I was saying that I think I may have given the impression in my previous statement that Amazon just made the casual choice not to include Scope three, and I don't think that's, that was the point.Scope three calculation is hard. It's extremely hard. It's extremely hard to get right. There's a lot of error bars. It's really obvious a lot of the time what to choose, what values to choose, what to input, and so that's why perhaps Amazon's taken this long to come up with the Scope three data because they've been spending a lot of time making sure they wanted to provide Scope three data that they were comfortable with providing.I just wanna state that it's quite complicated cause as you can imagine, going into Starbucks and trying to figure out. How much a coffee with all the components you can imagine that come up to delivering that coffee to Starbucks, the shipping, the person in the farm, making it, growing it, all of that stuff is someone needs to calculate all of that stuff and it's very, very hard.Chris Adams: This is indeed true, and even when organizations are reporting Scope three, there's sadly 15 separate subcategories beneath it, which makes it even more complicated a lot of the time. And there is another thing which makes it even harder, is that when you're trying to record Scope three, it's one of the parts of this protocol where.There isn't the same concern about double counting in other places, cuz initially when the GHG protocol was actually put forward, the idea was that you would use your own scope three figures as something that you wouldn't necessarily compare to another provider, but you could compare to your own performance over time as a way to track your glide path to something which might be avoiding climate apocalypse at an organizational level. However, this is one of the things that has actually made Scope three quite difficult for people to understand because this double counting issue is prevalent in this kind of scope and not so much in some of the other parts.So yeah, that's one we can dive into. And what I'll do is I'll share a link to that picture. Cause I've got a nice diagram for the coffee one I just shared with you. Yeah.Asim Hussain: that's the go. But also I think you raised an interesting point with the whole idea of double counting, cuz I wanna dive into that just a little bit more, think it's interesting, so for instance, it's quite easy with like scope one. Like you, if I have an oil drum in my front yard and I'm burning something in it, No one's double counting that.That's not in your yard. We know that's not in your yard. We know it's in my yard. It's very easy when I'm buying electricity because of the way that you have to trust the system works. The database is actually like allocating that kilo hour to me it only goes to one other person. Whereas with supply chain is quite interesting cuz your scope one and two, if you are a manufacturer, your Scope one and two will actually be another.Organization's Scope three.Chris Adams: Indeed.Asim Hussain: So I believe. The theoretical idea is that if every company, an individual in the world calculated the scope one and twos, that would all sum up to this wonderful total, which is equal to the total of carbon emissions in the world. And you're right, scope three is just, just nice to have.But I think in, in an organizational perspective, scope three is turning out to be quite an amazing lever to drive change Cuz by calculating the scope three, they're also applying pressure to their suppliers and saying, reduce your scope. Three, reduce your emissions, reduce effectively your scope one and two and your three or our go to another supplier and it's providing that pressure, which I think is really, I dunno if that was intentional or an accident, but it Yeah, I can see the, I canChris Adams: This was one of, this was one of the, I think this was one of the principles initially, and there's some very explicit principles designed for the kind of GHG protocol. The other thing that's worth sharing that we might refer to a little bit later before we dive too deeply, is that there is actually a whole process of redesigning how people measure this stuff.And what we can do is we can share a link to a kind of summary of some of the responses to the World Resources Institute saying, Hey, we're thinking of updating how we measure carbon emissions. Cause there are some problems with the current approach. What do you think? So there's some stuff there that we'll share to, but we'll share a link to, but we won't be able to dive too deeply into it because Asim, I think the two of us are getting outta our depth pretty quickly.Asim Hussain: that depth. Yeah. Um, but anyway, one of the, Part to this title that my mind zoomed in on. It says AWS confirmed scope three GHG emission data will be made freely available to early 2024. Why was the word freely added? It seems weird. A census could work without it. So the fact that freely is there implies that, can you pay for it now?Chris Adams: The reason is that if you are a publicly traded company and you need to do your own reporting, there's actually been a while where you. If you spend enough money with that with Amazon under an nda, you can get these numbers. Alright? Now the thing is that basically means that only people who are spending above a certain figure ever get to have an idea about this.And it also means that if these figures aren't in the public domain, then it becomes very difficult to have a data informed discussion about where we're moving with any of this stuff. And this is. Important when you have the largest provider, which has an organizational carbon footprint of 60, 70 million tons each year, which is, this is like a small European country level basically.So this is one of the things that has been problematic. So hopefully this may be a reference to saying it becomes available for everyone so we can finally have some understanding around this. But as opposed to just only the people who wanna do an NDA on that, cuz there is a kind of prisoner's dilemma aspect when you basically only get your own numbers so you can get your own reporting, but you make it difficult for anyone to have any kind of effective policy interventions on this at a kind of more wider and societal level.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah, very brilliant. So basically my personal website is hosted on Amazon s3. So I mean, I was always a major custom of Amazon's prior to this, so now I'm able, but even, I didn't even, I didn't classify, uh, to getting the data, but even now I'll be able to get, anybody can get it. Okay.Chris Adams: Yeah, next year, eventually. Yeah, soAsim Hussain: year, sorry,Chris Adams: we early 2024 basically just in time for the law to make sure it's absolutely essential anyway, so you do feel like, alright, organizations have to report this in 2024, so this May, maybe there's some link between that and all these new laws landing, which have reporting deadlines in May, 2024.Possibly. We'll see where that goes.Asim Hussain: it's weird. Weird cause and effect here, isn't it? I wonder. Yeah,Chris Adams: Oh, we'll see. It's good. It's good to actually see the progress and this does make it easier for any responsible professional to start understanding some of the impacts associated with their use of digital services. Alright, next one. Next story. Up.Asim Hussain: Yep, yep. Yep.Chris Adams: This is another one continuing our kind of Amazon tip, which is Amazon's SusScanner for cloud formation templates.This was shared by Charles Roberts, senior Security consultant at Amazon, and from what I can tell, this is now an open source tool, which can basically scan your cloud formation code to give you an idea of where you might make some improvements. And it's, this is largely referring to some of the kind of pillars, architected pillars, and sustainability from AWS.And assume, I think you folks might have done something like this in your old Microsoft days about having some recommendations and pointers for this, right?Asim Hussain: yeah. Maybe I'll just take a step back and talk a little bit about the well architected kind of framework itself, which is, Amazon's got one and Microsoft has one that's also called the Well Architected Framework.Chris Adams: Oh,Asim Hussain: I believe Amazon's came first. I used to think all that the well architecture framework was, cuz if you go to the website, you'll see well architected framework and they have I think four or five pillars secure to your reliability, this and that and the other.And it's advice for how. If you want to build a reliable cloud application, this is how you should build a reliable cloud application. Now, for the longest time, I just assumed it was just advice on our website, but it turns out it's actually a scoring system. And so what Amazon Cloud consultants do and so does Azure ones, is when you work with the customer is it's the scorecard.You go through and you ask 'em questions about their infra, about their system. Based on their answers, it gives you a literal score and you get a number afterwards. And that number can indicate how much work you need to do to rectify. And so when they added the sustainability pillar, what they also did was they added a bunch of questions.And if you don't, if you answered no or however it was structured to those questions, you got a yes or no, you got a certain score. And so from my understand from this is cloud formation, is there is what you call it now, infrastructure as code? Is that what Cloud I believe, yeah. It's infrastructure as code.So it's textual description in configuration files for how your application is defined, and it effectively runs it against that, those scores, and it sees what's your number, and it basically gives you a sustainability score, which is really cool. That's to say, yeah, automatic sustainability score. Yeah.Chris Adams: this is true. I think there are a number of tools that start, do start doing this, but having something riches in part of the ecosystem. Okay. It's better than not having this. So yeah, if you cut live it a Python, or if you ever have to manage anything related to some infrastructure as code and you're using cloud formation instead of Terraform or some other tool, then yeah, worth a look all.Asim Hussain: I think from when I, I had an original chat with the, with Charles. I don't believe Charles was the actual person who authored this, but he's the one who shared it. Currently. It's automatically scanning stuff and comparing it to AWS world Architected pillar rules, but you can create your own as well, so you can create custom rules for it, perhaps to your makeup or perhaps other people can come up with their own rules for what makes a good sustainable application, add it to that framework as well. So yeah, it can beChris Adams: Wow, I didn't know that. Cool. All right. Next story coming up is Mojo, possibly the biggest programming language advance in decades. This is a link to fast ai. Yeah.Asim Hussain: It's quite a headline. Quite a headline. Mojo may be the biggest programming language advanced in decades. Come on, let's talk about it.Chris Adams: Okay, I'll, I, I actually read through this and I, I'm actually pretty excited about this and I shared this before because I do a bit of coding in Python as my kind of main working language, and Python is often maligned for being a slow language, even if it is a relatively pleasant language to be using.Asim Hussain: Mm-hmm.Chris Adams: But the general kind of gist of this story is that it combines the ease of use of Python, and it's designed as a kind of super set of Python so that you would actually have all the syntax and all the kind of ease of use and the familiarity of using Python. But you have a really smart compiler, so normally.Like with kind of, you have different flavors of Python. So for example, there's like maybe Sea Python or Pi Pie or stuff like that. These take this and come up with some kind of much, much faster representation of that code, and there's limits to what you might have there. Now, Chris, what's the guy's second name?Who's behind this?Asim Hussain: Latner.Chris Adams: Thank you, Chris Latner. Yeah, so LVM is known for creating a kind of where you might have things that kind of create assembly or stuff like that. It creates what's referred to as an intermediate representation. So this is like a piece of language, which is easy to turn into, really fast code for hardware.One of the kind of innovations was that a project which he worked on was called MLIR, so a machine learning focused intermediate representation. This is particularly interesting because it means that you can have that same ease of use of taking something which is relatively easy to write and make something which is really easy to run fast on GPUs or TPUs.I forget what TPU stands for, but it's a transformer processor unit perhaps.Asim Hussain: Tensor processing unitChris Adams: Thank you. Yeah, tensor. So basically we fast AI essentially. And this essentially means that you get the speed of these really low level languages with a lot of this. And typically you could do bits of that. Like you might write something in Rust, which is like what the COR kids do, and then use some kind of bridge language.But this idea is that there's like a subset of just extra functions you might type. So rather than typing deaf my function, blah, you just do. Fn my function, which is somewhat Rusty, and then your compiler knows that this part can be super duper fast and they're promising hundreds or thousands of hundreds or thousand fold speed improvement on this one, which is mind blowing in my view.Asim Hussain: My initial first thoughts were, I've been a user of Python for a long time now, on and off, but it is been aligned for a long time for being slow, and I think that's unfair. Because you would never normally write the things that need high performance directly in Python. Like that's why Python is still used for machineChris Adams: Mm.Asim Hussain: because what you end up doing is you import NumPy or, or even TensorFlow or something like that, and then you actually, your code is executed using those libraries.Those libraries are written in C and c plus.Chris Adams: Correct.Asim Hussain: So a, I think it was off times maligned. And so I was like thinking to myself, is this really necessary? Because. You can still get that performance improvements. But I was just reading it again and I realized that it was a really important point here was that it's actually really hard to debug that.Chris Adams: Exactly. Yeah.Asim Hussain: And that's the really, I, as soon as I like read that, I was like, oh, of course. And now you can actually just debug Python code. It's not just gonna make a call to some external thing, mysterious black box that does something