In this episode, we have a very special guest for an episode of Fact Check on Environmental Variables, Ola Fagerström from Microsoft Surface joins host Asim Hussain to talk about his work on the Microsoft's Surface Emissions Estimator - an important tool that helps measure the carbon footprint of the device. Ola talks about how difficult it was to take into account everything from materials used, to manufacturing, to packaging, and even end-of-life disposal to give an accurate estimate of the emissions produced by each device; and how these principles can be applied to other areas of green software development.  Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterOla Fagerström: LinkedIn Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterResources:Microsoft’s Surface Emissions Estimator AnnouncementOla’s Post on LinkedIn about Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator / LinkedIn [7:46]Energy Star Calculation / Energy Star [15:51]Microsoft Edge Green Tabs / Microsoft  [23:13]Internal Carbon Fee / Microsoft [37:12]New EU Laws on CSRD / European Commission [41:59]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcription Below:Ola Fagerström: When is the first company going to start to say, we only allow eight tabs open? Because if you start to have, I'm just making numbers up, 16 tabs, you might run to your boss and say, Hey, I need a device with the 32 gigs of memory because my memory is constantly filled. Yeah, sorry. We put a policy that you can only have eight tabs open because that will save on the memory, and therefore we can buy cheaper or devices that are actually greener.Asim Hussain: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Asim Hussain.So welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Asim Hussain. In this episode, we have a very special guest for an episode of Fact check on Environment Variables from Microsoft Surface. We have technology specialist Ola Fagerström.Ola Fagerström: Hi there, Asim. What a nice, uh, way to get introduced as a special guest and.Asim Hussain: Probably worse ways of being introduced isn't there? Not so special guest anyway. Ola, like it's great to have you on the show. Obviously we were colleagues at Microsoft, we're both circling kind of the sustainability space. I'm not at Microsoft anymore. So to give our listeners some context, could you please introduce yourself?Ola Fagerström: Yes, I'm Ola Fagerström. I'm based and live in the fantastic country of Sweden, where probably some of you listeners have heard of a small girl called Greta. Which is also helping, pushing the environment forward and doing a lot of stuff. So part of, I can say part of that inspiration, but I've been with Microsoft for in, oh, what is it this week?11 years.Asim Hussain: Oh wow.Ola Fagerström: So quite some time I've been with the devices and Surface family for the last, what is it? Eight, nine years since we launched Surface Pro Free back in the market. Way back in the days. So, uh, that is sort of my day-to-day job and then working with sustainability almost on a daily basis to make sure that we can.Help and tell our customers what we actually do, and I report back to our dear engineers what they have to do betterAsim Hussain: Ah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. ThatOla Fagerström: as well. Sit sitting a little bit that in between of, uh, explaining difficult things to people on the simple way on one end and the other way around as well.Asim Hussain: Yeah, and you have to explain the sustainability difficult things and even more difficult. So thank you for that. Yes, we've really great to have you on the podcast to talk about your work. So to just explain how this works to our listeners, this is a type of episode which we call Fact Check. It's slightly different from our typical Environment Variables or this week in Green Software TWiGS episodes.We're first going to ask you a few questions about your background and experience in the world of sustainable software, on the world of sustainability, and then we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into your work with Microsoft and the Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator, and then we'll just see where that takes us.Ola Fagerström: Sounds like a good plan, I think. Yeah.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Um, just a, before we dive in, it's just a reminder for everybody that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So here's my first question. Can you tell me more about your background and how you became a device sustainability specialist at Microsoft?Ola Fagerström: Yeah, so one of the things, as I said previously, coming from a region or a country where sustainability has always been on top of mind. Of our customers, people living here, it's been a, a constant topping, bringing back to our dear friends, sitting on the other side of the pond to ask them to do more. And then at one point in time, then you realize as well, okay, if they can't provide you with everything, then you actually have to start to dig in yourself.And help to do more as well. That is creating the thing that didn't actually exist. And that started quite some time ago, years and years back.Asim Hussain: So that's cuz like you're in the surface space and imagine you're getting asked a lot of questions. Is that I betOla Fagerström: Absolutely. And going back 4, 5, 6 years ago, bringing that back to maybe a market where sustainability was not the top of the agenda. That was in many cases, yeah, but we have some legal information you can find online. We can send you a PDF and things like that. But that was not so much maybe what my, my customers and I wanted to know when we started to think about those things.Asim Hussain: Yes. And that's really good. I think Anne Currie, who, who's one of the co-hosts of podcasts, talks about this quite often, which is if you are a customer of an organization, asks questions cuz that's what gives Ola and people like Ola kind of the imperative to do this work that we're describing here right now. So just before we really dig into kind of the service missions estimates, I know you mentioned that you live in a country where sustainability is a key, a very important thing. But would you say there was a particular moment or turning point in your career where you decided to focus on sustainability?Ola Fagerström: I think one of those key things when I really felt like, okay. Even though I think this is important now I know that the company feel that this is important. And one of those key things was of course, when Microsoft in 2020 went out and said that we are going to be carbon negative, we are going to be zero waste, we are going to be water positive.All of those things. One of the fine lines in the announcement said as well, that one of our focus things is around our product and devices. And I was like, don't really know all about that. Let's see what's behind that.Asim Hussain: Yeah. I love that answer because I've said this before and I, cause I was at the same company at the same time, and when the leader of a company comes out publicly and makes a statement, it gives freedom to the people working inside that organization to then follow through on those actions. Cause then when you're having meetings, you can just say to people Sachin, he said it on stage, so you know, you better have this conversation with me and let's talk it through.Whereas prior to that public announcement, that kind of conversation is more difficult, isn't it?Ola Fagerström: And, and the interesting in this, and then we'll probably discuss this a bit further on as well, if you are listening as a, as a customer and you have a company that has said something publicly, in most cases, the one who has signed off on that is in many cases the board of directors or the CEO. So you can quite easily start to hold them accountable to that.Okay. But you said this. We have set up this call. You and your dear friend at the table has actually signed up from this, so how are we going to do it?Asim Hussain: Yes. That's the wonderful thing, about making a public commitment. Whether it's telling all of your friends, you're gonna quit smoking, or whether it's a public sustainability commitment, there's a certain amount of peer pressure to keeping you honorable. So let's dig into the work that you've been doing.Firstly, can you give us a quick overview of what the Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator is? And you know what it does? Am I saying it right as well? Is that the official title?Ola Fagerström: Yeah. Yeah, it's a very long word. And of course we have legal friends that's making sure that we use exactly the right wording. So therefore, it's not the calculator, it's an estimator and things like that. At,Asim Hussain: Mm. Mm-hmm.Ola Fagerström: so it very much came from that announcement that we said that we are going to be as a company, carbon negative. When you start to dig into the details of that, you are also saying, see for example, that we are publishing what we call from our side an Eco report. So you can see, okay, what is the estimated impact from purchasing, a, surface Pro Nine, let's say. Those are public things. That's a PDF that you can find online, but then it quickly starts to come and you start to nerd, as I did around those things because in all of those PDFs, there are some fine lines saying, oh, the numbers in this PDF comes with the fixed assumptions of whatever it might be.In our case, it says that the numbers in this case is based on the assumption that device is used in the US for example, for four and a half years.Asim Hussain: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Ola Fagerström: Brilliant. If you're a customer that's using it for four and a half year in the US but if you start to think, yeah, but I'm a UK customer and I'm going to use that device for two years, is that really accurate for me then that number? So I start to then to dive into, okay. But we probably can calculate that in a much more granular and much more accurate way for all those customers who don't fit that four and a half year.Asim Hussain: Hmm.Ola Fagerström: The surface emission estimate is all about to make sure that you can understand what is the footprint from me with the assumptions that I say in the tool versus assumptions that someone has made for me.Asim Hussain: Hmm. Okay, so you're just trying, so you, you, I dunno if it's this, if it's just the Swedish way of saying it, but you called it a eco. Is it LCA report you're describing before?Ola Fagerström: Yeah, so in that, in that eco profile, you then see that the numbers are then based on what we call an LCA calculation or a life cycle calculation. If you don't know what an LCA is, basically you collect all the information that you have about the product that you intend to manufacture, and you can do some estimation of what is, for example, the environmental impact from producing that.Asim Hussain: Because effectively what an LCA sounds like, an Eco Report is just another, or a summarized version perhaps, of what an LCA form sounds like. Maybe something that's formalized for devices. It perhaps is, it sounds like. Yeah.Ola Fagerström: And you can find those eco reports for any given product. It's basically an LCA is not something specifically to the pc. It's done in the car industry and it's been done for a very long time. But we are on the path of where that data becomes super crucial for customers to understand.Asim Hussain: Because, okay, I see. So like for with a typical LCA report, what you're doing is you're just basic, effectively just writing a PDF because the technology has not moved on since 1994 about the ability to disseminate knowledge to other human beings. Just the PDF is the pinnacle of data dissemination in the sustainability arena.But the challenge with the PDF with something digital is you have to make a ton of assumptions like what you just made because it is just a static bit of data. So like, how would I write a static bit of data? About the carbon emissions of my laptop. You have to make a ton of assumptions. You have to assume what my user profile is.How much do I use it? Where am I? How long am I gonna keep it for? But that's all statically written down in a PDF. From what I'm hearing, from what you're saying is the estimator like a dynamic LCA, where you can put your real values in and it gives you your real estimated values back out.Ola Fagerström: Yeah. Cause what we have done now in the estimator is basically we have taken that LCA and broken it apart because in a normal LCA then, or in the output from that, you say, okay, how much in this case, carbon emission is associated with the production of that device. How much comes from transporting it to the location where it's going to be used?How much carbon emission is going to come from using that device in the PC, and that's how much electricity is that going to use in the location where you might be. And then the last one comes from the end of life treatment. So what we do in this case is that we say that use the production part be because that's very static.But then the transportation part is dynamic because we know, for example, then by our own logistics, what does it take to ship a device from our factory to maybe a central warehouse? To a central warehouse to the end location where the customer might be? The other thing as well is that. The energy grid in the UK might be very different from the grid in Sweden or in India or somewhere else.So we need to start to think of how much energy or how much CO2 is associated with, for example, one of use in the UK versus Sweden versus India. So that's what we also then bring into the tool to show that, okay, how much energy is that device actually going to use? And then we have. Done some clever stuff in it as well, where we actually start to show actual usage or telemetry data in that to make it even more granular.Asim Hussain: I believe the estimators designed a, probably a, and you tell me if I'm wrong, obviously tell me if I'm wrong, but for organizations that perhaps would buy a rather large amount of surface devices and manage like a fleet of devices, and so then typically if I was in that organization prior to the estimator, all I would've ever been able to do is take the LCA report.I've bought 10,000 services. Multiply, whatever that number report by 10,000, and that's just my carbon emissions. Now I can then put in some real values. And you mentioned transportation, so I presume what you can, one of the things you can say is 1000 of those machines were delivered to our France offices in France, 1000 in Germany, 2000 in Singapore, or something like that.So the estimator sounds like that's one of the variables it takes into account. So also sounds, from what you said, it also takes into account grid intensity of electricity to also take that variable into account. Are there any other variables, like what other variables Ola Fagerström: can I factor in?Yeah, so you can also say for how many years I'm going to use it. So you can say, I'm going to use it for two years, or three or four years instead to take that into account as well. Okay. How long are you going to use that energy in that location? But the cool stuff in the tool as well. Like we said, we're going to link to the tool so you can look it up yourself.Is that on the used part? We actually have two bars in there that shows. One, how much energy is that device using according to the Energy Star standard? Because all the devices say that, oh, we are rubber stamp. We meet energy star standards. But what people don't realize, and I have to share a little bit of a, a hard moment when I did my digging out about this tool, is that when you are reading the formula that Energy Star is using, To measure the amount of energy a device, tablet, or phone is using, they are saying in the formula, okay, you as a manufacturer has to measure how much energy is that device using and the grand prize for you Asim, if you know the answer to this, how much energy is your device using when it's in, in off mode?Asim Hussain: Ah,Ola Fagerström: When it's in what they call sleep mode and what they call as long idle and short idle, but what are we missing in this calculation?Asim Hussain: Uh oh. Well, it's idles. It just sounds like effectively off states, isn't it? So it's just like idles, sleep, off. Not actual. Also perhaps as a mirror of what I am actually like when I'm in front of my computer, which is fairly idle and sleepy, but doesn't really like factor in like as sometimes on a rare occasion I'm also quite active.So it sounds like it's not taking that into consideration.Ola Fagerström: So the funny is that when you explain that to people and say that, imagine that you would go out to the garage and look for that new car, and then they would have in the fine print and say, oh, by the way, the amount of fuel this car is going to use, it's measured by you parked a car in the parking lot, you put in the key in the ignition.You turn the key and let the engine run for a little while or for a little while longer, but you don't leave the parking lot.Asim Hussain: Right.Ola Fagerström: And I was like, yeah, but that can't be right. I must be missing something in their calculation. So I asked one of our engineers that's doing the Energy Star certification, ask them.Is it really right that Energy Stars actually don't calculate for actual usage? He said yeah, there's a small formula for it, but you have to think of where does Energy Star come from that was created to make sure that you lower the energy usage from refrigerators,Asim Hussain: Uh,Ola Fagerström: that, air conditions, which has a very fixed on and off or idle, but they don't actually take into calculation the actual usage of a tablet or a pc.Asim Hussain: interesting.Ola Fagerström: So when you start to think of, oh, we have a energy saving goal in our company, great. As a starting point that you ask for energy star certified devices. Of course, I'm not arguing by that. But it won't take you to your energy reduction goals because you need to start to measure actual usage. So what you will see in the tool is one bar saying, this is the amount of energy that energy stars are requiring to meet Energy star certification.Then we have a green bar saying, this is the amount of energy that we see collected from devices being used out in the field. For example, the Surface Laptop studio that might be used for CAD work and stuff like that. Of course, it's going to use a lot more energy than just to log into windows and don't do anything.It's like measuring the amount of fuel a car with a turbo is using based on that you're just parked is on the parking lot. Of course, the turbo is never kicking in. If you're just standing there and looking at technician.Asim Hussain: So, cause I imagine what people perhaps have done in the past with the absence of an LCA, maybe with one is take the energy star, I'm sure energy star as well as giving you A, B, C, D, E, F, or whatever it is. It's probably giving you an energy consumption per minute or something like that. And if you were just to use that and multiply it by the number of minutes you're using it, but it would not reflect cuz that's effectively saying like that's how much energy your compute would use if it was idle.What you are reporting in the estimator is actual usage. Isn't that a bit, I'm sure like that bar is so far high than the energy star bar, isn't it just a pretty depressing like thing to look at all the time?Ola Fagerström: No, actually, it's interesting because in some cases that bar might be higher. In some cases it's actually lower because some cases we also see that the device is used as intended. For example, the Surface Go, which is more sort of an iPad format. People might use it, just log in, check their emails, not doing anything more, so the energy usage will be actually lower than what we see when we did the testing.So this is also then seeing and giving the customer the deep insight because again, the nerding part of this, and this is the fun part of listening to podcasts, that you always learn stuff. When you are reading those eco profiles from the other large manufacturers, the sort of little fine line saying in there, the use of this device is calculated according to the Energy Star standard.So that means that, oh, we say that you're going to use 15 kilos of co2. Okay. But that's just based on that me logging into windows and not doing anything. So what we now do in the tool is actually using that telemetry data to saying that a hundred surface pro nines are going to use, I'm just making up numbers now, 900 kilowatt hours.Asim Hussain: So just want to clarify one quick point before we dig into this. So is that information available kind of per customer, or is this something that you're aggregating up and just making available yourself? Or, if I'm a customer and I'm using the emissions estimator, and I've got 10,000 machines, would you tell me the average consumption across all my machines?Ola Fagerström: No, it won't be across your machines, but it's across the sort of Windows estate. But it's based on that specific skew and product. So it's for a Surface Pro 9 i5, whatever it might be, coming from the data reported back to Windows and Microsoft.Asim Hussain: So this actually could be quite useful information for a lot of people out there in the world. Like they could actually go to this and then see, forget energy star. You've effectively got a real world model of usage, real human UX, user experience of devices and energy consumption that goes there.Fascinating.Ola Fagerström: So, of course inside of today, that's only a long green bar saying this is the energy usage. Then we have to start to think of what you are doing on your daily, which is making sure that the software that runs in that green bar, Because then we can start to slice that up and say, oh, what is, for example, Edge using as part of that, or whatever kind of software I'm running on that device.Asim Hussain: Can you reveal? Cause I've, I think I've heard data from various sources. I don't think I've heard anything official from a Microsoft perspective, uh, or just stay quiet if it's true. But is it true that browsing or browsers take up, is it 60 or 70% of the energy consumption on most kind of laptop devices?Is that something that is too far away from what you think is true?Ola Fagerström: I think the interesting in that question is that if you look at what we have done in Edge, where we now can start to put the tabs into green mode, which is actually quite interesting because then you can start to measure those things as well to see, okay, how much are we actually saving by using that kind of green mode or whatever kind of green or energy saving that you have put in your software.And then start to think of how are we collaborating in that sense with the OS that device is running on.Asim Hussain: That was the feature of Edge that dragged me onto Edge was that that was, it was both useful from a sustainability perspective and also just from a human perspective. Cuz I'm one of those people that just opens a ton of tabs and it's just way more performing.Ola Fagerström: Yes to nerd on that a little bit. It's kind of interesting as well when we start to talk about in this world to make sure that we save on the environment. So when is the first company going to start to say, we only allow eight tabs open?Because if you start to have, I'm just making numbers up, 16 tabs, you might run to your boss and say, Hey, I need a device with the 32 gigs of memory because my memory is constantly filled.Yeah, sorry. We put a policy that you can only have eight tabs open because that will save on the memory and therefore we can buy cheaper or devices that are actually greener.Asim Hussain: That's a very interesting angle to take on this whole world. You're right, actually, yeah. You constantly install things on your computers. They slowly degrade over time. And then all you have to do is reinstall everything and start from scratch and everything's really fast again. So yeah, there's a slow degradation which forces you into action choosing tooling.I think that's also another factor, like tooling should be,Ola Fagerström: Absolutely. And. It leads me also sort into the discussion where another thing that people constantly talk about now as well is of course circularity in in, in those things as well. And where I, cuz I'm in a lot of discussions with customers and they often ask, well, yeah, but what kind of questions should I ask for the, yeah, probably the first question you should ask for, what is the residual value of the thing that I'm going to purchase?Asim Hussain: When you say residual value, would you mind, would you mind kind of clarifying what you about residualOla Fagerström: Yeah, of course.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Ola Fagerström: Cause when you start to think of when you purchase something, you are probably then doing it with the intent of either using that thing until it falls apart and you're going to recycle it, or you're going to purchase something with the intent of, I'm going to use it for X amount of time and then resell it. We know for a fact something with no value at all will most likely just be thrown in the bin. Something with a high value will for sure be sold over and over again, regardless if it's a PC, a phone, or whatever it might be. And I often refer to this as well in calls and say, nobody would think of taking their three year old iPhone and throw it in the bin.Everybody knows, Hey, I can just go on eBay and get $400 for it and it will definitely be sold again. Exactly the same thing we see with Surface. My daughter is still using my Surface Pro free that I got. What is it now? Eight years ago,Asim Hussain: Yeah,Ola Fagerström: a couple of weeks ago when we checked on eBay, that was still worth $150.Compare that to something. Made of cheap plastic that nobody cares of, that would've been thrown away a long time ago.Asim Hussain: It's a very interesting point as you remind you. Cause I, I got a, a electric car a couple of years ago and I leased it. And what was fascinating about that experience is that they, they still look arguably very expensive for a car. However, the thing that was fascinating about with the lease price was actually quite low.Ola Fagerström: Yep.Asim Hussain: after I've finished leasing it for two years, its value remains high so they can lease it for less, if that makes sense. If that math makes sense. Yeah.Ola Fagerström: interesting to this is again that key question. When you purchase and you want to come into circularity, how are you going to enter that and how long are you going to use that? Whatever you buy until it falls apart and you're going to make sure that you repair it yourself. Or if you repair something, send it back to repair centers and things like that.Or are you going to do, just as you said, making sure that working with the lease partner that's actually going to make sure that electric car's getting sold again and again?Asim Hussain: That's very interesting. Yeah, I think the world is gonna have to move towards that secondary market model. And I think it's interesting cuz in the tech space, I would argue that four or five years ago, like it really mattered getting, I felt a very significant difference getting the latest model in my life.I would argue these days, maybe I just don't do as much hardcore as I used to, but like for most of the work that I do, which is having a meeting, browsing, writing a document, like there's almost no difference. Now if I was to get a new machine in terms of any performance, like a machine that's like 4, 5, 6, 7 years ago, would do just as fine for me as a machine right now.Which maybe indicates, and I used to this, the nature of devices is changing.Ola Fagerström: And I think also when we start to think of the other thing that you used to work with it, which is of course Azure, back in the day at Microsoft. How much power do you need in your device versus how much can you actually start to use from somewhere else when you need it?Asim Hussain: Hmm.Ola Fagerström: Without your own organization need to, uh, purchase 10,000 servers and have to build all of those things where you today can then buy it from Windows 365, which powers next generation of windows.So, do I need to buy a laptop with. I nine just because I'm making some CAD drawings for a couple months, or can I just buy that as a license when I need it for X amount of time?Asim Hussain: The There are virtualized desktops as well. I think that's, that's kinda the thin client argument, isn't it? Like we could get away now, perhaps a lot. I think a lot of people will probably get away with very thin clients and then just a lot of the compute on the cloud and then that can be hopefully have greater efficiency, efficiencies of scaleOla Fagerström: I think so, definitely too. And something that I'd like to point out, what is a little bit special with the tool or actually the methodology that Microsoft and the eSign team is actually using now? To do that LCA, which stands out as very much as the gold standards for everyone else, is that when you're doing that LCA, you can do it in two ways.Either you can use a simplified tool, which is based on an either an algorithm or you can use a tool that then takes into account your own supply chain.Asim Hussain: Oh.Ola Fagerström: That means I've made this little simple analogy. So if you are listening to this and you've imagined in your head that you work in IT, and then our dear friends at the communication department comes to us and ask, Hey, you work in IT.You can always help with everything. Hey, of course we do. We do it all the time. We are going to run a super expensive ad campaign. Okay. We need you to find a new picture supply for that. Okay. Also, I can do that. Okay, great. The only requirement we have is that it needs to be a picture of an orange and gray super sport bike.Okay. I know exactly what I'm going to ask for. Shouldn't be a problem to find a new supplier for it. The first supply took them about 20 minutes to do the job, it only required one person. They used a simplified tool where you just put in a few keywords today, orange and gray, super sport bike, standing inside your studio.Voila! You have a picture of an orange and gray bike. The tool that you used may not give you who took it because nobody took it. Can you see when it was taken? Probably not. Is it a hundred percent color accurate? Most likely not either. The other supplier, it took them three bloody months to do the same job.They used a super expensive tool to do it. They used a super high resolution sensor. Came back with the most astonishing picture you can ever imagine. You're zooming to every screw. You can see who took it when it was taken a hundred percent color accurate. Could you compare those two? Of course. Cuz Hey, you just asked me to find a supplier of orange and gray bikes.Could you really compare that? Probably not. So what most manufacturers today are using is a simplified tool because their catalog of devices is so large,Asim Hussain: Right.Ola Fagerström: so they put in a few keywords like. What is the size of my screen? What is the material that I might use? What is the thickness of the motherboard?It takes about 20 minutes to half an hour. What it gives you is sort of a half blurry picture because it's not the display that you exactly are using or exactly that disk that you are using. What Microsoft has done very differently now is that we have gone out to our own supply chain. And collected exactly the measurement of what does it take to produce that specific screw that we use in a Surface Pro 9, if I just make something, or that specific motor board that is used in just that device, and that takes all the way from producing that raw material.To getting it to the next supplier, to the next, to the next, to the next. So of course, that spreadsheet is, you know, thousands and thousands of rows of processes, and then we produce that life cycle for that specific skew using the bill of materials or the bomb for that specific device.Asim Hussain: So I'd always assumed, actually that's how everybody does it. So what you are saying to me, that's how Microsoft does it. But if I'm another manufacturer, there are tools out there. I'm some sort of Web interface tools where I can just answer a series of questions roughly describing my head. I've got a head, I'm holding headphones right now.It's these headphones that I've manufactured. And it will roughly generate cause it's gonna have, it's gonna be so averaged out now, isn't it? Yes. I've got a bit of metal. But what metal is in this? How much, you know, within 20 minutes it'll gimme a very rough report. But you are saying there is multiple levels of quality of LCA reports that are out there.Is there some way, as a consumer I can know that this report was built using not, yeah.Ola Fagerström: what you need to start to ask, especially if you are an organization and purchase something, the first key question then, okay. The data that you provide me, or this number that I saw in your eco profile or whatever it is that they call it, is that using what the nerd calls primary data means data collected from your own measurement and supply chain.Secondary data might be data that is publicly available in some sort of database. What we could see when we did our own measurements, we could see, for example, that the assumption of how much energy was used when you, for example, molded out the chassis of a surface device, and we could pair that to the measurement from our actual supplier of it.We saw that the energy usage was 20 times higher.Asim Hussain: So you actually created this manually yourself or some other mechanism through in-house manufacturing. You created your own chassis or what case you said, and then you calculated that was in a controlled environment, so you calculated the energy you needed to do that. You went to your suppliers and then asked your supplier for the same information, and then number was 20 times less than your number, is that what you're saying?Or the other way around?Ola Fagerström: No. So what we did before was we used one of those industry available databases that said that if you are producing one kilo of aluminum into a CNC chas- chassis, you're most likely going to use this amount of energy. So we could say then, so don't hold me accountable for the numbers, I'm just making some up.Let's say that to create 500 grams of surface chassis, you may be using 15 kilowatt hours of energy. But then when we actually compared that and went to the supplier who did that molding for us and ask, okay, how much energy are you using to create 500 grams of that chassis? And they said, oh, but that's 150 kilowatt hours that we use.Asim Hussain: Oh, so suppliers were telling you like a greater amount than these existing kind of emission factor models.Ola Fagerström: Exactly. Because when you start to look down to where those model comes from and the assumptions of that, in some cases, those models and assumptions might be 20 years old.Asim Hussain: Wow, I suppose you are actually trying, cuz you're trying to model everything in the world. Everything that could possibly be modeled in a supply chain.Ola Fagerström: The interesting to this is also what many people are not aware of. So inside Microsoft we have what's called the internal carbon fee. So all parts of Microsoft needs to pay a carbon fee depending on how much they add to the organization.Asim Hussain: In terms of carbon emissions?Ola Fagerström: Yeah so as taxpayer, we all know we want to have control of our numbers to make sure that we pay as little or, as much tax as we have to. Of course, to be able to do that, you need to have measurements from the people that you are purchasing things from.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I know. I remember for the Microsoft announcement, that was one of the announcements was one of the pressures that Microsoft put on its suppliers was to provide that data. Which is one of the hidden aspects of that, but you had to dig a couple of layers deep into that announcement to get that. But yeah.Ola Fagerström: And that, of course, then starts to play into account. Cause what we do then in the estimator is that then we are both showing very accurate numbers based on that specific skew that you are looking at. Which comes from the measurement of our own manufacturing and supply chain. And then couple that with measurements from the logistics and then we take measurements from actually using it device based on telemetry in the location and for the years that you're going to use it.So when we start to compare that there is, okay, here we are providing you with a Hasselblad picture for you picture nerds out there, you know what it is and the image quality. Versus the simple picture that I got from Dall-E or using Bing Create. Very different in when it comes to quality and control of everything.Asim Hussain: That sounds really fascinating. So you've got better numbers, you got more refined. Numbers more accurate, more precise numbers. How are these numbers being absorbed back into Microsoft in its sustainability? Are they being factored into the sustainability report and kind of Microsoft commitments or, yeah is this a separate measurement?Ola Fagerström: So of course being able then to both model your supply chain, then you can start to take informed decisions when you are selecting what you want to do with your suppliers to make sure that you meet your sustainability goals. That could be things like, okay, which suppliers should we invest in to make sure that they have green energy?Are there some suppliers that adds more carbon footprint to our devices than others? Where should we put our effort and investment? If you don't have that kind of measurement from your supply chain, then it's easy to say, oh, we are just going to go out and plant a couple of a hundred trees and hope that we are fine with that.Okay, great for the planet. Maybe not so great. If you're going to meet your sustainability goals. Don't want to cackle down on people saying that we're planting trees, but or for them who plant trees. It's a good thing you do, but you need to start with the basics.Asim Hussain: Yes, and I can see actually the drawbacks then of using those simplified models would be that every single manufacturer that uses that simplified tool to generate it, it would give you poor information for what to optimize for. Cuz if it's just an emission factor for thickness of motherboard rather than constituent, then that's just gonna apply pressure to have a thinner motherboard.Because you're assuming a thinner motherboard. Cause that's the only variable there that you can tweak. Whereas the actual surface landscape that you wanna optimize for is very different. So that's a really fascinating insight. I think we've run, we're getting close, closer time. So just wanna ask one final question.You know, what advice would you give to other companies or individuals looking to reduce their carbon footprint? Other people in similar roles that you perhaps in other companies.Ola Fagerström: I really urge people to say or ask exactly what I said. Ask your supplier, how did they get to their number? Are they actually measuring that from their own supply chain? And I mean, that could be if you are just going to purchase a new office desk, find the eco profile for that office desk and ask that supplier.Have you measured that from your own factory? Because it will tell you both how much they have actually invested in people like me and you to actually do this work and make sure that our customers can actually get that kind of data. Because if they even don't know, it'll just give you a rough idea about what it is.Yeah. It tells you quite easily what it is.Asim Hussain: Mm, very interesting. Yeah, ask them if it's primary or secondary data.Ola Fagerström: Yeah. And again, if you are working at the company that has gone up and said, okay, we are going to meet this goal, and you are actually manufacturing something or writing code, or whatever it is, are you actually measuring that and how are you providing that to your customers? Because with the new laws coming in EU with CSRD and things like that, I was told in one meeting that organizations might need to report on a thousand data points when it comes to sustainability.Asim Hussain: Good.Ola Fagerström: That is the work that's coming just ahead of us.Asim Hussain: Yes. Yeah. And so asking lots of questions and you have to ask the questions to get that data to be able to report, andOla Fagerström: And then also be able to say, no. Okay, dear customer, if you can't provide me all supply, if you can't provide me with that, I'm going to go to that other manufacturer and I have this other little analogy that I use. If you would go to the car or to the garage that we talked about car before, and you would say, okay, how far can I drive in this electric car?And they would say, oh, oh, you can easily get a thousand miles on every charge. Brilliant. I would buy that car directly. And then you ask that little hard follow up question. By the way, have you tested that yourself? Oh, you know, no. No. That is based on that. It's an electric car and it's a sedan. Oh, so you haven't invested in testing that yourself?No. That would be way too expensive and required way too much work for us. No. Maybe in the future we will do. That's the work that Microsoft has already done because we set up that work years back again. When we started to say, okay, we can't select you as a supplier if you can't provide me, and we will make sure that we can provide our customers so they can actually feel secure when they buy our products to understand what is the footprint of things.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Full. Yeah, great information, great insights from somebody like yourself who's been at the forefront into really calculating these numbers. And I can really see, and I, I knew you from before, but I can really see that doing this properly is really important to you and making sure that there's a truth to those numbers and a usefulness to those numbers.So thank you very much. Ola, thank you so much for your time, for time today and spending time. And thank you so much for the work you've been doing at Microsoft.Ola Fagerström: Thanks a lot for having me and fantastic to know. It out a little bit over over an hour as well.Asim Hussain: There we go. So that's all for this episode of Environment Variables. All the resources for this episode are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. I would like to say huge thank you to Ola again for being on the podcast today.Thank you for sharing your unique input to the world of sustainable software, and thanks again for coming on this show. Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing.It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation . Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