fast and you dunno what it's gonna do. You can step through, step by step.And I think that's very interesting. That's right. Cause that was a learning experience that's really gonna help people. Build performance systems. Yeah.Chris Adams: I am hoping this means that I don't need to learn how to try and learn Rust or something, to be honest, cuz there's lots of things which seem nice. But this basically is an alternative to having to learn yet another language because if it's gonna take me 10 years before learning Rust, then I'm not gonna be very far from retirement before I'm any good at coding in these new languages.So yeah, that.Asim Hussain: I never thought about it from that perspective, but you're right that a lot of people are gonna hate me for saying this. This could be a Rust killer. This could be like, there's a lot of people who know Python already and if this is gonna give you effectively Rust level speeds, which it would, it will do.Cuz it's a system level, it comp compiles onto system level. That's very interesting.Chris Adams: See now you see where I share that? See, kind of be exciting, right? Yeah. Alright. But for folks who are fans of Rust, it is the, I think, the most popular, most lovely programming language. This doesn't mean that you won't have a job. There's lots and lots of work for Rust, and I think Rust has actually been adopted in favor of C plus for a number of Microsoft projects now, cuz there's a lot to be said for.Yeah, absolutely. So there's plenty of life in a Rusty world. Absolutely. And this isn't really out yet as well. We're not even sure if we're gonna have this as open source yet, but it looks like it might be in all the previous projects like LLVM and so on were open source so we can hold our fingers and hopefully Asim, we can stay relevant for maybe a few more years before we are consigned to the aging programmer trash pile.Okay.Asim Hussain: know. There's, there's still people paid to code in a cobalt, so I think we're, I think we're all right.Chris Adams: You're right. Okay. That's great. Let's hope that stays there and we don't get replaced by some form of machine learning in the future. Alright, should we move on from that one? Because that feels like it's about to just, I can see it yawning open ahead of us.Asim Hussain: you mentioned AI. Let's close it down quickly and moveChris Adams: Yes. Okay. So the next story is from an organization called Catchpoint.And in particular there is a project called Webpage Test, which is an open source, a Web performance tool, specifically designed that's used by governments and lots of Web performance specialists to basically analyze pages somewhat like how we just described the well architected thing for Amazon Cloudworks.So this is interesting in my view because webpage test is one of the most well known uses like Web performance tools. They've started incorporating the carbon measurements inside this, and it's a really nice quote from. I guess what I'll refer to as the godfather of cloud or what, what would you call Adrian Cockcroft?Sustainability is becoming a higher priority for organizations globally. Not only is our ethical responsibility, but there are new regulations that will require companies to monitor and manage their environmental reporting, said Adrian Cockcroft, tech advisor and sustainability advocate. Carbon control is making it easy to take the first step by measuring the carbon footprint of a website, a Web application, whilst also providing actionable recommendations on actions that could result in improvements.So that was like major praise. I was pretty excited to see that actually, because this is, this was like one of the former VPs of cloud and he's very much someone who cast a significant shadow across industry. So yeah, I saw that showing up in LinkedIn. I was like, Oh sweet result.Asim Hussain: interesting. I remember he also mentioned, cuz Adrian was a year ago, he spoke, he gave a very, a really excellent talk, a very inspirational talk as in, I don't mean inspirational as in go and do it, but as in opening people's minds to the idea of monitoring as an action for this, it really helps inform something of me.So I think I remember part of the post was, The creator of Carbon Control saying that the idea for it came from meeting at that Monitorama conference like a year ago and how that idea kickstarted this whole thing, which, yeah, which makes me, I always say the most powerful thing you can have as an idea.So it's just goes to show, just having one one talk can lead to, yeah.Chris Adams: The thing I might share with you is that success has many mothers. And this is also using a library called CO2.js, which includes some of these numbers, some of the kind of conversion practice. So if you have an idea for how much, what kind of resources a webpage might be using, this is what it converts into carbon figures.So one thing I've shared a link to the Monitorama talk, cuz it's a really good talk and this kind of process from monitoring tool to carbon tracking tool. Dynatrace is another organization that does something like this. So there is a, it's a real kind of trend in my view, and it's really encouraging, I think.Asim Hussain: Has Dynatrace added some sort of energy carbon tracking? I haven't seen thatChris Adams: Yes, last week Max uh, Schulze from the SDIA, he referenced this and I didn't know about it before there. I'll share a link into their show notes. But yeah, they have their own carbon impact figures as well now. So.Asim Hussain: There's so much stuff happening in this space. It's so amazing. Just, yeah.Chris Adams: So who knows, maybe Datadog will do it and let's hope they don't charge 65 million per year for the privilege. Sorry, that's a nerdy joke about Datadog's recent investor reporting, realizing, and they mentioned that one of their providers was paying 65 million us.Asim Hussain: million for.Chris Adams: it looked like it was Coinbase.People weren't paying attention, and suddenly the numbers went up. And when Coinbase realized there was a 65 million hole in the reporting and they had to explain what happened, and they said, yeah, someone realized that they weren't paying attention to it. So if you ever feel bad about cloud spend, yes, they,Asim Hussain: So they literally, they, because of Coinbase's growth, they just hadn't factored in how much the observability was adding to the whole thing, and it just added toChris Adams: I think that was the idea. So this was like the, I think the canonical example of sometimes cloud can lead to people not paying too much attention to expenditure. But see, I've never done 65 million of spend before and I'm not sure I will, but that's now my kind of benchmark to make me feel better about myself if anything I have is not very efficient.Asim Hussain: that, that Datadog account manager is driving around in a new Ferrari, I reckon.Chris Adams: You hope so, or maybe not, because that's gone now. So they probably had a comfortable disc, had a discussion and said, Hey folks, are you sure you wanna be spending 65 million a year with us on tracking your logs and metrics? So there was actually something ongoing there. So there was some proactive outreach to say, folks, I'm not sure if you mean to do this.Are you sure you wanna be doing this? Apparently,Asim Hussain: We're just bringing it back to Catchpoint trying to, because you've been a Major S CO2.js, which is the Green Web Foundation's project. I did put the Green Software Foundation website through and fingers crossed and it, and we scored pretty well. I think there's still room for improvement. I thought believe we did score green, but why don't you tell people what does it tell you?Chris Adams: So the main thing that webpage test does is it will look at your page and analyze it. And like we mentioned with Well Architect Checker, it'll basically. Tell you some things that you could improve based on what it's seen about your page. So if your pages are very large page and sending a bunch of JavaScript over the wire, which would result in a kind of poor experience for someone waiting for it to be loaded, it will say, maybe you shouldn't be sending such massive payloads over the wire, because it's not gonna be very much fun.And it also is gonna have a impact on your end user's battery as well. Now what it actually uses is inside the library that we maintain called CO2.js. There are a number of different models, and one of the models that is in use is called the Sustainable Web design model, which is based on some peer reviewed literature. Basically saying for this amount of usage, which is right now is basically the data center of the wire. It basically makes some assumptions about how much energy use happens on the device, in the servers and in the networks. And this gives you some idea of what the actual missions might actually be.So that's how it works, and you can link back to it and we can share a link specifically to see some of the assumptions for this. There's also a really nice post by one of the people who was actually advising on this and helping get this implemented, Fershad Irani, he's written about, okay, this is the things you need to make.These are the assumptions we've had to make here, and these are the alternatives we might use in future for this. So this is designed to be a first step that you could then start improving this, cuz as we know Asim, all models are wrong, but some models can be useful.Asim Hussain: This is the post that Fershad wrote about basically asking the question is network bandwidth the only metric we should be using andChris Adams: Yes,Asim Hussain: between? Yeah. I thought it was a very interesting, yeah, very interesting thought. Cause I think, not how CO2 JS works, but I presume it just says JavaScript is equal to this,Chris Adams: pretty much.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So he was thinking about what if you could split and you would give the same carbon waiting to a kilobyte of a JPEG image as you would give to a kilobyte of a video image, but maybe there's a difference.Chris Adams: Yes. So this was raised by Mike Gifford, who was. So he was a real kind of like sustainability and accessibility advocate based in Canada. He actually opened this issue in the CO2.js repository to talk about some of this stuff. So it's really worth looking and we'll share a link to that. But what we've done is we've shared a link called Is Data Transfer their best proxy for website carbon emissions?Where he explains this and talks about where this is good and why this is bad. Because very much, a lot of the time, the tools you use to understand an environmental impact of something, it'll often be impacted or influenced by what data you have available because not everything is instrumented to provide the kind of levels of num uh, levels of detail that you would like to have at the moment, but we're getting there.Asim Hussain: Yeah, like I think my response to him was like, like when it comes to models, as we just said before, like they have inputs and they have outputs, and you tweak the inputs to optimize the output. And so if the only input you have is bandwidth, that's the only thing you would tweak. If you separate it out bandwidth for image and video, and you saw that video is so much higher than image that would change the decisions that you would make, which I think is an interesting thing here cuz I, there's a balancing point between making something useful and ubiquitous and so everybody finds value out of it versus getting enough fine grain information. So the behavioral choices afterwards are the right or better people claim better choices.Chris Adams: Yes. This is actually a nice segue to some of the events we might be discussing. Actually assume So should we look at some of these on then?Asim Hussain: Let's go for it.Chris Adams: the first one is Ottawa, the Green Software Foundation Meetup on the 24th of May.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yes. I'm so excited about this one.Chris Adams: Abhishek's talking. This is actually exciting cuz Abhishek has been quite involved in this as anAsim Hussain: unfortunately he had to, for personal reason, had to pull out one at the last minute. It's, Henry Richardson is now giving a talk there, which is just as exciting cuz he's the, I dunno what his title is, at Watttime is Researcher.Chris Adams: Lord of beards.Asim Hussain: Lord of beards,Chris Adams: does have an impressive beard here.Asim Hussain: lord of beards, emperor of electricity, carbon emissions.That's what he is by anyway. He'll be giving a talk and I believe also, yeah, Tajinder Singh from GitHub will be giving a talk on sustainable DevOps. Oh, we never heard that one. Have we yet? Su No. Yes, we have SusDevOps. We've heard that one before. No, we haven't. We've heard DevSusOps.Chris Adams: no. Is this like the people's front of Judea? It does feel like it.Asim Hussain: one of them will win out in the end.Chris Adams: Oh, speaking of things with ops at the end, so Google and ThoughtWorks have a thing called green ops. That's their particular term that they use for this and on in Berlin, Google had an event talking about green tech and assume, do you remember your principles.green stuff?Yeah. I'll have to share a picture. They saw them sighting your principles green and their own internal stuff. It was pretty cool. I've got a really blurry photo. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share it, but I could definitely tell you. It was definitely in the kind of presentation that was shared with various people at it.Asim Hussain: Ah, brilliant. That actually I just checked now. We haven't actually deployed it. We're on the verge of deploying a change to principles.green. So actually all those pages are now going to get forwardedChris Adams: Oh.Asim Hussain: to the new learn.greensoftware.foundation, the new, I forgot it suddenly, can't quite remember what we called it now, but our green software training.But if the evolution of this page be.Chris Adams: All right. Here's the elegant segue I was gonna be mentioning. So the SDIA has a hackathon on the 24th of May. Also in Berlin, where this is actually some work with the German Environment Agency, the equivalent, the Umweltbundesamt. I think they are actually hosting this event. With the SDIA, A Green Software Foundation member to do a hackathon about trying to understand the environmental impact of software.And they have actually a whole set of tools and a hack day specifically for improving the environmental impact of open source tools. So there's a competition there. The reason I was mentioning this is because this was actually where the initial work with Mozilla to start exposing some of these numbers.It initially took place. I met some folks at Mozilla and they explained how they've been able to reverse engineer the energy usage figures for visiting a page. So you can actually get some of the numbers, like the environmental footprint for JavaScript versus videos or pictures and things like that. So maybe here's to actually extending it some more so we can make that more available to more people.So yeah, that's the 24th and available for everyone.Asim Hussain: I've gotta say, that's the wonderful things about hackathons. It's not even really what happens on, it's not even necessarily who wins on the day, but it's the work that happens. It's the connections you've make and happens after us. I did not know that that may work that you've done with Firefox.I don't think we've really talked in any great detail about at all. I think we definitely would love to be less deep dive on that, or even deep dive on CO2.js one day.Chris Adams: We should ask some of the folks at Mozilla because there's a bunch of other things they're doing and there's a bunch of really cool stuff they've been doing with telemetry that I think would actually fit into this. Cuz I think there's a chance to create a kind of public data set, specifically be used on actual observed data rather than the model data that you see, right?Asim Hussain: because they have dataChris Adams: Yeah, exactly.Asim Hussain: not in any nefarious way, but they must be collecting data.Chris Adams: Anyone who runs a browser, they gonna Google collect this, probably Edge, have this as well. They've got a rough idea of, cuz every single organization would have to optimize this and try to reduce the kind of costs imposed on their users.Asim Hussain: if it's anything like how it was at Microsoft, like you'd actually ask the users of the canary version of Edge and you actually, you would have a pop-up saying, do you want to give your data? And I go, 0.01% people say, yes, but that's enough to get like a significant amount data. So I imagine the firefighters doing the same out of, I just wanted to just make sure everybody's clear.There's a hackathon in Berlin 24th of May. There's a prize of 1,700 Euros. That's Space Shack Berlin, which sounds amazing. Chris will be there, Max will be there.Chris Adams: Yes, I am definitely gonna be there. Some, some of the Green Web Foundation, some of the SDIA folks will be there and I suspect some other people will also be around as well. So there's a nice group of people now said doing stuff in our little town, and I really like it. Actually. I'm very much enjoying itAsim Hussain: our little town of Berlin. Yes.Chris Adams: compared to London, where I moved from.It does feel, yeah,Asim Hussain: I always thought Berlin was huge. I've never really,Chris Adams: the population is definitely lower, but it feels a bit more spacious.Asim Hussain: Berlin. Anyway.Chris Adams: All right,Asim Hussain: Great stuff. So youChris Adams: back to London.Asim Hussain: Oh, back to London. There we go. Always comes back to London. Yeah, so there's a London Green Software Foundation Meetup happening the day after on the May 25th at 6:00 PM UK time.That is actually, I believe it's coming with the UBS offices in London, which have very cool offices actually. And it's also a special anniversary special. It's actually the two year anniversary of the birth of the Green Software Foundation, yet I will actually be there myself. There'll be networking, drinks and pizzas. Will there be a cake? We should definitely have a cake actually now that realized, yeah, there will be a cake. I dunno. Maybe there might be a cake.Chris Adams: If you've got 10 days, alright, you who knows, you might even have cake pops. Easy for people to eat.Asim Hussain: Great idea.Chris Adams: Cake on a stick is the future my friend.Asim Hussain: Cake on a stick. There we go.Chris Adams: Yes. All right. Okay, so I think that's it for our news Roundup and list of upcoming events. This is the part of the show. We have a short show closing question to ask to our guests.This is what we see. We've seen a number of meetups happening recently. If you could travel anywhere without too much impact in the environment, where'd you like to see, uh, meetup and why? I'll put that one to you. Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh, that's a great question cuz you know, I would actually really like to see meetups happening in places where it is typically been very hard for, not for us, but for people to discuss. Other, other people with an interest in sustainability and find each other. So I often find in, especially in Asia, it's in the larger cities, it's usually better.We've had meetups in Japan and some of the larger Indian cities, but I'd love to see, oh, I could travel. Oh, I probably wouldn't travel myself because there's a little bit too much impact, but I'd love for other people to go and travel locally to their local Asian GSF meetup.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. I'm gonna be really boring here. I'm gonna say something like Vienna. Because never been to Vienna. Sounds like a cool place. And what I've been told is that Vienna is one of the cities where if you had like electric scooters and things like that, you had dedicated places to put them rather than putting them in the middle of the pavement.So there are car parking spaces dedicated for that. And there's even an app in Vienna. So if someone has parked it in the wrong place, you can take a photo. Send it to it. And then the people who are allowed to operate the scheme, they have an SLA to maintain, so they have to get it moved within four or five hours, otherwise they get fined.This feels like a really interesting use of public space and I feel like, yeah, I quite like using some of these scooters, but I don't like how if you are in a wheelchair they can get in their way and it doesn't feel like it's the best and most equitable use of space. And this felt like a really nice a way to address some of those issues.Asim Hussain: That sounds lovely. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, so Vienna, that's what I would say. Alright. Okay. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources in this episode are in the show description below and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of our podcast. Finally, I think huge thank you.I've really enjoyed chatting with you again, Asim, nice to see you. So yeah, take care of yourself, mate. Lovely seeing you. Too-da-loo. Ta everyone.Asim Hussain: 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.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Max Schulze from the SDIA (The Sustainable Digital Alliance) and they discuss three stories from the worlds of IaaS, PaaS and Saas! While these three acronyms are more than likely ever present in most digital people’s lives, we might not know about the environmental impact that they have. Chris and Max cover stories from the CNCF, Google, CIODive and OpenJS as well as upcoming events in the Green Software community. Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteMax Schulze: LinkedIn / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:CNCF: Sustainable Software Projects Breed Eco-Sustainable Computing Systems: / Forbes [6:52]Google: We have no moat, and neither does Open AI the story of open source vs openAI / Simon Willison [14:37]Technology pulls enterprise green ambitions within reach: / CIODive.com [20:57]OpenJS Foundation Receives Major Government Investment from Sovereign Tech Fund for Web Security and Stability / OpenJS [30:41]Resources:Microsoft scales cloud-native workloads with carbon awareness / SDX Central [7:02]Kepler / Red Hat Emerging Technologies / [7:33]ECO-Qube / SDIA [9:25]Environmental Data Agent (EDA) / SDIA [9:55]Carbon Aware Scheduling on Nomad / Green Web Foundation [12:37]Vicuna: An Open-Source Chatbot Impressing GPT-4 with 90%* ChatGPT Quality / LMSYS Org [20:40]Unilever completes cloud-only migration to Microsoft Azure / CIO Dive [24:21]Events:Rise of AI 23 (9 - 10 May, BERLIN ᐧ Hybrid) / Rise of AI [28:15]SDIA Hackathon on the Environmental Impact of Software (24 May, BERLIN) / SDIA [28:45]LF Energy Summit 2023 (June 1 – 2, PARIS & Virtual) / Linux Foundation [31:47]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:Max Schulze: It's important that we recognize that this is happening on more than just Kubernetes. That's why I think it's a movement that's happening.Chris Adams: Absolutely. Yeah. Diverse ecosystems are healthy ecosystems.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 and software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we're gonna be covering three stories about green software and the acronyms, PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS.We'll also be discussing some exciting upcoming events in the world of Green software and talking about moats and open ai. Before we dive in though, please let me introduce myself, my guest for this episode for of this working green software to today we have Max Schulze. Hi Max.Max Schulze: Hey Chris.Chris Adams: Okay, Max, uh, although we've known each other since about 2019 when we first went to some Green Cloud procurement events back in Brussels many years ago, you may not be familiar.Some other folks might not know too much about you. So if you introduce yourself, then we'll kind of jump into some of the stories.Max Schulze: Thank you Chris, and thank you for having me as your guest today. It's always fun to to chat with you and debate with you. I'm Max. I'm the director of and founder of the SDIA Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. That's why we never say that. We always say SDIA cuz it's unpronounceable.Very excited to be here. I also talk about digital infrastructure all day. I write about it. I think about it. I talk about it, and recently I've been very involved in driving data centers to be more sustainable and more transparent through like the European energy efficiency directive, but also the code of conduct for data centers.Chris Adams: This is something you'd be doing in not just German, but also in English. Is that correct?Max Schulze: Yeah, I'm one of the very few Germans that can also speak very fluent English, so it's not a problem for me.Chris Adams: Okay. All right, Max. Okay, so we've spoken about the format here and for folks who are new to this, basically what we're gonna do is look at a few stories that caught that kind of came up across our feeds and came up on our radar This week. We'll do share a little bit of reckons and share some extra context that you might not be too much to aware of, and then we'll look at some coming events.So Max, the first story we have here before we actually go too far, we've used these phrases, PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS. Let's just briefly just define these, cuz these might come in handy and we might refer to this a little bit later. So Max, Hey, let's start actually, because ERs is at the very bottom. Let's start there then.Work your way upwards actually. All right.Max Schulze: Yeah. So yes, for me is the commodity. It's compute. Storage and network capacity essentially is what AWS started with EC2 VPC and s3. Those were like the three primitives that you can build almost any software from and abstracted in a way that you don't see the server, you don't see the data center.So it's really like digital resources as commodities in the highest form of abstraction.Chris Adams: And IaaS for most people stands for infrastructure as a service, right? So you pay for things on a kind of monthly or hourly basis, almost like metered electricity. Yep.Max Schulze: Yep.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right then, so that's IaaS or IaaS, PaaS, the next one up. That's platform as a service, which as I understand it, you might not want to be working with all these low level things yourself.So there are companies that provide higher order so. Functions on top of this. So for example, you might choose to purchase cloud storage or some computing power from a hyperscaler or maybe a French company, say Scaleway or something like that. But you might also pay for someone to just give you a place to put a Docker container or a piece of program, run a program, and they take care of keeping it fast and secure so that you can just focus on writing some code.So that's platform as a service. Do you have a go at describing what SaaS or software as a service might be then Max.Max Schulze: To me it's the most ironic one because past, like a database as a service is also a software as a service, but it's tools that developers use to build more software. So it's funny. And SaaS is when you then glue a lot of different kind of open source components together into a product. For example, this product that we're using to record the podcast is also a software as a service product.The most well known right now is probably Office 365 or like Microsoft Teams or now SaaS based product. So usually subscription based, usually Web based, but can also be desktop applications. But it's more about the fact that you don't have to maintain, run, or install any software. It's just available to you at any given time as a service.Chris Adams: So we've defined these somewhat confusing terms and Max is almost like a taxonomy that people actually need to be armed with for them to understand any of this stuff. And it might be worth just briefly touching on that before we dive into one of the stories. Cause I know this is some work that you've done when you speak to policy makers about them struggling a bit to try to work out where one layer ends, another one begins, and where you need to purchase these and how you actually purchase these.Max Schulze: I think in tech or IT, we often lose simplicity to understand things or to make things understandable, because we want to be so specific, we want to be 100% accurate. And a lot of people get lost in that process when they hear a hybrid cloud setup or on-prem versus public versus, yeah, something else. Or a VPS, a VPS machine, or a dedicated machine, and you hear these things, it's like, what is this?And I think it's, what I've really come to realize is that you have all these words, and think about it, public cloud. Five years didn't exist five years ago, didn't exist as a term, and now we are using it every day and every developer knows what it means. But outside of our bubble, very few people actually understand all these different technologies.And ultimately it's software, hardware, some form of infrastructure, networks, data centers, and energy, and that's it. This is the whole thing, but we have so many words to describe different configurations of those that I think it's really important that we have some kind of taxonomy. You also know that we wrote a paper on this sometime ago to propose something, but I think we need very simplified explanation models so that we don't lose policy