This week host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain and Environment Variables regular Sara Bergman to discuss the hidden costs of generative AI. What’s really at the tip of this iceberg and how far down does it go? They also discuss just how thirsty AI chatbots really are and developments in platform engineering. Finally, we share some opportunities for development from the world of green software.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteSara Bergman: LinkedIn / TwitterAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:AI Chatbots Guzzle Enormous Amounts of Water, Study Finds: / Evening Standard [3:16]Two-phase cooling will be hit by EPA rules and 3M's exit from PFAS "forever chemicals" / DCD [9:35]The Mounting Human and Environmental Costs of Generative AI: / Ars Technica  [15:02]ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim / BBC [20:29]Free Dolly: Introducing the World's First Truly Open Instruction-Tuned LLM / DataBricks [25:19]How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable: / Devops.com [30:43]Resources:How much water do data centers use? / David Mytton [8:10]Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models / Back Market / UC Riverside & UT Arlington [9:28]Jevon’s Paradox / Wikipedia [14:24]The AI Iceberg / Ars Technica [22:54]Simon Willison’s Blog about Dolly [25:37]Breaking the code of silence: what we learned from content moderators at the landmark Berlin summit / Foxglove [28:03]Holly Cummins from Red Hat’s Speech at QCon London 2023 [32:34]Events:Meetup on How to measure energy consumption of software (April 24, Virtual) / Green Coding Berlin [35:11]Microsoft India’s Green Software Development Hackathon (March 21 – April 24, 2023 • Virtual): [36:13]GreenTech Southwest Meetup (April 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm • Bristol & Virtual): / Green Web Foundation [37:00]Transcript Below:Asim Hussain: I'm talking to people in my family, in fact, who are like thinking, will I have a job in two years time? Will I have a job in three years time? And like as historically, we have ignored in the just transition the other side have created a lot of very unpleasant noises, which has forced us to deal with that.I think the same thing's gonna happen here. I think there's gonna be a lot of noises, and I would love for people to start really talking about how do we make that transition fairer.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams of the Green Web Foundation. And in this episode we have some interesting news about how thirsty AI chatbots really are, and we uncover the hidden costs of generative AI.And finally, we share some opportunities for development from the world of green software. Before we dive in though, let me introduce my guests and colleagues for this episode. Today we have Sara.Sara Bergman: Hi. Glad to be back and in this format as well. So my name is Sara Bergman. I'm a software engineer at Microsoft. I also work with the standards working group here in the Green Software Foundation. I do some conference speaking. I'm actually speaking at conference later this year on this topic in particular. So it's very near and dear to my heart.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Sara, and Asim.Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. And I also am director of Green Software at Intel. Excited to be here. Am I supposed to say an anecdote?Chris Adams: This is when you normally talk about mushrooms Asim.Asim Hussain: ThisChris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: I actually bought a robot lawnmower yesterday and it's currently mowing my lawn, so that's a weird anecdote. But anyway.Chris Adams: That is quite a special anecdote. I don't quite know where to go from there, so I'm just gonna park it and then maybe the,Asim Hussain: let's cut it outChris Adams: yeah, the.Asim Hussain: robot. It's a really shitty robot. The every few minutes I'm going outside and pulling it out of a ditch. But anyway.Chris Adams: Okay. And if you're new to me, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, where we are working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. So before we dive in, there's a reminder. Everything we talk about on this show will be shared as links in the show notes that are published.So if something did catch your interest, please do follow the link to the podcast.greensoftware.foundation link, and you'll see all the links that we do actually have plus some extra commentary. Let's begin with our roundup of the news then. So this is the first story from the evening standard actually, AI chatbots, guzzle, enormous amounts of water study finds.So we're starting this episode off with some news from a mainstream news source, the evening standard in London, in the UK. It's actually covering a report from the university of Colorado Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington, where some researchers are working to estimate the water consumption figure for AI chat models such as Google Bard, and ChatGPT.The water consumption required to train advanced AI models such as Google Bard and ChatGPT is potentially staggering. With training GPT and Microsoft Data Centers requiring something in the region of 700,000 liters of clear freshwater according to our paper from these two universities. The operation used super computers with 10,000 graphics cards and over 285,000 cores.And this study calls for AI model developers and data center operators to be a bit more transparent about the water usage, as well as suggesting some steps that people could actually do to make better use or incentivize people to use chatbots during cooler, more water efficient hours.Asim Hussain: Hmm. I think in the parlance of, uh, World. The consumption of water in data is, no one was surprised. No one in the data center space went, oh, water. But it's actually a term, I think, is it? W There's a term called PUE for power. There's a term for water called WUE, am I saying that right? Water Utilization Effect?Sara Bergman: Yep. Water Usage Effect.Asim Hussain: And this has come up multiple. This is something I remember when I was at Microsoft. It was one of the, Sara, do they have a target for w ISara Bergman: Yeah, for 2030, replenishing more water than they used. But all hyperscalers do have targets for water usage. So it, as you say, it's definitely a known problem in the space.Chris Adams: This is one of the next ones, so maybe I should ask, Asim. Why do data centers need so much water in the first place? Is it cuz it's when you initially think about it? Yeah.Asim Hussain: Very thirsty ops People see ops people. They're so big. When the ops people walk around, they just need to guzzle a lot. I think it's for cooling. I think it's for cooling, just cooling service. When you actually look at kind of compute, the challenge of compute is the challenge of cooling and trying to get the maximum from efficiency as possible is all about kind of cooling chips.So, I'm not sure the mechanism of cooling where it's probably just like typical HVAC systems and things like that, but it's just cooling aspects of it. And I think also from my understanding, it's not just the fact that it's usually, cuz you don't just wanna take put river water in your HVAC system. It's like good quality clean drinking water, which could go to everybody.But it's also the fact the other end of it, you're pumping out hot water into natural like rivers and stuff like that. And I'm not a hundred percent whether this article or paper covers it, but there's like an impact to nature as well. Some of this stuff, I'm unsure. Maybe both of you have got an idea for this.Like I'm unsure like why is this, why are we running out of water?Chris Adams: So in the study there is actually a map mapping out water stress in various regions, and you'll often see overlaps between areas of water stress and data centers typically because data centers as critical infrastructure get to get the first bite of the cherry, as it were, just like with power. Last week, Aerin Booth was talking specifically about this, how when you are considered critical infrastructure, essentially priority goes to storing data about people rather than the people.That was the phrase he used, which was quite memorable.Sara Bergman: I think this is a fascinating topic, first and foremost, and also what you can use for cooling is essentially air cooling. So you can like pump in cool air interior data center and use that as a cooling. That works great in some parts of the world for the majority of the year. So where I live in the Nordic this is great. This works great. Other places like Arizona who has a lot of solar power, it does not work so great. Arizona is also water stressed. So you get these multiple climate factors on top of each other, which becomes a problem. And the second part, which makes water very interesting is that it's so incredibly localized.If we think about our energy grid, that is also localized, but we can send electrons way further with way less waste or loss compared to water. We don't have the infrastructure today to send water over vast amount of stretches of land. We have very localized production of water. There is like even some places in the world where you look at, there are some islands around here in the Nordics, they have like incredible amounts of water facilities because it's just not centralized and cuz there hasn't been a point or they don't have the, a large body of water for which they could centralize, et cetera.So that makes it an even more localized issue and even more connected to the communities who live in the immediate vicinity of the data center.Chris Adams: Okay, so this is one of the issues. It's the locality, not just actually the wider thing. There's also a link from here from David Mytton who's a researcher in this field, and he's been one of the people contributing to a number of the Green Software Foundation projects. He's written a bit about how much water do data centers use.It's really worth looking into because one of the immediate takeaways that you don't really see from this paper is while we are talking about the water used by the data centers themselves, the majority of the water in most cases right now is actually coming from the energy sources, not necessarily the data center themselves.So you've got water being used to cool, say the generation, like a big fat thermal station, like a coal fire power station, or a nuclear station. So there's a chunk of the water usage there. Then there's the more localized water usage in the data center itself, where it's pulling it out of, say, an aquifer or a like subsurface store of water.So there's two places to look at, and this is another one of the levers you might actually have. There are tools, as Sara mentioned about different kinds of cooling, like adiabatic cooling, which use ideas from almost hundreds and hundreds of years old, as well as actually the effect at the generation part.And this is where moving away from burning fossil fuels, I'm gonna keep bringing that in, is a way to reduce the water impact. The paper here actually talks a little bit about having metrics so that you might get an idea of the embedded water in a model, just the same way you might have the embedded carbon in a model, for example.So it's worth a look, and we'll share a link to the underlying paper as well as the original evening standard piece that was shared. Sara, I spoke a little bit about adiabatic, but you've shared a couple of links which look interesting as well here about the different kinds of cooling available in the world of data centers, which is not really my specialization.Sara Bergman: I won't say it's my specialization either, but I think it's been some interesting conversations. So this has been a known problem for a long time, which means there have been a lot of people thinking actively about this, which is always a great thing to be in or a great situation to be in. And one of the things that have been experimentally used by several hyperscaler providers is what's called two-phase cooling, which is basically where you use a type of liquid, it's a chemical, not water based.And then you use this to cool your server acts. It looks wild, but it's apparently very effective. But as of February, this year, the European, oh, let's see if I can find the full name for that. E C H A.Asim Hussain: Yeah. European Chemical Agency, there's no H there. Where's the h?Sara Bergman: Where's the chemical? Maybe, I don't know. Yeah. This is how you know we're not chemists in case you tune into the post calls wondering our profession. Yeah, so they, but I think also the American EPA, they both ruled or have concerns about the type of liquid that was used for this cooling, because it's what's called a forever chemical, which we have seen in other areas.Its not great on, on the environment and the people who inhabit it, but because of that, 3M basically stopped producing these PFAS type of substances, which were used for cooling. And now people are saying that will likely slow down the process of innovation of this two phase cooling.Asim Hussain: So what I understand about forever chemicals is that these are chemicals that once they're in our bio circle, they'll go into the oceans and the animals will eat them, and then we'll eat them and then we will pee and they'll go in the ocean and it'll carry on going and going. And so all we're eating is like the sludge of chemical and they're all, they're quite damaging.That's, yeah, that's very scariest. Forever. Forever. Chemicals.Chris Adams: These are things in like, non-stick frying pans. So every single one of us, we have a little bit of a non-stick frying pan inside us forever now. Thanks guys.Asim Hussain: looking at my non stick fry pan, probably a lot of non-stick frying pan is inside me right now. The, so, um, Sara, so what I, one thing I've never really. Never really started. One of the questions I've always thought about liquid cooling, cuz I've seen the videos, they look really cool when you've got like a server and it's, it looks like it's boiling water and inside, but it's not.It's, it's the special oil and chemical. The reason you put servers inside these liquid cooling things is so that you can put more electricity into the server and get more power out of it. So it will make the cooling more efficient. Maybe I'm talking about Jevons paradox type thing, but it'll actually mean there's greater amount of electricity going in. I suppose maybe the trade off is overall better.Chris Adams: Yeah, these are typically used. You'll see liquid calling and liquid immersion cooling in particular. Is that simply because liquids are much, much more efficient at moving heat than air, right? So this is a really good way to get the heat you don't want somewhere else, and that's a tool that's been used in many cases.However, it's often quite expensive upfront. A lot of us will usually default to be using air cooling in a lot of places. But yes, as the power density and racks increases, then people are reaching for more kinds of cooling, just like how cars used to be air cooled and now increasing your water cold. You have the same thing happening with increasingly industrial servers.So yeah, this is something that we could definitely talk about and it's definitely one of the mechanisms that people do use to move some of the heat around. But once you've got that heat, you still need to figure out where it's gonna go and what you're gonna do with it.Asim Hussain: So just to clear, so with immersion cooling right now, it would allow us to use less water because fundamentally it's more of an efficient mechanism of extracting heat. And so right now it would allow us to reduce the water, but we'll just be back at the same problem in the near future anyway, as the power density increases.Sara Bergman: Possibly, I'm not sure, but it should also clarify that there are two kinds of liquid cooling so we have the two phase one, which is the forever chemical, and then there is the one phase one which uses a water based or an oil based. And it's, as I understood it, less effective, but it potentially still uses less water.But yeah, it's always a scale problem, right? Because our industry has to grow. So as we come up with solutions, we outgrow the solutions as well.Asim Hussain: Yeah. We're in a constant race to, to increase efficiency faster than consumption increases. Yeah. Yeah.Chris Adams: Outrun Jevon's Paradox,Asim Hussain: Out outrunning, Jevons Paradox is our challenge. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. And for those who are not initiated, Jevons Paradox is this notion that as things become more efficient, the absolute use tends to increase. This was first noticed when William Stanley Jevons in hundreds of years ago, noticed that making steam engines led to an increase in the use of coal that was being burned because people end up using them in lots of new places.Just the same way that making cloud can be more efficient. But if it makes more people use cloud, then we still have an increase in absolute usage. So this is one of the things that we are currently wrestling with as an industry basically. Should move on to the next story because it feels like this is a nice segue?Okay, the next one up is the mounting human and environmental costs of generative AI. This is from Sasha Luccioni, one of the researchers at Hugging Face, but I believe also was working at MLA, a Montreal Institute for Gen. I think she's a colleague of, or was a former colleague of Abhishek, one of the people working in the Green Software Foundation Standards working group actually.So this one here is a story from Ars Technica and over the last few months, the field of AI has been growing quite rapidly, as we know. And we see all these new waves of new models being used like Dall-E, which is specifically for generating images, or GPT four, which is, you may be familiar with if you've heard of the term ChatGPT every week brings a new promise of new and exciting models, but it's easy to get swept up in the waves of hype. And these capabilities, these shiny capabilities come at a real cost to society and planet. So this piece basically outlines some of the key areas that we need to be aware of. And one of them is actually the environmental toll of mining rare minerals to actually create the GPUs in the first place.And there's also a bunch here about the training costs increasing over time, how these have been growing larger and larger, and I think the figures we were looking at was actually the economic accessibility of this. So the training cost of GPT three has listed around 5 million dollars, 175 billion parameters, which basically restrict who gets to create these models in the first place. That's the idea behind this. And this also talks a little bit about the climate emissions as well. Citing a study from Professor Emma Strubell, talking about the environmental emissions from an earlier model called Bert, b e r t, which had a figure of around 280 tons of emissions dedicated to the training of this one here.There's also talking about some of the other larger models and how they're growing over time. So these figures, I think this one refers to things like GPT. The estimated figures would've been if, depending on what the energy source would've been, they were looking at around, assuming you're running this on coal and natural gas, like one of the typical things on the grid, the figures for the actual emissions associated with training are in the region of 500 metric tons of carbon emissions, which is what they've listed here.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I just think there's a lot of stuff being said about AI. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of noise about this, and I see a lot of people trying to play down the impacts of AI Both. I'm just gonna talk to sustainability. I think the societal spec, or which I would be happy to talk for hours and end about, but like for instance here, it was just mentioned that just the cost of training GPT-3 was $4.6 million.That's one training run. How many times have people actually. Train that you tweak it, you run it again, that doesn't uncover inference. And this is also GPT-3, which I believe is an order of magnitude less complicated than GPT-4, which is an order of magnitude less complicated than GPT-5. And when you actually look at the way.Like the business value of AI models, the emergent properties are coming through vastly more compute and vastly more data. This is just an indication of where we are right now. The future is like this nonlinear curve upwards of even more and more. So I think that's the thing I think to think about and that some of the things people have said to me have been around the lines of, even though it's this big, it's not as big as the airline industry.It's not as big as other things. Whereas my answer to that is actually one of the reasons why we pay so much attention to software space is so few of us like a 2, 3, 4%, but it's relatively small number of people, the number of people who are involved in training things like GPT is minuscule. The number of people that need to be influenced to reduce those emissions, I think is very small, considering the impact they would have, which is why I would argue it's very worthwhile having strong sustainability conversations in this space. That's my rant on this whole topic. Yeah.Sara Bergman: I agree. I plus one the rant, but also something that I think is interesting in this space because I really like to read research. And this is a topic that I've been speaking about for a few years now and what I see is there's conversation and research around the training cost and there's quite a lot there and it has been for quite like the paper you mentioned, Chris, that.From 2019, it's a very well written paper, so I would still argue that people should go and read it. But this has obviously been talked about and I don't know if it's because it's easy to research on or because it's fun, but what I see less obvious inference cost, and when you have these huge production companies, I can only guess that the inference is much higher than the actual training, and any number of times, like a billion is gonna be a big number, but even more in the shadow than inference is data collection, where at least I cannot find any good research on what is the cost of this? How do people do this? And when we have these larger and larger models, well we need larger, larger datasets to feed them. And how do we gather this data and where does it come from? And I don't know, maybe we're awesome at reusing datasets here. I don't really know. But without research, it's hard to say.So if someone's listening, have a great article, please send it my way. I'd be curious to read it.Chris Adams: So we'll speak on the labor part for a second, cuz that's definitely one thing that's, that was highlighted in this essay. But Sara, you mentioned something quite interesting about where the data is coming from because there's actually a really interesting scenario that came up literally just this month. If you are using ChatGPT.Try typing in the name Brian Hood. Ask who is Brian Hood inter ChatGPT right now. Tell me if you get something back.Asim Hussain: Who is.Chris Adams: Brian Hood. So b r i a n Hood?Asim Hussain: It's taken me a long time. I think, mayor?Chris Adams: Yep. Okay.Asim Hussain: Okay. An Australian mayor prepares the world's first defamation case against ChatGPT is that what it is?that whatChris Adams: Yeah, this is exactly it. So this is a story. Basically, this gentleman in Australia essentially started a lawsuit against ChatGPT, cuz this gentleman was, he was a whistleblower in a significant financial, essentially a FIA financial fiasco back in 2010. And for a long time ChatGPT was basically listing him as the person who was the cause of this.So, when you have models, which can lie and not tell the right thing, you had this baked into the model. So if you would ask this, it would basically say this person was, it would switch this stuff around. Cause we know that ChatGPT can be a little bit, not entirely truthy, basically, because it's very small auto complete, not actually really intelligence.And this now brings up the question, how do you actually then retrain the entire model Now to get this person out, you can't just remove the line in a database because the model will break. So there's now a whole set of new research onto retraining and relearning because this person here has a pretty valid request of, Hey, can you please not be defaming me inside this?There's a human right associated with this, specifically in Europe, for example. This is the kind of things that are currently, we are wrestling with right now. Have to manage either the retraining of this or to allow a sense of redress and accountability. When you are looking at this stuff.Asim Hussain: Sara are the, well, you are the expert of the AI like cuz we just read that it takes $4.6 million to retrain GPT-3. I presume it doesn't take $4.6 million to edit out this Australian mayor, but it wouldn't be the same as like Google just de-indexing pageSara Bergman: No.Asim Hussain: I imagined be significantly higher. Yeah,Sara Bergman: Yeah, because we have transparency into those systems, right? We don't really have transparency into what makes, yeah, it's like a brain. You don't go in there and just remove a line like, yeah.Chris Adams: It's an interesting one to think about that, right? Because if we don't have this, I think the essay does refer to some of these ideas. It presents this idea of a kind of, AI iceberg is the kind of model that's shared inside this with things like the benefits generate really realistic images, do your homework for you, answer questions, and then there's all these other costs and things we need to take- think about like the raising barrier to entry, the actual emissions, the tons of carbon emissions. If it's a 50 tons of CO2 to remove someone's name from a 500 tonne model, then that's quite an expensive refresh cycle when you're developing. If we ever worry about continuous integration, this feels like it's in a different league, for example, that we might need to be somewhat aware of.Asim Hussain: Or if you wanna delete your data, if you like go with a delete data request, how does it, that has to like factor all the way through. And then the thing is, like we, we've had Anne on. Me and Anne have spoken quite a few times about this idea that really these days it's about developer velocity. Like we have abstracted so many layers.Like one of the big paradigm shifts in computing was adding like a level of programming abstraction onto hardware, which birthed like an entire explosion of software being written and applications being built because we just made it so much easier to build, arguably inefficient. We weren't focusing on efficiency, we were focusing on speed of developers and speed to getting stuff out to market.And I'm seeing more and more stuff in the generative AI space, which is a similar idea, which is, it's not really about building efficient stuff, it's just about getting stuff out there as quickly as possible. What if you, instead of writing a really efficient API call, you just wrote like a ChatGPT prompt as an API request, and it gave you like 50,000 words and you stripped 49,000 on the way cuz you needed one. But that was just the quickest way to get a solution. How many times have we built software like that? Have you seen software like that? That's I think the danger of the world that we're heading in is cuz it's all just about that getting a valuable thing out on where does the ef- where our world is about efficiency.Everything we talk about is about efficiency. So where's the efficiency in this? That's where I'm concerned at.Sara Bergman: Yeah, no I agree. And I think I called the AI a brain and I already regret it because it is generative, right? It doesn't like, it reads the world and then present it in a slightly different format. I've seen people say, oh, AI has the same biases as us. Like, yeah, because we modeled it after ourselves. At least for now that's how it works. So that's another aspect I think is interesting.Chris Adams: So this is one thing, we'll just touch on this and then move on to the next story. Have you folks been looking at their new stuff, coming with, I think Databricks published Dolly, which was an open source LLM, and they've also created their first entirely open Creative Commons training dataset. Specifically, they've got a bunch of their own staff to work to create this dataset where there's very clear provenance of where the data's coming in.So unlike with some tools where you don't know where the data's come from, there's a lot of visibility on this, and there's a chap Simon Willison. He's been blogging all about how he's been able to run these things on his own local machines, but also there are people running these on Raspberry Pi's. Now, they're not very fast, but this is the direction that things are moving to where you see the open sourcing of this.Because right now, while OpenAI is, we don't actually know where the data is coming from, what data is being used for this, which has all kinds of interesting issues when, like we just mentioned here as well.Asim Hussain: It's not very open Is.Chris Adams: We said we were gonna talk about that. There was also one other thing that was touched on here was this, the idea of when you're building an LLM and you're creating this training data, there's also an issue of like hidden labor inside this.Uh, there are people who are actually paid to be working on this. And I think the piece by Sasha Luccioni refers to actually this time article about essentially Kenyan gig workers being paid less than $2 an hour to essentially examine all the messages for OpenAI. And this is very similar to the kind of content moderation stuff that you see in lots of other places.I think this is actually really interesting cuz it raises these issues like what do we actually do? Or what can we done to address this issue of like unpaid laborers or underpaid people working in AI model development. Cuz that's not necessarily the people writing the code, but there's definitely people involved in doing that just like we have when other platforms, for example, too,Asim Hussain: I think this is where things get very interesting with, and I'm gonna stray very far beyond sustainability right now, but we're talking about why are they getting paid so little is because it's unskilled labor, right? It's unskilled labor, and that's why you can get away with paying people $2 an hour.When the AI is a de-skilling the workforce anyway, right? So the de-skilling the workforce and like I saw somebody post the day, like maybe the future of software developing is just prompting ChatGPT, which is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking like, how much are you gonna pay somebody to enter prompts into ChatGPT versus-Chris Adams: As a promptAsim Hussain: engineer.As a prompt engineer.Chris Adams: So there's an issue of underpaid or very low paid labor involved in the AI model development that we don't really have really well addressed right now. And this is something that definitely needs to be addressed. There is actually one thing that may be worth looking at in other fields where you do see this, where you have the use of gig workers involved in this, like content moderation.There's lots of parallels to this kind of work where you have people who are considered outside of a firm who have to do this work. And typically what we've seen there is actually honestly workers organizing and talking about their, the conditions they need to be part of. There's a link to Foxglove, the UK law firm, who are doing some really interesting work specifically about representing the power and representing essentially people working in these kind of moderation or below the API kind of roles because they are very clearly part of it.And depending on when you look at the cost structure for a particular, say, organization, like if you look at, say, Facebook for example, Facebook might have made something the region of over a hundred billion of revenue last year. And this project, the actual moderation, which is one of the key parts, there is a single contract to a consulting firm for 500 million dollars for that part there, which is less than half percent of the revenue is being dedicated to this part here.And that's an issue about, okay. How are you representing these costs when we're creating this and how do we actually make sure that there is a just and a correct way to actually recognize this kind of labor, especially to address some of these issues? Cuz it doesn't seem particularly fair to me right now to do this.Sara Bergman: And I think it's also interesting because this is not the first time in history this is happening, right? Machines have been taking jobs from humans since the Industrial Revolution, but we want it to be for good. We want the machines. Whether that's a mechanical machine or a digital machine to take away the dangerous, the boring, the damaging jobs so that we as humans can focus on the fun, create a positive things of labor.And here you have a paradox, right, where this is potentially improving the working conditions of one group of people, but forcing it for another group of people. And how do you represent that and how do we solve that? Yeah.Asim Hussain: There's a lot of parallels here cuz we're talking about this in the energy transition as well. We're talking about just transition. We're talking about if we wanna move everybody over towards renewables, we have to think about the people that are in other industries because one of the reasons, cause they vote and they'll get quite upset if they lose their jobs and don't have an option.So it's always been like this thing as towards just transition and I'd love for there to be conversations about that happening right now in the AI space. Cause I'm talking to people in my family in fact who are like thinking, will I have a job in two years time? I'll have a job in three years time. And like as historically, we have ignored in the just transition in the other side have created a lot of very unpleasant.Which has forced us to deal with that. I think the same thing's gonna happen here. I think there's gonna be a lot of noises, and I would love for people to start really talking about how do we make that transition fairer?Chris Adams: I think this is one that we need to dive into in a bit more detail in a future one. In the meantime, Foxglove is probably one organization that's doing some really interesting work in this field at the moment, and I believe there is some work coming from AI now in this field as well. Okay, so the next one is, Platform engineering, how platform engineering makes software sustainable.So this story here comes from devops.com and the kind of thrust of this story is platform engineering seems to be essentially an idea of providing self-service tools for software teams themselves. So they are able to say, spin up an application or access, spin up a database. Ideally in our kind of green software world, spin up a cluster that turns itself off at the end of the day.Because we do know that one of the big issues we have is that people just leave things on. Cause it's easier in terms of people's time to leave, loads of things running rather than turning them off. So this is the idea that by incorporating tools like Cube Green or some of the metrics tools, uh, I think Spotify had been doing, you can essentially set some more sustainable defaults for teams rather than relying on them to remember to do all this stuff themselves.That's the general idea for some of this. Those are the benefits. Being proposed was, yeah, less friction. Reduction of cognitive load for developers. Basically consistency across the board. That's one of the things that seems to be pushed in this angle here.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I'm seeing it's got two aspects to it from a sustainability perspective, and I like the way they phrased it. They're talking about observability and optimization. You know, observability is like, how do you. Having that visibility. Most people don't really know. They don't think we have. I think we should tell 'em that the secret Sara about how people use cloud?Like most companies haven't got a clue like what's going on. And they're like sending out emails going, why are we spending $50,000 on this thing? And somebody goes, oh, I forgot to switch that off two years ago. That's like a level of visibility which exists right now. And so like any kind of like surfacing of that observability.And when I was at Microsoft, I got that email like every, two weeks we hired someone just to email everybody, to tell them to switch things off cuz it was costing so much money to keep it running.Sara Bergman: And actually at QCon in London last month, Holly Cummins from Red Hat, she actually had a whole talk on cloud zombies and she told a lot of these funny stories. So if you had the chance to catch that, she covered a lot of it because yeah, it's harder even with on-prem because then you might have a physical server.That you don't even know where it's located in your buildings cuz you run a university and you have lots of buildings or whatever. And uh, yeah.Asim Hussain: I have definitely remember, this is a long time ago and it was not Microsoft. So before you think I'm saying a Microsoft story, I remember. I was doing audits and then discovering machines that hadn't, we just completely forgot about, completely, utterly forgot about whole machines.Chris Adams: So the company was making so much money that they didn't have to care, or they didn't realize that itAsim Hussain: You can look through my LinkedIn and probably guess. Yeah.Sara Bergman: but I think this is also interesting because if we look at data centers. We have seen on-prem data centers that are managed by one corporation for their own sort of benefit. They're typically way less effective than the hyperscaler cloud platforms, and that is because they can spend their money as in engineering resources to make them so efficient, because it's worthwhile the investment for them just in pure monetary cost because that's their primary business, whereas, Company running an On-Prem data center.It's not their primary use case. They're maybe never gonna have enough people to do asset management in the most effective way possible. And it obviously depends on how you do it, but this internal developer platforms platform engineering situation, it could be the same thing, right? It all depends on how you do it, but potentially if you allocate a small group of people who are responsible and sustainability is one of their primary goals, then they have the incentive to spend the engineering capacity, and I'm saying engineering, but really any kind of practitioner that you are to make it more sustainable instead of having 10 different teams all have to fight for the same change. So it has potential, but it's possible to say the outcome without really getting into the nitty gritty.Asim Hussain: I loved your explanation there. I'd never really heard it phrased that way, but yes, like Microsoft and Azure, the team, you're making money through Azure, so you're gonna make Azure more efficient. But if you are a consumer, you're making money by selling shoes or something.Sara Bergman: Yeah.Asim Hussain: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.Yeah.Chris Adams: Alright let's talk about some of the events that we have listed inside this then. We have just a few meetups and events, which might catch your eyes of some people. These are all virtual events. So the first one is a meetup on measuring the energy consumption of software. This is some work by a group called Green Coding Berlin.They're a small but mighty little outfit working on some very literally named tools. Like we can probably guess what the Green Metrics tool might do, right? As you can imagine. Does that, and they've got another tool called Eco CI, should we guess what that one does?Asim Hussain: Continuous. I'm trying to think of something funny for I, but I can't think of anything. Integration.Chris Adams: So, yeah, this is a small team of Berlin based developers who've been building a bunch of entirely open source tools specifically for this. The thing that I might share with you that might be interesting is that some of this work looks like it's probably gonna be fitting into the work with Wagtail at Jango based CMS on the Google Summer of code that we mentioned last week, where the goal is to actually start figuring out what the environmental impact of running various CI tools actually is, but also to measure where the, where the savings might actually possibly be inside open source tools. So you can pull out some of these patterns cuz we have things like patterns in the Green Software Foundation. Some of those might be applicable specifically for this.There's a Microsoft Green software development hackathon from the 21st to the 24th of April.Christ, that's this weekend, isn't it?Asim Hussain: Oh wow.Sara Bergman: Yeah.Asim Hussain: I thought this was like the internal Microsoft Hackathon, but this looks like an external one. It looks like Microsoft India is having a green software development hackathon and Wow. 1,945 registrations, so good luck if you're applying. You've got a lot of stiff stuff. I got a lot of competition there.I dunno what the prize is, it doesn't say.Chris Adams: I don't see actually that much in the prizes listed here either, but I'll be honest folks, I dunno about you, but. I'm gonna sound like an old fart now, but like when I first got involved with this, they weren't called hackathons. They were called hack days. With the idea being that you'd like work on something, you're not trying to win a prize, you're doing it because actual hacking on something is interesting in the first place.You figure out what can actually do rather than to win something to kick off your startup, basically, I. I'm a bit confused about this part, but uh, yeah, it looks like it's happening this weekend. Maybe if something comes out of it, we might feature it.And then finally there's the Green Tech Southwest Meetup in Bristol of all places.This one is run by Hannah Smith of the Green Web Foundation, and it's featuring two people. Adam Turner, who's the head of digital sustainability at DEFRA. That's the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, who are the kind of defacto environmental department for the UK government.Asim Hussain: Thought it was DARPA.Chris Adams: Oh, not that's, that's America and that's a slightlyAsim Hussain: Oh, is that the me? Okay. Isn't that the weapons one? Any whatever.Chris Adams: No, that's, yes.The, there there is DARPA and darpa E. These are the folks. I'm out by death here. I'm not gonna pretend to, to know what DARPA is or what it, or what the significance would be for this one. I'm actually quite excited about this because this guy, Adam has actually been writing quite a lot about where the challenges are, and he's also been talking about, okay, these are the things that we're doing as a government with legally binding targets that we need to be meeting, and this is what our sustainability strategy looks like.And the nice thing is that. If you are not sure about what to do, because the UK government publishes all their stuff, you can kinda copy their homework to get an idea of what you might apply internally for yourself, and they're actually got a really quite well-developed team and there's a lot of really interesting stuff to be looking at for both just on-prem and in cloud and things like that actually.Asim Hussain: Mm, very interesting.Chris Adams: We've spoken about the news and the events. I guess there's a question. We spoke a little bit about this generative AI iceberg and some of the things that should be on this list. Is there anything that isn't there that should be there? Maybe Sara, I might start with you. If there's anything that we should be putting into this AI iceberg as things that people should be aware of that will share a link in the podcast for.Sara Bergman: Yeah, so one thing that I saw that wasn't there was lack of diversity in research. They said lack of interest. So maybe the same thing, but I think with the increasing cost, if really only the really large universities and or the really big corporation can participate in this sort of bleeding edge AI research, we're missing out on emerging research for people who probably have great ideas and couldn't do this incredibly well, but simply don't have the monetary resources.Chris Adams: That's a really good point to mention here cuz when you see a lot of these papers, they tend not to be coming from that many different places so far, and this was something that was raised in an earlier discussion, an earlier paper, basically making the argument that, yeah, when you only get models coming from Western Europe and North America, you're probably gonna miss out on a bunch of extra context that we are currently missing.In the same way that in lots of other places, when you only have modeling from certain parts of the world, you get an incomplete idea of what modeling the world might be looked like or what kind of policy options we do have to meet the climate challenges that face us.Sara Bergman: Yeah, because talent is equally distributed opportunity's not.Chris Adams: Indeed.Asim Hussain: I love that.Chris Adams: I think we'll leave on that one as a challenge from this. So that's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and papers and links will be available on the Green Software Foundation podcast website, which is podcast.greensoftware.foundation. So thanks again for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.Thanks, Sara. Thanks Asim.Asim Hussain: Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Thanks everyone.Chris Adams: Bye.Sara Bergman: 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 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.

Chris Adams is joined by cloud sustainability advocate and founder of Cloud Sustainably, Aerin Booth in this episode of TWiGS brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. On this episode Aerin provides his insight into the cloud to discuss cloud zombies, the effect that generative AI is having on the environment and exciting developments from Xbox (including a list of some of Aerin’s favourite nostalgic games!). We also touch on GreenOps and the future for green software developers.  Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAerin Booth: LinkedIn / PodcastFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Generative AI and cloud zombies: Raising the alarm about global climate impact: / Silicon Angle [2:48]Report on ChatGPT Model’s Emissions Offers Rare Glimpse of AI’s Climate Impacts: / Truthout.org [2:48]Xbox’s New Energy Measurement Tools are World Changing: / Xbox [6:23]Wagtail and the summer of code / GitHub [14:32]Events:LF Energy Summit ( June 1 at 2:05 pm - 2:35 pm CET • Paris & Virtual)  [19:35]GreenTech Southwest Meetup (April 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm • Bristol & Virtual) [20:00]Resources:PS5 Power Consumption / ecoenergygeek [10:58]The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill / Linklaters Sustainable Futures [20:16]The Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to Amazon Web Services / 451 Research [21:02]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:Aerin Booth: When I think about anything we choose to do, not only in terms of carbon and IT, but in our life, if it doesn't have purpose, it's almost a waste. And we forget that we're not really building things for ourselves in technology. We're trying to build services for one, helps people in their day-to-day lives and hopefully save the freaking planet in the next upcoming climate change catastrophe the rest of our lives.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 discussing generative AI worrying impact that I could be having on the environment.We'll also cover some exciting news from Xbox and some events for you to take part in as part of the world of green software. Before we dive in though, let me introduce my guest with us today. We have Aerin Booth the former head of Cloud at the UK Home Office now turned cloud sustainably advocate joining us.Hi Aerin.Aerin Booth: Hello. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having me on. So my name is Aerin Booth. I, like Chris said, former, I say in name in, in some ways product manager for Public Cloud at the UK Home Office. But while I was there, I signed 130 million pound contract, was part of negotiating the memorandum, understanding between the UK government and the cloud providers, hyperscalers, AWS, Azure and Google.Um, and did a lot of other stuff for the cloud community across the UK. And then moved into my own consulting. So I've been running a consulting company for the last few years. Not to go too salesy or anything, but it's called Cloud Sustainably. Just helping people rethink how we consider carbon emissions in it, because it's on the rise.And obviously we all know and care about this. We wouldn't be listening to this podcast otherwise. And yeah, I think more people talking about it does the world a little bit of good. And yeah, I've been on an interesting journey to say the least.Chris Adams: Okay, thanks Aerin. So if you're new to this podcast, I am Chris Adams. I am the policy chair, sorry, I'm the chair of the policy working group in the Green Software Foundation and the executive director of the Green. Web Foundation. Every week we do this, we will basically share any of the links that we discuss and do a roundup of the news.So that's generally of the plan. Today, it's gonna be a bit of a short one cuz it's Easter, so we're gonna keep it short and sweet. And I suppose Aerin, should we look at what stories have come up on our radars today? What's the first one here? There's one about generative ai and in particular, the environmental impact from generative AI and cloud zombies.Aerin. I think given your background, with cloud, the Cloud zombies one might be an interesting one for you to start with actually.Aerin Booth: It is really interesting. Yeah, cloud zombies, I mean it's, we could probably use any term we want really. I did a talk on being ethical in tech at Reve last year in November, and just before that I did a talk, I think it was titled DALL-E oh God, what was it called? Now? Is DALL-E Ethical? Something around like the use of ai?What's the purpose?Chris Adams: This is DALL-E, the AI model, not the former modern artist, right?Aerin Booth: Yeah, yeah. There's a good comparison, isn't it? Names of such power and sort of representation. In terms of what were open AI going for, when they were creating this, and I see the power of AI. I use it myself, like when I'm on Instagram, on TikTok and all these things, and you see these, I don't use filters, but I do use like generative images.I had one recently, which was really cool, but. When I think about anything we choose to do, not only in terms of carbon and IT, but in our life, if it doesn't have purpose, it's almost a waste. I saw a lot of apps on Twitter ever since I did that talk, and just keeping on what's going on in the world of AI stuff like, oh, change your hair cuts to these five different 10 different styles, and it cost like 30 quid.Because it costs that much energy effectively. Like this article and some of the notes here are talking about the carbon emissions training a model. So what was it? Chat GPT three. It was 502 tons of carbon, which at the end of the day, what is that? A little bit in Norway for a little bit. But if we're all using this all of the time, and now what we're seeing is stuff like Bing and another search engines integrating, using this model as every single transaction on the internet.And there's a lot of transactions on the internet. It's bigger than we realize.Chris Adams: Yes. Okay. So that's the stuff that you get to use. I think this term, cloud zombies is particular being referred to this idea of basically, long running jobs and basically, essentially cloud stuff that no one is even using alone. Some of this stuff here, you could probably make an argument that most of us aren't necessarily asking for kind of a neat kind of AI features inside Bing when we're just doing a search.But I think this one was specifically referring to this massive amount of waste from people generally not really turning things off or just it being easy to leave something on. Then, then to turn it off and face the consequences of things being turned off. I think that's where the phrase came from, and I wondered if this is something you might have something to speak to given some of the background with Cloud that you saw.Aerin Booth: Definitely. I mean, you think about working at the Home Office, none of this is not public, by the way, that this is in ministerial statements in Parliament, but the percentage of AWS spend as terms of cloud and we had the definition of cloud is always hazy, a bit dreamy and up in the cloud, but we estimated it was about 94 to 97% of all of our spending was with AWS when we at the Home Office. And when you think about that, is that a problem? Yes. Now, but we started using the clouds in that department in 2016, and it's now 2023. Think about the journey cloud's been on since it was invented, invented, or whatever else we started using there.It has gone through generations like we, we used to string together S3 and VPNs and build things ourselves. Then we have managed services, or Kubernetes came along in the middle, like all of these different generations of the cloud and a lot of enterprise organizations are now carrying all of these generations of the cloud and sometimes losing the skills.As new people come in, they've not always got the history of skills or long-term experience. They've been taught whatever's being taught today, and a lot of the time it is new services. So it's like you've got two ends of the spectrum. Let's say AWS is a labyrinth designed to trap anyone in any decision they could ever make and fuck it up, and then charge you for the privilege.And then a consultants in to say, oh, we'll help you with FinOps or whatever. Go calm down like you're an idiot by the way. When you need help from others, lemme charge you some money. And then you've got like the opposite end of the spectrum with GCP where in my view is let's just turn everything off every other day and it's okay.That makes sense. If things can be migrated easily. But if you are asking a company to every single year, start again. Whatever they're building on the newest platform, okay, they're keeping up with the skills, but what about developing new features instead just re-platforming because you are whim on what you are going to turn off and there's two ends to the spectrum.And Microsoft, I wish I could say they're doing better, but honestly, the horror of active directory and stringing together some of this stuff when it's supposed to just work. It's pretty gnarly. Like you, you wouldn't wanna be going in there as a startup these days. I'd recommend something like Digital Ocean or some of a new cloud SMEs, particularly for cloud.And yeah, here we are, next generation of cloud computing. It already exists and a lot of people don't see it because we stare at AWS, Microsoft, and TCP all the time.Chris Adams: I see. Okay, so this is one thing. So there, so it, so I guess one of the questions I should probably ask you here is, given that there was a significant amount here and uh, we're to. Talking about being able to switch things off. Basically. In your experience, how did people manage to keep track of which things were running and which things were not running and these kind of experiences?Cuz you need to have people to have some understanding of which things are, where you're able to scale things back. In a lot of cases, and in many cases one of the kind of ideas behind switching to something like cloud, which might be more efficient, is that it's supposed to be much easier to manage and it's easy and there, there are supposed to be some co cost savings for this surely, which would result in energy savings?Aerin Booth: Yeah. Uh, well, Let's say energy savings, for example. So this is something I've been finding very frustrating. So I started caring about sustainability in the cloud, let's say 18 months ago. It was probably like November, ReInvent, two years ago. Yeah, about 18 months ago now. So I've not been doing this for a long time, but I've been in tech for a long, longer time, 10 years or so, or at least doing my own stuff.And it's not so much spend, cuz spend comes as a result of you doing an action. Having something that is created to have a purpose like spend is secondary to whatever is you are building as a team or whatever features are coming down the pipeline. And a lot of the time, because the pace we all move at in terms of new features, new releases, management direction, all of this sort of stuff, we're on the hamster wheel.Basically just saying, okay, I've gotta add this new feature. Or the tails wagging the dog. You do user research, get two conflicting pieces of advice, and you're throwing on a new feature rather than making whatever's there better. So you're always moving forward. You're never really stopping to deal with tecta, you're never really stopping to keep up on platform.Restructures best decisions here and. I wouldn't say it's by design, but no one makes it easy. No one is really saying, okay, here's what you need to do. How about you try this? Like Amazon, you'll get hundreds and hundreds of emails about all sorts of stuff just randomly announced to every single account, and you pay your ID as an enterprise.Not very helpful, especially when you've got account teams who will help, but they've got their own sales targets as well. Because at the end of the day, the cloud is all about selling like it's rent-tier capitalism of technology. Like previously, you could own your own data center, manage it like even, and a lot of those can be cheaper for the right size organization.Just the cloud doesn't always make sense. Let's say, because one of the things we've always talked about is like a cloud first policy, but the cloud doesn't just mean AWS. Like I'm saying, Azure and G C P, there are loads of different cloud options and even SaaS services managed services. These are all in the cloud.IAS, PAS, SaaS and whatever else, that's how the cloud's moved on. A managed service from AWS is a SaaS service in a different form, and people just get a little bit mixed up sometimes and it advice for anyone. Just stop and think a bit more in terms of what you wanna achieve before you just start building stuff.And I dunno, products management and delivery management are the two key parts. Like doing them well is about shaping the team in the right direction when we're building stuff. And that's where people forget. They just follow the rules and don't understand why you should be doing these things. But anyway, quite off topic for the original question.So,Chris Adams: Alright, let's park that one there and come back to a little bit later cuz there's an event later on with the head of Digital Sustainability, who's speaking at Green Tech Southwest. And we can touch on some of that a little bit later. Next story we see here, I see one about some of the new ideas in Xbox.Xbox has some new energy management tools, which they're basically using to, by the sounds of things, reduce environmental impact from gaming specifically.One of the key things was this idea that by essentially optimizing Fortnite, the game, people have been able to identify something, the region of 18 megawatt hours a day of power, and at the same amount as basically an entire wind farm in Sweden, and basically remove that by making some optimizations to the actual game itself by removing, say, excess use, which people aren't using, for example, or removing some of the really expensive computing when it can't be perceived so easily.This is one thing. Didn't realize that. This is actually quite interesting in my view, cuz A, we forget just what the impact of gaming might be when you have all these machines, which are about maybe half a kilowatt of power, or hundreds of watts, for example, but also the scope for actual optimization here.Aerin Booth: Yeah, and, and I really like what Microsoft's doing to be honest, in terms of Xbox and the direction for their technology because they clearly have a vision that's further ahead than other providers, I'd say in some ways, especially when it comes to sustainability and technology and just even connect. I remember Microsoft Xbox Connect, like that was pretty cool back then and it just got dropped off slightly and I think PlayStation's a bit head in in VR with the new VR 2 coming out, but, I like to think about this again as a generational problem of gaming.Gaming is one of those industries which just derises it a lot in the media and people assume like hardly anyone's a gamer. I probably bet now especially was listened to the podcast. You game a lot more than you realize. Like people do it on Candy Crush, do it online betting. It's all gaming. It's all gaming theory.It's all basically around, okay, what we getting out of this? What's the purpose of this game? It either gives you fun or, or takes money off you, pick your poison. And I've got an Xbox, I've also got a PlayStation and Xbox is doing some really interesting stuff. I think one thing I might have read, maybe it's not in this article, but it's like just doing updates and downloads at a period where the carbon intensity of your energy grid in the country that you live is low.So scheduling overnight or whatever it is, cuz it, it doesn't follow the sun per se. The way we consume energy, especially when renewables are coming in the day and it varies, especially Europe way. We're all connected. So it's, I don't need to care about that. I don't need to worry, go around the house and unplug things and do all these smart home setups if it's baked into the technology that we're delivering.And Microsoft obviously just deciding to do that, whereas PlayStation, and especially, I'm gonna say rather than PlayStation, Activision, blizzard, like Activision and COD. Have you seen the size of some of these games? GTA 5. They are like almost terabyte games these days. Can you think like they're always getting updated?People are going up and down, and especially when you almost have to do a fresh install somehow, or some reason I've had to do it once or twice over the years, and that was really unnecessary. And as much as we had like games flying around disks years ago, and everyone's saying do digital now, it's like with a game, I can keep that passive to a friend, take it back to a shop and get a refund from CEX or a computer exchange store.Whereas now if I get a digital download, what I'm getting is a license to rent something off you in the future and continually have to ask for permission to download it, which you may ban me one day who the hell knows. So it's okay, we're solving the technology carbon element and now we Microsoft's going, but didn't we just do that anywhere with disks?Recycle your disks. It's mostly plastic and glass and cases and whatever, and yeah. Do you know, there's an interesting fact and, and Corey Quinn mentions this one, the fastest way to transfer data around the world is on a hard drive on a plane. That's the quickest way to send data halfway around the world because the fiber network, speed of light is the limitation and there's only so many open routes.So it's like, okay, we can still ship more data in the world, but it's just like, yeah, put it on the back of a plane, fly it round. It's, that's what we used to do with disks anyway, so it's, thank you Microsoft kind of thinking about this, but what's the point of all this and like these days, especially with ai, do games have to get any bigger, like I'm pretty.Most games I love Legend of Zelda, Wind Waker, it's cell shaded. It's timeless because of its style, not because of it's trying to chase realism of the day. Cuz we always get better at doing realism. So we always date a game by being realistic.Chris Adams: So this is actually a nice segue because one of the ideas for this story here was people are basically talking about getting between 9 to 16 watts per user of savings per player, basically, which I know sounds okay. And then you gotta think about how does that relate to, say, the power usage of say, maybe a PS 5 or Xbox.The numbers that we, I just did a bit of Googling for this beforehand, and we can see some numbers for like when a game is in full use. So with a PS5, the numbers. We see from say, okay, I'll be honest, this is pretty short. So the citation required from ecoenergygeek.com, PS5 power consumption gaming figures.You're looking at around 200 watts with outgoing, up to 350 watts of power. Now, when you compare that to say, min Nintendo Switch, Which is basically, let's say you're using something full-time gaming. You're looking at maybe between 6 and 12 Watts of power usage here. Now this is something which is 10, 20 times, and I, you've gotta ask yourself, is it really 10, 20 times better the experience for this when you have this kind of trade off here? This, there's one thing that we're not really so aware of when we are looking at the gaming we might actually use here, because the savings we're seeing here are basically the entire usage of some other smaller devices like you just mentioned.Aerin Booth: For me, I've got Steam Deck for example. They have Steam do gaming and like, you know, they've built community, they've built the steam store. Like, you know, that in itself revolutionized gaming. Like the games died off for probably creative differences and gotten bored and all fighting rather than playing together, but, What they created is a storage.Very good. The steam deck and the innovation and hardware is really good, so like they add a bit of a dodgy controller, but I love the steam deck. Not only can I stream games to it, so I can have it in my house, connect to my wifi and stream Microsoft Cloud straight to it. I can remote play to my PS5 to it.I can emulate other games that are legal to emulate if I own copies elsewhere, blah, blah, blah. Disclaimer here. Yeah, it's a brilliant device and to be honest, I've not looked into the energy consumption so much, but gaming, we shouldn't worry about gaming if I'm a gamer. You shouldn't sit here and worry about our energy consumption of, okay, I've left my TV on and I've had a game on all night.I remember when I was a kid, I didn't have a memory card for Final Fantasy VII. I had to play with my PlayStation and never switch it off and say to my mother, never turn this device off because we don't own a memory cars and you can't save games. So I'm like trying to play Final Fantasy VII and Crash Bandicoot with like never stopping it, which is quite an interesting one.Not a good attempt. I tried playing Crash Bandicoot recently as the remasters and oh my God, that game is frustrating. I can't believe I even bothered as a kid. So at the end of the day, gaming is about connecting people World of Warcraft. Best game for me in my life in a lot of ways because of the people and the connections I made.I have four godchildren because I met a friend in a guild. She married the guild leader. They had kids. They asked me to be the godfather. I went to another wedding, second marriage of hers. We've been lifelong friends ever since. I met her when I was 13, playing World of Warcraft as a old blue warlock, a female warlock, which is quite interesting.That's all my online personas have ever been women. Which is now, I look back at it, I go, that's really interesting. But yeah, it's good fun and like, yeah, it brings communities together it's healing and Tetris great example. If you play Tetris after a serious accident or incident, whether that's a stress ambulance, blah, blah, blah, it reduces PTSD because you give your brain something to do while you're trying to process all those thoughts, and it actually helps you not get them stuck and can do with your hands and spend more time processing at the same time and literally prescribe someone 30 minutes on a Game Boy of playing Tetris or on the phone after an accident or after whatever else. And it'll really help them in the future. So gaming is not until worry about when it comes to carbon.I, I think, What is to worry about is just attitudes from gaming companies around their impacts and how they run things, and that's their choices rather than the console manufacturers, some licensing deals here and there, but yeah, it's open Wild West out there these days.Chris Adams: So don't blame the gamer. Blame the. WayAerin Booth: Activision Blizzard,Chris Adams: Oh,Aerin Booth: I, no, I find it interesting. Activision Blizzard because in all honesty, There's been uproar online around the culture of that organization. It was started by a big group of men, basically provided over quite a horrible culture for a long time, over decades. They had very good stories like Green Jesus, we all love them.For all rest in peace, you're back from the dead, who knows? And you know it, it lost its path slightly. But what I see with the newest expansion is it because they really did a change of their culture? They started to actually focus on, on, on being more loving in the environment. The game itself is much more interesting now.You have queer characters and dragons and all this stuff. A lot of people are really happy about it these days and it's like this. The thing about boycotting anything, if you boycott something. Like how is anyone supposed to get better? Okay. Tell them what they did wrong, accept them. Make changes like removing people, which a lot of these companies have been doing.So removing these people who were bad for the environment and then that's it. Like I know especially, and I'm not saying this to people who were harmed directly, I can never. I can't comment on that. That's your own stuff and your own opinions. You can choose to just never interact with them again. But to say to half the world or most of the world, you have to do this way or you're a bad person.What's that gonna get us More fucking sad people in the world.Chris Adams: Yes. Okay. All right. Should we jump onto the next story?All right. Next story we have here is wagtail and the summer of code. This is quite an interesting one in my view. Basically, Wagtail is a CMS, just like WordPress is a content management system used by significant part of the internet. Wagtail's used by companies like say, a number of charities, Google, lots of well-known blocks are actually running on this, and this project is about the Google Summer of Code. There was a joint project. Basically start embedding some greener coding practices into Wagtail itself. So the idea here is to do things like introduce some kind of green modes or also think about, okay, ways that you can create a different architectures to make this scale down to zero in various places.This one actually, I think, is. I have to say I, I am somewhat involved in this because this is a joint collaboration between Torch Box an agency and the Green Web Foundation. We've been doing some work for this, but there's a number of really promising directions for this to go in, and this was using some of the tools from an organization called Green Code, green Coding Metrics, largely because when you do use some tools like say a cms, it's not obvious where to make these optimizations.And if you're making able to have something open for people to start implementing some of these pattern, The idea is that you can possibly adopt these in other places, so I might ask you actually. Yeah. Any reckons at your end on this one Aerin?Aerin Booth: so it's really great in terms of anything that is up the scale. Wagtail is effectively a content management system same as WordPress. I understand it in terms of that. That's what I've ever heard of. I might take a look afterwards. I had a little look then, but yeah. Great. Do carbon reductions at a platform level and anything hack around it.Like this is the great thing about open source projects and whatever else, like if you solve an open source project. As in terms of it has this capability now and anyone can contribute to, if you solve the problem, then we can come back like that as a team, as everyone in the community to say, okay, we care about this.Now we're gonna show it some love and make it better. That's the whole focal point about community-driven development, which is open source communities. This is the sort of thing which we could almost stop and do anyway. And you see this at Kubernetes, especially these days. I think Adrian Cockcroft did a good talk at QCon just talking around obviously stuff he learned at Netflix, but you know what we need to do with Kubernetes?Effectively, Kubernetes is a zombie of its own. It was open source to encourage people to be able to migrate between clouds or just have a more generic platform layer. You put a box and a docker, whatever to cube and it goes there and we can move trade cubes around. But the reality is it helped people get onto the cloud quickly.Okay, I can write all these things, but at the end of the day, there's always services that are connected different ways. So it's like I've got my Kubernetes cluster with all my nodes and whatever else. And then I'm relying on, uh, SSL toys. Ssl, isn't it? Like all of these things which are either cloud providers you host from AWS or you buy a SaaS service and you've then think it as chemical reaction.You're slow as the weakest reaction or whatever else, or bond is as weak as the weakest chain link. And that's where a lot of the time when I see outages in the cloud and have experiences them, it's never really the whole of Amazon going down though that has happened. It just happen a lot more regularly these days due to thermal events.That's why we care about carbon emissions. A lot of data centers can't actually handle variations in temperature than designed for that, but that's where it actually goes wrong. Like you don't even notice it as well. And I think you asked me something earlier, which I didn't finish off, and I'll come back to it now.Enterprise organizations, and I'm talking generically here because I know it's gonna be a problem everywhere because to be honest, they all run in very similar ways. And the government, civil service, massive organizations have worked in all the biggest ones. Ministry Defense, DWP, Home Office, HMRC.They're very similar. We don't even know what we build. Like enterprises, generally things will get built. Innovations, money will come in cuz this is it. Money arrives a decision maker and it something gets built underneath. So when you're an enterprise organization, you've got all this money flowing out through cash cent-, cost centers, whatever you call them, bloody accountancy things and stuff just starts getting built, which is fine, but people are building their own fiefdoms.People move on. Things get passed around. I would bet any money that people who've gone to use Service now, especially service now because it's very self directed. You have to do a lot of manual work, and I think they've got better things these days, but again, it's hard to connect everything across the generations.I would be very surprised to find many organizations that have a very full record of every single IT service, it's service name, it's in service Now. All of it's onboarding for live service and operations because things just fall through the cracks and they just exist. They are zombies themselves, and you have a service that just works.Even look at the internet itself, there's so many open source projects that sit on underlying all of our core open projects that I think there was one a couple of years ago where, I dunno if it was protest or it just went down, but it caused half the internet to fall over. Yeah, we're all building crumbling towers when we go too big in terms of tech and it, especially enterprise, because sometimes it's like, oh, you know, you're a bit of an old man now Microsoft, can you really do everything in its dog like, especially when startups are just doing it better and faster Digital Ocean, Genesis Cloud, Leaf Cloud, all of these places in Europe.Chris Adams: Okay. Alright, we'll pick that thread when we come back to this. Let's look through the last few stories that we have here. Cause we're just coming to the end of it from here. There's a few events coming up there. Linux Foundation Energy Summit in June in Paris. There's a few people speaking specifically about tools like Carbon Aware SDKs, and if you're in Paris, it seems like it's worth going.I know that I'm actually going along to see some of the talks, cuz it looks like one of the most interesting places to. Essentially find out what's happening at this intersection. One layer down where we work with at the internet, for example. There's that there. There's also a upcoming event is Green Tech Southwest at the meetup on the 20th.This looks interesting cause so if nothing else, you've got Adam Turner who is the head of digital sustainability at DEFRA talking, basically providing a bit of a way in for people who are new to the idea about. Apply sustainability to the digital sector, but he'll also be talking about the UK government's digital sustainability strategy themselves.This I think, is actually quite interesting cuz this is one of the UK's probably further along than are a number of other governments right now and they're at least very quite public on this. I might ask if there's anything that you wanna add onto this one here, cuz we're coming up to the last few minutes for you Aerin?Aerin Booth: Yes. I'll take it over for a couple minutes and just kind of add my views in here. So I'm a former civil servant. I was independent, impartial. Following the government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Always did my job to the most first honour and respect of that role. I was part of a lot of these negotiations and sustainability was always a touchy subject.Like it's a very difficult thing to get anything straight out of a lot of companies, because we're all playing with assumptions and numbers right now with the reality of it, like Scope 3 hardly exists in all the cloud providers, especially AWS, they don't show Scope 3 at all in any of their online tools or any of their reports.They have an awful report. 451 did this report about the carbon reductions you can make by migrate into the cloud and they say you can have 88% energy savings in the cloud if you migrate to the cloud, and therefore you'll have carbon reduction. Okay. I said something very specific there. 88% energy reduction if your migrates to the cloud.If you read the report itself only covers scope two carbon emissions. It doesn't cover scope one, which I thought was quite interesting considering there's so many diesel backup generators in all of these places. If you think about Puerto Rico, for example, when they had the hurricane several years ago, the only thing that didn't lose power on those on the island was the data centers.The people of that country waited, what, nine months, year, 18 months to get power restored to everyone. Data centers never lost today because we prioritize data of people over people themselves. That's a crazy thing that's going on here. We're like we shipping these boxes of ones and zeros. Rather than thinking maybe I should do something better with my energy on this island and help people out for a little bit and take the loss and turn off some hard drives, put it all in disc or tape storage and turn the damn thing off for a bit.And there's so much we really need to think differently about because yeah, that report, that's all over 80 versus sustainability pages, it's literally the top link. I went to an event in Ireland, I flew over for Amazon's first ever sustainability event organized by the wonderful public sector and marketing team over in Ireland.And they basically said that report, and then they also said, oh, look at our wonderful carbon reporting tool, which by the way, everyone only reports Scope one and two. Scope one and two is about 7% of carbon emissions from AWS. 93% of all their carbon emissions comes from their own supply chain. So when I'm making a decision about my cloud and I'm looking at these wonderful graphs, I am seeing 7% of the a hundred percent of the big picture and thinking I'm making an 88% carbon reduction.So what effectively Amazon has just said. You can reduce your carbon emissions by 6% if you move to the cloud. Sound a bit different now when you really analyze the facts and read the report more than two pages or get through their first blue blog post and sustainability for me cuz I've worked with Amazon, I'm a community builder at Amazon I don't really care about not pulling punches or whatever else because I've honestly tried to work with them quite a lot and their PR team consistently always pulls the plug on sustainability conversations. And I'm not even joking. I was supposed to do a Twitter space or someone invited me and I got pulled, I'm not saying it was me, I just say they have a problem talking about sustainability.They have no idea how to do it. Cause they think. Oh, if we admit this is a problem, everyone's just gonna run away and not join. It's like maybe, but you can't just carry on what you're doing just because you want to make some profit at the end of the world while the rest of us like have to deal with the climate crisis.And yeah, I almost not given up on Amazon, but I won't be helping them directly anymore. I consult generally probably between like a bit like Corey Quinn. 10 to 15 different people or teams who reach out and ask for my advice at Amazon and all of it's unpaid, like I'm giving unpaid labor to one of the world's richest companies for no thanks or credit.Not to say thanks. I was like, oh, I deserve this fin. But to be blocked or just have events disappear randomly because of PR decisions, when all I've ever been trying to do is help is like, well, now the time to just do things differently, which is why I've got my own podcast. Why I come onto podcasts like this.I do obviously talk about sustainability with my rights hat on AWS channels when I do get on. And yeah, we need to think differently about the cloud. And for me, me and Adrian Cockcroft have been talking about this for a long time, and it'll be coming out soon and I might as well throw it at the very, very end.I've been recently asked to propose a book to the British Computing Society on Green Operations, and I'll be writing that hopefully with some co-collaborators and figure out how can we really reframe this as a cultural issue. Okay. We are DevOps because even with DevOps, what we prioritize development and developers, we're thinking about ourselves when we're building services, try thinking about the people and the planet.Chris Adams: So this is the dev suss ops thing is.Aerin Booth: Not DevSusOps, that was Adrian's term and we're not gonna use that. In some ways it has its own purpose, but again, I don't want people thinking about developers or su sus like it. It just doesn't even make sense. Like what you read that I have no Green Operations is about thinking people and the planet when we're building services.If you put those two things at the top of your priority list, okay, what is my priority? It's for people on the planet, not users. By the way, people. And then you go, okay, how do I build this? I'm gonna build it with diversity and accessibility at the front of my mindset and open source and reusability. And if honest to God, you just do those things.Think about people on the planet, build accessibility needs and usable parts and, and sharing and SaaS services. People just want to use it because it is actually a good service. You don't have to just build everything from scratch. You just need to think about things differently, and it's always chasing the tail or the money or the next feature, whatever else.And we forget that we're not really building things for ourselves in technology. We're trying to build services. For one, helps people in their day-to-day lives and hopefully save the freaking planet. In the next upcoming climate change catastrophe the rest of our lives. So green operations hopefully be published by the British Computing Society once I submit the full manuscript later this year.And yeah, it'll be a good little thing to sort of, you know, think differently when it comes to sustainability in the cloud.Chris Adams: Okay, so green operations, you heard it here first. I think that takes us up to the time we have. This actually Aerin. I'm gonna say thank you very much for joining us for this episode of this week in Green SoftwareAerin Booth: Can I just add one more thing? I always love doing this at the end of my podcast. One I is just in terms of, you wanna find me? My name's Aerin Booth, but my online persona is Aerin Clouds, A E R I N C L O U D S. That's on most social media. It's really easy to find quite a unique name, but. What I always try and say to people is like, if you're listening to this podcast, if you finish it and made it this far, thank you so much and well done.But do something nice in the next week. Take some time off you. Were gonna do, spend some time in nature. Don't forget that there's other things out there, rather than staring into a box on a screen and working for cloud companies or technology companies. When you know you shouldn't really be traveling away from everyone all the time, you shouldn't always be on the go.We need to balance these things out. And that's Green operations. If you stand in nature, you're gonna think about nature a lot more when you're making decisions, if you're always away from it, if you're in a city, you're on the tube, getting back home, sitting down, having a takeaway, it doesn't really cross your mind.And sometimes we just need to have a little bit of fresh air and it really helps us just to do some of this stuff. I'm basically a digital hippie. So let's go and let's do this together. Peace and love.Chris Adams: So the secret to Green Ops is to get out in the green. All right. That's a nice point to end on. That's all we have time for. All the resources and links will be added to this. If you have any feedback, go to greensoftware.foundation in your browser. Uh, And if you did enjoy the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.Your feedback is valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. So thanks again. Thanks for listening and seeing you in the next episode. See you next week, Torah. Takecare, Aerin. 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.