makers with our complexity.Chris Adams: All right, thanks for that, Max. So now that we've got a little bit of kind of background for what some of these terms mean, should we look at the first of these stories here? So this is one in Forbes from the CNCF, which is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. They're talking about software projects and e sustainable computing systems.We've touched on some of this, the idea of kind of Kubernetes or low Carbonetes and the idea that there are existing products and projects that could be adapted to basically tread someone more lightly. On the planet as it were. And this is the first time I've actually seen people in the CNCF really talking publicly about this and really talking a lot about their special interest groups, where they are essentially trying to get gaggles of nerds to talk about some of this stuff.And there's a few particular projects of interest that have been catching people's eyes of late. One of these is Kepler from Red Hat, which stands for Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Export-er, right? And that's been one tool which has been used to essentially expose some of the energy numbers when you run little clusters of compute so that you can start to quantify and understand the environmental impact from some of these tools.Max, I know that you folks did some work with similar project or related projects around this, and it sounds like it will be quite simple, but I think you can share a few war stories about some of this stuff and where some of the difficulties might actually be when you're working with this.Max Schulze: So I think first of all, it's great that the CNCF is actually talking about this. They've had the sustainability working group, I think for almost a year now, and I'm glad that they're now going a bit more public with it. I think there's a lot of value in Kubernetes and what it can do in terms of distributing workloads across different physical locations and machines.I think the worst story that you're alluding to is that. I think we've seen a lot of technology solutions that enables load shifting, which is the one of the holy graves. Like I can move it where the energy is greener. I can move it where there's under utilization and things like this. The problem is that the infrastructure, so it doesn't matter if it's a virtual machine or the data center doesn't actually expose the.These metrics that you would need to make those decisions. Right. So we see a lot of workarounds where you're trying to guess which data center you are in, and then you're getting the emission factor of the whole grid around it, which doesn't really exist, and there's so much data missing that. I think the problem to solve is not necessarily the at the highest level, but rather in the levels below, making these APIs available, making these metrics available to enable load shifting, not to solve load shifting.Chris Adams: Okay, thanks Max. This is also something we might touch on a little bit later. When. We talk about some of the events that we have upcoming here. I think you also did a bit of work with a project called ECO-Qube when there was some discussion about actually exposing some of the numbers from data centers, because as I understand it, one of the reasons people basically say we can't share these numbers is we don't have access to these numbers, but I understand that you ended up spending a bit time looking into this specifically to see where the real pain points and what the possible solutions might be for people at the data center level to expose some of the numbers for the rest of us further down the food chain as it were, so we can actually optimize for carbon.Max Schulze: Yeah, we did. I actually, we even released, it's gonna go open source in I think a few months. It's running in three pilot data centers. It's basically a monitoring system like Prometheus and Grafana. But what is surprising that even though we in it monitor a lot, right? The underlying infrastructure doesn't have a very sophisticated monitoring system.You can really imagine it like software from 20 years ago. It's not that you can just query are the diesel generators on or not. It's the cooling system at 40% or 50% load. And so we wrote basic in experimental piece of software that collects all that data. Makes it available as one unified API so that you talk to the infrastructure, like you talk to some database system and you just say, what's the energy mix right now?Is the diesel generator running? Is the, I dunno, is there wind park running nearby? And you get all these signals and you can respond to those signals. And I fundamentally believe that when the signals are available, when the transparency is there, then software will adjust to the available parameters.Chris Adams: Okay, so we will share a link to this. What was the name of this particular project that we should be looking for, that we should be searching for if we do lookMax Schulze: the environmental data agent, EDA EDA, if we renamed it, I think to EDS, but EDS is already like European data something, uh, or European Space Agency, something related to that. So it's not the environmental data system. But the environmental data agent, because it is really a physical box that sits in a data center that has two network cables connected.One from the IT side and one from the infrastructure side. And it also acts as a firewall because you don't want the data center, physical infrastructure connected to the internet either that, um, the security risk, of course.Chris Adams: When you talk about connecting that in that way, you are, you are referring to the idea of maybe you don't wanna have the cooling systems exposed so someone can switch them on or off, resulting in. We already have heating problems as is right now, so makingMax Schulze: You don't want it to be hacked. Let's put it like this. And the safest way for cybersecurity, for everybody listening who loves cybersecurity, the best way to protect a computer is to not connect it to the internet.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay, so that gives us some pointers there. And there's something to be talking about some of the CNTF projects that people might be interested in. So we spoke to Kepler, and we'll be touching on a proposal by Adrian Cockcroft to a formula. VP of Sustainability, Amazon, who's been talking about some of the actual proposed metrics that you could actually use, and he'll be explaining where some of the problems are when you do try to actually work out these numbers from existing providers.So that's one thing we could talk about, but maybe in the future episode, we might touch on it a little bit later on today. Yeah, goMax Schulze: what about you? Didn't you guys do something with Nomad?Chris Adams: Yeah, so my organization, the Green, Web, Foundation, we did a bit of work with Nomad because we saw a bunch of people using Kubernetes as a way to orchestrate all kinds of computers to run software.And we have a kind of tradition at the Green Web Foundation, where we look for the people who are not the dominant providers, because they're often doing some really interesting work. So we did some work with Firefox as, for example, took a carbon calculation library into that particular library as well into that.But last year we did a bit of work with the folks at Hashicorp, because we use Nomad ourselves to run our kind of internal infrastructure. And there's now a separate Fork of Nomad, which does have this kind of carbon oil computing inside it right now. So this is on one thing that we did a bit messing around with, and also what the other reason is that I'm quite a big fan of a service called fly.io, which is one of these PaaS.It's a kind of way to manage software without having to actually be. Maintaining all your kind of Amazon accounts yourself, for example. And I think the idea of like green fly sounded kind of cute. So we were just doing some work. We're there to use that basically. So we did some work on this, I think last year with an organization called Ripe that the people who allocate IP addresses to the world basically.So we did some work there. But yeah, that's the exposure that we have so far since in the last six months. What we've seen is Microsoft basically donates their own. Schedule and a bunch of their own open source works specifically for demonstrating how they do carbon air computing. So there's a bunch of things around here, but that is probably the thing to look at if you are using Kubernetes.But if you are looking at Nomad, then I'm very happy to talk about this and I'll share a link to a blog post where we explained how we would go about doing this and where we're moving to next. Cause it's got a lot easier.Max Schulze: I think it's though, it's important that we recognize that this is happening on more than just Kubernetes. That's why I think it's a movement that's happening.Chris Adams: Absolutely. Yeah. Diverse ecosystems are healthy ecosystems, as we say, where I work. Okay. Next story. Let's talk about moats. So this is a story which is partly blogged by developer Django co-founding. Nerd, I suppose, and now a AI specialist or AI researcher, Simon Willison. He linked to this leaked paper from Google, which says, we have no moat and neither does open ai.This is basically a story which in many ways, kinds of goes against this kind of narrative that we've seen over the last year or two, where lots and lots of the. Advances in kind of machine learning and AI have been associated with ex ever larger amounts of compute. And while we did do a bit of research and point to some papers a few weeks ago where there is less of a link between absolute brute computing power and the actual kind of accuracy of models, there's now a really interesting paper talking by a, a kind of nameless person inside Google.Basically saying, since a bunch of open models have been released, The kind of gap between million pound uh models and literally a hundred dollars models worth of training is really narrowing quite now. And the quote that I think is probably good for setting the scene is this one. So this was talking about comparing models like say, GPT3 or Google's bard, for example, with some of the more recent ones based around, I forget this, Lama, LMA, and Lama and alpaca.I'll refer to these later on. While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound for pound more capable. They are doing things with a hundred dollars and 13 billion parameters that we struggle with 10 billion than 540 billion parameters, and they're doing this in weeks, not in months.Max Schulze: I think the biggest risk here is the rebound effect because. Yes, it's now more efficient, so to say, to put AI models. It's basically everywhere and everybody can have their own and like I can have one for my notion space. I can have one for my Basecamp, I can have one for my Wiki. I can have one for my tickets.That just means that same as with LEDs, we will get exponentially more AI models embedded into everything that's probably in aggregate, we'll use still much more infrastructure, much more energy, much more GPU power than ever before. I think doesn't matter if you have 10 big ones or a billion small ones, the effect is probably almost the same, if not even worse with the small one.So just looking at it from the environmental perspective, what do you think about it?Chris Adams: I think that automatically reducing the amount of compute needed for this, in my view, is a good idea. And if you just have a larger number of smaller players who are playing rather than just an oligopoly of three or four. I think that means that when it comes to actually regulating and being able to have civil society involved, I think you get more people able to talk about this.And you don't just get to have innovations coming from a very small group of people. So I think that you end up with, um, which would be more representative of society and therefore probably coming up with a. Uses and ideas, which are probably not quite so full of some of the kind of gaps and some of the kind of blind spots we've seen previously.So I think this, by having a larger number of people doing this, I think is a good idea. I think that makes it more likely that you have one or two people who are pushing for, say, The idea of these models being as a part of you training, you basically just say, I'm only gonna run this on green energy, for example, or I'm going to disclose the information about how this has been run.And because you have more people who are actually able to do this, I think you're gonna end up with. Greater transparency in people being much more explicit about both the providence of the data and the actual cost in terms of environmental impact that's come into it in the first place. So I think this creates scope to compete on transparency and compete on the fact the data can be trusted and has actually mean created in a more equitable fashion.So I think that's good. And there's another really key idea that I saw here was basically people saying lot of these new open source projects, they're achieving wins, not by having loads of data, by having much, much better curated data. And I think this is actually a much more promising direction to be going in than what we've been seeing so far where you just throw ever larger amounts of compute because if you are, say Google or Microsoft, you've made so much money that you don't know what else to do, then spend 70 billion on buying your own company's stock, right? That makes you think that it'd be nice if there's just more people who are able to use this rather than a small vanishing number of people put involved here.I think that's actually useful from a governance and an environmental point of view, basically.Max Schulze: So also from a society perspective, you basically say, well, we had this property theft problem, right? Then also larger datasets, open source dataset, address that. I agree with you. I do think just for completeness, I want to say that we do still need rules for bias and lots of other problems. I think we, from a societal perspective, so the third component of sustainability, we do need still rules.I think we need rules, some basic ground rules and principles for what's okay to do with AI and also what problems are okay to solve with AI. There was a great article by The Economist on a war game that they play with nuclear weapons and basically the end of that every. Minister and government person that plays that game says, I want to automate the decision of when to deploy retaliation strikes, and like everybody can tell.And also my neck hair went up and I was like, no, you don't wanna give that decision making power to a machine. That's the whole point. And I think we need those kind of principles and rules of what you