On this episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain discuss the latest research on streaming emissions from Netflix and DIMPACT, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, The European Commission's Right to Repair Law and their proposal for an Anti Greenwashing Law which is being echoed across the channel with the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill. Asim also discovers an alternative to central heating with his hot TV! The usual exciting resources and events in the show notes from TWiGS, Environment Variables and the Green Software Foundation.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:What the Latest Research on Streaming Emissions Tells Us / Netflix [2:39]The environmental impact of refurbished tech / Back Market [13:21]The European Commission's Right to Repair Law / European Commission  [17:58]Microsoft wants to export 'grid-interactive' Dublin datacenter setup / Microsoft [23:31]The European Commission's Anti Greenwashing Law Proposal / European Commission [36:20]The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill / Linklaters Sustainable Futures [38:06]Resources:Table that Chris refers to from ADEME [14:19]ADEME Study on the Impact of Refurbished Electronics / ADEME [14:19]The Restart Project Podcast [20:27]US Right to Repair Law from 2022 / Reuters [21:21]Balancing Power Systems With Datacenters Using a Virtual Interconnector Balancing / Conor Kelly [24:31]Ecovisor / Ecovisor [26:21]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Chris Adams: Turning bauxite into aluminum is incredibly energy intensive. It's in terms of density of load versus the area used. The only thing that is greater than it is data centers.Asim Hussain: Oh, alright.Chris Adams: Yeah. Or maybe Bitcoin mining, but you can, they probably count as a data center as well. But basically, yeah, incredibly dense load, which is why you see this, and this really spelled out to me just how big a player some of these large companies are now.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 The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and I'm joined here with Asim today. Hey, Asim.Asim Hussain: HiyaChris Adams: Oh, see, before we go further, we should probably introduce ourselves, shouldn't we?Asim Hussain: yeah. Sounds good.Chris Adams: Okay, so my name's Chris. I am the policy working group co-chair in the Green Software Foundation, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I'm also an organizer at climateaction.tech, and I think that's enough things for me to explain what I do. Asim, I'll hand over to you next.Asim Hussain: Yep. Hi name's Asim Hussain I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also a director of Green software at Intel and uh, ex-organizer at climaaction.tech, which is where me and Chris, we didn't meet then, but we first started working closely together.Chris Adams: Where we started working together. We met at OMG Climate, another conference based in London and Berlin, which was a successor to OMGDPR, which is a conference all about GDPR, which was considered quite an earth shattering thing to be thinking about back in 2018.Asim Hussain: I definitely shattered the earth a little bit, didn't it?Chris Adams: Yeah, a little bit. It definitely had an impact.So today, if you're familiar, if you're not familiar with the format for this show, we generally run through some of the stories that have come up and share some of the commentary and sometimes we invite guests on to talk about some of these. I think we've got a few stories here from link, stuff from Netflix, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, and some interesting news from the policy point of view with both the European Commission and stuff going down in the UK as well.Should we start Asim?Asim Hussain: Let's start with Netflix, should we?Chris Adams: Yes, what the latest research on streaming emissions tells us. So this is a piece published by Netflix and in collaboration with the folks at DIMPACT, which I think stands for Digital Impact. So this has a number of real kind of heavyweights in the field. Dr. Daniel Schien, Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Jens Malmodin and a number of other companies are sharing data along this like BT, Orange, TalkTalk, Spotify and Netflix themselves. Uh, they did a bunch of literature review about what the state of the art is for this, and they used some of this to work out some of their own figures themselves. Asim, I think you've had a look at this as well.What caught your own when you saw this?Asim Hussain: Well, what caught my eye was I've been hearing about DIMPACT. Is it DIMPACT or D-IMPACT?Chris Adams: I'm not quite sureAsim Hussain: DIMPACT for a while and Daniel Schien is Dr. Daniel Schien is a member of the foundation's, been active member of the standards working group amongst other things for a while. So we've been talking for a while and just really, and yeah, it's.Think the papers as well as the Litera literary Review does it in such a way where actually creates recommendations or what's it call 'em? Principles. Yeah. Which is a good way to go. It gives very direct feedback advice to everybody else for what to look at. See, they've got four principles. Should we dig into them?Chris Adams: Yeah, you can run through. These are the ones for the government. So as I understand this is basically the company saying, Okay, government, this is what you need to do so we can do our reporting properly. That's largely it. I think with the idea being that one organization is saying it's too big for any one of us to solve by ourselves, so you're gonna have to have government involved for this part here.That's the argument they're making, at least as I read through it. And yeah. Should we run through these cuz there's four and they're relatively catchy. Do you wanna start with number.Asim Hussain: yeah. Principle one, expand access to shared contemporary data that is no more than one to two years old, and which does not compromise competitive and proprietary information, which is interesting cuz that's actually oftentimes the feedback I hear from organizations regarding being more transparent with around data.It's that worry that you are going to be revealing yeah, competitive and proprietary information. And I don't know, I will say now I'm gonna be opinionated. I would say it's not even with the greatest understanding that you will, it's the worry that you might, because if you're an exec inside an organization, it's far easier.You're not gonna have a huge mistake by saying no to revealing some data. But the worry is that you are gonna say yes to something and then something will get revealed.Chris Adams: And then you publish your cost structure. Is that it?Asim Hussain: Accidentally. You don't realize if you divide it by five, it's your cost structure. Like you just don't realize that.Chris Adams: Fun factoid. 10 years ago I worked at a company called AMEE, Avoid Mass Extinction Engine. One of the ideas behind some of the carbon accounting was to work with organizations because if you are upstream and you have organizations sharing their carbon emissions to you, It does indeed give you some idea of what the cost structure is likely to be, and that gives you an idea of who you should be speaking to first in terms of trying to achieve some carbon reduction.So on one level there is this idea about a cost structure thing, but there's also this idea that if you have deeper supply chain engagement, then there's greater chance to have some mutually beneficial up collaboration there. And there were was one example of a very large soft drink manufacturer then working with their suppliers and they would basically say, A huge chunk of our supply chain emissions is from you guys having old fridges.So why don't we actually just agree with you to get so you buy better fridges. Cause it's gonna make us look better and you look better so you can you please change the fridges? That's literally how it worked and this is why I think it's quite interesting because it works both ways and uh, there is a kind of mindset shift that may be necessary for this.Anyway, we've got three more principles to look at here cuz this is quite exciting. Okay, next.Asim Hussain: You do the nextChris Adams: one.Yeah. Okay. Ensure appropriate modeling for decision making. This is through continued research to avoid oversimplified and biased results. I think this is actually a reference to the fact that in many cases there will be models which you say let's you looking at something like streaming, for example.This one here, if you look at the research, Netflix basically say, okay, for what we do, and we're looking at about 1% of the emissions come from the data center, 10% from the network, and nearly 90% come from the device manufacturers like at the end, which is like your tablet or your big screen, or your router, or like the wifi on your house, for example.Or maybe a TV or digital video box, whatever settop box you might actually have. And that's a different modeling from what you might see in other services. So if you have something which is entirely web based, where they're not doing so much streaming of video, then you might have a different setup because each request has a lot more work going on.You're not sharing the same thing. Cuz the whole point about things like Netflix in many cases is that everyone gets to see the same video, right? It wouldn't work if every single video was different, right? That would make for a pretty ropey shared experience.Asim Hussain: are they? But I think that's also speaking to the fact that, and I think there has been some pretty simplified, they call it oversimplified. I would also say there is a need for a simplified models here as well, but there are like simplified models. I don't wanna name a name, any names here, but there are simplified models that people have used for networking in the past, which have come under some criticism.And I can imagine if you're Netflix, those models would overestimate your emissions just, I know you just mentioned about the end user divide, but there just overestimate your networking emissions.Chris Adams: It's gonna make you look awful.Asim Hussain: for Yeah. Whereas the reality is, I think that's, what're talking about basically use good models.Chris Adams: Yeah, I think the, so the thing that's worth the thing,Asim Hussain: Revolutionary statement there.Chris Adams: The useful statement to reach for this is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So depending on what your resolution might be, it might be useful to use a quite high level model, say sustainable web design for Web design. But if you tried to use something like the sustainable web design model for Netflix might not give you particularly useful answers.So that's the second principle. Okay, number three, go on. This one is you. I think.Asim Hussain: Principle three. I love principles. Principle three, institutes energy efficiency requirements for devices and infrastructure, TVs, data centers, internet networks, home devices, et cetera, energy efficiency requirements. So it's like an energy star aspect.Chris Adams: Yeah, it does sound a bit like that, and I think this is, I think this is interesting for two reasons. So first of all, various bodies like the GSMA, I think, or GESI, which is G E S I, and I think the site's best Targets Institute. They've issued a press release in maybe 2020, basically saying if we want to hit two degrees of warming, we need to basically half the energy consumption of the entire sector, um, by 2030, and that's about a 7% reduction year on year.So that's what you have there. And uh, we don't have any kind of regulation for this kind of stuff. And in many cases there's a cadence for which when new bits of technology come in to allow you to scale some of this stuff. But back, for example, so like routers for example, when we look at this helpful diagram from Netflix, you can see a significant chunk is actually stuff which is on the subscriber's premises. So that's like your router in your house. And because they are always on and there's no real kind of sleep process, there is basically no relation there. And when that's taking up, maybe say a quarter of the impact they see here, that's like a, that's a space where you really would really would be helpful to have some kind of agreements on this.The good news is there is actually some of this described in the next, uh, draft of WiFi. I'll have to share a link with this to allow things to scale down.Asim Hussain: Oh really? That work is now actually becoming part of the standards.Chris Adams: It's a really early draft, so there I've seen some discussions where people were saying, yeah, maybe we should have a way to scale some of this back when we're not push sending data over the wire.You see the same thing with the deep connections as well. For some of the really fast connections, what you essentially have is when you have nothing being sent over the wire, to make sure that the system is very responsive. When data does come down the wire, you basically have messages saying, I've got nothing to send.I've got nothing to send. I've got nothing to send. So you're still sending stuff even when you're not sending stuff. So again, it's because people haven't prioritized energy usage for this. So there's a bunch of scope here. So yeah, that's a fun one to talk about.Asim Hussain: To drive that work, there needs to be kind of requirements for devices to be energy efficient. There's also a software, I just wanna be clear, like I don't think this is purely a hardware story. This is a software story. A lot of that story you just described it, uh, it could be implemented in the hardware, but it could also be software components to that standard as well.And there's a lot of stuff about switching devices off like this. This stuff is a software driven aspect of it. And there's also like your TV is oftentimes taking in a stream of data and un-decoding it and putting it onto the display. That's a software. We're in that world where you actually, like the boundary between software and hardware is blurred because you could actually like implement a lot of the stuff as a hardware aspect of it.But I think there's stuff there as well. You can implement energy efficiency stuff in in software as well. And just another random, my TV's hot every now and again. I go close to it with my hand and I'm like, wow, this is actually radiating a fair amount of heat. So I think that's something to think through.But anyway.Chris Adams: Yeah,Asim Hussain: don'tChris Adams: so,Asim Hussain: of your TV as a radiator, but mine acts like a radiator for my house.Chris Adams: So you heard it here first. If you want to reduce the environmental impact from your Netflix habits, use a smaller screen or turn on the big hot television that's attached to Asim's wall.Asim Hussain: Watch more Netflix shows in winter and reduce your energyChris Adams: bills.Yeah, there could be.Asim Hussain: in summer. Get out in summer and enjoy the sunshine and stop watching Netflix in summer is basically what- that's advice from Netflix apparently, according to the Netflix report.Chris Adams: Should we move to principle four? Assume before we get in trouble. Okay. Prioritize broad availability of low carbon and renewable energy for companies that operate large scale infrastructure and consumers since most streaming emissions come from inside the. Basically what they're saying is you need an entirely fossil free internet, which is what my organization cares about more than anything else in the world.Yes.Asim Hussain: A fossil free internet broad of low carbon renew- and that's so important. I mean, when we talk about the pathways to achieving the only viable pathway to achieving the goals of 2030, very fast decarbonization of the electricity grid is pretty much the only path these days, isn't it?I don't know if anybody talks seriously about another one.Chris Adams: There is a bunch of really useful work that's been published by Transition Zero and Ember Climate about this. We can share links to this, but let's not dive in too deeply because we end up being an energy podcast rather than an a Green software podcast. All right, so next one, the environmental impact of refurbished tech.This is a story from Back Market and uh, I think this is quite interesting. I've shared this Asim because Back Market, yes, they're in the business of selling refurb technology. So if you wanna buy an iPhone or an iPad or something, rather than buying it directly from apple.com, you can buy a refurb one from them instead.So,Asim Hussain: I've actually never heard of them before, so it's really, yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, they're available in quite a few countries, but they're not the only people. They work to look, work a little like a kind of two-sided market. So they speak to smaller shops that do some of the refurbishing and they connect buyers to this. So they're like right in the middle. And I've ended up getting into habit of basically purchasing most of my electronics through them now simply because there's a really interesting set of stats and research on this, which basically shows that the carbon savings are really quite substantial. So this isn't just like a puff piece. This is actually work from the French from ADEME, which I'm not gonna try to pronounce in French, but more or less translates as the French environment and energy management agency.They published a study last year to work out just how much of a impact having refurbished or circular electronics might actually be. And, uh, I've shared the table here from this report, from the actual link that's in here. And generally speaking, say, let's say you're gonna buy a secondhand smartphone and hold onto for two years versus hold onto a, bring a new one and having it for three years, there's every single saving here in terms of CO2 or water or e-waste, it's above 80 to 90%.Asim Hussain: So it's just so I understand this number correctly. I'm seeing a table, and for one cell it's saying smartphones, and then the otherChris Adams: Tablets and laptops and desktops. Yeah.Asim Hussain: from a smartphone carbon perspective, I'm seeing the percentage, 91.6%. So what I believe that's telling me is, I will save 91.6% of the emissions. Why wouldn't it be a hundred percent?It's a refurbished or something a little bit confusing in my mind.Chris Adams: There's still an environmental impact from taking something and refurbishing and doing some work on it.Asim Hussain: right, right. Okay. Yeah. So if I was to keep that, why'd they say two years and three years? That's a,Chris Adams: I think the reason this is because that's what they typically look at when people purchase a new machine. They might not hold onto it for so long. There's actually a link to this really detailed report from ADEME, the French agency, where they go into do this like 200 pages long, where they talk about every single possible scenario of one year ownership versus five year ownership.Are you buying a secondhand one that's two years old versus five years old? It's like every permutation you could imagine. But the high level stats here are basically the key takeaway is that buying something refurbished is a really effective consumer way to reduce the environmental impact of the electronics you have.Or conversely, how guilty you feel about your gadgets habit, basically.Asim Hussain: and I think it also speaks to the, I won't say fallacy, I will say the misunderstanding of the effectiveness of recycling. because recycling you really will not get anywhere close. I don't know what the statistic is, but it will be in nowhere close to 91.6% for a smartphone. Reselling something or just giving it to somebody else rather than throwing it away is one of the best things to do.It's actually, I still, that's why I love the, I've gotta really gotta check out black market. Sorry, I just called it, I just, I called it black market cause that's what I first read when I saw it. It's the black market, but it's back marketChris Adams: As in take back or give back or refur-. Yeah.Asim Hussain: it black market accident many times from this point forward, but I think that's a really important aspect.Cause I think one of the challenges people have for refurbished stuff is a lack of trust.Chris Adams: Mm-hmm.Asim Hussain: I buy stuff from eBay all the time, but I have it with this. Is it gonna, what's the mo- what I'm gonna get? Whereas getting some form of kind of trust out of interest do they offer guarantee or something when you buy it from Back MarketChris Adams: they do. And where are we of turning this into a advert for them? Because we, cuz basical. I purchased all these. I think I've pretty much got my phone, my an iPad and my work laptop through this one company. They're not the only company doing this. In the UK there's an organization called Tech Buyer.There's plenty of other ones, but I've been pretty happy with this and I've got a year warranty from this and basically because. Computers have, their speed is not improving at the rate they used to be. It's okay. So I've got a machine from 2020 that I bought secondhand and it's banging. It's really good.It's, I'm really happy with that. And that's enough to last be for the next few years.Asim Hussain: you just need a Web, what is it? 60, 70% of all apps is just Web. You're just browsing on the website. We've solved that. You've got a laptop that's good enough for that, and it'll be good enough for it for a long time.Chris Adams: And it's just as well, because there's changes in the law coming down in particular, this is the next story that is somewhat related to this. One of the reasons that has been a problem with getting these things like devices lasting longer is that if a single thing broke it, you basically didn't have an easy way to get it repaired or replaced or anything like that.And there's been some interesting new laws with a new right to repair law, which will require hardware makers to provide fixes for up to 10 years. From new, new electronics. So that's so much further for this, uh, basically the, it's still being drafted to some, when it comes to actually being implemented in different countries.So just because it's plaster, either European, European level, you still need someone to implement the interface, as it were in Germany or France or stuff like that. But generally speaking, yeah, things like, uh, hardware, cell phones, tablets. The goal is to have things at least five years and up to 10 years of there, and also providing clear access to all the bits that you might need to repair these.Asim Hussain: This is kind of like, I think iFixit. Is it, are they a non-profit or a for-profit? I can't remember, but this is, this is kinda what iFixit has been trying to do, which is figure out how to repair things. When manufacturers have provided no information about how to repair it, and they're just like smashing up 50 iPhones just to figure out how to repair an iPhone, and then they're publishing the information online.But this is saying, this is actually gonna have to be law. Oh, it looks like there's still some negotiation that needs to be done here, but it'll be law for organizations to affect even beyond the guarantee period. It same between for five to 10 years. Five to 10 years. You have to make something, somethings repairable. That's amazing.Chris Adams: I know it's pretty cool, right?Asim Hussain: This is, this is how the world used to be. The world used to be you. Anything. I don't feel old. I do not feel that old, but I do remember repairing things. Repairing things like a normal electric thing was a normal thing to do. You went to repair shops and you got things repaired and you brought them home.And these days it's almost impossible to repair anything. And the times when you do go and try and repair something, the cost of repair is so much higher. Not higher, just almost the point where you like another 20% more, I can buy something new and then you get that world. Whereas I love the idea of whole cottage industry of repairing things has almost been lost.And now that generative AI is gonna take the rest of our jobs, maybe we can just, maybe our jobs will be, maybe the only jobs will be left will be repairing the machines, which the AIs need to survive. Maybe we'll be in service of the AIs to repair the machines for them. Okay. There we go.Chris Adams: Topical. I like it.Asim Hussain: we go.Chris Adams: Okay. This is the thing. It's, we'll see how it shapes through. Before. For folks who are more interested in this, there's a really nice podcast from the Restart Project because last month there was London Repair Week where there's a bunch of interviews with people who actually are doing repairs of electronics and talk about how it's changed or what some of the trends might be.We should share a link to that cause it's quite fun. It's quite a nice kind of uplifting and happy story. When usually a lot of things around climate and technology can be a little bit hard work. All right.Asim Hussain: This is interesting. Do you think that there's? As Moore's Law and all this other stuff, it's not slowing down. I don't know. There's other things that are happening. The law's not that simple, but as technology moves, is the fast paced nature of technology, the thing that's made things harder to repair and now that maybe technology will move slower, or you just mentioned your laptop's gonna, it gives more room, more breathing space for people to try and repair things.Chris Adams: I don't think it's that. I think it's more a case of business models. Right. So even one of the things you did see, cuz in America recently passed a recent right to repair law themselves and organizations which have been moving, who have been pushing back against this one of the tactics. So if. Basically said as well, okay, what we're gonna do, we care about the sustainability of things, but you can only ever return things to us.So therefore we, we are gonna capture the entire value chain ourselves rather than share it with anyone else. And that's very much a deliberate decision that some people have made to say we are gonna be, and if we get devices from anyone else, we're gonna either withhold the parts, which means you can't create a whole kind of secondary market around this.You'll see things like that. And I think this is one of the issues. It's very much a case of. How people designed things. Because even if you look at, say a hardware point of view, there are examples like the framework Laptop in America, which is essentially a laptop designed to be the opposite of say, an Apple MacBook, which honestly I own cuz I'm stuck using Apple devices.But basically this is, this is the thing.Asim Hussain: You're in the ecosystem and that's how it's designed.Chris Adams: Exactly. So these are, this is very much a function of the, in my view, the business model for this. So even if I wanted to have some things which were not the same, the fact that I am locked in using the same operating system means that I'm not able to do that. And that kind of integration isn't really addressed with this right now.And I feel like in many cases it's case of which feudal landlord do you want? Do you want Microsoft? Do you want Google or do you want Apple? You can do everything yourself, but then you're open and vulnerable against all the bandits and everything like that. But then you have to realize, except that, yeah, maybe the feudal landlord has shareholders to return to, and the priorities are making sure those guys are happy rather than you are necessary happy.So that's some of the things you have to worry about really.Asim Hussain: Well, I think it's interesting. I think there's parallels here between the kind of the closed source and open source ecosystems as well. It's like those are huge, like what you just described about you can only return products to us is a closed source system. I think there's definitely cases where the open source model has been more successful than the closed source model. I'd also probably argue this case where the closed source model has been more successful than opensource model as wellChris Adams: I don't think we are gonna resolve this one on this call. We see not this one. I think there's plenty going either way for a bunch of this. Should we look at the next story of this one here?Asim Hussain: go on. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So Microsoft wants to export grid interactive Dublin data center setup. So this is a story that I think is interesting from the perspective of kind of green software developers because it's worked by Microsoft who have basically working with a power management specialist called Eaton to build kind of grid interactive UPSs into their data centers. So this basically means that rather than just having backup energy, which just sits there doing nothing, the idea is, is that the backup battery could supply it into the grid if necessary.So this basically allows you to kind of smooth out, say spikes in demand or stuff like that. And you can see it as a kind of compliment to renewable energy sources being somewhat variable and at times intermittent. And what they're doing is they, this is about them saying, we've got this setup. One, we're gonna do it in lots of other places, and we're gonna start with Ireland because Ireland only gets maybe 35% of their power from renewable sources, but there is a really aggressive growth in data centers plant in Ireland, or that we've seen over the last few years. So this is actually quite an interesting one. I think that the person that might have been related to some of this work a chap called Conor Kelly, he published a paper about this idea of balancing power systems or data centers.I think Asim this is my, uh, you used to work at Microsoft. I reckon you might have some reckons on this.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I know Conor. In fact, we should probably reach out to him, see if he wants to come on the podcast. Conor, if you're listening as you as of course you always listen to our podcast. Welcome to, to come on. Yeah. Conor's, he's been in this, I wouldn't be surprised this, this looks like it's got Conor's fingerprints all over it.Yeah, so I think for, for my understanding, so just so I'm gonna break it down for everybody, so. Data centers have a lot of backup power supplies. Sometimes actually diesel, but they sometimes actually are battery powered, sometimes actually hydrogen batteries, all, all sorts of stuff. But this is a battery powered backup.And the point here is can you reverse the energy back out onto the grid? And therefore be like effectively like a short term battery act as a battery for the grid and therefore make money. Which I think is a really not make, necessarily make, maybe, probably do or not make money, but I'm sure they have other relationships with the utility providers like a, I dunno, reduced fee or something like that.That's interesting. And I think it's also interesting cause I remember I was talking to somebody ages ago in this space about carbon aware computing and I was talking about shifting compute. And they raised the point, well if all of our data centers have batteries, like why not just shift the energy? Cuz if you shift compute, it's like if you take the opposite side, it's like you're shifting energy.So we've got batteries, shift the energy. And I was like, huh, that's actually quite a great idea. Actually just shift the energy from France to, well, wherever.Chris Adams: So this is the work that I think is most interestingly demonstrated by the work on some, I think Ecovisor is the name of this kind of series of projects where the idea was that rather than just having a rather software just knowing that there's power coming in, software has some idea about what quality of power that might be saying, this is the grid power and this is the carbon intensity of this. Or here's renewable energy that, that you might have attached to a data center. And this is what the carbon intensity of this is. And this is how much battery power is available and how many hours of battery is available.And also what the kind of intensity, carbon intensity of that might be. Cuz if you were to charge that battery when there's loads of wind on the grid, then you've got really green energy, which in many ways may be greener than the grid power that you have. So if you wanted to say optimize for the greenest possible power, you might choose to only run on say, battery when the grid I is particularly high. If you are able to figure out where you are pulling the power in from. If you're saying, don't feed me grid power, but please feed me power from the battery and from onsite solar onsite renewables, then you are able to control the actual power going into the system.And there is a, the thing that's really cool, I did a talk about this cuz I was so excited about it when I discovered it at FOSDEM. This idea of kind of virtualizing and different kinds of power, I think is one thing that if I wasn't doing what I was doing, I would try to build a service and build a company around it basically.Asim Hussain: Virtualizing. Describe what you mean.Chris Adams: So, you know, we have virtualized compute, pay for compute, storage, and network. Yeah, it's a big physical machine, but it's exposed to you in the form of a computer, which is just the right size. Just has enough memory. Just has enough of this right. Now if you know that, say your computing job don't need to happen right now, they're not time sensitive. Then you could say, okay, I only wanna be fed on variable power, for example, renewable power. I don't need it to happen, come from the grid because I value that it's greener and it's cheap more than it being available all the time and dispatchable. And I think that people who actually have batteries inside data centers, I think people will figure out how to turn that into a product that you can sell as make available inside this.Because I think that's a kind of value added thing that you could quite easily add to cloud compute to just say, by the extra green stuff inside it, which you know for sure has been come from the power that stored at certain times. Yeah. You could segment now the power that way.Asim Hussain: Cause I've always wondered about that, about battery, cuz if you're a wind farm. When I sell electricity, I can then sell like a rec and I, that's like how you signal that my electricity was green,Chris Adams: Mm-hmm.Asim Hussain: but if I have a battery on the grid, I'm currently, I know the grid is 50% green, 50% fossil, and I'm storing the energy, like the, like I know that electricity is like half green, but no one else would know.That's what I mean by virtualized. So if I was to then send that back out onto the grid, I could then give. like a half-rec here somewhere, or, I dunno how that would work actually.Chris Adams: You just don't decouple the greenness from the power. That's a whole kind of silly market construct that only happened because for historical reasons, right? If you actually just treat the power like it really is, yeah, then you could totally do stuff like this. And that is the premise behind this Ecovisor concept, which I think is super exciting and even has an API to implement.Asim Hussain: Oh, eco. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, exactly. If you virtualize the compute, why don't you virtualize the power? And that allows you to purchase things differently because I think there are people who would basically say, okay, I'm using a bunch of cloud services. If there's a way for me to just purchase a kind of greener quality of power from this for certain parts than I would.Cuz that allows you some more tools as a designer of services, for example, if you know that like then maybe I can pay for say, eight hours of definitely green power, for example. Then I can redesign the rest of my time to either, I can redesign my compute to work within that budget, or I can say, I know I don't even have to see what I mean.Yeah. You could do a bunch. You could come up with all these new system designs. Yeah.Asim Hussain: completely not thinking about recs in the slightestChris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: just, thinking about the whole, just like blank. Yeah. Interesting.Chris Adams: This is also why the discussions and if you look on the kind of, you look at the trends for grids, there's a huge amount of battery storage looking to be connected to the grid, both in the UK and in America. For example, masses. And it's growing so fast. So I think.Asim Hussain: As in it's there, but it's not physically connected to the grid. What do you mean? Or do you mean?Chris Adams: It's being connected or people who, cause you need to apply for permits for a bunch of this stuff. It's basically being permitted and being fit into the grid. So traditionally you might have had relied on say things like open cycle gas turbines, which have really this stuff. You as batteries come into this, that means that the kind of marginal intensity was you you don't have the same signals, basically, so you can't be sure that it's gonna be open cycle gas turbines that are powering that marginal power now. So a lot of the assumptions we make about marginal intensity may not be the same, which is why many cases open some of this up. And if you just look at the location based amount, then I think it's actually an exciting new horizon opening or opening up to us. And I reckon Conor's probably got something to say about this, cuz I, yeah, this paper I read, I thought, this sounds super cool cuz it basically uses data centers like CDNs, but for power essentially in the same way that CDN relieves pressure on network by rather than you congesting commonly used channels with lots of the same things being sent over, you're just getting it from somewhere nearby. So you can think of transmission in the same way. If you have a way to reduce the need to fetch power from somewhere else, by getting it from somewhere nearby, then you've essentially taken this idea of a CDN, but you've applied it to grid services.And I think that is actually, there are so many places, there's so much overlap in this stuff. There really is, and. I think more people should be discussing this cuz cloud is utility. Once you start thinking about these things as utilities, then yeah, all these ideas which have been developed for decades in other fields become applicable in our world as well.Asim Hussain: I'll just say one thing, and I think we were talking about gang Adrian Cockcroft in, but I listened to his talk at QCon last week and one really interesting statistic he said, which I thought was fascinating. But if you add up all the power from all the major clouds, it actually becomes one of the top 10 energy utilities in the world.Chris Adams: Well, it's not just that there's a crazy figure I saw recently. So if you look at, say, which companies have been purchasing all the kind of corporate green energy, power purchase agreements in Europe, right? Amazon is responsible for 19.9% of all the PPAs, the capacity. In the last 10 years, so 20 to 13, Google is 7.4% and that's like the next two largest organizations are Alcoa, which makes aluminium and Norsk Hydro, which is basically, it's really eye-opening seeing these numbers.So these are the stats from Wind Europe, and I will find a link for this. I didn't realize that nearly 30% of all of the PPAs, the power purchase agreements for renewable power has come from big tech firms.Asim Hussain: Which is just to be clear, you're not saying that's 30% of all energy or 30% of all. Energy, but 30% of all like this, these what these things called power, which we won't go into, which is still a significant amount just to go to some tech company perhaps how belittling of me just to go through a couple of tech companies.But you know, aluminum I've always heard is like quite significant.Chris Adams: Yeah. Turning bauxite into aluminum is incredibly energy intensive. It's in terms of density of load versus the area used. The only thing that is greater than it is data centers.Asim Hussain: Oh, alright.Chris Adams: Yeah, or maybe Bitcoin mining, but you can, they probably count as a data center as well. But basically, yeah, incredibly dense load, which is why you see this, and this really spelled out to me just how big a player some of these large companies are now in the kind of shifting of the grid and how that might impact what we do as developers and people building digital services.Asim Hussain: why like things like grid, what are we calling it? I've forgotten the term GridChris Adams: Interactive is what they.Asim Hussain: Yeah, grid interactive batteries. Yeah. That's why it's so important. Yeah. That's why it could potentially could be quiteChris Adams: significant.You say potentially one of the reasons you can get the idea that people are doing this just outta the goodness of their own heart, right? And the linked story basically says they're not just doing it out of the goodness of their own heart. They're doing it because it makes financial sense a lot of the time.So when you are a larger organization, you do a big power purchase agreement like this, you're gonna get power way cheaper than other people because you're buying in so much bulk. So yeah, you get to say that you are green and everything like that, butAsim Hussain: I gurantee if you are creating utility scale kind of grid interactive batteries, you are getting a better deal. There is definitely a financial, and I wanna say like one of the things that's quite surprising to me actually was to find out that the interrelation between gas and renewables, which is an unfortunate kind of temporary, in the decarbonization of the grid, you do need to be able to create electricity very quickly when the wind dies down.And currently for a lot of places that's now gas. Whereas that's why kind of battery solutions are so important, cuz we don't want that to be gas. We want that to be non fossil solutions.Chris Adams: Yeah, basically if you can find a way to avoid burning fossil fuels to quickly respond to changes on the grid, you need to generate power quickly or reduce power quickly, and this is what some of this stuff makes possible, essentially. So you can either reduce demand from data centers or feed power in instead of the gas.Yes.Asim Hussain: know how, how, how much we try every single episode to not be a podcast about the energy system. We end up being a podcast talking about the energy system.Chris Adams: We're talking about distributed systems in my view, and like the internet and the grid are, there's lots of similarities between these two things. So anyway, we can move away cuz we're talking about the idea that if you are prepared to be flexible on this, then you can get paid quite a lot of money for this.And that doesn't mean like it's okay for you to be doing this stuff. But if you say that you're only doing this for the goodness of your own heart, there may be changes in the law that mean that you're not really allowed to say that now. And this is some of the new stories. There's next story actually.Asim Hussain: The EU Commission's, anti-green washing law proposal.Chris Adams: Yeah, so this was published, I think end of March, was the draft version of this, which basically says that, uh, later on this year, pretty much all the, there'll be moratorium on new kind of certification schemes, if anything, marking something as green. And also you'll only be allowed to use a certain set of really explicit, like the greenhouse gas protocol and stuff like that.They're gonna say every single claim has to match up to this stuff here. So there's gonna be some really much more stringent stuff, and there'll be like injunctive things saying that if you don't, we can basically force you with the full force of the law to stop you talking about power being green, for example, or things being presented or things being ocean friendly, for example.Asim Hussain: Is that driving things more to certain well defined terms? Like academic terms? If you say the word when you say you're a hundred percent powered by renewables, I'm like, okay, let's break that down for a second. What do you mean?Chris Adams: Yeah,Asim Hussain: You know, like what does thatChris Adams: so the early version I saw in the stats basically is quite nerdy in terms of it's using all the kind of recent technical language, and there is probably gonna be a challenge in terms of how people communicate that because the good example of this is Ireland once again, cuz we're talking about Ireland anyway, right?What we saw before this was that the advertising agency in Ireland, Basically banned energy companies using the term a hundred percent renewable for power in Ireland, because Ireland only has 35% of its power coming from renewables. So therefore it can't possibly be a hundred percent right. And it has implications for all the people running data centers in Ireland, right?So suddenly where people have been talking about, oh yeah, our cloud super green, a hundred percent green. Now you've had the laws basically saying, no, that's not allowed to, you can't make those change. And this go next story has a similar thing to this cuz you are seeing a similar story in the UK the Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Bill is going through law, and this is a bit like the GDPR.The idea is that if you are making misleading green claims and you continue to make them, when you're told to stop, you'll be liable to finds of up to 10% of global turnover for misleading green claims. So this might explain here.Asim Hussain: say anything about green at all from this pointChris Adams: I think this is the thing that was interesting cuz back to the world of cloud recently Amazon used to have a hundred percent sustainable as one phrase that was used.But in the last year there was a change to say up to 90 x percent renewable instead. And I was wondering why they made these changes, cuz Google say we're a hundred percent renewable. Microsoft says we're a hundred percent renewable. Amazon has been really weirdly coy about this and I wonder if it's because they saw this lawsuit coming through. Realize that even if you are following the letter of the law and the way that you know, if you purchase enough renewable credits, you get to say your stuff is green. If it's seen as misleading to consumers, then you're still not allowed to. It may be that like organizations, they were being a bit careful about this stuff because yeah, there's a real shift in this stuff happening basically.Asim Hussain: Well I welcome this. I think one of the challenges that I see in our space, and it's something that I've railed up, talked about thing before, is the different languages that organizations use. Like I was picking something up the other day. I think it was some food and it had written on it carbon negative at the top, which is a term which has no legal definition, carbon. And underneath it in smaller writing, it wrote climate positive. And I was like, okay, so it's carbon negative and climate positive. What do both of those things mean? And it's like so much left to interpretation. Whereas if we landed on, you know, like we work in standards in the foundation, if you land on a very standard definition of this stuff, I think that's really beneficial to the end user.I think yes, it might take some time for them to learn the language that we are talking about, but they will bother to learn it cuz finally when somebody says something, they'll understand what it means.Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree. I think this is positive. I think it possibly suggests a problem for yourself as a director of the Green Software Foundation, and myself, a director of the Green Web Foundation. So we, we have to might have to end up with a much less catchy sounding name of our respective organizations, Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh my word. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I'll take it.Chris Adams: Okay.Alright, so let's, we're just coming up to the end. Should we wrap up? Are there any events or things that we should be pointing people to or is there a list of up coming conferences we might tell people about?Asim Hussain: Probably as we get close to Earth Week, there's a bunch of meetups being launched through the foundation. People are running a bunch of things around Earth Week, but yeah, we'll talk on, talk about it at a future episode.Chris Adams: For next week. All right, then. That's it for our news and events roundup for this part, all the resources in this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below. If you're looking at this podcast, and you can also visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation In your browser.And if you did enjoy this show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And your feedback is very valuable. It helps us reach a wider audience and hopefully helps improve the content of this show. So thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.So bye from me.Asim Hussain: And bye for me.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 Asim Hussain is joined by two of only a handful of people to try and calculate the emissions of software; Navveen Balani of Accenture and Srini Rakhunathan of Microsoft. In this episode of TWiGS Navveen does a deep dive into the processes behind Accenture’s use of the SCI Specification to calculate a measure to track and, ultimately, reduce the carbon emissions of one of its internal reference applications. Asim also quizzes Srini on the upcoming CarbonQL project by the Green Software Foundation which Srini is leading. We also get some links to great resources (particularly for UX folk) and some exciting event news!Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterNavveen Balani: LinkedInSrini Rakhunathan: LinkedIn Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:How Accenture Implemented the SCI Specification Score to Track Software Emissions / GSF [2:59]CarbonQL / GSF [19:49]Powershell Module For Watttime Emission Data / Watttime [25:15]Events:GSF London Meetup (Thursday, March 23 at 6-9pm GMT) / GSF [30:12]Resources:Circa by Andy Wood (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF[26:56]Sustainable Design Toolkits for UX Designers: / Vitaly Friedman [27:33]Sustainable UI (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF [28:27]Green Jobs Network / greenjobs.net [31:52]Branch Magazine / climateaction.tech [34:04]lowwwcarbon.com [34:32]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: Oh my God, that's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problemsNavveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable softwareAsim Hussain: as long as it's not my ops, as long as it's somebody else's ops, it's not my problem only joking.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 and your host Asim Hussain.Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development, I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Today we'll be discussing the latest development from a bunch of people, but on the call we've got Navveen from Accenture. We're gonna talk about some of the work that they've been doing calculating carbon emissions are using what's called the SCI specification, which we've been developing, the Green Software Foundation, and we'll also be sharing some valuable resources and some exciting events to do with the world of green software. Before we begin, let me introduce our guest for the episode of TWiGS, with us today, we have Navveen.Navveen Balani: Hi everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm a chief technologist with the Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture. Very excited to be here. I look at innovation and creating assets at the intersection of technology and sustainability. I'm also a Google Cloud certified fellow and a published author with several technology books.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yeah, I did discover just how many books Navveen has been writing. You just, you go to his Amazon profile, there's quite a few there. I know how hard it's write one book, Navveen, so I'm quite impressed. Oh, it's you.Srini Rakhunathan: Hi, I'm Srini. I'm with Microsoft and I'm working for the sustainability division of Microsoft. Sustainable Software is something that, that, it was just a spark about three years back in January when the goals around carbon emissions were announced, and I immediately wanted to do something within the consulting space for which I was part of at Microsoft, but I'm happy to be here.And then Greens Software has started and I've been with them since I think the beginning and as far my interest with green software is going, I like to write a lot of blog articles because they're small and probably can finish it within a couple of weeks. A little lazy that way. But yeah, it's been exciting working with GSF, the different groups and I just look forward to learning a lot from this initiative.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. It's great. It's great to have you both here and you've both been involved in green software since before the foundation were born. You've both been involved since day one of the foundation, so yeah, really appreciate it. So let's go with the news. Let's start off with the first piece of news.So this is an a piece on our website, which is called How Accenture implemented the SCI Specification score to track software emission. We were gonna cover this last week, but we figured it made more sense to wait till this week so we could be joined by Navveen because Navveen, you work at Accenture and you are one of the authors of this post.So yeah. Why don't you tell us people a little bit about what the article's about, and I'd love to know what were some of the challenges you faced while trying to calculate the SCI specification. Just very quickly, just explain to everybody, and the SCI is something called a Software Carbon Intensity specification, and it's a specification being developed by the Green Software Foundation to measure carbon emissions of software.So yeah, over to Navveen.Navveen Balani: Thank you Asim. The SCI provided us with a practical methodology to baseline carbon emissions offer software application included embodied emissions and reducing the same. And when we started realizing the SCI specification, we found out getting accurate data for energy and embodied emissions was quite challenging.And as we were deploying the application on cloud, many of these details were abstracted by the cloud vendors. . So we had to change our focus from getting accurate data to probably approximations and work towards getting a baseline for our SES code. And once we had the SES code, we basically have a value to track.And as long as you use the same approximation, you could easily identify what caused the reduction in GI code, for instance, did you change the code to be more energy efficient? Or you did hardware optimizations and based on hard hardware optimizations, the energy estimation got reduced. So with SCI and using this SCIis a score, we were able to in our carbon emissions and once we had the score, we went about with various reduction techniques.Asim Hussain: So you basically, you calculated the SCI score using a type of ar, like a reference architecture. Could you describe the type of application that you were trying to calculate a score for?Navveen Balani: Yeah, so our reference architecture was basically a three tier application, which was deployed in the cloud we had using the interfaces create created using Web application. At the backend, we have developed all the application code was available as a set of containers, which was deployed on a container management.We had an API gateway, which all communications happened to the API gateway. And at the backend we had a few databases and no SQL and SQL databases, which stored the data for the application as well as alt-text information. And then we have other cross-cutting concerns like security logging, right, which is provided by the cloud vendors.Asim Hussain: So it's basically like the, this is, this is about 95% of all applications in the world. Is this basically right apart from a database, an api and some compute using one mechanism or another, virtualized machines or something else. And you mentioned earlier, earlier cause you, because I think the, the thing you mentioned at the start is the thing that comes up all the time, which is a data problem.It's a data problem. I think it's a problem that we've, we three have discussed for quite a while now. So what were the solutions like, how did you solve the data problem to be, to be good enough for you? As in like how did you solve getting good enough data for you?Navveen Balani: Yeah, getting data was a challenge because. Most of the data right, is currently not available, or I will say really available. So we have to look at certain approximations. For instance, the first was around energy calculation and the various approaches to calculate energy curves. Some are based on coefficient values, like how many Watt Hours it would take to run a virtual machine.Some are based on statistical methods and some provide methodology through a set of APIs. And most of the energy calculation strategies are based on certain approximations, so there is no single source of truth. And the intent here is to basically use the same methodology for any future calculation. So you could actually have a baseline and then you use the same approach again and again to find out the SCI score.Asim Hussain: So when you say an energy curve, you are talking about trying to calculate how much energy is actually consumed by a CPU because it's a curve, right? It's not linear. It's a curve. Yeah. And what did you land on in the end? So what, which solution did you land on in the end? You mentioned a couple of solutions there.Navveen Balani: We went ahead with a combination of a statistical based method and uh, APIs, which are provided through various third party sources, and we found out that we have to pick up one of the values. So we went ahead with a statistical based method, which provided in our instance, a better accuracy, I would say.So our concern was to find out, accurate method will we end up using? Right. So statistical based gave us a good, I would say benchmark, but even if you have picked up the API method also, it was not about more about accuracy, but I think it's more about getting a value, right? So that we could unblock ourselves to arrive at an energy curve.Asim Hussain: And so that's basically just a, just a sim- I'm, I consider myself the simplification. I'm the five year old on the call and you have to explain it. I'm asking the five year old questions. So you're basically talking about being able to provide some model with some inputs, be it. I'm guessing CPU utilization, maybe RAM usage, maybe.It depends how much telemetry you can gather. If you can gather as much telemetry as possible, I'm passing that into a model which then just pumps out for you. Given all these inputs, we guesstimate your energy consumption is that amount because you actually don't know, like I can tell you from like Intel's perspective, I'm with Intel now, so I can tell you from Intel's perspective, like we have certain tools, like for instance, Intel's RAPL, but Intel's RAPL only really gives you data at the socket level. The mechanical mechanism of being able to calculate electricity, we can only give it you at the socket level just cuz that's the pipe coming in and there's lots of model-to get that to the process level, you have to do lots of modeling to try and figure out how much of that incoming value do we partition off to all the processes running on a machine. So at some level you always have to use statistical modeling, even if you've got like a direct measuring capability. I'd say yeah.Navveen Balani: So, yeah, as you pointed out, right? So it was as long as you can get telemetry data, whether it's CPU, Memory usage, storage utilization, network input, and output bites. Right? You should then convert it into some energy curves, some statistical models, and get a value, which is, yeah, which is your energy curve.Asim Hussain: So what, let me ask you another question. So Srini, you and Navveen are just, there's a rare set of people in this world who've actually tried to calculate the emissions of software. I think you, there's probably, I used to say there's only two or three people who've ever attempted it, and now it's probably more like 10, 12.But there's a small like limited skillset. So, and I'll start with you Navveen. I'll ask Srini as well. So what are your key takeaways from implementing something like the SCI specification?Navveen Balani: Yeah, so that's a great question. So I would say we had three key takeaways from this case study one was around energy calculation, and as I mentioned, there were various approaches for calculating energy curves and there was no single source of truth. And the intent here was to use some method for future calculations to compare against the baseline.And we documented the various approaches as part of the SCI Guide project, which I worked with Srini. And this can be a starting point for all software practitioners to calculate energy of this software system, whether it's using surgical methods, coefficient, or API-based technique. The second takeaway was around embodied emissions.So the type of underlying hardware for running virtual machines and it's embodied emissions are currently abstracted by the cloud vendors. And we had to rely on certain approximations based on VM-type to calculate the embody emissions. And we relied on sources from the cloud carbon footprint, which had an Excel, which talked about for a given virtual VM type, what is the scope three emissions.And there's similar study from Vista also, which talks about the cal- scope three emissions for a given hardware type. And third was around the cloud managed services. Uh, so there were certain managed services and shared services like the API gateway, load balancer, where the type of hardware is not listed by the cloud vendor.In certain scenarios, we had to rely on certain approximation like we did with API gateway. We just assumed that 5% of our total carbon emissions goes to API gateway. And for serverless components, we relied on, uh, using, uh, a timeshare approximation and the utilization to come up with a carbon emission score.Asim Hussain: So you just, for serverless, you just assumed it was like a normal workload, but the just your time shared it just cuz underneath it's a normal workload. It's a normal server that's been using it underneath. There is a serverNavveen Balani: that's right. So we wanted to attribute some value to it because we thought, okay, maybe a 5%, uh, based on our overall load might make sense to at least give some emission value to the API gateway.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Good takeaways. Srini as somebody else who's been calculating SCI scores for a while, do you have any other takeaways from your experience implementing SCI scores that you think might be useful for other people to know?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks for the question. I think I completely echo what Naveen said about learning how to do embodied emission calculations as well as for serverless. Other couple of things that comes to my mind, the first takeaway I would say is from a, the case study that I picked up was very similar to what Navveen was talking about.Mine was a managed services set of application. I managed set of services combining to form a website. It's as simple as that. We had a Web application, you had a middle. I didn't even have an api. All that I had was a direct database, but to make things simple for me I chose managed services from a deployment standpoint, but from a calculation standpoint, it's the most hardest thing because a lot of abstraction is happening under the hood in terms of the, like Navveen has said, the database server, the front end server, and also if you talk about real production application.You have replication. You have active configurations, active passive configurations. So the first takeaway that for me was from an infrastructure standpoint, the complexities around the deployment will we take into account the development machines that help build that infrastructure in the place? What should be included?What should be excluded? So for me, the first and foremost thing is to define or be very clear. Around your software boundary, and that's where you need to make it iterative. Try not to boil the ocean in the first place. Say I've included everything. No, that's not how it works. Right? You need to iteratively keep adding and your calculation also ends up becoming iterative.Second takeaway I would say is the networking piece, which was, I think we have talked about it enough in many of our group calls. It may sound the easiest to measure, but the most difficult to calculate. I can just go in and say, this is my data in, this is my data out in bytes. Hey, gimme the number. There's no reference number at all.There's no reference multiplication factor that you can use. So I believe there are lots of studies going on and this is an area where we could do a lot, we could, we could invest in a lot of academic research to figure out what would be the best way to do this. And third, I think for me a revelation was I needed to brush up on my high school physics.I needed to understand what's energy, what's power, what's joules. It's very important. It's just not software development anymore. If you talk about sustainable software, you need to know your basics, and so you should study.Asim Hussain: I can tell you somebody's moved from like software development at Microsoft to Intel. I ask questions, which I think are just, I'm expecting an answer oh code it this way. Half my answers involve the word voltage. It's somewhere in the answer, and I'm like, whew. It's almost like a lost art. And I wonder if the secret to all of our world is this.There's like a lost art to programming back in the day, like what you described, and I talked to a lot of people at Intel who, who write software at the very low level. And the understanding of what you're saying is inherent, it's natural. We've become so abstracted away and the abstractions are useful because make for faster development, but there is a nature of understanding how the discipline programmer in silicon has become quite distant.Whereas if that reduced, that'll be something I think that interestingly might help us in our space. I've been thinking about this. I don't know if I've spoken to both of you about this yet, but this idea that I've had around, like you mentioned, software boundary Srini, and that's something we've spoken about a lot.I know Navveen, you've been driving a project for a while now. The SCIentology, which I, I think we should change that name. Navveen. It's just the suggestion cuz it's SCIentology. But anyway, you've been driving a project around like when someone saves my application. What do they mean? What do you include in an application and what do you not include in application?Because one of the things I've seen historically when people publish carbon footprints for applications is they conveniently cut out bits that they are either just inconvenient to calculate, but they are part of your application boundary. Like I've been thinking a lot more about monitoring. The monitoring of an application, like when you have these larger applications, you're monitoring all these different components of your software product.You're monitoring the database, you're monitoring the front end, you're monitoring this, you're monitoring that, and I've been having this idea that what if you defined your software boundaries, everything that you're, if you care enough about some software component to monitor it, is that philosophically part of your software application? Does that make sense what I'm saying here right now?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. And I think if you wanna make it systemic, if you want to make your calculation systemic and repeatable, you would. That's how we do, right? When we, when we want to calculate the number of users who are actually using their application, we fall back to telemetry, we find, and that's, we use words like user journey and scenarios, et cetera, et cetera.But then here, if you really wanna understand what are your operational emissions, you need that telemetry, you need that telemetry across the, all the software components in a system. So yeah, definitely it's, it's, it's a must have.Navveen Balani: I also think maybe if there is a simple way to calculate operation emissions and carbons directly from the data which has already been available or gathered, the whole generation of SCI's score might be very simplified. Maybe do whatever data you have, if you are maybe proxy data, cost data and some efficient way of converting that to a score because one of the challenges I would say is going through the SCI requires a fixed set of steps, right? Defining your boundary calculations, coming up with the conversions, and so it has sequence of steps, it takes time, but any available proxy, if you are able to quickly generate a SCI score, at least some benchmark.I think that would be an ideal scenario, and maybe it's integrated as part of your DevOps in future. So you don't need to do much, right? Just build. Get a score next release, get a score. Maybe you're not there yet, but hopefully that's the intent and direction.Asim Hussain: It's come up a couple of times on the podcast about the GreenOps, DevSusOps, that aspect of it, and actually monitoring is part of that. That's what you think of when you think of DevOps and is it, I think it is. There's monitoring. I hope it is. Someone should be monitoring my applications. It's not me. Hope it's a DevOps people.Maybe the DevOps people think it's me,Navveen Balani: Now we are giving more additional responsibility to DevOps. I would sayAsim Hussain: yeah, , that's just, that's just . Oh my God. That's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problems.Navveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So you integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable software system.Asim Hussain: As long, as, long as it's not MyOps. As long as it's somebody else's ops. It's not my problem, but I'm joking. So maybe let's bring it back down to an interesting, I think both of you also work on, I think I teased in a previous podcast episode this idea of something called the CarbonQL Project, which Srini you're leading, you both heavily involved in, maybe let's flip over into that and talk about this brand new project that we're launching in the foundation called CarbonQL.Do you wanna give it a quick overview?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks Asim. Again, this has been something that I'm really excited that there is going to, 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 or passed 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 frame. 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. Navveen do you want to add anything?Navveen Balani: So maybe I think CarbonQL will be a Chat GPT of Sustainable Tech. You ask questions, what is your emission for laptops? What is your emission for mobile phone? What is the emission for your CPU? What is the emission for my software boundary? You give us spec, right? So can we ask easy as you just give us spec or a software boundary or the artifacts from SCI anthology if you define something and just please provide me a emission so it can make lives easier for people who want to calculate carbon emissions and maybe provide a simplified way of getting carbon emissions be for developers. DevOps, if they're able to provide that vision and implementation. I think the calculation journey would be quite simplified and more adaptable, right to all the development community.Asim Hussain: I think we've mentioned the chat GPT every episode for the last 10 episodes now. So it's come. It's come up again. Yeah. Just for the audience. It is not a flavor of chat GPT. You are not going to be typing in what is the carbon emissions of my three tier thing. I think what you're alluding to is there's quite a few different methodologies and data sets and models and statistical models you can use.And are you on a laptop and maybe you want to use this model. Are you calculating from mobile phone? Maybe use this model a server, use this model or this API or this data set. And I think what I've always found is that the set of people like you, two or two, a very rare set of people who've actually sat down and calculated this stuff manually.The knowledge that's in your head is rare. Actual, real experience. People can read like roughly theoretically how to calculate and sum it all together. But you've actually got like that real knowledge and what I see is CarbonQL is gonna try and codify that so that anybody else. Does not need to be an expert in this space.They can just say, I'm using the greenhouse gas protocol methodology. I'm running on these types of machines. This is the telemetry I've managed together, but I don't really have all of it. And then you'll just figure out the rest and like use all of your expertise and all of your best judgment to combine all the data sets into one, which I think is, yeah, it's been the number one problem.I've heard from everybody about the SCI since day one was data. It's really hard. There's lots of data sets out there. We don't even know if they can merge. I get this number from one dataset. I get a number from another dataset. Can I add them together? Is that possible? We don't know, so the set of people who know that is low and you're two of the sets of people who know that.Navveen Balani: I think the data, once we have CarbonQL implemented, right? I think through the data we'll get various insights across all data sources. Maybe that might be a good way to look at the various data trends, right across all these, um, APIs and SCI, right? Whether you want to use average value or which works for a given scenario.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm really, really excited for this project. I think this is one of the projects we, we've, uh, it's been on the tip of our tongues for a while now. and it's just really exciting to get it and there's been a lot of interest from various organizations in the foundation from getting involved, so I'm, there's a lot of interest in this.So really excited to see what you both and the rest of the team deliver on this front, and we'll get you on the podcast again as things get a bit more mature to talk about kind of where the progress is. Let move on now to few of the other bits of news. One other bit of news that's happened recently is a PowerShell module for Watttime emissions data.So Watttime are one of the organizations that price carbon intensity for electricity. They are a member of the foundation. So Henry Richardson and the team at Watttime have released a PowerShell module that retrieves near real time emissions data from Watttime for a supplied Azure region during resource deployment, this is a really lightweight solution.It utilizes the limited functionality available with one of the Watttime's free accounts. Because it is a pay, they do need to earn money, and it's not really like a real solution for reducing carbon deployments of software. I imagine to get that data, you probably should pay for the full licensed versions of the data and get the more accurate data.But it does provide some nice real-time values to simulate the behavior of deployments and software based on emissions without the cost of a paid account. So all they need, they'll need an account on Watttime, and you'll need the AZ resources PowerShell module for Azure installed. I need to connect all to Azure account.This is a really great free resource, which we're gonna link in the show notes. Are any of you PowerShell users? Are any of you PowerShell users? Cause I've got to admit, I am not.Srini Rakhunathan: I have used it.Asim Hussain: You have used it. Srini's like, I work at Microsoft. I should know I should be a PowerShell power user. But you are like how I used to be at Microsoft, which is, I don't really use SharePoint, but yeah.Power PowerShell. Yes, I PowerShell is, it's like a command line tool from my understanding for Windows, isn't it? Yeah. So it's really exciting. Cause I know it's using a lot of DevOps scenarios. Pretty simple idea and we think so complicated about the world that we do. This is a really simple idea. Just bringing a lot of this functionality into the command line interface all by itself is, I think, quite valuable.Navveen Balani: No, I just remember we had a similar innovation right in the hackathon that we did some something around shell trying to get carbon intensity.Asim Hussain: Circa that was it! It was called Circa. Yeah, in the hackathon we had last year. That's a good, that's a good memory. We had a, yeah, I remember now. There was one of the submissions was Circa, it was one of my favorites and it was a command line where you typed circa. Then you type the command that you wanted to execute, and it would literally just do a sleep.Such a simple idea, just a sleep on the command line until the electricity becomes better, and then it lets the command run. So all these simple ideas. Very, very good. So let's move to the next one. So sustainable design toolkit for UX designers. This is from Vitaly Friedman. I've met him. We, I've been, I've spoken at his Smashing Mag conference.I've met him at quite, quite a few conferences. So Vitaly if I've got your frame name wrong. I'm really sorry. So he's released a really cool list of sustainable design toolkits for UX designers, all with practical guidelines, frameworks, and tools to focus on what matters and removes what doesn't. The list is really comprehensive and includes a UX checklist for sustainability. It looks really useful. Again the link's down the show notes. I took a quick look at it earlier on today. He posted it. If you know there's a big post on LinkedIn and there's a lot of great stuff, I get asked about this. I just got asked about it last week. I spoke at a conference and people are asking for like a UX framework.Because a lot of what we talking about starts at the UX level. We do need to build some of this functionality. I remember what there was one, again, like coming back to the Carbon Aware Hackathon last year, there was one proposal, which I thought was really interesting, which is like carbon aware components you can put into websites.So like a literal carbon aware, I think it was carbon video or something. You can type a HTML tag called Carbon Video. and it would play the video if it was electricity was clean and if it wasn't clean it was, I think it would just play the audio component of the video, save on energy or something like that.So I think a lot of this stuff, it all starts really at that stage. Before you even speak to a developer, it's probably the best time to do a lot of your sustainability thinking. Did you guys have a chance to look at this? Don't worry about it. If you don't, UX is for the other folks.Navveen Balani: I think given how the UX will evolve, right? Particularly new interfaces maybe in Metaverse, right? I don't know. We will have a lot of thinking to do to decarbonize the entire UX story. Not now. Maybe when you see a lot of emissions where everything is virtual. I don't know what kind of carbon emissions we would have, right?Maybe five years, 10 years down the line.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting point. Or may, maybe the only interface with how five years down the line is a version of GPT that just work GPT or your laptop just opens up and it's a chat GPT, like command line at the bottom and that's it. There's nothing else left for us to do, do my work for the day.You know, I joke about this, I had to hunt around for it, but I actually found. Four years ago I was giving a talk. I think I tricked an audience into thinking I'd built an AI that could make a website. From a textural description, I tricked the audience. And then just last week it happened, and now the chat GPT four can see a picture of a website and code it for you.So I, I wonder how long we've got left. Probably not as long as we think, but while we're here, let's make sure we go out with the bang. Last thing, lemme talk very quickly about the really excited the Meetup program. So the Green Software Foundation has a meetup program, meetup program where we support meetup groups.If you wanna launch a meetup group around green software, In your region, or actually we've got like 20 regions where we already have members of groups, where we are actually missing organizers and leaders. If you're interested in launching a meetup group or or taking over or co-organizing a meetup group or even speaking at meet group or even being involved in any which way in a meetup group at all, go to meetup.greensoftware.org.I'm very excited cuz this week actually GSF the London Meetup, which the first one that we're launching now is having an event on Thursday, March 23rd at 6:00 PM GMT. It's at the MasterCard offices in Angel Lane in London. There's more links in the show notes. Chris Adams is going to be there, so he's visiting from Germany.I'll be Liya Mathew and Sarah Hsu from Goldmans is gonna be there. Daniel Vaughan's gonna be there for MasterCard. And big thanks to MasterCard for helping us host this event. And gen- are offering the venue. So if you're in London and you're listening to this podcast, pop over to the meetup. Thursday at 6:00 PM and if you're interested in launching a meetup, please reach out to us and we'd love to, uh, get your help and we'll to help support you launching a meetup.So that's it for our news and events roundup. As part of the new format of TWiGS, we have a short closing question that we'd like to ask our guests, and it's gonna be different every single week. So whilst I go and figure out my answers, question's going to be, I'm going to ask Srini, what is a go-to green website that you have booked in your, bookmarked in your browser.Srini Rakhunathan: So we are part of a sustainability action group within Microsoft and a couple of months back during one of the community calls, there was a website which is founded interesting. On green jobs. Yeah. And I don't think it's a carrier website or a job search site, but I found it interesting that it collated all types of green jobs.You know, it could be an electrical engineer, it could be as simple as a sustainability policy maker. So I think I have it in my bookmark. I keep looking at it and trying to understand what types of carriers are there in the sustainability space.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Great. Send it over our way. We'll put it in the, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Navveen, what go-to Green website? Have you bookmarked in your browser?Navveen Balani: Interesting question. I would say, I think the simplest answer would be go to google.com. . I think from a, I think from a technology perspective also, and from a sustainability perspective, also, they have very simple interface where you can get whatever information you want, right? So I really love the way they have for the last 10 years.Made the search more. Yeah, minimalistic. I would say for the two decades, I would say I haven't seen it change much. And maybe through that I'll explore more websites, but. . That is what I think it comes to my mind. That's probably billions of people might be using.Asim Hussain: Just remembering, like back in the days when like search engines were like appearing, like there were just big messes on the screen, but Google's was just like this empty page. And then this thing in the middle, and it was like a breath of fresh air rather than all these other sites you're going to. So for me, I've gotta be honest with you, like my head is fully in the foundation and kind of the, the, the, I was just checking, I was just literally checking my history, my bookmarks right now and like we are currently like building out a wiki, so like pretty much every other bookmark right now on my website is a wiki page where we're trying to flesh out like every single aspect of, I, I joke that I manage kind of the, the operating system for the foundation and we're like building out what the operating system is and how we work and how to get involved and lots of information there.So that'll be coming up not right now, but in a future episode be released in the Wiki, but that's, that tends to be what I'm working on. The only other kind of, I think, website that I really love in this space is is Branch Magazine. , which is, uh, Chris Adams who's the other host who of this podcast talks about.He's built it originally, but it's a wonderful like magazine, which has like lots of articles about green technology and the really cool thing about, it's also carbon aware, so, when it, the electricity's dirty, that doesn't show images and when electricity's clean. So actually it kind of implements what it's, Oh! I have another one as well actually! I just remembered another website, but I'd admit I don't have it bookmarked cuz I just remembered it. But there's a website and I just discovered it the other day. I think it's very cool. It's low lowwwcarbon.com and it's a showcase of low carbon websites, how they've done it, and the case studies, how they implemented it, some examples.That's a pretty cool website I've got. So yeah, I didn't think I'd have any, but I've had, I've got a couple actually now just so it just goes to show. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below, or you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software, one word foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.Bye-bye.Navveen Balani: Thank you for listening.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