can do with AI and whatnot.Chris Adams: Okay. This is actually one thing that gets touched on a little bit later, is this whole explosion of much, much clearer data sets where you actually have a good idea of what the provenance is and how that's been created. Cuz this has been one of the problems that we've touched on in previous episodes.When you are playing around with LLM models, if you look on Twitter, you will see lots and lots of people telling you about how your job will be destroyed if you do not learn to use OpenAI, but there's also. A flip side to this about, well, some of the labor rights associated with this, and whose labor is actually going into these models and being obscured that we touched on.Okay, so this is the last story that we have. This is technology pools, enterprise green ambitions. This is from CIOdive.com, and this story is largely talking about some of the providers of IaaS infrastructure as a service. And what's some of the mechanisms you might actually have available to you to reduce the emissions associated in your supply chain?So this is aimed at telling CIOs. Okay. There is this thing called Scope three, which is like a kind of way of thinking about the emissions in your organization's supply chain. And let's talk. It talks a little bit about which companies are doing better than others, and we've seen some new updates from actually Amazon of all people.So for the last year, there was the kind of initial rush to get an early version of say, Amazon's cloud computing. Sustainability dashboards out the door. And then no updates have happened for 12 months. And then we've seen some updates again. So it looks like folks are starting to pick up on this, but that is not the whole story.And I think Max, you might have some records to share on this one here actually.Max Schulze: Ayayay Chris, I'm gonna be very diplomatic here. I admire that Microsoft is very transparent about their Scope three and their data reporting. You have to. You with a grain of salt, because if you go one layer deeper and you look at the available data from, let's say, how much emissions is in a data center building, how much is in a server, even HP and Dell's reports are.Let's say vague. So let's say if you look at it as like a chain of data that you need to collect, I think that it's starting and it's good that the big ones are really saying we want to be more transparent, and then they realize, oh, we don't have the data from our suppliers. I think that's a good thing.I think that it's always tricky because even the GHG protocol is made mostly by corporations. They make their own reporting rules. So I think there is a lot of work still to be done to include all environmental effects. I do agree with the article also talks about third party vendors and consultants.I think there's a lot of tools being built to help with this. Our formulas have been integrated in Dynatrace monitoring tool. So in Dynatrace, you can actually now at least calculate the energy of your AWS systems and you get very much larger numbers than AWS is reporting to you. So yeah, again, comes down to rules and standards.And I think in tech, this is the first time somebody's doing like a holistic inventory of all environmental impacts of digital technology, and we are lacking so much data at every corner. It's just not there. So a lot of these things are really brutal estimates right now.Chris Adams: This is true. We spoke about this change. We were surprised by some changes coming through, and I'm afraid this is a bit spotty and nerdy. This energy efficiency directive that was basically rooted recently that is seen as a transparency win for a few people, basically that to provide a lot more transparency at a data center level that you haven't seen previously.Max, I think you, you had some exposure to this or you saw how some of the, what they say in gentlemen, how the sausage gets made, right? Maybe you could share a little bit on this one here.Max Schulze: Yeah. Yes, we were very involved in this process. It was very politically loaded. It's essentially about, so even the big cloud companies often rent data center capacity at co-location facilities, which are, uh, You can think of it like WeWork for your servers, right? You get everything power cooling included in your rent, but you have to bring your own servers.And some of these companies are very intransparent about your energy consumption, the emissions of your energy consumption, the embodied emissions. And this law essentially forces them to both make it public and then also attribute it and give it to their customers. And that's quite the game changer, especially because the law, the first reporting interval, you pointed this out as well, is already in May, 2024, which is very short notice and will drive a lot of data centers to now really quickly scramble together a reporting system.Right now, the most used spreadsheets and uh, that, that's why also what you mentioned earlier, the, our EDA project of course, can help with this. That's why it's open source so that every data center can deploy the monitoring tool and then release that data as quickly as possible. And I think that will also increase the accuracy of what the hyperscalers are reporting, but also what you as a developer have access to.I hope it's, of course the, all your Digital Oceans and AWSs have to still pass through that information, but I, the law really sets the stage to get the data in place to begin with.Chris Adams: I see, and there was one thing that surprised me when I read through this, was this real focus on heat reuse, basically. Now that's a key thing. It's starting to be warm again, at least in Western Europe compared to other parts of the world. But, uh, we do know essentially space heating or heating things up here is one of the big sources of emissions for this.And, uh, I think Max, you mentioned some of the idea, like one of the reasons some of the transparency stuff might have come through is because there was a almost disproportionate amount of interest in making sure that heat gets reused by various organizations. Is this one thing that you saw?Max Schulze: Yeah, absolutely. I think heat recovery has been something the SDIA has been talking about for five years as like, why on earth are we putting a hundred megawatts into a system that produces 100 megawatts of heat and then not use it because you will know your computer generation. Every electronic process generates that heat and it's just silly to not use it.And because you mentioned it, this idea for example, that in summer you can't use the heat is complete bollocks because storing thermal energy, right? Putting it in an underground tank to store the heat, you can store it for a whole year until winter and hear this, to store energy one kilowatt in the lithium ion battery.Cost about $180 per kilowatt hour storing one kilowatt of thermal energy using any form of tank, $1 per kilowatt hour. SoChris Adams: Okay.Max Schulze: not storing that heat recovered or not, we have to use it. It is like literally we put all these green electrons, right? All this green energy into the data center, and then instead of reusing those green electrons, we just throw them away as heat.And it's the rarest commodity we have on this planet right now is green electricity, and we should use it as much as we can in as many times as we can. And yeah, I'm really glad that the directive suggests that, or basically forces the data centers to at least consider heat recovery and show proof that they have considered it.Chris Adams: Now, and this is something that I understand has been so outside of this world, I'm a bit of a kind of heat nerd because I know that Denmark is actually one of the, one of the countries which has a long history of storing heat for long periods of time just like this. And I think I might have spoken outta turn about just when it's hot, you don't, you might not want to put the heat somewhere, but you're absolutely right.There's various parts of the world where they store things in significant bodies of thermal mass, like pools underwater and so on, so that you can pull the heat out and as people end up do using things like heat pumps and so on, you're able to move it around to other places to make better use of that actually. Okay. All right. We podcast about green software and not just heat. So I'm just gonna look at some of the events as we run up now. So we have, I think, two or three events on the horizon that are coming up here. The first of these is this rise of AI 23. This is happening in Berlin on the ninth and 10th of May.This is a hybrid one, and basically the Responsible AI crew starting to look at carbon neutrality and trying to understand. The actual leverage points on a project to work out where you can make meaningful savings. Here, this is a free thing to join to see some of the talks and there's another event taking place later on in May that I think, Max, you might have something to say about here cuz it has your organization's name on it actually.Max Schulze: Yeah, so we are hosting a hackathon with the German environmental agency to measure the environmental impact of software. This is really about measuring and we build a test system where people can basically upload their code to a GitHub account, and we have a special CICD runner that people can use and that runner is so to say, energy aware and also carbon aware, and it measures everything. So what we are gonna do, hopefully, is take some open source projects like a Django or like some noJS library, and gonna basically see what can we change in the code and then run all the tests again. So without. Reducing the functional scope without removing any tests. How can we make it more energy efficient?How can we use less energy or use less server capacity, and also measure in between different versions of software. That was an idea that somebody brought to us that I thought was really exciting to say, you know, when you release a new version of a piece of software, can you basically do a diff of the energy use versus functionality growth and basically say each new version should not use more energy than the version before unless it adds like significant amount of functionality free to attend.Chris Adams: Oh, cool. All right, so a bit like how cars keep getting bigger and bigger and some of the things you might care about, say crash safety, but some other things like cup holders you may be less excited about or there's maybe things you are. The idea is to provide that level of transparency to make some of that more visible to people.Yeah.Max Schulze: Yeah, what you can measure, you can change, right? And so I think if we make people aware that their software keeps growing in terms of environmental impact, then I think there's more incentive to reduce it.Chris Adams: I see, and this is part of the project, I think of the German Comp SoftAWERE, the project with the Federal Environment Agency, the Umweltbundesamt who are doing thisMax Schulze: Very good pronunciation, Chris. VeryChris Adams: to get some practice in. All right. Actually there's some, I'm I, there's another story we didn't have time for, but I'm just gonna share cuz it caught my eyes.Basically the Sovereign Tech fund is essentially a fund in Germany and they've basically made a donation of 875,000 euros or $900,000 to the openJS Foundation. So the people, the foundation that maintains like noJS and various tools like that. This is the first time I've seen a government make a direct donation in this kind of, Fashion for quite a substantial amount for something like this.Actually, this is like the focus on security rather than sustainable software. But it caught my eye cuz I was not aware of just how much, I guess the German government is involved at the software level now.Max Schulze: Funny. Yeah, I think it's interesting because. That also means that soon the open source community will finally get political because once you take the money from the government, you also have to have a position.Chris Adams: This is very true actually, and I wonder this might be something we touch on in a future episode actually. Okay, so we've got that happening on the 24th of May. That's the hackathon there that people will be going along to, or that you can go to. Final event that we have listed here is the LF Energy Summit taking place in June.So this is happening at window. In LA Force, Paris, France, and this actually has a few people from the Green Software Foundation presenting both the Green software principles and uh, the Carbon Aware sdk, which is an open source software development toolkit for people who are building projects, uh, using the kind of Microsoft stack, using C Sharp and so on, and trying to basically reduce the impact there.This is something that I think we also touched on, Max, you spoke about the idea of Linux appearing in various parts of the kind of. Energy sector now, and this to my knowledge, is where you see a lot of people in the kind of open source world now looking at lots and lots of proprietary scarda infrastructure tools and say, maybe we can use some open tools to make it easier to maintain and manage this stuff.Because once we go down to the data center level, it can become a bit harder to get the numbers or basically work with open source software the way that you might see it at an infrastructure level really closer to the metal.Max Schulze: Generally a bit worried because I think. The energy system works, right. Our computers right now are running. The light is on. There's no no problem to fix. What we need to do is to scale renewable energy as quickly as possible, and the technology for that. We have 14 megawatt wind turbines now is really there, and a lot of the problems in renewable energy is about.It's about permitting. It's about, I don't wanna win park in front of my house. I don't want solar field next to my house. And I don't think that the solution is digitalization right now. I think as a tech sector, as digital people, we need to look at our own stuff and not go bring our stuff to other industries right now so much we need to make sure that we are not going to be the bigger problem at the end as the biggest energy consumer left or something like this.I'm always trying to put us back on track. Like tech can solve tech. We don't need to go solve energy system right now because energy system is already on track to decarbonize itself and let's just let them run with that. If they need help, they will call and we do us.Chris Adams: Okay. Okay, Max. I think that's the wise words indeed. Max, thank you so much for coming on to this show and this conversation. I really enjoyed chatting with you and I hope we can do this again sometime soon.Max Schulze: Me too. It was, it's always a pleasure to talk with you, Chris, and I always feel like we have to rush so much, but we could do a lot. We could do four hour podcast episodes.Chris Adams: Maybe in the future we'll do that. Okay. Alright. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. 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, the kind of larger name for this podcast.I'd like to say thank you very much again, Max for coming on, and folks, see you next week on the next episode. Bye for now. See you around Max. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get to your podcasts.And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser.Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie on this episode of The Week in Green Software. They discuss the potential for data centers in space and how the use of potential death rays might be the way forward in powering these! Not only this, but sweeping changes in Reporting Law, and making Kubernetes clusters into Low Carbonetes clusters are covered too. Anne has a special report on her upcoming book and Chris finds his own variation of Boaty McBoatface!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Data centers move into space to mitigate power consumption and pollution / El Pais [2:41]Building Green Software Book Preview [14:43]Microsoft Scales Cloud-Native Workloads with Carbon Awareness / SDX Central [21:32]Solicitation for Public Comments on the Business Practices of Cloud Computing Providers / FTC [26:32]The SDIA welcomes the deal of the European Council and Parliament on the Energy Efficiency Directive / SDIA [30:16]Resources:Community Clouds and Energy Islands with Dawn Nafus and Laura Watts about Data Centers in the Orkneys [6:26]White Paper that Anne’s Book is based on [14:43]Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick [20:43]https://github.com/Azure/carbon-aware-keda-operator [22:00]The Green Web Foundation’s Guide on Carbon Aware Scheduling w/ Kubernetes and NomadRoss Fairbanks [22:18]Kube Green [28:17]Boaty McBoatFace Culture Ship RandomizerIf you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:Anne Currie: Data centers in Greenland are an obvious thing because there's tons of free energy, green energy from ice melt runoff.Chris Adams: Yeah.Anne Currie: But one of the issues there is that nobody lives in Greenland to man the data center, but even few people live in space demand the data centers. So I would, I would hope that you would solve the Greenland issue first.Use all that enormous amount of energy before you,Chris Adams: Okay, so our site, so before we reach for the sky, let's sort out things down here on Earth. Yeah?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. This week we'll be talking about data centers in space, sweeping changes in reporting climate laws affecting the digital sector.Making Kubernetes clusters into low Carbonetes clusters and a set of interesting looking coming events. But before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guest for this episode of this week in Green Software. This week we have Anne Currie. Hi Anne.Anne Currie: Hello.Chris Adams: Anne, would you just introduce yourself?Anne Currie: My name is Anne Currie and I am currently one of the community co-chairs for the Green Software Foundation. I'm a software engineer. I was a software engineer for many years, many years and 30 years I've been in the industry. And so I date from the time in the nineties when we used to build software using the same kind of techniques that we might, that we are thinking about using to date for green software because machines were very weak then, and we had to handle that. So that's my perspective on this.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Anne. So if you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit focused around us reaching an entirely fossil for internet by 2030. And I'm also the policy chair, the chair of the policy working group in the Green Software Foundation.Each week we do a run through of stories that caught eyes, or that might be fun to discuss. And everything we do discuss, we share all the links that we can find for you to dive it down your own little Wikipedia kind of holes after this session. Alright, so Anne, should we look at the first story that came up here?It's data centers move into space to mitigate power consumption and pollution. So this is the story from El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, and uh, they published this story I think of stem. It's about this program called Ascend, which is Advanced Space Cloud for European net zero emissions and data sovereignty program.Anne Currie: That's not, that's not a little bit contrived at all.Chris Adams: Yeah, exactly. And the European Union has selected fails Acun space, a joint venture between Thales group in France or Thales possibly, I'm not quite sure if I'm pronouncing that correct. And the Italian defense conglomerate Leonardo. And the plan is to see if you can create space data centers here. And I think the plan here is to try to address some of the energy issues related to data centers on the ground. I found like the initial press release for this, but Anne as a science fiction writer, I figured you might have some records here before we dive into this a little bit more, actually.Anne Currie: Yes I do and I read the piece and it's, it is an interesting piece from my perspective. I am also a science fiction writer and I have written a series called the Panopticon Series and three of them are set in space and address the technology in space you mentioned is all about Arthur C. Clark. And interestingly cuz Arthur C. Clark was a physicist when he did his. For example, his lunar based novels, he put realistic technology in it, and he often had patents. So he had the first patent on an electromagnetic cannon in space, which uses electromagnetic fields to fire stuff around. Or it was a, an idea of delivery mechanism for getting stuff from the surface of the moon into orbit.Chris Adams: Whoa, whoa. Did you say that Arthur C. Clark patented the rail gun? Is that,Anne Currie: did? Yes,Chris Adams: oh my God, my mind is blown. Gone. Please do. Go ahead. That's, I'm never gonna think of Quake another way that's changed how I think of Quake. I.Anne Currie: But thinking, I don't think he was thinking about it in the form of a rail, but it might be quite specific patterns. Often quite specific. It might be specifically for electromagnetic canons for the delivery of stuff from the surface of the moon to to lunar orbit. But anyway, he did have the patents on that, which now expired cuz it was quite a long time ago.But anyway. So that all that stuff does all work. And in fact, there's loads of interesting things you can do with rail guns in space as a way of, as a transport mechanism or a power transport mechanism as well. But anyway, there's, that's a side there. In terms of data centers in space, obviously you've gotten a lot of power that can potentially be generated in space room solar because you've got nothing in the way between you and the sun, and the panels can be in a hundred percent light.So, but it is a very. Interesting idea. And along those lines, China and India have been coopering for a while. I dunno if they still are, but they were cooperating a few years ago on a space based solar power system. So space based solar power is the idea that you have a giant laser in space and you capture the energy from solar panels and you beam them down, beam it downChris Adams: down to a panel on the ground, right?Anne Currie: Yeah. Which has some kind of giant death ray connotations around it. So it's not, it depends how you do it depends whether you use light lasers or microwaves to get it onto the ground. And then there are lots of, but it is perfectly doable and I think that's a very plausible idea for getting power, using the same kind of idea of using solar and space to get power down toChris Adams: Okay.Anne Currie: re-usable space.But yet it's, so the idea of data centers and spaces that you build them out there in orbit somewhere, probably quite a long way out. Cause they don't necessarily need to be a near earth orbit. And that's quite busy. And yet you could just be powering it directly. The difficulty with that is always that it's gonna be very hard to maintain that data center, but it did remind me slightly of a story that came up a few years ago, and it's definitely true, which is that Azure have been experimenting with undersea data centers in effectively the size ofChris Adams: Yeah. Around the Orkney's underwater. Yeah.Anne Currie: Yeah, and those have similar issues in that you put them in and then you can't maintain them. That's it there. So the idea of having a self-contained, smallish data center that's no one can subsequently touch is not a new one. So it's not utterly, utterly impossible. And of course, Starlink has got the cost of getting stuff into orbit down quite low.Yeah. So it's not impossible. It'sChris Adams: It doesn't seem impossible. I, so I think I struggle with some of the numbers on this. Because in this press release, we see something saying, okay, we want to install data centers in orbit, powered by solar plants generating several hundred megawatts of power. Now, several hundred megawatts is a very large data center, so like hyperscalers are between 20 to 50 megawatts of power.So you're looking at something like that and then, I also, let's just look at say, okay, the International Space Station, they've got solar arrays. Right now they have maybe 120 kilowatts of power coming through, but they're old, and that's two and a half thousand square meters here. So more or less, if you are looking at something which is, I don't know, what is that roughly, that's maybe that's for a hundred kilowatts of power.You're looking at maybe what, 2000 square meters per a hundred kilowatts. That means. For a single megawatt of power, you're looking at 20,000 square meters, and if you're looking for hundreds of megawatts, that's gonna be 20,000 square meters multiplied by hundreds. That's a lot of solar to have in the sky.This is the thing I was struggling to get my head around. Things might have got more efficient in the last, say, 20 to 30 years, but surely that is gonna be a heavy thing to get into the sky in under any circumstances, will it not.Anne Currie: Presumably that is a massively heavy things to get into the sky, but launch has really come down in price a lot. And of course it doesn't have to be particularly co-located with the data center cuz you can use those space-based solar power death rays to the subject of my last science fiction novel called Death Ray.So you can, you don't have to be right by the thing, you could have those arrays literally millions of miles away in space and beam it back. You do get dilation on the beams if they're too far, but you can keep relaying them.Chris Adams: Okay, so we could have our data centers in some or, and then the solar panels further out. So they're far away from there. Okay, so that's one thing. Then you mentioned that there, there's different kinds of orbits, right? So as I understand, There's kind of low earth orbit like LEO, which is Starlink, and that's maybe 2000 kilometers above the ground.And then would that mean you're hidden from the sun so that it's dark for your satellite sometimes?Anne Currie: Yes, I think it does. I think you have to be reasonable distance outChris Adams: Yeah. So geo stationary I think is like maybe bit further out where it looks like you're not moving because you're that much further out. Right?Anne Currie: And you've asked me a question, I dunno the answer here. I do not know how far you have to go out to be constantly in the sun, but to be honest, it's just less busy further out. So if you can be further out, there are loads of reasons why you might prefer to do that. And yeah, it's just a matter of then beaming the power back.Chris Adams: Now I'm with you on this, and then this feels like latency's gonna come up at some point, right? Because I'm curious about cause. In the LEO, like low earth orbit 2000 kilometers. We already use CDNs for like to have things closed. So if it's 2000 kilometers, that's one thing, but if it's something, I think geostationary is something like it's either 20,000 kilometers into the sky or 40,000 kilometers into the sky.So that's gonna be, I don't know if speed of light is what, 180,000 kilometers per second. That's gonna be a significant chunk of latency no matter what you do. And that's even if, if it's just you going straight up and down, if you're going around the world, that's gonna be even harder, surely.Anne Currie: Yeah, lower orbit latency isn't too much for an issue. It depends, but it, the further you go out, the more there it is. If you had your data center on the moon, latency is about a second each way? No, it's half a second each way, but it's, it is a total latency. You say about a second, which is obviously it wouldn't make for a very good podcast or a Zoom call, but it depends on your use.And it depends. Just depends whether the latency is an issue or not, because sometimes bandwidth is more of an issue with than latency, so.Chris Adams: Oh, okay. Yeah.Anne Currie: Yeah. It all depends what you do, what you're doing with it, and where it's going and how much. I mean, I, I would guess that the whole point was a lot of the things they're talking about, like in that article they were talking about, data that they gathered in space, being analyzed in space, using the, a big array of CPUs, and then boomed back in a more compressed form back to earth.In that case, latency is not an issue in any way, but if you wanted to move all data centers into space, then latency would be a giant issue. As you say, CDNs and stuff on the edge.Chris Adams: Yeah. And the final thing, we'll stop on the space part cause there's other things we're gonna talk about. But the final thing that really kind of, cuz I scratched on my head about this, cuz last week we spoke all about using different kinds of ways to keep computers cool. Right? Now when you're in space, one of the arguments seems to be that because it's so cold anyway, you don't need to worry about cooling.I don't think that's how I understand physics. As I understand it there are three ways to cool things down. There's radiation, convection, and conduction, and I'm not familiar with that many cool breezes in space, so I can't rely on conduction. Maybe convection, not very much. So that just leaves radiation.And those pictures of the space shuttle with its doors open, it's open to radiate out heat. Because it's got so much heat still. So I feel like if you've got this issue where data centers generate lots of heat and there's no way to get rid of them, this feels like a problem that I don't see how it's gonna be solved by putting things into space that people haven't really taken on board