This episode of TWiGS has Chris Adams at the helm again with guests Asim Hussain and Anne Currie. They talk about the impact of Web 3.0 and why the future of immutable blockchains needs to be open source and sustainable and perhaps isn’t the only solution out there. They also talk about recent news from the BBC, AWS and highlight some great resources for you to expand your knowledge in the world of sustainable software.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions: / BBC [3:34] Amazon denies claims hiring freeze is slowing AWS sustainability work / Computer Weekly [13:55]Nori launches Web3 Marketplace: / Nori [24:38]Why the future of Web3 needs open source, sustainable blockchains: / Linux Foundation [33:35]Events:QCon London Software Conference (March 27-29, 2023): / QCon [35:14]Resources:Sustainability at AWS re:Invent 2022 / Adrian Cockcroft FOSDEM 2023 Responsible Clouds and the Green Triangle / Chris Adams [12:42]OVH’s 2020 announcement of carbon and energy metrics APIs for customers / OVH [21:46]The Cloud Energy Project / Green Coding Berlin [24:02] Asim’s Interview with Nori’s Founder on The Climate Fix [26:35]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!Transcription Below:Asim Hussain: In the foundation we talk about carbon efficiency, which is minimizing the amount of carbon per whatever unit per value that you're providing to the end user. And I think there's multiple ways you can think about that cuz you can actually think about fundamentally changing the nature of your application so that you can actually provide the same value without even needing the same functionality.And I think that's kind of the way we need to really think about this stuff.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 this week's 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 have some exciting announcements from the world of energy standards for software, and yes, even Web 3.0, we also bring you some exciting upcoming events. Before we dive in though, let me introduce our participants for this episode of this week in Green software. With us today, we have Anne. Hi Anne!Anne Currie: Hello, Chris.Chris Adams: And we have Asim Hussain. Hey, Asim.Asim Hussain: Hi Chris!Chris Adams: Okay, so if you don't know Asim and Anne, maybe we should, they should introduce themselves.I'll hand over to you Anne first, if that's okay. Cuz it's alphabetically ahead of Asim. And then we'll know to you Asim. So Anne, for people who've never met you, how would you introduce yourself?Anne Currie: So my name is Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly 30 years, and I've been an engineer in various other things. And the past six or seven years I've been doing quite a lot on sustainable software. I work for a company or I work with a company called Container Solutions, and I am one of the co-chairs of the GSF Community Committee.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Anne and, Asim over to you.Asim Hussain: I really respect the going via alphabetical order. If you go to the Green Software Foundation website, you'll notice that all our companies are listed in alphabetical order. So as, uh, to be fair, So my name's Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. One of the ways I used to describe what I do there is I'm in charge of the GSF operating system.I'm like Linus Torvalds but for the GSF operating system, that's who I am. But I'm here to help all the wonderful people like Anne and Chris and every else involved in the foundation build their amazing solutions and help them to execute what they do.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Asim. Alright. My name is Chris. As I said before, I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I work with the Green Software Foundation. As their policy chair for the policy working group. And I also help run a small community online called climateaction.tech, which is passed recently, 8,000 techies working on climate and tech in this particular intersection.And, uh, Yeah, that's what I've, that's the thing I do. And that's the milestone that we've passed recently. But before we dive in, we should just stop and I'm just gonna make you all aware that anything we talk about today we'll share links. So if there's something that caught your eye, if you go to podcast.greensoftware.foundation, you'll see some links specifically to those stories.Okay. So I guess for that, folks, should we start looking at some of the news and see what's showed up in the news this week?Anne Currie: Yes, let's do that.Chris Adams: Okay, so the first one we have here is how slimmed down websites can cut their carbon emissions. This is a story from the BBC and this is the first time it's actually one of the set. The BBC has some, is some form in looking at this stuff.But this is a recent story that came out in the last week or two actually, and uh, I might hand over to either Anne or Asim who've got some records on this one because it's quite nice to see the BBC looking at this. But there's always more to this story than what you actually just see just here.Anne Currie: Chris, it's, it's interesting you've handed over to us for the reckons on this, because you are literally the world's expert in this particular field, are you not as the chairperson of the Green Web Foundation, which is entirely devoted to this very subject of how you make the Web less carbon intensive.Asim Hussain: I think Chris is being humble, soAnne Currie: A humble aside, Chris, what do you think? What do you think about this?Asim Hussain: Because you know what if I was ever asked? I will just forward the request and ask Chris what he thinks and then mirror that statement out to everybody elseAnne Currie: Indeed, so would IAsim Hussain: Yeah.Chris Adams: Well, the thing is I, the thing I can actually point to is that, that's nice of you to say, although I work at the Green Web Foundation, there are lots of other groups who are mentioned in this now. One of them is the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance, which I'm not so familiar with, but some of the other names, Wholegrain Digital and Eco Grader are both listed in here.In this, they talk about some of the tools that you can use to basically, estimate the environmental impact of a website by looking at how much data is sent over the wire. Now, the thing that I should share with you is that this is one way that you can, uh, Get a rough idea of what the environmental impact for Web website might be.But it's also useful to bear in mind that a phrase that all models are wrong, some models are useful, and we maintain a library called CO2.js, which helps get some of these kinds of conversion factors. So if you know how much you're using something, you might get an idea of what the environmental impact might be.But there's a lot more to just looking at the data that's sent over the wire. And I think I might hand over to one of you two here because there's a few other things I can tell you about, but I'd wanna make some space for either of you, because I'm pretty sure you have some questions at this point.Asim Hussain: So they talk in this particular article or the show about how the highlight of the story is how a UK knitwear designer was trying to do everything else with her business to be environmentally friendly, sourcing surplus yarn. Everything is made to order using hand powered knitting machine. But, Not being aware that her website emits con nine, was it 9.89 grams of carbon every time a user visits her homepage, which is 10 times the eco-friendly Web alliance's recommended limit of one gram. So that's an interesting aspect of it all, which is like you, you've got this person who's building this business. Interestingly, just as a slightly slide, my wife is also a UK based knitwear designer, and literally yesterday in the evening, she actually was spinning her own yarn using one of those oldie style like foot things.That's what she does. So this is, this is, we'll definitely watch that show. But yeah, it's interesting. So, You're doing all this stuff in your life, but you don't realize that your website, the thing that you're selling, your product actually has carbon motions as well. I think so. Chris, you were mentioning something before we used to hit recording.You mentioned something about how it was like people just realizing that , your digital aspect of your business is almost just completely ignored. You don't even think about it. And I remember like those, there was some, a video that came up to my radar the other day was just a bunch of young guys sitting around talking to each other and one of 'em going, did you know you can edit the internet?Another one going, yeah, you know, you can go to Wikipedia and just edit a page. No way you can editAnne Currie: Good luck with getting that edit accepted!Asim Hussain: but it was like, I feel like that's maybe the statement that's coming through from this show is, oh, did you know by the way, that websites also emit stuff they have, and there's things you can do to reduce that.And it's that realization in people's minds that this is actually an important aspect of their total emissions footprint.Chris Adams: This is true in that yes, the energy has to come from somewhere. That's definitely the case. Now, whether a website being 10 times the size of another website mean it means it has 10 times a carbon footprint, that's another matter. And I see you shaking your head. So I think, I reckon you've got something to share before I come in on this one as well.Anne Currie: Yeah, there are loads of factors, operational factors to take into account when it comes down to that. Where is the power coming that is powering the servers that are hosting that machine, for example, is, are you hosting somewhere where everything's green, all the power's green, in which case, you know, fill your boots, it's fine.Are you delivering content at a time when basically everything's green, so maybe only business content and therefore you're not really serving up at peak times? For example, in the evening when people are home, if you are a very popular website, then you might be using a cdn, you might be caching your data, and in fact, the more popular you are, the more likely the data is to be cached somewhere close to the Edge, so your website isn't even hit when the big images are pull pulled.So yes, there are loads of factors that are not just about whether you've got a really heavyweight framework that's serving up your webpages, although there are bad reasons for that as well. There are accessibility issues associated with very heavyweight web platforms as well. Cause often they do not have the accessibility features.That's basically an HTML based website would have. So there are lots of issues and lots of questions.Asim Hussain: It also depends upon the value that your website is providing to the end user as well. Because there's 10 grams per sending some lifesaving medication to something. It depends on the value it's providing as well. I'm sure we can always like, sure all of our products are as efficient as possible, but that is the one way.I really talk about it is in the foundation we talk about carbon efficiency, which is minimizing the amount of carbon per whatever unit per value that you're providing to the end user. And I think there's multiple ways you can think about that cuz you can actually think about fundamentally changing the nature of your application so that you can actually provide the same value without even needing the same functionality.And I think that's kinda the way we need to really think about this stuff.Chris Adams: Thanks Asim. Alright, so the thing I might share now is, yes, I agree that we'll do all these things. Accessibility is absolutely a factor that gets played into this because there's actually studies and there's evidence showing that, uh, Basically designing a digital service in a particular way can basically lead to induced updates.So people being forced to have to upgrade from, say an old phone to another phone and something like that. And when you bear in mind and Yeah, exactly. There's actually a really good study that was shared at a conference called The Limits Conference, where people are looking at the devices that were being used in various distance learning tools, and you could see very quickly, At a certain point how just certain devices just stopped showing up in the analytics at all simply because they were being, essentially they, the site was no longer accessible to people.And given that around 75% of the impact for most devices is actually from the manufacturing, not the use, this is one of the big leverage points actually. If you are interested in this, there is actually some work from the Green Software Foundation. There's actually a training course for this. In my organization we've recently published a handbook for community tech specialists who are basically taking their first steps into this. But the thing to bear in mind is that, It doesn't automatically follow that a website being 10 times the size is 10 times as bad for the environment. It really doesn't necessarily work like that.It's useful to start, but there are tools to, for you to get a much better idea and really observe directly where the energy is being used in the system. But in order for you to do that, you do need to have a bit more transparency through this. And because the internet is made up of so many different companies, that can be quite difficult and the story of transparency and companies when you're trying to understand where the hotspots are in digital services is a perennial one, but this is actually one that is actually getting better in that there are companies like Microsoft and Amazon and Google who now expose some of these metrics to end users.Asim Hussain: There is a very significant percentage believe it's safe to say like greater than 50% of all the energy. Like if you think of like using laptops, what is the application that's actually been used the most on a laptop? Like we think it's like the actual things we install. It's not, it's the browsers. So that's why websites are so much more significant than we may be give them credit for, because a significant portion of the energy from a desktop is be of my laptop.Desktop is being used to just to browse websites. I think the mobile, I've heard a slightly different story, which is that mobile use, people tend to still install things, but then they probably still install. That's a technology. Now, Web, you're installing effectively a Web. , but it's an installed thing. So I think like the Web is, at least in terms of end user devices, probably the most significant consumer of electricity I'm guessing here right now.And I'm also guessing that on the service side, that's not going to be the case. It's probably gonna be something more like a numerically computational like machine learning thing or something. I don't know.Chris Adams: So here's one thing that might be of use. So we spoke about the Firefox browser having some of these metrics cuz they've basically the people who build the Firefox browser set a target to make it the greenest browser possible. In order for them to do that. Need to see where the actual impact is taking place.And I dunno if any other browser that provides the same level of detail right now into this, and it'd be really lovely to see the other browsers doing this to expose those kind of metrics out there. But this is probably one way you can find out. So we could actually see which applications are doing this now in Germany at least there is some work going on to start providing a kind of labeling system for various processes.And uh, one thing that was shared at FOSDEM, a recent kind of open source conference was essentially comparing an open source word processing tool and a well-known proprietary word processing tool. And basically as you got a, a document open, the actual blinking cursor was basically one of the things that end up causing a massive spike in CPU every single time again and again.It might be fixed now. If you look up the project called SoftAware, and I'll share the link for that. There's a bit of information around here, and the folks at, oh God, KDE, they have spoken about this at length, and there's a really nice talk at FOSDEM about specifically this stuff. We'll share a link to it. Okay, so what's next on our list?There's another one, Amazon Sustainability work. This is a story in computing weekly and the short version, the headline is basically Amazon denies claims hiring freeze slowing AWS sustainability work. And, uh, as I can see it, basically a number of high profile people left the sustainability team within Amazon, and that's led to a number of people who are downstream as consumers or customers of Amazon thinking, oh Christ, what's gonna happen with the actual metrics?Is it gonna keep developing at the speed it was? And given the size of Amazon, this is probably quite a substantial story, basically.Anne Currie: Yeah, it does really matter what the HyperCloud providers do, really does matter. And it sounds like aws, have they, they had a bit of. They moved forward, they did quite a lot, but now suddenly they seem through falling back behind Azure and Google again. They're still making good progress, apparently on sourcing green electricity to power data centers.But in terms of that whole architecture, so it was two years ago now, I think they announced the sustainability. Architectural pillar, which was an indication that everyone needs to actually start thinking about how to we as Amazon users, we were responsible for the sustainability of our own systems within the cloud.So AWS said that, take responsibility for the cloud, but we had to be sustainable within the cloud. And that really meant things like using serverless, using spot instances, that kind of thing. Just being more efficient, turning things off when you're not using them and all that kind of stuff, and they had quite a focus on it, but lots of people have left and now there seems to be much less of a focus on it.And the thing is that with Amazon, the reason why I'm animated about it, because there's something we can do about it because. Amazon are very focused on customers and customers saying they want it. So here, if we want that to get focus back again, and it is important that it does have focus. We need to be telling our AWS reps that we care about this and we're annoyed that we're not getting the progress that we are seeing that we would've had we been on Azure or GCP.So yeah, use your wallet to have your, say, tell your AWS reps that you care about this and it needs to go back up the priority list.Asim Hussain: I feel capable of giving a balanced viewpoint now that I don't work for one of the hyperscalers anymore. But I also do, I do work with a partner who partners deep with hyperscalers, so I'm not gonna. Say anything wild. But what I will say is that like it was always like, cause I was at Microsoft at the time, like a couple of years ago, I remember there was an article by Wired very early days, just ranked the hyperscalers and gave them an A, B, C, D, F score.And I remember Google got B and Microsoft got B plus and Amazon got. Hopefully we'll correct, we'll make sure, we'll make sure the right number is there. I think it was like a D or an E or something like that. But the, from those days to just recently they moved, they accelerated very fast. I remember it was not last year.It must have been the year before. I remember that. So they announced a couple of things that, not the last reinvent, the previous re is it is reinvent every year. Is it everyAnne Currie: Once a year. Once aAsim Hussain: last, not the lastAnne Currie: It wasn't last night. It was the previous one. Yeah.Asim Hussain: they announced that the sustainability content, the WAF content, they're from the rightly, the well architected framework content.Then almost immediately they tease their cloud carbon footprint calculator, and I tell you right now, I was there thinking, oh, they're teased it. Well wait a year and then, then they'll announced it and within months it had come out. So I was at the sidelines going, wow, this's. They're really going for Amazon.Really impressed. This is excellent work. I chatted to people who were in there and I was very, I was honestly very, very impressed with Amazon's execution in this space. It was happening very rapidly, very fast. I, from what I heard internally, you know, this was actually being driven the way I would, I think it should be driven from within organization, which is top down.You were getting measured at the leadership level for sustainability commitments, which is why it was happening. So it's really sad to me to see an article like this, and I think there was this follow on conversation with Adrian Cockcroft on LinkedIn, which is about, there's cuts happening across the board in tech companies.And I remember I was quite naive at the start of the year. I was thinking, no one will touch sustainability, but we're on the chopping block like everything else.Chris Adams: Well, I guess if you're only making 300 billion in revenue each year, I gotta, I dunno how you're possibly gonna be able to hire anyone, right? How many hundreds of billions do you need to be earning before you can bring a sustainability team in? For folks who actually using Amazon and feel a little bit defensive about this.We've also shared a link to some of the sustainability theme sessions at the last AWS reinvent from Adrian Cockcroft's blog, where he's gone through the the list of all this and put together a number of really interesting and useful ones for this. But this is the thing that, as Anne says, if you were a customer of Amazon, this is probably one thing you could ask for to help a customer obsessed organization move a bit more quickly on something like this, because this is one thing where I think they're quite comfortably behind the other two right now. And given the size, they probably have disproportionate impact.Anne Currie: Yeah, so actually I do as well to add something like, because this has reminded me of something I'd forgotten about, but it's very relevant to this podcast. One of the things I'm working on at the moment is a book that I can talk about, which is a, a reissue of a book I wrote, ooh, about six or seven years ago about Cloud native and it had a lot of case studies in about people who are doing interesting things and we're just about to reissue.So we've re updated all the case studies. One of the case studies is a particularly interesting one from Skyscanner who are a company in the uk. And what they've been up to recently has been FinOps with a climate's twist. So they have been looking at ways to cut their hosting costs. And that's mostly been through, they have massively reduced their posting costs in a large part by using spots, by moving over to using spots.But the tool that they said, you know, actually it's the AWS stuff is better than it used to be, this tooling, but none of it's enough for them to really do a FinOps flywheel and proof test and a tool that they were really, and this is, I've never used this tool, but they were raving about it with something called Cloud Zero.And obviously I don't know them, I know nothing about them, but that appeared to be what they were using instead of good quality AWS stuff. Basically there are other tools out there that, and maybe that's why AWS and I really want AWS to keep the foot on the gas here, but there might be other tools coming out that do some of the job quite well.Keep your eyes open for other tools.Chris Adams: So I'm gonna come in here with a question, if that's okay to put to the two of you. And we have it written here. So let's say you're a customer of a cloud service provider, Amazon GCP, Azure, maybe OVH or ScaleWay, what do you actually need to have access to to effectively manage the environmental impact of digital services?Like Asim I reckon, this was some of the stuff that we were struggling with the software carbon intensity for figuring out some of the inputs for this, and I'm sure. I reckon you might have some reckons for people to know what to ask for.Asim Hussain: Yeah, this has been one of our first conversations on it Anne you were challenge. Yeah, the data. It's data. It's all the data problem, like speak, whether you calculate the standard that we are developing here, which is just for almost an internal metric for teams, a software co-, whether you're calculating a greenhouse gas footprint, whether you're doing an LCA, whatever it is, you need data.And the big problem is there's very minimal data that's surfaced to customers. It's not granular enough the methodologies are challenging to understand how given the methodology of that calculation, how can it actually be merged and combined with other data sets. So just a lot more transparency around that.And I also understand, I hear it from multiple sides, I understand it. It's sometimes quite challenges for organizations to reveal this data. I've even heard that at some point becomes such a contradiction where you could actually, some lawyers have said you're actually revealing materially non-public information about your company and that gain you trouble with the SCC.There's, it's a very complicated space, but the truth through all that complexity is more transparent data is what we need.Chris Adams: So there is one thing I will point you to and I'll add a link to this because one of the things I do where I work is we maintain a directory of kind of providers who share some of these numbers. OVH are probably one of the largest cloud providers. In 2020, they announced APIs for exposing both energy usage at an instant level, but also embedded carbon usage to figure these out numbers out.So these are the ones that we've been looking for ages for the SCI and like some providers expose them as part of the service. This is like mind blowing for me when I found out about, I tried to chase it up cause I'm not a customer from 2020. This was, I found a.Asim Hussain: they announced in 2020 or theyChris Adams: It. It was announced in 2020. I'll share the link.I'll share the post on LinkedIn where I was asking about it, because I'm not accustomed myself, so I don't know what the numbers look like. And honestly, this would be game-changing if that was actually something that was made available because it's just very difficult for people to actually have access to.And at the moment, most of this is people making educated guesses or using various kinds of modeled approaches, which don't necessarily match reality. A lot of the time.Asim Hussain: We will have to review that data and maybe we should come up with a. This of next podcast actually reviewing the data and then coming up with what we conclude rather than just being our guess guesses right now. But I would say one thing that comes up quite often is what we call measurement for reporting and measurement for action, and then large, again, one of the limitations that the hyperscalers have is because when they're actually giving that data, they're giving you from reporting perspective, which has different constraints and it's not so useful.It's not useful almost at all. I'd say from a developer perspective or very limited, useful usefulness perspective. If OVH are giving that data, hopefully it's providing it at a level of granularity, which is more useful to software practitioners, but I would then question whether or not it's the kind of data which would be approved from a regulator perspective to using GHG calculations or something.Anne Currie: So I think the SkyScanner experience is interesting in that the payoff of moving to spots is financially very impactful. So it's, yeah, in some ways, There's just tweaking and tuning a little bit, but if you make a radical change, sometimes that is quite apparent.Asim Hussain: It's gonna make it very easy to compare and contrast versus OVH isn't it?Chris Adams: So there's one thing I will just move on, just share one more link for us to maybe discuss the other time. There's a unimaginably titled Green Coding in Berlin, have a project called Cloud Energy, where they have basically put together some of these modeled ideas for this. Basically, look at this, the machine you're using, make some inferences about the provider, the number of calls and everything you have.To give you some numbers for this and, uh, I think they're doing a bunch of really interesting stuff in this field and they're doing it with a very open license. So open that maybe companies might not wanna touch , they're going AGPL rather than GPL. And uh, some people were okay with that. Some people aren't, they treat it like it's radioactive.Let's move on to the next story because Asim, we were talking a little bit about the fund that was Web 3.0, and this seems to be a thing that you might have some reckon on. Nori launches a Web three marketplace for offsets. So the story here is that Nori a US-based carbon removal marketplace. They've launched a Web 3.0 Marketplace specifically to essentially our people, what they call nori, carbon removal tons, so not NFTs, NRTs. And this seems to be something set up to allow you to purchase an offset and for want of a word, retire, make sure it can't be traded to someone else. That's the idea behind it, and I think this is partly in this has been shared because the Linux Foundation had a recent report on open source sustainable blockchains and, and I think you had some reckon about some of this that I might give some space to you or Asim can come in as the good cop to your immediate, your inevitable things to say here.Anne Currie: Yeah, cuz I would say that blockchain is so horribly tainted with general evil and terrible behavior that I would not want to touch anything associated with it with a 10 foot pole. We were talking last week about greenwashing, and to be honest, this is an awful lot in the financial press about ESGs being effectively ethics washing.This feels like an attempt to, ethicswash some aspect of blockchain, but I think there's the time. I think that the stable doors has truly is open on that one.Chris Adams: Has been closed after it's been bolted. Yeah. Yeah.Asim Hussain: Well, oh man. This whole space is so complicated because it also gets tainted with the whole blockchain emits lots of emissions aspect of as well, and it also gets tainted with, it's just a wild west of people getting money, getting stolen, left. I got lost in the rabbit hole of watching CoffeeZilla on YouTube.He's this internet detector who just rips into all these NFT scams out there in the world. But one thing I did actually interview the founder of Nori for an old podcast I used to have called The Climate Fix like quite a few years ago, like before I even really knew what an NFT was, he was describing to me this really complex thing and I was like, oh, I, oh, he was explaining it to me, but it was linked to what you were saying, Chris, earlier on, he introduced me to this whole idea. I was actually unaware of the fact that these carbon offset credits can actually sit as a financial asset in your books and be traded, which, which was shocking to me.So I could buy some credits this year, claim those credits, offset my carbon emissions this year. Next year sell the same credits to Anne, who could then claim those offsets for next year. But no one that goes historically back into my time and then says, well actually you don't have those credits for last year's.And so what they were doing with the, I'm not not going into the Web 3.0, but the blockchain aspect of their work was the ability to verify that a credit has been retired, and therefore cannot be traded against. I would buy it and retire it. I then can't sell it. I can buy it, not retire it, sell it to Anne, but if I buy it and retire it, claim those credits against my emissions this year, I then can't sell it again.It's my understanding of how it works.Anne Currie: That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, except that as is always the case with these blockchain things, there are other ways, other cheaper, and it doesn't have to be decentralized. Sometimes centralization is okay. If you had an authority that was saying yes, that is an okay carbon credit, which arguably we should have, we should have some kind of better standardization of carbon credit.Chris Adams: When I read this, the thing I don't quite follow for some reason. So this is where the ultimate source of truth is for lots of these, because as I understand it, blockchains are good for making sure that if you've put something, you can be sure that it hasn't changed because you have this kind of chain of kind of custody.You can see what the integrity of what might go all the way back, but in many cases, The actual kind of carbon removal parts are usually issued by a government somewhere. So you're not really trusting a blockchain, you're trusting a government. But what you're doing is, so in many cases you, there are a number of schemes where this has actually been issued.You have, there is some organization which is issuing these kinds of credits, and then they might be put into a blockchain to then be traded around. That means that I haven't actually got rid of the problem of trust. I'm still trusting an external organization, and I haven't really seen a really convincing way around that when I've seen any kind of blockchain related tool.I have to be honest, when I've looked at this, I'm still not totally sure who is actually, I'm trusting at this point here, and that feels like the thing that's ultimately worth looking into. And if you are interested in this, there is a report. The report is actually that this came from, it's actually not a bad word, it's not a bad read to be honest.Asim Hussain: Yeah.Anne Currie: I think it's unnecessary in this case to do that. You don't need it to be done that way. But the classic example of effective use of immutable ledgers is certificate revocation. Now in there you have a trust or authority, which is the authority that issued the certificate that then sits on the immutable ledger.And when it's revoked, everybody can see straight away that it's been revoked. And it means that nobody, for example, the people who no one trusts, which his governments in this case can't go in and arse around with that certificate without anybody knowing that, that that's happened. So you've got that transparency, you've got the immutability, but you still have the trust of the person.You've still got trust in that system, which is the person who issued the certificate, but you got protection from the person you are, you don't trust, which is the government. So you're right, but in this case, Chris, yeah, the government's in the chain . So what's the point?Asim Hussain: I would say one statement, which is when I did interview the founder of Nori a couple years ago, at the end of my interview, I felt more convinced that they were on the right side. I just can't remember all the points right now. And I would probably link it into the show notes here. They were doing this before there was even a language around this kind of stuff.So they, and I do remember specifically, there was a time I was like, oh my God. Yeah, another climate startup that's using blockchain. Are you just using the keywords to get the funding? And I know that was a feeling for a while as well, and we were having lots of conversations with people and then you dig into, you're like, this could be a database. This could be a database. This doesn't need to be block-. But then there were other time, and I think when I had that interview them, I was like, I remember feeling afterwards, okay, I see the argument for why this is a, this particular use case was important. So I will put that caveat out there. But then I'd also say, you should be asking me too much about blockchain.Chris Adams: In fact,. we can actually ask them. The folks at Nori maintain a really good, quite an informative podcast. If you are particularly interested in this field, then it's common has been going for a good few years and I actually was introduced to a bunch of quite interesting ideas when I found it. Like the carbon takeback policy, which was an idea related to oil and gas firms.The idea being that, okay, if oil and gas firm is gonna get some fossil fuels out the ground, they should be responsible for putting it back in the ground. Like they're able to make some money in the meantime, but they need to take on the actual responsibility to put it back if they're gonna do that. And that's the only circumstances by which they're allowed to work.Now you have an immediate reaction to this.Anne Currie: Well, I, it is an interesting point to make because I was saying that's the classic only reasonable use for an immutable blockchain is to protect from state level actors like the American government arseing around,Asim Hussain: That's the,Anne Currie: it's basically there to protect, protect people from the Amer, from American government, asking around with the.Chris Adams: I thought the American government was there to bail you out when your bank fails. Yeah, I thought that's what you're supposed to do when you're with your libertarian projects.Anne Currie: I don't think it's controversial. I think everybody knows that immutable blockchain in certificate revocation exists to make sure that no one, no matter how powerful i.e. The US government can ask anyone to muck around with a certificate, because if they do, it'll be obvious. It's people tying their own hands against they're states, people who might be putting pressure on them. Now, obviously states are state level actors, but to a certain extent there are fossil fuel companies that have so much money that they are effectively state level actors, and in fact, some the biggest ones are almost. Indistinguishable from state level actors.So to a certain extent I can see that argument that you might need something super tough to protect everybody from an immutable ledger of some form, not necessarily blockchain, which is not one of the better ones to protect against some fossil fuel companies who have a load of power.Asim Hussain: because if it was a database somewhere, if you had enough power, you can get it changed.Anne Currie: indeed you can. You've got money to bribe people, to threaten people to do all kinds of things. The value of immutable blockchain immutable ledger for certificate revocation is that you can do it, you can change it, but everyone will be able to see, and I can see potentially that there might be something there where if you're protecting against fossil fuel companies.Asim Hussain: So I just wanna say one thing on the next related article to this, which is why the Future Web three needs open source sustainable blockchains, which is a report from Linux Foundation Research, which is my colleagues, and Tamara, who's actually joined the foundation, was involved in this as well. One of the specific conclusions in the last paragraph, I think is relates to what we're saying, which is there was a deep need for standards and regulation for Web 3.0, the sustainable blockchain space needs standard transparency and accountability, especially regarding claims about carbon offsets and other efforts to benefit marginalized communities. ESG regulations, making carbon measurement reporting more important, and standardization regulation will help build and shape the Web 3.0 Space.I'm all for standardization and I'm all for regulations, so this is, this is a good conclusion.Chris Adams: Last word on the report, which is really surprising to me, but a nice surprise. This is the first report we've ever seen talking about Web 3.0 That actually talks about climate justice and actually talks about the different kinds. Of climate justice in there for actually put bringing that in. She talks about distributive justice, as in who's actually getting the benefits and the downsides.Procedural justice, who's actually getting to make the decisions, and then rec recognition, who gets to say their cultures are valid or not valid? So to see that in a report, Quite a techy report. Wow. This is some kind of STS level stuff, like actually in actual interesting humanity stuff being added into there.So it's not just total tech solutionism in in this and it's probably worth having a quick look if you are new to this and you're looking around there. Alright, we're just coming up to 10 minutes, uh, left in this. So we might wanna talk about some of the coming events actually, if you folks are okay with that.Anne Currie: Mm-hmm.Chris Adams: All right, so I see there's two things actually. There is QCon London Software Conference, uh, at the end of the month.Anne Currie: Yeah, so I've helped organize this track cuz I've been involved QCon for years and years and it'll be hosted by Sarah Hsu, who is one of the key members of the Green Software Foundation. And our opening speaker will be Sara Bergman, who is another one of our key GSF folk. We'll also have. Holly Cummins, who used to be at IBM and is currently working on Java, I think Efficiency.Adrian Cockcroft will have a little bit from the financial sector. Goldman Sachs are gonna come and talk. Basically it should be a really very interesting track. So if anybody who's at QCon London come along to the track, which will be on the last day on the Wednesday, and say hi to me and Sarah and Sara, we'll be very pleased to see.Chris Adams: Excellence. That's March the. To March the 29th taking place in London, and there is a link to the conference that's taking place if you are prepared to walk out your house and go to an event without a mask on. That's it for our news and events roundup for this week. As part of this format, we have a closing question now that we ask our guests.It's gonna be different every week, but this week the question is, if you could only use one sustainable software tool for the rest of your life, what would it be? And why?Asim Hussain: Is this a tool that exists or doesn't exist because most of them don't exist.Chris Adams: Come up with the perfect, yeah, the dream. What's your dream tool Anne? Doesn't have to exist.Anne Currie: my dream tool is easy. It's obvious. I would pick this. hands down every time, and that tool is a whiteboard that when it comes to being green and doing any kind of stuff, it's design that really makes a difference. Can you come up with a green design that will totally swamp any improvements you make in an code efficiency or anything like that?Operationally, what's your design? Do your thinking upfront and share it and discuss it and come up with the design of your system that will be greener. Yeah. Whiteboard always my favorite tool.Chris Adams: Okay, there we have it. Whiteboard is the number one sustainable software tool for Anne. Currie. How about you Asim?Asim Hussain: Do know what I was imagining in my head as I was talking? I was imagining like a whiteboard and actually touring your architecture on it. The whiteboard goes, oh, you sure mate? It's gonna cost ya, kind of whiteboard. That'd be a great whiteboardAnne Currie: That would be a greatChris Adams: Asim software tool is a whiteboard with a cockney accent like a taxi driver, giving you commentary as you design your system.Asim Hussain: Like a sustainable software GPT.Anne Currie: Yeah. Sucks its teeth.Asim Hussain: Surface plugin for Yeah. Like, ah, I wouldn't, ah, I wouldn't pick that choice. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I think we're still really early days in, in any tooling in this space. I know there are some great tooling and I, and I spoke about earlier on in this episode.There's the Eco Grader, which came from MightyBytes, I think. Oh, there's ones the Green, Web, Foundation makes as well, and there's this tool in which you can just put in like the URL of a website and it gives you a score. And I think that would be, I've seen the impact of stuff like that. The almost immediate feedback you get from that thing.And in fact that's what measuring, so we need much, much better tools for measuring, like you mentioned stuff again, Chris, you mentioned earlier on, there's the Firefox tooling as well. There's lots, I think of really great toolings available right now for the Web developer, the front end experience primarily of our website.There's very limited tooling for everybody else, and I think that this is what we need to get to. I think the next stage in all of this is just much better energy measurement tooling that just are various solutions out there. I want there to be an out of the box solution that works for everybody everywhere.Whether you're in a virtualized environment where you do your bare metal, it will work if, even if you're running on a hyperscaler, whatever it is, it just gives you the numbers. And we are working on something like that in the foundation called the Carbon QL Project, which is just getting kicked off. But I'm quite excited for where that might head to in the future, butChris Adams: Oh, you can't tease us with that. Just at the end of the show, Asim.Asim Hussain: Well it's just, there's only been two meetings on the project. I can't re-announce tooChris Adams: so, so what? That's called carbon ql, and that'd be something we discussed at a future date then? Yes.Asim Hussain: Carbon QL Graph QL.Chris Adams: And I think that's everything for this episode of this Week in Green Software or The Week. in Green, Software. Cause we're not sure at what point this week becomes next week or last week. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below.If you're visiting this on the Green Software Foundation website, the website for the Green Software Foundation. Green software, one word foundation. And if you wanna go to the podcast, you can go to podcast.greensoftware.foundation. If you've enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast.And as ever, if you didn't really enjoy it, please leave a five star review. But tell us why you didn't want, why you wanted to give us a lower score and respond, and we'll try harder next time. Your feedback once again is very valuable. So please do comment on this and uh, once again, thanks for listening and see you on the next episode.Tira!Asim Hussain: Awesome. Thanks all. 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 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.

In this the latest episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by first time Environment Variables guest Tammy McClellan and regulars Anne Currie and Asim Hussain. They discuss the concept of greenwashing; what it is and how companies can avoid it, and why green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector. They cover various statistics about the environmental impact of data centers and cloud computing, the importance of optimizing code and algorithms to reduce emissions, and how developers can’t just rely on hardware to reduce emissions. The hosts also touch on some valuable resources to further your knowledge in the world of Green Software - links below!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterTammy McLellan: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Greenwashing: The Red Flag of Sustainability / Intel [4:01]Green IT Is No Longer An Option For The Tech Sector / Forbes [13:46]Everything is moving to the cloud. But how green is it, really? / ZDNET [22:01]The Oversight Committee has been launched! / GSF [28:21]Resources:The SBTI [11:24]ZeroTracker.Net [13:24]Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls in assessing the Internet’s energy and carbon impacts / John Koomey [17:21]New WC3 Database of References / WC3 Sustainability Group [32:02]The Transformation Impact of the Cloud (2016) / 451 Research [23:00]There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? / Journal of Science [26:43]Green Software Practitioner Course from Linux / GSF [31:13]Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification Guide / GSF [31:31]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!Asim Hussain: 80% of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits, and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved tick!Okay, everyone trusts you now, rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.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.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 today we're discussing the growing issue of greenwashing in tech and the importance of reporting and communicating corporate sustainability accurately.Before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guests and colleagues with this episode of The Week in Green Software. Today we have Tammy. Hello, Tammy.Tammy McClellan: Hi there.Chris Adams: AsimAsim Hussain: Hi.Chris Adams: and Anne.Anne Currie: Hello.Chris Adams: And if you're not on first name terms, let's do proper introductions. First of all, I'll hand over to, um, Anne. You'll be the first person to introduce.Anne Currie: So my name's Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly three decades, which is quite depressing and good. And good, depressing, but but also good. And I am part of the Green Software Foundation along with everybody else here. So today I've been working on the introductory chapter of a new book on green software, which we can't yet talk about who the publisher is, but it's a good publisher.Next time I'll be able to tell you who it is.Chris Adams: thank you for that, Anne. All right. Next in the alphabetical order would be Asim Go for it.Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel. I'm excited to be here. I also do, I also, oh, I grow mushrooms, which is an active hobby at this time of the year, soTammy McClellan: No way!Asim Hussain: Growing. Oh yeah. Have we not told you about that, Tammy? Yeah. Spring time's coming. So we're getting, as you are, I imagine, Tammy getting ready for a growing season. But anyway, I'll let you introduce yourself now.Tammy McClellan: Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Tammy McClellan. I work for Microsoft. I'm a cloud solution architect, developer advocate. So along with Anne, I've been in the tech industry for a really long time. I think I probably just passed the 30 year mark. I'm also the co-chair of the community working group along with Anne here, and, uh, recently became the chair of the oversight committee.So I'm super excited about that. And I also, as Asim alluded to, I have a small sustainable farm here in Chelsea, Michigan, where I grow lots of veggies and flowers. So happy to be here.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you.Asim Hussain: What's the name of your farm? Tammy. What's the name of your farm?Tammy McClellan: It's called Wonderful Tiny Farm or WTF forChris Adams: SureAsim Hussain: wtfChris Adams: That's very good. That's a, I think that's an appropriate lead in for the stuff we'll be talking about actually. Alright. All right. Before we start, I'm just gonna share a reminder for anyone who's listening, everything we do talk about will be linked in the show notes. So there'll be a link for every single story we do cover, plus some supplementary links for the things that do come up as we scrabble around to try to find them as we discuss them.And with that, I think we'll start on the first story on our list, actually. So, What I have here is greenwashing, the red flag of sustainability. This is a piece from the Intel Podcast put together by Intel called the Intech Technology Podcast. They recently published an environmentally focused episode with I think Caryn Herder Fritz, one of the marketing initiatives sustainability initiative leads.Speaking about how companies can avoid some of this greenwashing explaining what greenwash actually is. So, I suppose now is a good time as any, to answer the question, what is greenwashing here? Anyone want to go forward or volunteer something here?Asim Hussain: So I actually work with Caryn. It was really exciting to hear her talk about this. It was interesting cuz I actually have a slightly different definition of greenwashing as well, personally, which is interesting. But she was describing greenwashing as a term to use to describe when companies make misleading or false claims about the environmental benefits of their products or activities in order to appeal to consumers who are concerned about sustainability.So that's the definition that she gave about greenwashing. I'm actually interested to hear what, how do other people feel about that definition? Is that aligned with your thinking?Anne Currie: That sounds pretty good, but Asim, you, you feel different, you say,Chris Adams: What's your,Asim Hussain: What a leading.Anne Currie: so we who we're agreeing, disagreeing.Chris Adams: what's your, areAsim Hussain: or incorrect? According to my. My definition of greenwashing? No. I would also, cause I like, I don't know, I think about it a lot. I actually think about it a lot. I think about, I'm in corporate industry, so I think about it very carefully. I think about the messaging that I'm we're giving out.What does it mean to be authentic? And one thing I haven't quite resolved in my head is the intention behind the work. And I think Anne, you've said something about this in the past, so if you did something without the intention of it being sustainable and then afterwards went, oh, actually, if we look at it through this lens, is it sustainable?Let's talk about it from a sustainability perspective. I dunno where that landsAnne Currie: I'm okay with that.Asim Hussain: ofAnne Currie: I'm more of a consequentialist . I'm fine with people saying, Ooh, it was good. I'll talk about it being good.Asim Hussain: Accident. Oh damn. I did something good by accident. Yeah.Chris Adams: There are two things which are really interesting at the podcast that caught my eye, so first of all, one of them was, so there was a stat shared from some UK surveys, I forget this particular poll came from, but they basically said 81% of comm's messages about environmental measures from tech firms are not trusted by their audiences at present.So this is one of the key things that she was saying was, This is a real problem that needs to be addressed right now. The other thing that came out of this, and I guess putting the question to Asim is quite an interesting one, is the genuine idea that using the word green itself is a bit of a red flag because it's so wooly and so kind of open.I think Asim, I think you are about to speak to this particular as the director of the Green Software Foundation.Asim Hussain: And what are you the director of again Chris?Chris Adams: I'm a member of the Green Web Foundation, so I may also have things to say here as well, but after you first.Asim Hussain: No, I think that was a really interesting insight. Now, the point she was saying was because greenwashing has the term green in it, and if you then just use the term green, it just reminds you instantly of the word greenwashing before you've said anything. So already frames. Like really pulls up that thing in their mind.I was like, damn. Where were you Caryn? Like, where were you like maybe four years ago when we were like coming up with the name for this thing. But I would also argue a different point because I tell you that when we were coming up with the name of this foundation, and I've apologized to Chris Adams like so many times for this because I knew Chris and he had the Green Web Foundation, and the very first name that came to my head was the Green Software Foundation.I always intended it to be like a pinhole name, and then we'd come back to it later and we never came back to it and they just ended up being the Green, Software, Foundation. But the other thing was, there was actually another organization called Sustainable Software or Sustainable Software Foundation. There's actually another organization out there, but they're much more focused around, can you, as a developer, can you, on a human level, sustain.Chris Adams: Yeah, the Software Sustainability Institute, can you keep things going? So it's nothing to do with climate at all, it's just am I able to keep working without code collapsing under its own weight from like bugs and issues and usability problems and stuff like that.Asim Hussain: So that's where the idea, it was like you either pick sustainable or you pick green. In my mind, I personally felt green was a bit more targeted than sustainable. That's why we went for the green in the first place. So that was my thinking on it.Chris Adams: Okay. That's fair.Anne Currie: Well, it's interesting, so the, the book that I'm currently working on, I originally pitched. Sustainable Software, but the publishers chose the name Building Green software and presumably that's because they're much better at marketing than I am . They obviously feel that green is the word that people want to be using or be interested in.So that is to a certain extent, then that becomes greenwashing. Cause everybody likes the phrase, but everything that's more specific, I really like 24 7 carbon free electricity, for example, but it's very boring and it's quite specific, and it does not really get to appeal to folk in the same way. SoChris Adams: Actually, I'm kind of glad you mentioned this Anne, cuz this was the other thing that Karen was saying. So she said there's green washing and there's gray washing where you go so far away from emotional and evocative images. The unit was something which is accurate, but basically impossible to get anyone to remember or respond to in any kind of meaningful fashion.So I think that's actually, I've never heard it come across the term graywashing before or anything like that, but that's caught my eye. The thing that it might be worth actually talking about in this context is that, and Asim, you touched on this idea of is it intentional or unintentional? You can see parallels right now with the basically misinformation and disinfo discussion online right now.Because one of the big problems about the internet, which is not necessarily being fixed by things like generative AI search engines, is that you have a real problem with it being very difficult to find reliable information online. All right, and in those circles, people call things misinformation, where you're unintentionally misleading people or disinformation if you are intentionally misleading people.And like the kind of mental model that I've been using for this is, it's a bit like murder and manslaughter. You know, manslaughters, I don't intend to cause harm, but it's happened. Whereas murder is very much like a degree of intentionality. This is actually part of it. You might wanna think about where in your organization,this kind of comms function might actually be alright if they're in finance compared to marketing, you're gonna have different drivers, but there's plenty we can refer to there. And I suspect the thing that might be worth looking at is that there are various kind of non-profit organizations who do try to keep track of all this stuff.And one of the things that, if we could talk a little about, say some of the things that companies have, but, so I work for a nonprofit called the Green Web Foundation. We did a whole thing about net zero targets and uh, you can. There are some ways to tell if you have a good net zero target or a bad net zero target based on the kind of organizational changes you might need to see happen.So if someone has a very far off net zero target, for example, where there's no meaningful action, the hat needs to happen in the next five, five yearsAsim Hussain: We'll get it done by 2050. We'll, 2050.Chris Adams: If you have that, then it suggests that maybe you're not prioritizing it. And the reports that from groups like say the corporate climate responsibility monitor and stuff like that, they basically say you need to have a net zero target by 2030, and sorry, you need to have something with interim actions in the next five years for this to seem meaningful.Asim Hussain: Did any of you read? I don't think, we didn't appear in the last news that I, it might been one of you that posted it on, on, so I can't remember, but it was something somebody shared about, oh, it was cdp. It was, it was a report they had done about, if you are an organization that has a climate target that is a, an SBTI what's the term?Chris Adams: Science based target? Is that what you're referring to here?Asim Hussain: Is it is if your climate targets have been vetted by the SBTI? I think that's a term you are far more likely to over overdeliver on your climate achievements than if you haven't. And I think I wondered, cause one of, one of the foundation was starting like one eighty percent of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved. Tick. Okay, everyone trusts you now.rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.Chris Adams: Brief sidebar for folks who might not be familiar with SBTI. The SBTI stands for the Science-Based Targets Institute. They're a group of peer-reviewed scientists and and experts who look at various sectors to figure out what kind of changes and reductions in carbon emissions you'd actually need to see on a year by year basis in order to actually be responding in line with the climate.They do work for various sectors, but specifically in 2020, they released information about the tech sector. So they basically said, you need to be hitting these targets for your actions to be considered credible. That's all. Sidebar over. That might be useful for folks who might not know what the SBTI is, cause we should have actually come in with that one.Okay. There's a bit more here we could talk about. And there's a link here to zerotracker.net, which does track some of these targets and some of these actions by organizations. And there's even one pointed to specific companies. So you can see are they recording and are they reporting against these kind of figures that you've listed here.But I suspect we might need to move on to some of the other stories we have if we wanna go on from here. So what's next on this list?Anne Currie: So this is an article from Forbes. Green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector, although I think I would've called it no longer optional for the tech sector, otherwise it feels a little bit like it's saying the very opposite of what I think it's trying to say. But anyway, yeah. So a few weeks ago we did talk about, uh, some interesting and quite terrifying statistics that the cloud considered over 7.2 million data centers across the world, which actually is, that suggests that there's about a data center per thousand people in the world, which seems like the, the hardware utilization on data centers must be really bad for that. That's quite scary, although not totally implausible. If you think there's maybe about 7 million businesses across the world and each one has a, at least a couple of servers in there,Chris Adams: I feel like you need a loose definition of data center here for that to be plausible, right?Anne Currie: Yeah. I think it would have to be. I think it'd have to be, but even with that, actually, that really suggests cuz a thousand users. And these are not simultaneous users, but as Asim pointed out last time, these days everybody's pretty much connected all the time. So fundamentally far, then talking about a thousand simultaneously connected users.But anyway, so we've got a cloud of 7.2 million data centers, one data center per thousand people, loads of energy and water and all that embodied carbon. Or embedded carbon, depending on how you like to say it's involved in the hardware and that cloud computing is responsible for broadly a percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which now says it is about twice as much as the whole aviation sector potentially.But broadly speaking, I always like to say it's about an aviation sector from the tech industry, which gives us some feeling and likely to surge, but might not surge because we get better at it. But fundamentally, we use computers for more and more. So those are the numbers that we're talking about.Asim Hussain: So I think this article in particular, I liked it cuz it also touched on software. It didn't just say, data center's bad, go fix it, data center people. It was like, no, no. The one statement that I really liked was organizations of risk developing software that will run hot unnecessarily for many years if they do not improve the sustainability of their software today.And for me, when I think about building inefficient applications, like I forget, like it's just gonna run like that forever. 10 years. Some of this stuff just runs forever, unnecessarily, and then just dies. I remember the, like, I won't name it the company I used to work at prior to working at Microsoft. It was a very small startup and the technology was so unbelievably inefficient.We needed to buy one server for every 10 users.Tammy McClellan: Oh my goodness,Asim Hussain: but well. It was high net worth lending to high net worth, and it was very high profit business. They didn't care. But the, the software was built 20 years ago, and so for 20 years they've been running this unbelievably unnecessarily complex software.And as far as I know, it's still running today. I haven't checked in on 'em for a while. I think that's really interesting, like when you write software. It will run unnecessarily hot for a long period of time, whereas a data center in harder will refresh. That was a really interesting insight for me. Yeah.Tammy McClellan: Oh, good point.Chris Adams: This provides a link to the next story, which is about moving things to the cloud. And there's points and counterpoints for that. Specifically. There's one thing I might share with everyone before we move on from this though. When you see numbers like say 1.5% moving to 15%, there's a really good paper by John Koomey, a well-known professor who basically has, there's a paper called Does Not Compute, avoiding Pitfalls in Assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts.This is the guy who's been studying this for 30 years and generally speaking, if you look at our sector, People saying, oh, it's 2% now, but it'd be 15% by this time in the future. Aviation says that shipping says that every single sector, which is 2%, says they're gonna be 15% in the future. This is a recurring thing and it's really worth reading that to be able to interrogate some of these claims, cuz they can't all be 15% for this to be happening.Anne Currie: There's a tacit assumption there that nobody else grows, as she said. But that's not a crazy tacit assumption that you are making your point that the point is gonna get bigger. It's already big and it's gonna get bigger. The fact that everybody else is getting bigger doesn't make your problem lesser.And Dr. Koomey there, he has picked me up on this stuff in the past and said, oh, you can't say that this is going to continue. But I think there is a point here, to be made that, that we don't want these things to go up. The relative count doesn't really matter. It's, and, and it makes it, it makes a good point that we get more efficient as time goes, but we don't actually always get more efficient as time goes on.Data centers get more efficient. Cloud data centers get more efficient. We use more of them. He has a platform which is all about, oh yeah, everything gets better and it'll all stay about the same, but it, you tends to use it to shut down people saying we should do better is my opinion.Chris Adams: And maybe we should come up with a law for you, whereas Koomey's Law, maybe we need a Currie's Law as a counterpoint for this actually.Asim Hussain: Everything will get worse all the time until the heat death of the universe.Anne Currie: Actually, the thing is we do have a tendency to, over my entire career, 30 year career that Tammy and I have had. Hardware's got tons better, but utilization has been sacrificed to developer productivity. So machine productivity, no one cares developer productivity. Everybody focuses entirely on that, so we tend to move in the wrong direction, which then takes you down back to Asim's point that you end up with very inefficient software that could be a lot more efficient.Asim Hussain: That's a really good point. Cause you're right and I have been using. I, I feel very much corrected cuz I have been using that percentage relativity. But that whole statement about relative increases is pointless because if everybody is saying it's going to increase by 15%, that also isn't a good thing.It just means that. Maybe we should be talking in absolute terms of increases. Maybe that's the kind of statement. But I would also state that I think a lot of these things assume, like currently we are pressing 10% down on the accelerator pedal, and the statement is, if you keep pressing on the accelerator pedal, 10% you'll end up at this point in the future.Doesn't mean you can take your foot off the pedal. If you take the foot off the pedal, then it just all just goes crazy. So I think it's important to note that doesn't just mean, even if, even with that statement of it's not going to be as bad in the future, I think that statement should be, it's not gonna be as bad in the future if we continue to put the pressure on that we're putting on.It may not be that bad in the future, but if we just sit back and relax and say, apparently somebody says it's all gonna be fire in the future, then it won't be fine. I think it's about forces. We have to make sure we keep the force pressed to make sure that good actions happen. That's just one of our points.Anne Currie: And so I remember when I see these statistics about the aviation industry, I remember about a talk I gave at a conference HashiCorp Europe in 2016, and I was the first talk I gave on green software. And I thought, oh, I need a really good statistic. I need a good statistic. So I had a look. And I would say it looked like the aviation industry.We used about twice as much as energy. Maybe a bit more, but I thought, oh, I'm just gonna say it's the same, cuz then that's fine. I'm sure it'll get there eventually. But now everybody's talking about it being twice as much as the aviation industry. Things do. THe tech industry has got worse over the past five years in terms of carbon emissions.No matter what Professor Koomey says.Tammy McClellan: I'm just surprised you remembered what you were doing in 2016, so I'm just impressed by that.Chris Adams: [laughing]Anne Currie: So I I always felt a bit guilty cause it was a bit of a lie at the time, but I thought it's a bit of a lie, but it's going to happen, I'm pretty sure. So, you know,Asim Hussain: At some point in the future or past it's true.Chris Adams: I guess the good news we can talk about is that the technology sector is probably easier to decarbonize than aviation because servers don't need to fly through the sky all that often, and that's a nice link to the next story we have. Everything is moving to the cloud, but how green is it really?Anne Currie: Yes, there were a couple of papers came out last week. One from Adrian Cockcroft, who is the member of the GSF, and there's a bit of an insider on this as well as a slightly more outside perspective saying that, and they made the interesting point, although the cloud is getting better from a very low bar, for some of them they have not been as good at helping their customers to become green as they said that they would be, or at least Amazon hasn't been. Google has been doing pretty well. Azure been doing okay, but AWS has really fallen behind and that is a, an opportunity for everybody because AWS. Amazon care what customers ask for.So if you ask for it, you might well get it. And if they're not doing it, that might be a sign that people aren't asking for it. We need all need to make sure that we ask our AWS reps all the time for cloud carbon footprint measurement.Chris Adams: So that was one of the papers. You mentioned there was another paper and so there's a piece in computing.com that I've shed a link to that pointed to basically some really detailed stats talking about the environmental impact of refresh rates on servers and stuff like that. This is actually worth being aware of because a significant amount of the environmental impact comes from actually making the servers in the first place and.Asim as the guy at Intel, you probably have some insight on this one now, like there's a significant amount to making them and that part isn't particularly easy to decarbonize compared to the actual running of those. And this is the first paper I've seen, which basically challenges some of this narrative cuz this the reports that you do see that talk about the cloud.Generally, like one of them is by 451 Research, which was commissioned by Amazon. So unsurprisingly, they say that Amazon's super efficient, but you'll see this are coming up quite a few times. It's quite hard to get some independently confirmed information from this, but this one seems to be more about where energy is coming from and how it's being sourced actually. That was my takeaway when I read through this actually.Asim Hussain: Speaking to the point you just mentioned. Chris, it does surface an interesting stat. We're just gonna be like, maybe this podcast will just turn into one of us mentioning a stat and everybody else disagreeing with it. a, a well-researched stat from a very famous researcher and we just like that doesn't sound right, but the research seems that, that they say, the research indicates the energy consumption from data centers grew just 6% between 2010 and 2018.well, its computing output increased 550%. And that I think speaks to what you were, you and Koomey was probably talking about, which is the computing industry is the efficiency has been increasing dramatically.Anne Currie: I agree with you, and there's absolutely tons of efficiency improvements to be wrought from software. The difficulty there is that this quite difficult, takes a lot of time to do it, and this is my total stab in the dark guess. I think the next massive efficiency improvement will come from the, ironically, the same efficiency improvement that delivered to the industrial revolution, which is a move from generalists to specialists.Has a tendency to deliver a thousand fold according to Adam Smith in the Industrial Revolution in his Wealth of Nations of 1775. moving to specialists. Is a thousand fold increase in productivity and performance, and I think that's where I have a dual hope for the cloud cuz that is specialists, that's people putting their homegrown software and saying, no, look, I'm not gonna write this.I'm just gonna use the cloud stuff where they were specialists doing it for me. And also open source where they say, I'm not gonna write this library. I'm gonna use an open source library where specialists will have tuned this for me. I'm hoping that will to a certain extent, offset the end of hardware in terms of improvement.But that might be my dream and an unrealistic one.Chris Adams: Not necessarily. I feel there's a really nice paper called Plenty of Room at the Top, which basically it's a paper from the Journal of Science talking about specifically where the next generation of improvements are gonna be coming from. It basically puts this argument that, yeah, Moore's Law has slowed down over the last decade, so you need to find other ways.And it says, yeah, the thing you need to be looking for is things like, Domain specific programming, matching the compute jobs or can matching the workloads too. The hardware much better. You can see examples of this right now. We'll share a link to some analysis. For example, Google using very specialized ASICS like application specific integrated circuits for video encoding or tools like that.These are the things that are being used in production, a number of places which can provide these hundred or sometimes thousand improvements that there is an issue though about where you do if you wanna do something else. Cause we've seen exactly the same thing happening with cryptocurrencies, right? Where you get to an ASIC designed specifically for the Char 256 protocol.So if you don't wanna do stuff for cryptocurrencies, I guess you might be to use it for your passwords on a website. But there aren't that many other things you can use it for. So there's a discussion there to be had. But no, you're absolutely right. We'll share a link to that cause it's a really interesting paper and it basically makes you an argument that you've described Anne but in lots of detail with those are really nice examples.So we've spoken about those different tools and there's different ways that you can achieve some of these savings, both in software design and hardware design. And the Green software Foundation is maintaining and running a couple of projects like the Carbon Awareness SDK, the Patterns Project, and so on.But recently, there've been some developments to how these project projects can be funded, or similar projects can be supported so people can organize and work on them a bit more. Tammy, I think this is something that you've. Been involved in, and I believe, yeah, congratulations in order for actually becoming part of the groups leading this now, maybe you could share a little bit more about the oversight committee for the Green Software Foundation.Tammy McClellan: Sure would love to. I am super excited about this opportunity when talking to Asim and he basically came up with the idea of this oversight committee and the ability for G S F to scale as we get new members and organizations that are joining and it became pretty apparent, I think, that everything was funneling through Asim.So this gives us an opportunity to scale at Asim's pace. And so I'm excited about that and being able to look at some of these technical experiments that we're doing and helping to drive some adoption in certain areas. But well, I'm just really excited about the possibility of advocating more in this space cuz I really feel that there's loads of opportunity here for us to make an impact in our overall carbon goals that we have.And it's emerging tech, so we're flushing it all out. We're figuring it all out, and we're having some great success. So the Oversight Committee will also provide recommendations to improve the foundation's charter to set community norms and workflows and deliver budget recommendations to the steering committee, so folks like myself and Chris Lloyd-Jones will serve as the chair and the vice chair of the Oversight Committee, and hopefully we can get more OC members on this podcast to introduce themselves to our wonderful listeners here.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Tammy.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Congratulations Tammy.Chris Adams: Okay. Yeah, that's it for our news wrap up for now. But before we leave, there's a new format for this final part of the show where we are gonna ask a closing question to our guests. It's gonna be different every week, but this one we're gonna try to see what kind of resources or recommendations you might actually point other people to.So the question is, if you could point one of our listeners to one resource about sustainability and green software. What would it be and why? Anne I'll start with you first if that's okay. Cuz it looks like a sea is holding a child now.Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Oh yeah. One resource. One resource. Actually. So I'm gonna cheat and easily provide the one that everyone will do, which is, that's on the GSF websites available. Now from the Linux Foundation, you can get for free a certification in being a green software engineer, and that's two hours to do.It's quite an easy read, and at the end you get a certificate of completion.Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks Anne. Anyone else got one?Tammy McClellan: I have one, although I'm cheating here as well, but it's the one I find myself going to all the time when I'm having internal discussions or discussions with customers. It's off the Green Software Foundation website, but it's the SCI guide. But it has just loads of guidance around applying the SCI some use cases, and it's just uh packed full of really good information.Chris Adams: Okay. And the same yourself.Asim Hussain: So yes, I had, I think I shared it on socials recently as well, so, Recently had a really great conversation with Lucas from the, from various things, but he is also involved in the W3C Sustainability group, and he shared with me just an amazing set of resources that they've been collecting over. I don't believe he was a particular person collecting, but he introduced me to it and will put them in the show notes as well.There's all sorts of things in there from books to magazines, courses, events, media websites, even stuff from the Green GSF is in there as well. So just a great source of material.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that, Asim. So for folks who are following along the W3C have a Sustainable Web Group and they maintain a Wiki now, and that's where all that stuff is listed. It's a really good resource and we only found out about it in the last two weeks, but it's a really useful thing to look at.So that's all for this episode are for The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below, and you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software. One word. DOT foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast, leaving us a five star review.If you didn't enjoy the show and you hated it, please consider leaving a five star review and tell us why.Asim Hussain: We only listen, we only listen to five star reviews. That's the only ones we listen to.Chris Adams: Yeah, that's the way that, that, that's the . Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you on the next episode. Cheers, folks. Bye Cheers.Cheer.Anne Currie: Cheers. Bye-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 Green Software Foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

TWiGS returns this week with host Asim Hussain being joined by (now guest) Chris Adams. They talk about the environmental impact of the cloud and while some of the big cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud, have introduced initiatives designed to increase the sustainability of individual data centres and reduce their overall carbon footprints, will it be enough to help reduce carbon emissions produced by cloud computing? They also cover Microsoft’s Surface Emissions Estimator and a recent paper surveying the factors that influence the emissions of machine learning.Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterChris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:Microsoft launches its Surface Emissions Estimator / Microsoft [2:42]GreenOps Carbon Footprint Treads Closer To Cloud Developer Efficiency / Forbes [14:35]How green is your cloud? / TechMonitor [22:11]Counting Carbon: A Survey of Factors Influencing the Emissions of Machine Learning / Alexandra Sasha Luccioni & Alex Hernandez-Garcia [36:21]Ongoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:GSF Meetup Opportunities [46:24]GSF Speakers BureauOther resources mentioned:Ola Fagerström’s announcement about Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator [13:01]Cycloids.io [14:35]Net Zero Tracker [27:55]Chris Adams & Max Schulze talk Cloud Economics with a spreadsheet [31:02]WattTime.orgIf 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:GSF_Ep17_TWiGS5_TranscriptChris Adams:  The flip side of this, maybe the thing they're going for is saying if cloud carbon footprint is just ubiquitous like hoovering is, maybe that's the thing you would just say, well, you're just gonna ccf it, or cloud carbon footprint it.Asim Hussain: Yeah.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, Asim Hussain. 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 am your host, Asim Hussain. In this episode, we have some exciting announcements from various organizations, and we're going to cover some interesting articles about the environmental impact of cloud and machine learning.And finally, we're gonna share some opportunities for development for the world of Green software. But before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of Twigs. With us today, we have Chris Adams.Chris Adams: Hi Asim. My name is Chris. For folks who've never heard of me before, I work as the one of the chairs of the policy working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I also work as the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a small, non but fierce non-profit focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030.And I also work with the online community climateaction.tech, which is where I met Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh, the climateaction.tech days.Chris Adams: Yeah, that and OMG Climate as well actually.Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. OMG Climate. I remember the OMG climate. You should start those again. Oh, have you started those again? Actually, I have interest. For the listeners, OMG Climate was a A A A conference, an on a conference that Chris was running.Chris Adams: Yes, I can talk about this. We can segue into that gracefully in the podcast if you'd like. After we've covered some of the news. But this is something that we would like to do a bit more of, and I’ve got a fun story about why it's called OMG Climate and where some of that came from. So it's also open source.So if you like the idea of onConferences around climate, then maybe we should leave a bit of time for that actually seen, because there are some kind of green software and digital sustainability related events in the coming months that are probably worth pointing people to. So that was me introducedAsim Hussain:  And before we dive in, just a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So I think Chris to kick off uh, news from the world of Green Software, Microsoft Company I used to work for. Microsoft has launched a new tool called the Surface Emissions Estimator that helps customers understand the carbon footprint of the devices purchased.It is the surface device range of the purchases that are purchased. It uses a lifecycle assessment model to provide accurate estimates of carbon emissions, it also, I believe, helps you adjust those emissions based upon where you are, what you bought, where it's been delivered, and things like that.Chris Adams: I thought this was pretty cool actually. See, have you had a, have you had a go with it yet at all? Because I don't own a surface thing myself, but I'm happy to talk about it cuz I think this is actually a field that probably has some quite far reaching implications on how people like work within, with gadgets and things at all.So first of all, you, you shared this link before, so we've, you've seen how it. Basically, when you talk about talks about surface, it shows you like maybe a surface. Are they called laptops or tablets or is there another word for this kind of removable thing? They have?Asim Hussain: just called surfaces. I don't know. I just think they're Microsoft DevicesChris Adams: that's confusing.Asim Hussain: Yeah, but I believe the whole range. Everything is, the tablet and the laptop, they're all called surfaces. Funnily enough, I do have a Windows machine. Now I'm at Intel, but while I was at Microsoft, I had a MacBook my whole journey.So I, I missed out, I missed out on the whole, the . Yeah, I was almost called a heathen on my first day of, of, of my Microsoft training. But anyway, no, I actually haven't. Cause while I was there, Ola, who's the person behind? Ola Fagerstrom. Hope I pronounce it a second name. . I spoke to him about it and I think I saw early preview design sketches or what it looked like, but I actually haven't tried out the latest tool myself.Chris Adams: Okay. I could talk a little bit about it cuz I gave it a go before this. And there are some previous, there's like prior art that is actually quite useful to know about. So one of the things it does basically is, let's assume if you were to buy a laptop or a gadget or if you're gonna use the Microsoft parlance a surface, for one of these, it basically shows you.Where the emissions lie in the actual creation of this. Cause a lot of the time people might think about what bought a machine, but I now to be, need to be really careful about how I use it, for example, because I might assume that all the emissions are from this kind of use phase rather than the making phase.And the key thing that you learn from it when you were to choose something. See whereabouts you are in the world, how many you might use. If you are like, say, a medium to small, actually, if you basically have, you're working in an organization that's purchased a number of these, it'll tell you what the likely environmental footprint of those is over a particular time.And then if you held onto them for, say, six years, for example, or three years or four years, it'll show you. What the environmental footprint of that might be to own that and to have it for this time here. And this is quite useful because people didn't really think too much about the embedded emissions in electronics for quite a long time.It's only in the last year and a half that it's really become much more of a kind of thing that people focus on. People have typically been looking at, say, the energy more than the actual purchasing parts. And, and it's a French company called BOA Vista, which has created, has been collating lots and lots of data from lots of companies about this.It's a nonprofit. Yeah, and the thing that's interesting there is if you don't have a Microsoft Surface, but you think this is cool, they have similar tools so that you can basically. Pick maybe a Dell laptop or an Apple MacBook or something like that, and then it'll give you some numbers. But the thing that's been a problem has been that some companies have been somewhat reticent about sharing these numbers.So as a result, people have been either they have to like make guesses or they are do not have particularly  useful guidance. So if there's a company sharing this stuff upfront in a kind of structured data fashion, which is necessary for this. And I assume they are sharing it as open data for everyone else to be using, surely Right.Then that's, it's a good sign for you to see this and it helps you understand how useful it is to just hold onto a device for maybe a little bit longer and see how that might fit into some of your plans to basically reduce the emissions associated with the making part of running any kind of digital services.Asim Hussain: I love the work of Bovis on there, and the latest version of the API, I was taking a look at. A day they've done wonders, BA based off of the, as you say, like the incredibly limited amount of data there is out there, but there's a lot of extrapolationChris Adams: Hmm.Asim Hussain: the day, like some of the LCA work that they're using is like 10 years old.Chris Adams: Yes. L C A here stands for lifecycle analysis. Manasi mentioned these things like ISO 14040 and 14044. There's basically complicated methodologies which people use to talk about what the environmental impacts associated with any tools, with building and operating something over its lifecycle. Over its lifecycle.And LCA is the kind of short term for this.Asim Hussain: And actually I hadn't seen the parallels myself, but it seems really obvious right now what Microsoft Surface. Estimator Emissions Estimator is, is basically hopefully a more accurate version of what Bar Vista is giving you because it's providing you with that data. Remember the conversations around this originally, becuase it was based around the idea.If you're an organization with like 10,000 employees and you bought each of 'em a surface laptop, that's a lot of things to keep a track of. And also like those employers are gonna be based in different parts of the world. The laptop's got shipped over from different locations. Did you dive into the tool surface? Whether or not it took that kind of regional variability into account, I dunno where services, let's assume services all get shipped from the US. Would your US employees have less emissions than your European because you're just, the travel is less. Do does it take things of that into account?Chris Adams: So when I was looking at this, what you could see is you could actually, it does show some information about the carbon intensity of different grids, and it does talk about the end of life part of it, but it doesn't mess it by. I didn't see, I, I didn't see so much specifically about shipping. So if I'm in one part of the world, is there an environmental impact of getting it sent over here?For example, proportionally that's relatively small, meaning it's not being flown around, which in some cases it actually, unfortunately can be basically. So it doesn't talk about that, but it does tell you what the environmental impact is from the grid itself. So if you are running something in. I don’t know, let's say Pennsylvania, where there's load of coal, it's gonna say that proportionally the use face is gonna be heavier than, say, France or Montreal.Where like more than 99%, this is Montreal, for example, or like, uh, Quebec. Most of the powers coming from the hydro or nukes. So therefore it's gonna be very relatively low carbon electricity. So it doesn't, does seem, does take that part into account.Asim Hussain: So there seems to be a very unusual correlation between. , low carbon electricity and speaking French. There must be some research there aboutChris Adams: Honestly, I, this is gonna sound a bit weird, but like a significant part of it is in my view, having a real interest in there being a very strong state. So the entire. Thing about, say France being full of nukes on France like using, is because historically they had massive investment in the seventies and eighties in into nuclear power through the state owned systems, which is not really what you saw in other parts of the world.And uh, also you've gotta remember that France didn't really have much of a kind of fossil