yet.And Anne I'm struggling with this, maybe you've got some pointers or maybe it does sound just bonkers.Anne Currie: Not just bonkers, it's, it is, you're completely reliant on radiation and they have quite good things where they have little radiating shapes and stuff that can radiate off heat more quickly. But it's not easy. So it's not easy. It feels to me like you'd be able to do better on the moon because at least you're in contact with something that can conduct heat away.Depends on how conductive moon dust is and or moon rock is, and I dunno that.Chris Adams: Heat up the moon until it glows red. Okay.Anne Currie: But yeah, you're right. It's not a no-brainer that we could just go in. It's not like that under sea ones. People go, oh, that's great cuz you don't have to worry about cooling if you've got a data center under the sea.And that's true because it could just conduct into the sea and that's fine. But space is not the sea, you can't do it. So yeah, it's not trivial.Chris Adams: So we have latency, death rays and uh, heating some of the challenges that may face us if we try to put data centers into the sky. But this is one potential proposed solutions to the issues around energy crises or the energy supply for, or sustainability issues related to data centers by the sounds of things.And thank you for sharing all this, um, about the, provided the science fiction pointers on this, cuz yeah, this blew my mind when I first saw it and I, I think that you've actually shared a lot of useful things on this.Anne Currie: I think it'll happen. I think it'll happen, but I think there are other things that data centers in Greenland are an obvious thing because there's tons of free energy, green energy from ice melt run-off.Chris Adams: Ah, yeah.Anne Currie: But one of the issues there is that nobody lives in Greenland to man the data center, but even few people live in space demand the data center.So I would, I would hope that you would solve the Greenland issue first. Use all that enormous amount of energy before you,Chris Adams: Okay, so our site, so before we reach for the sky, let's sort out things down here on Earth. Yeah. All right. Okay, cool. Thank you Anne. Alright, next story is a sneak peek about a new book coming out. Anne, I think this is, this is your thing. It's a coming O'Reilly book called Building Green Software. We were quite excited about some of this cuz there's a couple of co-authors who also been on this here before.So spit on this podcast. Anne, I'm gonna hand over to you to talk a little bit about this cuz you are far more familiar with it than I am. And yeah, you know better than I do. So please do tell more.Anne Currie: Yes, so this is an O'Reilly book that we're working on, the O'Reilly book called Building Green Software, which is gonna be there. It's not the first green software book they've done, but it's the first kind of full picture as opposed to there are quite a few good niche ones out there for things like Web development, but this one is all the things.And there will be me and Sara Bergman, who is a key part of the Green Software Foundation and Sarah Hsu, who is also a key part of that Green Software Foundation. And so we are writing all together and the idea is to net down the thinking that. We've all, as a community, come to agree on about what's the right way to do things.So it's all based around the idea that there's three things that we need to be good at. We need to be good at carbon efficiency, hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness. So that's what we'll be talking about in the book. So we'll be talking about carbon efficiency in terms of code efficiency, operational efficiency, plus design efficiency through carbon awareness, how designs that allow you to shift around what you're doing.And we'll be talking a little bit more about that later, I think in this podcast and hardware efficiency. So don't cause everybody to throw away their phones every time you produce a new version of your software, cuz I dunno, you might know the answer to this, Chris, but what has the most embodied carbon per gram of anything in the world?And my guess would be a chip. And in terms of consumer devices, my guess would be hands down a mobile phone.Chris Adams: Do you know what? I've never actually thought about that in terms of Okay. A single kind of consumer good in terms of post embedded energy inside it. So it's true that there's a significant amount of power that goes goes into turning sand into silicon and all the other kind of materials there.Anne Currie: But also the operation, cuz silicon fabs are unbelievably difficult to make.Chris Adams: Yeah. And of course, and this is actually one thing we should probably talk about in a future episode. When you look at where lots of the really high-end chips are currently made, a lot of them are in Taiwan, which has a very kind of fossil fuel heavy grid. So even if the stuff is really efficient and even if they're just using electricity, that's gonna be one of the problems.But even then, when you are making these, because most of the ways that you achieve the high levels of heat, don't rely on electric kinds of power they rely on, but literally heat from combusting fossil fuels. You've got an issue there. This is actually something that's changing. There's a really fascinating paper by Doctor Sylvia Medadu who's talking about some of the advantages in heat pumps.You can now get heat pumps up to the high hundreds of degrees lts basically. So there are lots and lots of things that can be decarbonized now, but. For you to reap those benefits, you actually need to have decarbonized electricity in the first place. And Taiwan is struggling a bit there because it's not a really big place with lots and lots of land and it doesn't actually have much in the way of surrounding kind of shallow water for creating, say, offshore wind or things like that for the time being.So that's gonna be an interesting one ahead of us. But yes, you're right. I guess,Anne Currie: need the power back beamed in from space on giant lasers.Chris Adams: yeah, maybe what they need is a death ray. Yes. Uh,Anne Currie: in handy in all kinds of ways. If you were Taiwan as well, I would imagine.Chris Adams: Yeah, let's leave that one there before we get taken off the internet by a advanced persistent threat. Alright. Okay,Anne Currie: But, but anyway. Oh, that's, that's an aside. The book. The book. So the book, we are beavering away at the moment writing the book. We've submitted quite a few chapters already, so it's all going well. And the idea with an O'Reilly book, the way they do it is it's you as a writer, you writers, you submit the chapters and as the chapters are at least vaguely polished.Vaguely, okay. They'll go live for people to read in a kind of advanced read on safari. So that will be,Chris Adams: shortcuts thing?Anne Currie: Yeah, so shortcut so people will be available, will be allowed to read these things. So the introduction has already gone out and it's not live yet, but we are expecting it to go live quite soon. So we will let everybody know through this when it's live and also the co deficiency chapter.And after that we've got the various other chapters. But they'll, they'll be available in Safari quite really quite soon. Then the book, the book actually gets physically published and we get an animal. We'll have an animal, but we dunno what the animal's gonna be. So at that point we'll find out what the animal is and the book gets published.And then, uh, so it'll be available to buy in physical form if you so choose. And also at that point it will also be available. One of the things that we agreed with O'Reilly is that it will also be available under a Creative Commons license at that point.Chris Adams: Boom.Anne Currie: even need to buy it or have an O'Reilly subscription.And because if this is all stuff that is, hopefully by the time we get through this and everybody's reviewed it, it will be, this is just what we want everybody to be doing. This should hopefully be a baseline.Chris Adams: that's super cool. I did not realize about the actual Creative Commons licensing for that. That's really helpful. That means that brings the barrier right down.Anne Currie: Yeah, but it'll be a while cuz it takes quite a while for the book to actually come out. So I'm imagining that first quarter, 2024 will be when that's available, unless we really get our skates on and get it done much more quickly than that.Chris Adams: I have one question, if I may before we move on from this one. I haven't used Safari and I have never written a book, but I have heard horror stories about working with publishers and emailing Word documents back and forth. Is it still that process or is there something like GitHub or what does it look like to write a technical book these days for a technical provider?Anne Currie: For O'Reilly, you've got quite a lot of different options, and one of them, the one that we are using is just Google Docs, and so that's super easy because Sara is in Norway. Shira, our editor, is in. And I was on the west coast of the us. I'm in the southeast of England. Sarah isn't too far away from me.She's in London, so that's quite easy to do. But fundamentally, Google Docs are pretty good for that kind of thing.Chris Adams: Wow. So Sarah, yourself and Shira, it sounds like it'll beAnne Currie: Sarah and Sarah. Yeah. It's really quite hard.Chris Adams: Yeah, and this is interesting cause there are a number of existing green software books. So there's one called Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick, who'sAnne Currie: Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is very good actually.Chris Adams: Yeah. And then Tom Greenwood from Whole Grain Digital.Anne Currie: yeah, yeah, that's alsoChris Adams: he had his. Yeah. And I think there are a couple of other books that I've seen come out as a number of other ones, but. The first time I've heard of one of these books, which is actually written by guys who aren't just men basically. So this is actually quite inco. I think this one book may have actually righted the gender balance in the sustainability book canon.Yeah.Anne Currie: hopefully, and there is method in our madness on this in that we wanted to make sure that we got on stage to talk about it as well. And we are three women who are very good public speakers, so really we should be able to make a little noise about this.Chris Adams: Good. I wish you the best and I'm looking forward to some of the shortcuts for some of this. In that case, should we look at the next story?Anne Currie: Okay. Absolutely.Chris Adams: All right. Okay. This is Microsoft Scale's workload with Carbon Awareness. Now the actual story is links from SDX Central. As far as I can tell. This is basically a kind of press release talking about Microsoft and Cloud network stuff.But the thing that was really more specific is actually some of the GitHub issues that we've linked to inside the show notes here. Basically, there is a carbon aware operator for Kubernetes to add in a bit of kind of carbon awareness into it by the looks of things. So if you go to github.com/azure, then Carbon Aware KEDA operator, there's an open source operator that you can plug into Kubernetes to do this.And I think this is something that we've both discussed before, but I suspect you might have some records on this because I joined a mutual friend of ours, Ross Fairbanks, did some work in this field a while ago as well, actually.Anne Currie: Yeah. Ross and I used to work on a startup called Micro Scaling Systems, which was all about cluster scheduling. And one of the thing that we always had in mind was adding carbon awareness to cluster scheduling, so moving jobs so that they, uh, get, wait until there's green carbon available. There's green electricity available on the grid.Now Google have been talking about this as well. They aren't offering it as a service like this Kubernetes scheduler, but the idea, they've been doing it internally, they've been trialing it internally as a way of shifting workloads in time. So, so that they consume green electricity, more assiduously than they would otherwise have done.And this is the same idea now. As far as I'm aware, this is mostly about being able to compress what's on your machines so you can turn machines off. It's all kind of bin packing on machines, cuz all the machines you wanna compress them in so that there are few machines running because they've got loads of containers running on those machines differently shaped, and they're all squeezed onto a smaller number of machines at times when there's no green power available.And some machines got to get turned off. And in order to do that you have to have jobs that can wait. So this is not just merely a matter of scheduling, and it's two sides of information here. You need to know. What the current mixes are on the grid and what it's likely to be, which a lot of that goes around weather and grid load.So it doesn't matter if you've got great weather, but you've got high grid load, then maybe you're still not gonna have any green power. But if you've got low grid load, maybe you've actually just got too much power and you want to be using it. So it's not just about following the sun or following the wind.You need this information about what the grid is like, what the weather conditions are on the grid, so to speak. And you also need to know what jobs that are running in your data centers are non-time sensitive, so they can be moved around forward and backwards in time. So the same kind of things that might be running on a spot instance, for example.Now Google pointed out that with their stuff, they're pretty good at labeling their jobs internally, so they're pretty good at labeling jobs and saying this is a low priority. You can just wait if this has to wait. 12 hours fine. Things like video transcoding for YouTube. Sometimes that happens very quickly.You might notice as a user, sometimes it happens very quickly. Sometimes it happens and it takes quite a long time, and that's because Google. Just go. It's not a high priority thing, so something needs to wait that it will be video transcoding. So you need jobs that are non-time sensitive and are labeled as non-time sensitive.So I say one of the things that Google pointed out that they struggled with a little bit on this is that they can do it internally where things are very well labeled, but they find it very difficult on the public cloud where VMs are just black boxes and they have absolutely no idea whether the contents could wait until there's green power available.So for a scheduler, you need both the information on which to schedule, but you also need the information about the jobs to know which ones are schedulable. There's work to do as a user, as well as just install the