fuel, didn't have much in the reserves, so they chose to have that as their way. Achieving some degree of energy independence. But the thing that when you see lots of people talk about nuclear these days is like they say, oh, we should be more like France.But that means you have an entirely state owned system where you have a very different structure to how any of this stuff works. And people who tend to be talking about that tend to be the people who prefer to have a smaller state for this stuff. So it's like, okay, do you really want that? Because everything else you're suggesting suggests you probably don't think the government should be involved in all this stuff.Asim Hussain: I think one thing I will state though is that I think it's interesting the way , because I think I will actually, I won't. I won't. Even though I'm very out. My debt, I'm going to carry in a little bit because, I dunno if you know this Chris, but the French energy firm actually owns, I believe half of British gas, which is really fascinating because the.Chris Adams: You're talking Centrica, right? So they own…Asim Hussain: Centrica? Yeah, it's a British castle, the energy, but they're in a significant part of the UK energy market, which is fascinating because you know, Britain privatized the energy market which was sold predominantly to a state owned energy firm in, in France. So  now with the energy challenges that happening across Europe, France is somewhat protected.Whereas anyway, we're all paying like double, triple our energy prices.Chris Adams: Actually, so France over in the last year, there was a big thing about the cost of power going super high in France because while there was historically lots and lots of investment in the previous nuclear stations and what you might refer to as thermal energy, where you basically heat water up to make steam, to turn a turbine, to make, to generate power, what you found was.The, you had all these kind of issues with corrosion and stuff, but also because you had all these heat waves reducing the amount of water available, that meant that it was really hard to keep things cool, which meant things were coming offline. So you end up losing lots and lots of what you would refer to as firm nuclear generation, which put the cost of power really high in France, except that.Yeah. Nuclear thermal. Yeah, basically it wasn't just nuclear, it was any form of thermal energy had this problem because it's all relying on water to keep things running. If you're gonna turn water into steam, the water has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so it didn't increase the prices by nuclear going down and having to burn more coal. More coal and gas. It was just everything increased.Chris Adams: There was just like, there was just a shortfall of power and as a result, the cost of electricity went through the roof really high in France as well. And you saw that manifesting and yeah, this is one thing that you saw a lot of, basically, so what you ended up happening was the French government ended up essentially bailing out the large countries, doing a massive investment at that point, which is somewhat different to how we did it over here, but.Now we can move on. Cause I think we've just gone on off on one actually.Asim Hussain:  There is, I do wanna say one thing. I think more about the, not about what Dallas, let's leave politics for, uh, for. No, we can talk politics, but the one thing I wanted to say that I think is quite interesting what the Microsoft Service Emissions Estimator project, and I think this is parks back also to what we spoke about last week, which is Will Buchanan and his work at Microsoft as well.Ola, I remember meeting Ola initially from this, you know what's called a green team. So this employee led grassroots, sustainably focused individuals inside Microsoft and that's. All I was and from my, where my memory serves. And Ola, please message out and reach. Now you're a correction. The Future podcast said if I'm wrong about this, but you, Ola wasn't in sustainability at the start.This was a personal project. Something that he personally felt was important. Push and push. Years later, it's now being released. And this is what one of my things, and I think actually one of the things that we were really talking about in climateaction.tech, which was employee driven. Work inside organizations is so important.I think probably a lot of what is eventually advertised as like a big corporate endeavor really starts off with a couple of passionate people or one passionate person inside an organization who pushes and pushes until the lever finally moves. And soChris Adams: This is true. The drawdown, you, if you've ever heard the term drawdown, they've got the nice kind of shiny coffee table books. One of the people leading Drawdown labs, I forget her name, damn it. But she, there's a really interesting interview with her on my climate journey and she basically talks about, yeah, I think that employees are one of the kind of untapped, unrealized groups that we need to rely on more to actually see achieve some of the.Asim Hussain: Yep. So next up, we have just a really interesting article that came to our attention on Forbes actually reporting on a. A company called Cycloid,  Green Ops. So Green Ops, we have the term Green Ops mentioned this week. Last week we had dev suss up. So the uh, decision is still not yet made as to which term will win out, but Cycloid Green Ops tool, and I find this Chris, a little bit fresh on, it's called Cloud Carbon Footprint.Chris Adams: Hmm.Asim Hussain: Which, so basically Cycloid have released a tool called the Cloud Carbon Footprint, which measures the cloud carbon footprint of cloud computing. Interestingly, there's a whole other open source project called the Cloud Carbon Footprint, which was exactly the same thing, and it's from ThoughtWorks. So there's a little bit of confusion there.I initially, when I saw that was like, what's going on? Have they bought an open source product? But they're just named it the same as an open sourceChris Adams: Was this the case? I couldn't tell because when I looked at this, I thought, oh, they. I was confused by this as well. Cause I thought, hang on, those, these numbers look somewhat similar. And when I look at the, when I look at this, the screenshots don't look exactly like cloud carbon footprint. But yeah, cloud carbon footprint is, is a term that.Is associated with a relatively well-known and probably like thee most well-known open source tool for this. So I am, I was surprised by this actually. And I'm actually meant to ask the ThoughtWorks I and say, hi, is this you guys? Or has someone actually just rebadged it and provided a hosted service?Because it may well be that, in fact, cuz I, I. We know that's the thing that ends up being used in lots of places. And there are various other providers, like one company is called Green Pixie. They use some of the underlying parts of cloud carbon footprint in the same, and I suspect that this might actually be a.it could plausibly be a kind of view on the existing version of this because if you don't want to run an some infrastructure to work out the footprint of your infrastructure, then I can see why you might wanna have someone else manage that. Because the cloud carbon footprint tool from ThoughtWorks is, it's got some stuff like how to set up with Terraform and stuff and how to run things in type script.And if your team isn't comfortable using type scripts or this stuff here, then maybe it does make sense to use. Uh, hosted service for this. So that's my guess , basically.Asim Hussain: While you were talking, I was double checking the blurb and that's, they actually specifically mentioned that it is based on that very same project, the cloud carbon footprint open source project, which makes me feel good. I was, I was confused a little bit, but that's, Very clearly mentioned in their marketing material.This is based upon the open source project that I was talking about, which is really exciting cuz you're right, it is quite complicated to to set up cloud carbon footprint. It's not for everybody. It is a cloud-based tool that you need it hosted somewhere in order to work. And I believe how it works.Remember how it works, Chris? I believe it works predominantly through billing data, at least the AWS component of it. I remember correctly.Chris Adams: Yeah, there are two ways it would use the information. So the first one was that you could query the billing APIs provided. Large cloud provi providers and that, and based on that, they would say, you spent in the last week, you spent maybe a hundred a thousand euros on Amazon EC two, or Microsoft's equivalent or Google's version of that.And then it would provide a conversion factor to say, for this many hours, it would likely be this. Based on the size of your machine and how long it's been running, and I'm not sure what time, but they might do that depending on if you have that kind of access, basically. So it'll give you some figures like that.And that is the main way that it used to work. I think there is actually an alternative way that you can get the data from the, the, for example, you can also use utilization based approach. So they would read from say, Amazon, CloudWatch, Google's something, stack Driver, all this stuff. Yeah. Whatever.Asim Hussain: The equivalent. The equivalent for Google and that,Chris Adams: Yeah, and I, I actually dived into this cause I opened a Pi, a pr, a pool request on the project because I wanna look through it.It's not actually that complicated to get this information for things which are not just the big three. So as long as you have an idea of how long something has been running and what the kind of utilization is like, how much of the CPU you're using for any of these things, which is exposed by lots of providers.Then you could do this. So Hetzer could do this, Scaleway could do this, Digital ocean could do this quite easily. It's just a case of people not doing that yet. But no, it's open. It'll be really cool to see that. And ThoughtWorks provides some on-prem a service where they'll basically plug this stuff in so that you can have numbers specific from non-cloud infrastructure to have a kind of consolidated view of your emissions from all this stuff.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's good. This is, it's making the technology available to a lot of other people, which is very useful. I think. It's interesting, and I can, I see there's another, there's another announcement in the newsletter. I think it's interesting because Cycloid is a devops organization, I'm, this is more and more in the cloud space.This is, these are the organizations that we're hearing more and more about if you are, or the, not organizations I should say, like providers and providers from DevOps. As Anne mentioned last week and she was quoting Adrian, it's a very much aligned, like carbon emissions reduction is aligned somewhat to the DevOps, to what's the cost reduction and all these other aspects that DevOpsChris Adams: It's also easy to measure, dude, it's also easy to. Numbers from here, apply a number, apply a conversion factor, and come up with another number that you're being told that you need to report against by the C-Suite or the CSR or investors and anything like that. So in many ways you can think of these as a kind of pain reliever, whereas before they were considered like a kind of vitamin, oh, isn't this great?Now you're like, oh. Can this help that person go away so I can focus on my existing work? That's how some of this is actually being presented to people because there are like regulatory drivers for this, for increasingly. One thing that's confusing with this esteem, cuz we were confused by cloud carbon footprint being the name of a well-known project and a commercial service from a totally separate, unrelated organization, and this kind of makes me glad.There is a trademark on some of the green software stuff because I feel that if I'm confused by this, then I suspect other folks would also be confused by this. And I think when you look at other projects like say Firefox for example, or Jango or WordPress, people are a little bit careful about how the name can be used because it might not be obvious to what you use.On the flip side with this, maybe the thing they're going for is saying if cloud carbon footprint is just ubiquitous, like hoovering is, maybe that's the thing you would just say, well, you're just gonna ccf it. Or cloud carbon footprint it. I dunno, but it's a, it let me realize that this conf confusion is only gonna happen more and more as people start thinking about this or have to be mindful of this.Asim Hussain: yeah. Thinking more generously, which is not a usual trait of mine, but just to give the opposite viewpoint. So it also could possibly be seen as a sign of respect. You're a commercial organization, you wanna use a product, and you just name it the same as the open source, so you're not. The fact that they mention it very explicitly in their marketing material also is they're not trying to hide it.But, uh, but yeah, I see your point. Cause this is the Kubernetes, I believe Kubernetes is trademarked, so you can fork it and call it Kubernetes, you can't call it Kubernetes. So Yeah, that's really, yeah. So that's, yeah, I think that's something pretty cool.Chris Adams: a minor segue into IP law. Spoke about the actual project itself. Spoke about the fact that it's open source and can be extended and tagged in various directions.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah,Chris Adams: Yeah, I'm happy.Asim Hussain: I'm happy with that, how we covered that. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah. What's next? How green is your cloud,Asim Hussain: Ah, yes. How green is your cloud? So this is an article on Tech Monitor, and so as you might guess, this article is about the environmental impact of the cloud and just highlights some interesting stats. I always wonder, whenever I read any of these articles, I wonder what stat they're gonna quote.the cloud's impact, cuz there's, it's a wide, the band of, as you could quote, is significantly wide, but they quote, the cloud computing contributes between 2.5 and 3.7% of global carbon emissions. And they are quoting a 2019 study from the shift project. I've seen other stats I've seen as low as 1%. 3.7 I think is one of the highest in terms of current stats.The stat I actually find quite interesting is the one from Eriksson, which is I think is. Interesting because it talks about the growth of orange. So if we do nothing else, I believe in what we're doing right now. By 2040 we'll be, I believe it's 14% of global emissions, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at it.Cuz it,Chris Adams: 14% of global emissions. That's like steel,Asim Hussain: Yeah. That's like all of, almost all of transport,Chris Adams: That's,Asim Hussain: it? Yeah.Chris Adams: I'm struggling with that,Asim Hussain: Are you struggling with that? OhChris Adams: struggling with that being 14%.Asim Hussain: and 14%. That's what we know. We, we are almost certain.Chris Adams: Yeah, that's a, so for context, like shipping, all of shipping, that's like between one and 2%. And so I think agriculture's right, 20 to 30% or so. It's like a, these numbers, they are, we're not very good at like measuring, like keeping an eye on this stuff. But 14% seems incredibly high for us, part of the existing technology sector, right?Not everything is gonna be.Asim Hussain: Just so we're clear, they're not saying it's 14% now it's, it'll be 14% by 2022.Chris Adams: Even then, and that would mean that cloud computing would have to overtake the manufacturing of steel or the manufacturing of concrete as a key emitter. And like you could possibly make the argument that in 40 years, like between now and 2040, that steel will become so clean. and people are gonna shift away from using all this kind of coke and stuff to make steel to go there.And likewise, it's the same with cement, even though cement's been like the significant driver. Yeah, you maybe have that, but I think between now and 2040, like technology is probably one of the easier of the sectors to decarbonize. This seems like someone's taking some numbers and just like basically pointing it.Yeah. Rather than actually thinking what's gonna.Asim Hussain: I can see your point. There's probably multiple Variables at. They're all moving independently, but if you froze some of those Variables and extrapolated out, there's probably an argument to say there's 14%, like for instance, like in the incredibly complicated and lab that exists in ASMs mind that just run an experiment with his thoughts like, I can't imagine the manufacturer of chips is going to.The major part of what that 14% is, it has to be energy consumption. That has to be that in in terms of what that model, it has to be the energy consumption. I cannot see 10% of all global emissions in the world making chips by 2040. And then if you maybe assume the current grid mix and all things out to 2040, and then maybe you can get that argument.If you then have something a bit more complicated, then assumes the grid mix is going to get cleaner by the time it gets 2040. And then things may be balancing themselves out and probably that. That stat probably comes, well anyway, multiple levels of guessing even on my sideChris Adams: All right. I, while you were saying that Asim, I looked up. AndAsim Hussain: looked it up.You looked itChris Adams: looked to a, yeah, I wanted to bring some light rather than just heat into this discussion. This is our Weldon data, which is generally pretty good. Iron and steel is around 7% of global emissions. What we, what we have right now, all right, so it wasn't 15 and agriculture is probably around 18 ish percent, so like I was at the wrong end of the 20 thing.So this still feels. So all of cloud computing being double the footprint of all the iron and all the steel being made, that seems very.Asim Hussain: Chris last week. This is quite interesting cuz. Last week you quoted a stat which Anne found challenging to accept, which is a 7.3 million data centers in the world. And now a stat's been quote. I think what's interesting is there's stats here that boggle the mind because the scale of what we're talking about is really hard for human beings to imagine.I've had colleagues of mine, one of my colleagues gave a, a presentation, which I thought was really fascinating. She took a picture of a rack, and then the, the picture of the room, a rack is a silver rack, a picture of the room. A picture of the building, a picture of the campus, A picture of campus is part of like multiple campuses, and you are already an enormous space, and that's just one of those 7.3 million data centers that exist in the world.So I think that could form part of the resistance that we're finding in our minds as to the scale of where we're in.Chris Adams: One thing that I saw from there, there's like another highlight in this piece that says, despite sustainability now appearing in the top 10 business priorities, only 9% of companies are allocating resources towards sustainability goals. And like I Canditt, thinking you can't have both. You can't say it's aAsim Hussain: course you can.Chris Adams: and then say you're not gonna be.Can you imagine if we said revenue is one of our top 10 business priorities, so we're not gonna allocate anyone's time to chasing revenue inside this organization. Do you see how it sounds? A little bit unconvincing here. Or like a, and then if you look at the companies, let's say Google, Amazon, Microsoft, large companies, then we say, okay, if it's a priority, then why are the emissions continuing to grow every single year?Right? At least between 15 to 20% each of these companies year on year. That suggests it's not as much of a priority as you might be thinking. If we know the science is saying we need to be reducing these year on. . So I've struggled with that part, but,Asim Hussain: I think it's, there's, my colleague of mine recently did some analysis on, you know, this website, net zero tracker. Have you seen Net zero tracker?Chris Adams: uh, I think so.Asim Hussain: They analyze not just net zero, but like other, the various kind of sustainability commitments of organizations around the world. They like score the commitment on a kind of red, green, blue basis and they then score them on, this is your commitment that you've made.Let's look at the plans that you've published for actually how you're gonna meet those commitments. And what's amazing is looking at it, it looks 58% of Fortune 500 companies have set very like green. targets and yet almost all of them, like any form of detail plan as to how to actually meet those targets.So I think like setting targets is, is like a very easy thing for an organization. And in fact I, no, just to, I feel like I might be the one, cause I work in enterprise organizations, so I feel like I have a little bit more, I just have an insight that might not be available outside. And I think that. At some level in an organization, the leadership has got to set the direction of a, of an, of a, of an organization.One of the ways, one, I think the very important first step for an organization is for the leadership to come out very publicly, not privately in an email, which then get ignored, but very publicly say, this is important to us. This is the commitment that we're going to make. So I think that is an important step.That next stuff. I think the money, I don't think people fully understand how money shapes everything. Absolutely everything, and it doesn't even have to be intentional. It's just this is how our company makes money, a, B, and C earns us money. The whole organization is just absolutely geared towards maximizing.That's what a for-profit company is these days. It's an engine to make money, and so all these promises are off to the side of. Rather than the primary thing, and I think this is why regulation is so important, some advice is given to me a while ago, which is that people that all they're focusing in is solving their pains, their pain points, and unless you're causing pain, you're not really going to be solve it.So regulation is a pain for an organization. So they, if there's regulation on sustainability, they will put effort into resourcing it.Chris Adams: Peyton really was a vitamin. Absolutely.Asim Hussain: forces. is a pain. So if your customers are demanding more sustainable features and there's a competitive nature to this or another organization saying we will do it, that's another pain that you, you do it.And I also argue that employee, internal employee forces are also pain cuz it's becoming increasingly the sustainability credential and organization is becoming increasingly important as one of the metrics talent is using to choose to whether or not to work in an organization.Chris Adams: Yeah, absolutely.Asim Hussain: say.Yeah. Which counteracts the profit motive. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, actually, so here's how, here's one thing I see when, cuz there's an implication here that perhaps near liberal shareholder capitalism might not be the mis mechanism for us to actually get here. Right? And I won't di go down that particular rabbitAsim Hussain: keep on wanting to go into politics, likeChris Adams: But then, no, the reason I was saying this, cuz there's a good point.I'm assure you. So, for example, we spoke about in technology firms, there is a whole thing about being 24 7 clean energy by 2030, right? This sounds really like a big thing. Microsoft has this, what they call it, 10, 10, 100, I think, or 10, is it? What? Do you know what it is? Is it.Asim Hussain: yeah. It is. I think it is. It's a hundred hundred 24, a hundred percent renewable a hundred percent of the time. I don't, I can't remember.Chris Adams: Alright. I've actually, I did a talk about this, so I'm embarrassed that I don't actually have the particular thing at hand.Asim Hussain: don't think it's, I don't think it should be embarrassed. I think it's should be embarra. Like why is every organization choosing a different brand name for exactly the same?Chris Adams: I don't know. Google mentioned, Google spoke about 24 7 being the key thing that they have and like the key, let, if we just step away from the N, the words people use, it's basically every hour of every day. Being matched with renewable generation is the key idea. And Google was one of the leaders for this saying, yeah, we are gonna do it by 2030.We think it's hard, but we're just gonna manage it. All right. Then Microsoft came in. We are a trillion dollar company. It's gonna be hard. I think we're gonna get there. And then you look, and then earlier on this year, a small energy firm called Peninsula Clean Energy. Based in California, they were like, oh yeah, we're at 99% clean energy matched already, and we're on target to hit a hundred percent by 2025.And here's the model we've used to figure out how to procure this. So this makes me think that, okay, if one organization is able to move, literally doing half the time of these large companies, then it suggests that it could be more of a priority and they could move just as quickly as this other organization, which has far fewer.And I feel like this is why I, this is why like you said about the governing is so important. If it's a priority, you'll actually hit, you'll absolutely talk about this. And just like you said about like the pain thing, I'm really glad that there is now a really good example of a small, not particularly well resourced energy firm going so much faster than these trillion dollar companies, cuz I'm hoping it's gonna accelerate them to do this as well.To an extent, to be fair, some of the funding and some of the work is somewhat funded by some of these organizations, but it does show that if you make it a priority, then you will actually move that quickly, and we totally can do this. It's just a decision that people are choosing not to move as fast as they really need to right now.Asim Hussain: I, I, I agree. I, I've got two points to say. Here I was. One of them is I used to have a statement, which is, if you're working in sustainability inside a large organization, as as quickly as possible, you want to make sure that your work is not being supported through what I call grace in favor. So some executive leader, this is a priority for them, and they're pushing back the tide and pressure of all these other things saying, this is important to me.I'm making sure that Chris Adams has got the resources to focus on sustainability. That's great. And most things start off with somebody doing that. , but you won't get the significant investment unless you kind of align with the rest of the business of the organization. And if that exec leaves, your whole division has just gone.So I always say great. And I think that we should talk about it next week. I think. I wonder if some of the things are happening in Amazon are. Related to that kind of activity. But the thing I was saying, this is maybe like a call to the people who, who work in startups that are listening to this podcast, cuz quite a common piece of feedback I get when, and I talk to a lot of people who are in startups and I understand the pressure of a startup.You're in survival mode. I mean, this isn't, you're not just sitting back, you're like, you're wondering whether you've got enough money for the next six months or next year. And it's sustainability a priority for you. But I think, Chris, you had a really good point, which is, A smaller entity is far more capable of reaching these targets and these goals such as the 24 7 ALI matching target than the larger organizations.If your cloud businesses several hundred billion, it's much harder to reach like some sort of energy just because the market isn't there. You can't even just buy your weight out out of the solution. But imagine a very small cloud operator. It's much easier for them to achieve those kinds of targets. And I would just encourage you to explore that space a bit more because I believe if you were to achieve those targets, there is the market pressure there.There is the customers there who would then choose you over the larger organizations. I think that's a missed opportunity for a lot of startups. I see.Chris Adams: Yeah. I also, proportionally it's not that much, so if you, so I did a talk or I, me and Max Schultzer, he's another one of the members of the Green Software Foundation. We did a really nerdy recorded YouTube video. China basically deconstructing the cloud model to figure out, okay, how much profit is left over If you really were to step on the accelerator to try to actually achieve 24 7 by 2030 and like Amazon and Microsoft is 30% net profit for most of this stuff, there's plenty of cash left over to actually then like redeploy into this stuff and there's so much policy support both in.America now with the infrastructure, the I, the ira, the Inflation Reduction Act, and in the uk uh uh, uh, in Europe as well. Loads of this, like I really feel that this is something that you could, that people could move on and people who aren't, those companies could quite easily actually compete on this, in my view.Anyway, we're going way into something else cause we've got one story left.Asim Hussain: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally in in the news, I think there's a really interesting paper. It's called Counting Carbon, A Survey of Factors influencing the Emissions of machine learning, which is one of our favorite topics of this podcast.Chris Adams: This is cool. This paper, I'm really glad you mentioned it actually. Asim. Yeah. Okay. So Counting Carbon, the idea was there to this one woman, Alexandra, Sasha Luci. She works at Hugging Face in Montreal, Canada, and Alex Hernandez at the University of Montreal. They. Basically looked at something in the region of 500 papers where people were talking about the different machine learning models they've been creating.And they basically, they sent an email and contacted every single one of the 500 authors of all these papers and said, hi, can you share some information about where this was run, what you used and what and how long it was running for? And they basically came up with some figures saying, these are the key things which will affect the environmental impact of machine learning.And they talk about things like say the, the source of energy, the amount of training time that's being used, and a couple of other ones. It's a really nice piece and there are some really surprising things that came out of it. Basically, they broke this into five different tasks, kind of buckets of tasks that these machine learning models would do.So like image classification, so, which is object detection, so that's like picking out a face in a, in something like that. Or machine translation, which is. What is you imagined, like Google and all these tools use question answering and named entity recognition? I'll be honest, I don't work in AI and ml, so I don't, oh, hey.Your named entity recognition is basically through text, pulling out ideas and concepts, so that's what they were doing.Asim Hussain: Adams is the speaker of this podcast. ChrisChris Adams: So that's what they did. And the, there was one thing that surprised me was that of all of these ones, the only thing they saw was of all these ones here, only the image recognition one was the one that there was a strong correlation between the energy use and uh, the accuracy and effectiveness of the models, which was mind blowing for me.Asim Hussain: so what is a difference between those models? Logically, those models should function effectively. Similarly, they're just nodes that you pump numbers in and these weights and all this other stuff. It's just matrix multiplication. What's the difference in the matrix?Chris Adams: I don't know enough about it to really talk about it, but the quote, based on the comparison between carbon emissions and performance, we can observe that the only task in which better performance accuracy has systemically yielded more CO2 emissions was image classification. Really. So that was one of the key things that kind of blew my mind because you might naively assume that in order for you to have better models, you would need to just burn through huge amounts of energy.And it turns out no, that's not actually the case. It's much more about the actual design and how people have actually been putting some of this stuff together.Asim Hussain: Or it could just be those other types of models they could just plate. Plateau. Whereas image processing is like such a complicated thing. What's in an image is probably a lot harder to understand than what's in a body of text, which is a bit more structured. So what does that mean for chat G P T in large language learning models?Because those are more.Chris Adams: This is the thing that was surprising for me because you hear about chat, GBT four, chat, GBT three. You hear like, oh, it's used this much more compute time. Like it's now in the, it's now like maybe a hundred times. There's an implication. It's a hundred times more effective and like this paper is basically saying now that's probably not the case.It may be more effective, but the link isn't as strong as you might think. It's not like a one-to-one thing where. Doubling the amount of computing you throw at something, you increase it by twice as much.Asim Hussain: Oh, sorry. Is your argument is the argument. Models are not going to get much better the more we compute them. Right.Chris Adams: Yeah, the argument is that yes, throwing computing at something can increase it, but it doesn't hold true that it's a kind of one-to-one correlation, and that by doubling the amount of machines you throw at a problem, you double the effectiveness of it. In fact, that's actually the thing they say. That's probably not the case a lot of the time.Asim Hussain: Okay. But the one thing I did catch from reading the paper was they did discuss how, and I think this is interesting for this space as well. The energy source is a really big, the grid mix effectively is a really big cause of the emissions that they, they measured, which ODE 12 for the future.Chris Adams: Yeah, it's it. What this kind of implies is that for something like machine learning where you don't necessarily need, where you're not, it's not like you're not waiting on the other end, waiting for the stuff to come through. You're training something for a long period of time, and it's kind of. It's something that probably is more interruptible than other fields.Right. But that was one of the key things that led to the carbon footprint of the extremely heavy ones, is because not only were there was there lots of computing, but the actual fuel intensity, the carbon intensity of the fuel was actually a significant one as well. And weirdly, for like a significant number, like 12 of the papers, oil was listed as the primary source of power like burning oil, which is just, that blew my mind.I didn't know that was actually. I didn't, I, I don't know where in the world uses oil as their primary fuel for generating power for the grid, basically. But for these folks who are in Montreal, in Quebec where they have 99% plus renewable energy, that's basically a really good place to be running things and.For folks who might be using Amazon stuff, for example, Amazon have a, have a Montreal data center. So one of the most effective things you can do, probably run it somewhere where the energy is super clean. Even if you're not able to say, Hey boss, we don't necessarily need to be running loads and loads of machines.You can say if you're gonna run machines, then running them somewhere where the electricity is very clean. It's probably one of the most effective ways to reduce the environmental impact of this.Asim Hussain: That just made me realize cuz you know, a lot of a, some cloud provider. Do give you information about how much a renewable energy or whatever it is, different data centers use? I believe all of them, yes, I do believe. I think it's only Google, actually. Google provides that data with their market based measures included into it.I'd be very interested to get a list of all the cloud regions around the world with actual grid mixes or average grid mixes. Because to answer the questions like that, because I think one of the things we talk about in the SN and the things is you should be picking, preferably picking just based on the nature of the grid mix, not based on the nature of the offsets that you purchased to, to,Chris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: that'd be just a really simple thing.Chris Adams: Yeah. Okay, so last year we announced where I work an IP to CO2 intensity api specifically to do some of this stuff. Now the thing is the information that is available for free. As in as open data go works at the country level. And for someone like Canada, this is actually quite an interesting one because let's say that you were looking, I'm gonna run everything in Canada.So right next to Quebec is, it's the place where the tar sands, I've totally forgot the name of the province of Canada, basically two provinces right next to each other with radically different carbon intensities of power. So if you just say Canada, you could be running something in. Versus Quebec. So Alberta tar sands, super dirty, super carbon, uh, electricity.Yeah, that doesn't have very green does it. And right next to is Quebec, which is hydro and nukes, which is problematic in its own ways, but very low carbon.Asim Hussain: but are you saying, are you, because like surely what time and other providers, like they provide the carbon intensity data by grid level, not by country. When you mentioned that, what were youChris Adams: So for this one here, I actually think that what time does provide the figures at the kind of grid level. So I think the term is like either a balancing organization or a BA or balancing authority. So they will provide some of these numbers. I think those are the marginal numbers you would actually see, but.As far as I'm aware, I dunno, of any open data source that provides a higher resolution in that.Asim Hussain: source, right.Chris Adams: And that's the thing, like you could be using what time stuff for like e either to experiment with, but as soon as you wanna put them into production, you have to pay for, there's a fee for that. And I don't know where that data is at a kind of free level like that right now.And I think that's a thing that's really missing. Cuz in many cases you gotta ask yourself, how many times do you have to pay for this information? You pay once through the, your use of the energy bills, right? You're paying once there. In many case, you're paying through like taxation, so it to be generated and then to be like repackaged again so you can use it.It feels like surely this should just be a kind of universally open thing that people are able to use, especially if it's like the stakes are this high and it has this much of an impact.Asim Hussain: Yeah, something I think access to this and I, and I love what I think they do. These are great organizations and they have to keep the lights on one way or another, so I, I, I do understand it, but it would definitely benefit the world if a lot of this data was more readily available.Chris Adams: It might actually be with, with Canada, to be honest. I mean, I'm probably just being lazy. Yeah. They provide a usual useful service and there's an API and stuff for it, but this feels like stuff which I. I feel like every single government everywhere in the world should be publishing this stuff automatically as open data because it does, it makes it, cuz you can still provide value added services on top of that.You can still do stuff like that. But for it to be something which is so difficult and so not, not particularly open in lots of parts of the world, is a real problem for the policy discussion, cuz this is actually one thing that, going back to the paper, that the paper mentioned, this paper said, okay, all our models, all the kind of large learning models or machine learning models, There was zero representation from South America or Africa.All right, so that's lit. So all the models published, all the, that were shared in papers were from universities or from institutions in either North America E, either what you might refer to as, say, Western Europe or China, or, or. The kind of North America, more North American continent, and it's not like there's no one living in Africa and there's no one living in South America and they don't have opinions and they're not doing this kind of research.It just means that there's a whole sponge of things that we're missing out on because access to this stuff is not available.Asim Hussain: Okay. Thank you Chris. I think there's one other thing that I just wanna mention before we finish our podcast, which is the meetup program. That we're launching in the Green, Software, Foundation. So one of the things that we would really like for there to be is a global network of people who are just.Shared similar interests. We're meeting up on green software, different places all over the world, and we actually have a Meetup program, which means that we pay for, if you know what Meetup is, a meetup's, a platform which enables people to, to meet up and we pay for the costs of running a group on Meetup and we actually have about 25, 26, 27 meets up groups there.A bunch of 'em are looking for organizers. A bunch of those groups have now become the actively looking for organizers for them. We're actually willing to also, Launch a meetup group in your area and if this is something you are interested in and if you're interested in organizing a meetup group, if you're interested in helping out with a meetup group, if you are even just interested in joining a meetupChris Adams: Speaking for one of the meetup groups.Asim Hussain: for one of the meetup groups.Really anything. I personally have built and grown multiple meetup groups in London and it's incredibly rewarding. Meeting up with people with a shared similar interestChris Adams: realizing they have legs. Yeah. Mostly,Asim Hussain: Realizing they have legs. And especially in this space, I'd say cuz we're in a very challenging space and it can at times be quite hard to stay motivated even sometimes.But I think I find that meeting people with similar interests is a very empowering thing. So if this is something you're interested in, please visit meetup dot Green, Software, Foundation, and you'll find like a bunch of resource information about how to get involved. So that's just the call to action here.If you want to get involved in a meetup program, visit meetup.green software found.Chris Adams: Oh yeah. Cool. And I suppose. Realized with the meter thing you're doing, if you were to choose to run an event somewhere, you've probably got a list of people you could ask already with the Speakers Bureau. So that would make it a bit easier to find.Asim Hussain: Yeah, exactly. That's why we launched the Speakers Bureau because to help the Meetup program, that was one of the primary reasons cuz we, we have a speakers mentioned before, the Speakers Bureau works very closely with the meetup program.Chris Adams: And just as I understand it, the Speakers Bureau, you don't need to be a member of the Green Software Foundation to be part of it, do you? You can be, as long as you've been doing research or you are able to talk about this and confident talking about this field, you can get yourself listed.Asim Hussain: That's exactly right. And the same goes actually for the Meetup program. You do not need to be member of the GSF to be an organizer of a meetup group.Chris Adams: Oh, cool. That's handy. Okay. That's so nice. Everything to end this. So nice I up for that. And I, I think you're listed and I think I'm listed. I can't remember if I am.Asim Hussain: in the speaker's bureau. Yeah, you're listed. Yeah.Chris Adams: Oh, okay. In that case, I guess that's one way to ask if you want me to speak at one of the events you or seem to speak at one of the events or even Anne and.Oh, this is being recorded in February. If there's something happening in March, I might be around to actually be doing a talk in London about that stuff as well.Asim Hussain: So that's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green Software Foundation are in the show description below, or you can visit Green Software Foundation. That's green software. One word. Dot the Symbol Foundation in your browser.If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts,Chris Adams: Five stars. FiveAsim Hussain: star , leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.Bye-bye.Chris Adams: right. Take care everyone. Bye.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit Green Software Foundation. Thanks again and see you in the next.

The Week in Green Software (or TWiGS) is back with a new format! This time host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie and Asim Hussain to talk about news about AI and the environment (with a particular focus on Chat GPT and Bing), the environmental impact of the cloud, the Corporate Sustainable Software Market report, and some exciting opportunities to explore, learn, and contribute to green software. Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAnne Currie: LinkedIn / Website Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterEvents:LF seeking speakers for upcoming Energy Summit / Linux Foundation June 2023 ⋅ Seeking Speakers until Feb 17News:AI can help address climate change—as long as it doesn’t exacerbate it / Fast Company Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” / Simon WillisonThe Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret / WiredWhy we can no longer afford to overlook the environmental impact of the cloud / Computer WeeklyCorporate Sustainable Software Market report explores industry size, share, growth & forecast 2028 / WhaTechSustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps / InfoQHow a Hackathon Is Slowly Saving The World / Will BuchananCO2.js: An Open Library for Digital Carbon Reporting / ClimateAction.techBooks:Bulls*** Jobs by David GraeberPrevious Episodes Mentioned:How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? / Environment VariablesOngoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:Submit Call for Papers / GSF Speakers Bureau Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity SpecificationIf 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!

For our first episode of 2023, we have an episode of The Week in Green Software where Ismael Velasco looks at 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; Ismael will help you make sense of it all! Learn more about our people:Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterLegislation & Reports:State of Green Software Report from The Green Software Foundation [3:16]France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation [9:22]The US' Executive Order 14067 Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets [11:33]AWS Environmental Sustainability Impact Report [23:13]ITU Activities & Sustainable Development Goals [30:14]Gartner Survey 2022 [34:14]2021 World Bank Study on Green Public Procurement [36:36]The UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy [38:31]Projects, Protocols & Tools:Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Tool [24:44]ISO 25010 [29:08]Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification [32:46]Talks & Events:2022 World Telecommunications Development Conference [5:04]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!