scheduler. You will need to start labeling your jobs.Chris Adams: And this is presumably something gets touched on in both books and patterns about the idea of decomposing maybe a particular monolith or a single big program into a number of smaller programs where some bits have to be. Really low latency, responding quickly, any other parts can be moved around so you can make use of either carbon or cost savings presumably.Anne Currie: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, cuz it, cuz you won't be moving these jobs, I would imagine. You won't be moving them from data center to data center cuz you know, data gravity and all that kind of stuff. But you will be moving them in time. There's really no downside to moving things in time. And so there's no data gravity download.So it's, that's where the wind tends to be.Chris Adams: So just, can I check with, so you mentioned an interesting concept here, data gravity. So data gravity is the idea that one data is in one place, you are not able to move it, it's difficult or expensive to move to another provider. Is there like a technical reason for that or what's the thinking behind that?Anne Currie: Yeah, it's, it's network, it's bandwidth, it's all, and it takes time and blah, blah, blah. But there's an awful lot of data. Gravity is one of the re one of the ways thatChris Adams: So we're referring to egress fees here. Yeah. So paying money to get things out of your cloud storage. Oh, just by the way, if anyone, you. There's a whole FTC kind of inquiry right now about oligopoly and competition right now at the cloud sector. So this may be something that if you feel like you would like to be able to do more stuff with in terms of green computing, maybe this is a thing that you might want to respond to the ongoing FTC basic kind of inquiry into this stuff.Cuz I feel that maybe it'd be better for us to actually be able to move things to more than just two or three clouds. Cuz data gravity seems primarily to be a kind of business constraint rather than a technical constraint.Anne Currie: Yeah, it probably is. Really? Yeah. Technically it's diff, it's difficult, but it's doable. You can get, you could have copies of your data in multiple places. And yeah, you could move it at night. You could copy it on, you could do the whole snowmobile thing, copy, copy it all out once to a bunch of disks and drive them across the country.It's not an insurmountable problem no matter how big the, the data is, but it is unbelievably costly. So yeah, that is fairly insurmountable because you don't, there's nothing much you can do about that.Chris Adams: Okay, this is true just like the cost of transmission in some places actually. Alright, so we spoke about the Azure carbon aware KEDA operator. So I think maybe we should actually explain what KEDA says. Cause there's something in the briefing here. Yeah. Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler. So the idea would, being that this would automatically scale Kubernetes up so you have more computers or more pods, and then scale it down again in response to various activities, that's what it would be, right?Anne Currie: That sounds plausible. I dunno, but that sounds plausible. And actually then you just use your normal scheduler and presumably your normal, however you label your pods normally on how many of these do I need to keep alive at any point? So the ones that are less important to you can just all get shut off.Chris Adams: Yeah. There's also another related project to this called Kube Green, which is a project by some folks in Italy. Actually, this is early on. It doesn't do quite the clever kind of carbon air scheduling stuff, but if you want to dip your toes into this. It literally turns off your pods when you go home. So basically all your staging devices and your developing developer machines at 6:00 PM they switch off and go to sleep just like you might choose to go home and go to sleep.Also, in the show notes, we've got a link from the Green Web Foundation, where we talk a little bit about this using both Kubernetes and Nomad a while ago. But the stuff from Azure looks really complete and it looks really quite exciting actually.Anne Currie: That is, so I, we ran like a sustainability track at, uh, QCon, London, uh, a couple of weeks. Sco big conference and it was very successful. One of our, I think our top rated speaker was a woman called, another woman called Holly Cummins, who is a really excellent speaker from Red Hat. I don't know if Holly, but she spoke about that.Her dream was that we'd have effectively light switch operations, so it should be as confident. Turning off machines on in, in the cloud or in private cloud or public cloud or wherever. As you are turning the light off with the light switch, because when you turn the light off with the light switch, no one thinks, oh, I won't turn the light off just in case it doesn't turn back on again. The aim is that you feel that confidence about all of your systems that you could just turn them off. Because you don't need them overnight knowing that you could turn them back on safely in the morning, and her light switch analogy was excellent. It's like you don't leave all your lights on at all night just in case you can't turn them back on again in the morning.That would be madness, but that's what we do with computers. One of the best things that you can do with your systems is invest in making sure that you can turn them off and then on again.Chris Adams: I think that's a useful piece of advice to make sure you can turn your things off and on again, if you'll. Is like a low stakes, but I think you and me, we've been on various projects where we've been afraid to do that. So I'm glad that someone is spelling it out that it's really needs to be this basic.Alright, next story. This is one that really caught my eye cause this is the SDIA who are a Green software Foundation member, the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. The kind of headline is the SDIA welcomes the deal of the European Council and Parliament on energy efficiency directive. This is super like legal blood gump, but basically there is some really, in my view, quite far reaching stuff inside this.Essentially, there has been a whole bunch of laws being thrashed out about transparency around energy usage for data centers, and this seems to have snuck through in the first quarter of 2023. And there are some headlines which are in my view, which go much further than we are right now. So I'll just read some of this stuff out.So owners and operators of data centers above 500 kilowatts will need to make the environmental performance public at least once a year. This includes annual energy consumption, power utilization, temperature, heat utilization, use of renewable energy, as in how much renewable energy you're using and where it's coming from.And we haven't mentioned it here, but it's also water usage as well. Now these are figures which. I, and you've tried to get, I'm sure you can talk about how easy it is to get access to these figuresAnne Currie: Almost impossible. Yeah.Chris Adams: and now they're like, it's law. Basically this is coming in. People need to be delivering, do their first reporting in March, 2024.So things, something which a large providers have been pushing back against and saying, no, we can't possibly share of this stuff now it's. Basically gonna be part of the law in all around Europe. So if you're outside of Europe, you still may be okay, but this is quite a precedent to be setting, in my view, cuz yeah, this is something that a lots of us we've been asking for and really pushing for and now you've essentially got one block saying no, this is a condition of doing business in this part of, cuz how on earth are we gonna know if we were on target or not in harming our emissions by 2030, for example.Anne Currie: Yeah, and in fact, this was discussed on stage at the coupon conference as well this time by Adrian Cockcroft, who is the retired VP of Sustainers. He can never remember what the titles of anybody are at aws, but anyway, who's the big cheese? Of sustainable architecture at aws and he was saying, if you're American, you might think this might, this won't affect you cause it's just an EU directive and your data centers in the US who, who cares?But it is basically the GDPR of Green. The EU is such a big block. They have so much clout and they exert their will that this is the same way that everybody ended up having to do GDPR. This will be the same. Everyone will have to comply with these things, even if you think that you're in the US and they won't touch you.The reality of the situation is that this will all spread out in a GPL style until everybody is forced to comply in the same way that we've had to comply with the GDPR.Chris Adams: That's a win for transparency by the sound of things, but it's probably gonna be a headache for a bunch of people who have to start reporting in less than 11 months for the first reporting deadline for this. There's also something that I call my eye here is that any data center exceeding one megawatt of power, they need to recover the waste heat.So basically they need to put it to good use or prove that they, it's either technically or economically unfeasible for them to be doing. So this isn't a really interesting one because within Europe at least, and I'm gonna speak about Germany where I live, like 40% of the energy demand is from gas heating things up.So if you have this being put to actually addressing one of the other big demands for energy inside Europe, that's actually quite a far-reaching one and one megawatt. That's likely to impact pretty much every hyperscaler, cuz hyperscalers tend to be 20 megawatts upwards in size. And as a kind of, I was trying to do some like rough figures, like 500 kilowatts if you're assuming maybe 15 to 20 kilowatts per rack.So that's, I know between 20 to 40 racks of service based on how efficient your data center might be. That's not that big. That's like a lot of data centers. This is gonna be impacting basically,Anne Currie: Yeah, so we're gonna see an awful lot of public heated poolsChris Adams: I hope so. Yeah, absolutely. IAnne Currie: ringing every data center anywhere, everywhere in the world.Chris Adams: Maybe this will change how we think about how you build data centers. Like when you build a data center as a kind of big box out of town, Walmart style thing, then it's really difficult to use the heat. But if you're able to integrate the data center into the kind of fabric of the urban environment, then there isAnne Currie: really want to have, but you don't. But that has issues of its own. You do not want that generally because in the open environment, you want people living. And also you don't want the draw on the grid, cuz often those cities, the grids are already overloaded. So it would be counterproductive to have a whole load of data centers now suddenly located in urban environments just so that they can have a local pool that's heated up using their excess path.I would say that's counterproductive, but.Chris Adams: they're providing or generating any of their own, any of their own power on site. That's another thing that some of the new providers are doing. They're basically looking at using batteries on site as a way to act as a kind of anchor customer, but also to provide use. Cause if you have this case where you're scaling machines up and down, there will be times where you should be able to be a kind of active participant in the grid.Just like how having a kind of read write energy grid, just like we have a two-way internet and you could have a two-way grid, but that's a, another podcast I suspect.Anne Currie: Part of the grid balancing solution, which is absolutely required, particularly when we struggle with grid balancing at the moment, and that's when most of the grid is powered by stuff that is utterly predictable, like gas or coal. When he starts adding a whole load of comparatively massively unpredictable solar and wind into the mix, then grid balancing is a major problem.Chris Adams: It gets more complicated depending on how much of a grid island you might be. So if you are connected to other things, You can get stuff from neighbors, but if you can't then it's a bit more complicated. Now there is some interesting news related to that. I, I assure you, were not an energy podcast. There is basically an energy England to Dutch interconnect just announced in the last week and there's a bunch of similar stuff happening around this field, but we probably need to discuss that another time.And I think we're coming up to the last few minutes of this and I think there's been a question being that's been posed to us that I think Chris, our producer, shared. If we were to launch one data center into space, what would you name it and why? I am. You can have a bit of a thinker like, and I'm gonna go for the dataface out answer that people tend to use when faced with this stuff or what English people tend to use when they get the chance to name things.Boaty McBoatface, the well-known research vessel, was doing some absolutely fantastic work in the field of climate science. I'll share some links specifically for that because yeah, both face or Richard Attenborough or the Sir Richard Attenborough is its official name. That's a thing. So yeah, that's my example.That's my answer. Data McDataface. What about you, Anne? you call a data center?Anne Currie: I dunno, but I can immediately say what I would choose as my naming convention. I would give them culture ship name conventions, the Ian Banks Culture Series, all the AI spaceships name themselves, with some slightly tongue in cheek name.Chris Adams: Of course I love you one andAnne Currie: Oh yeah, exactly. Yes. Yeah, so I would, I would give them culture names.So that's up. There's an exercise for the listener to come up with a whole load of, in fact, I believe there is a cultureship named generator online that you can, it will automatically, or to be a perfectly honestly ChatGPT, but almost certainly supply you with culture ship names that it has made up. So I would defer to Ian banks and in the, and,Chris Adams: And a generative AI large learning model. For naming our servers. I guess that's a circular of nothing else. All right, I think that takes us up to the time we have here. Okay, that's all we have for this episode of The Week in Green Software. 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 this particular show.Thank you very much, Anne for joining us, and hopefully see you on one of the future ones. So bye for now. See you around Anne.Anne Currie: Goodbye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get to your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation In any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.