Environment Variables

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tony van Swet from Electricity Maps, to talk about the mapping of the carbon intensity of electricity grid. Tony shares some of the work that Electricity Maps has been doing to make it easier to understand how clean or dirty electricity is around the world, as well as how they’re making this data more accessible and usable to consumers. Join in on this candid conversation discussing the uses of such data and how to access it, as well as Tony talking about carbon intensity, open data, and open source.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | WebsiteTony van Swet: LinkedIn | WebsiteFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:How to trace back the origin of electricity (Smoothie Blog Post) | Electricity Maps [06:16]The value of space-time load-shifting flexibility for 24/7 carbon-free electricity procurement | Zenodo (TU Berlin’s Study with Google, using PYPSA) [12:11]Electricity Maps | Client Story: Monta (EV Smart Charging use case) [15:41]GitHub - electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib: A real-time visualisation of the CO2 emissions of electricity consumption [21:01]Electricity Maps | Reports - Hourly Residual Mix Methodology [27:13]Resources:Electricity Maps | Data Portal [18:29] Electricity Maps Methodology 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:Tony van Swet: Looking at Google's use case at their data centers, they have the huge potential to shift their computation based on time or location, so this enables them to manipulate their energy consumption through using our API to increase their consumption when the sun shines and the wind blows. Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of This Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, it's often common to talk about energy efficiency, and one of the reasons we care about it at all, is that right now we burn a lot of fossil fuels to generate electricity used in data centers, networks, and end-user devices. But how much of that comes from fossil fuels? And is that changing? This data exists all around the world, and sometimes the data is open, but it's often very messy. In 2017, the Electricity Map project was launched to make it easier to understand how clean or dirty electricity was all around the world. And as the name suggests, it took the form of a map showing the carbon intensity of electricity in as many places around the world as possible. Over the subsequent years, an open source project has grown with hundreds of developers around the world, contributing open web scrapers for data in their parts of the world to make the data more accessible. And earlier this year, the company behind the project released a new open data portal for historical data about how clean electricity was for anyone to use how they wish. So, what does this have to do with green software? Having access to this kind of data makes it much easier to understand the carbon footprint of your software. And this week, we're joined by Tony van Swet from Electricity Maps to talk about carbon intensity, open data, and open source. Hey there, Tony.Tony van Swet: Hi, great to be here.Chris Adams: Okay, Tony, before I get ahead of myself, I think we should give you a bit of space to introduce yourself properly. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Electricity Maps? And for folks new to the field, what Electricity Maps does these days, please?Tony van Swet: Yeah, of course. I'm a senior software engineer in the advocacy team at Electricity Maps, and I'll give you a bit of background on what we do at Electricity Maps. So our mission is to organize the world's electricity data to drive the transition to a truly decarbonized electricity system. And as part of the advocacy team, my focus is enabling climate action with transparent insights.We do this with the help of the open source community, building products such as our map visualization and the data portal that we're here to talk about today.Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks for that, Tony. Okay. So if you're new to this podcast, um, my name is Chris Adams, as I mentioned before. Um, I work as the executive director at the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit focused on an entirely fossil-free internet. And I also work as the chair of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation. And before we dive in, here's just a quick reminder, everything we talk about, we'll link to in the show notes below. So if there's a paper that caught your interest, or there's a story you've heard about, we'll do everything we can to make sure there's a helpful set of links that you can follow up for your own research a little bit later. But back to Tony. Tony, I've got to have to ask you, I know you're working in Denmark, but... I suspect you might not be coming from Denmark in the first place. What does a Kiwi end up doing on the opposite side of the world in Denmark, working for a company like Electricity Maps? I'm sure there's a story behind that.Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a bit of a career shift for me. So I started out about 10 years ago as a truck driver in New Zealand. I was full of self doubt, a bit depressed, struggling to find my place in the world. And to lift myself up out of this, I made it my mission to create technology to combat climate change, and I identified that software was the most powerful way to effect change at scale.And this led me to enroll in a computer science degree. From there, I worked at a few cool startups in New Zealand, eventually looking to integrate electricity maps data when I saw their job postings and applied, and within a few months, I had the job and was waving goodbye to my friends and family to fly across the world to Denmark.It's definitely been full of challenges, but it's been amazing to find a company that really shares my values and aligns so perfectly with my mission.Chris Adams: Wow. So you, when you say you're a truck driver, you're talking about the massive, like 18 wheelers crossing from city to city, right? Something like that.Tony van Swet: Yeah, I actually worked with the HIAB trucks, which have a crane on the back. So I was delivering building supplies around Auckland. It definitely gave me a lot of time to think about the world and take in the kind of sights and sounds of the city.Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. So I think you may be the first former truck driver we've ever had onto this podcast. So yeah. Wow. Thank you for, thank you for coming along. That's also a fun story. I, it's, it's quite nice to hear something like that because, uh, I myself, there's a lot of us who are self taught technologists and to hear a nice story about switching careers you're going, "that's cool, actually." All right, before we digress, let's go back to what we were supposed to be here talking about, which is open data and carbon Intensity. So one thing you mentioned is that we're here to talk about open data and there's some recent work at your end that's made that visible. But before we do that, could we briefly just cover what carbon intensity means at your end, because this is something that isn't obvious to most people.And I remember there being a kind of nice introduction on your website using metaphors like blenders and so on to explain that there's more to electricity to it being just gray versus green, for example. So maybe you could just. provide a bit of a background or how you explain this to people, then we can dive into some of the details about open data.Tony van Swet: Yeah, the blender analogy is really great. We even did a smoothie maps version of our app for April fools, renaming all of the power sources to different fruits and vegetables to illustrate that. So yeah, carbon intensity to us seems like it's relatively straightforward, but if you're not familiar with this idea, it's quite hard to understand.And in this case, we refer to carbon intensity as the CO2 equivalent for a given zone where energy is being consumed. We calculate this by determining the carbon intensity for each generation type and then weigh it according to its proportion of the grid mix. We also then calculate the neighboring zones and account for all the imports and exports of the connected zones to figure out a final number for the carbon intensity where you plug into the wall and consume it.Chris Adams: So basically, if I understand that correctly, you're, what you're saying is you look at all the various parts of the world, and when you say zone, you're referring to maybe a country or a part of a country, depending on how a grid is designed. And then when you're talking about the kinds of generation, you're talking about, say a coal fired power plant or a gas fired power plant or a solar farm or something like this. So these have different levels of CO2 that get emitted for each unit of electricity and you're mixing those together, something like that. Is that correct?Tony van Swet: Yeah, definitely. When we take a look at a coal plant, it's going to emit a lot more carbon than the equivalent solar or wind farm.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So that talks about the consumption, the how, where the electricity comes from. So maybe we can talk a little bit about, okay, how we experienced that and how, like, when I plug something into the wall, for example, what happens next?Tony van Swet: Yeah, so when we, um, plug into the wall, the energy we consume is, um, considered a mix of all the generation types of the grid you're connected to, um, and it's almost impossible to determine whether an electron comes from a wind farm or a coal plant, even though this will have a significant change in the carbon intensity of the energy you consume.So this is where it's really useful to consider the grid as a giant blender, mixing together all those generation types. And then we can evaluate the true carbon intensity of the energy that you consume.Chris Adams: Okay. If we're going to continue this blender analogy, if you put lots and lots of, say, strawberries in a blender, it's going to look one color. And if you had lots of Kiwi fruit in a blender, it's going to look another color. So that's a little bit like what you expose to people and how that might change over theday.Right. Okay, cool. I believe what we'll do is we'll share a link to the blog post, becauseI found it one of the clearest ways to actually help people get their head around this kind of concept, because it is a bit of a leap when you're first starting to get into this field. So with that, we've got a kind of grounding there. Maybe it's worth talking about this from the point of view of a software engineer. So. Let's say you do know this and you have access to this information. Why is this helpful if you're a software engineer? Like where does this fit into what you might do, for example, or affect your job?Tony van Swet: I think it's super useful as a software engineer to, to have this information and I see a few main categories where you can apply this data, particularly around raising awareness of when to consume energy. We want people to use power when the sun shines and the wind blows. So I think that there are ways to present this information so people can make decisions in their everyday lives.But particularly for me, I find it interesting of automating solutions where we can get carbon-aware products that will shift their consumption or the load of the power consumed based on how sustainable the power is available to them.Chris Adams: Okay. So in this case, this scenario here, you're basically saying, if you have an abundance of power, which is very green, you might kind of tune or change your usage to use more of that, and when the power is particularly dirty, for example, you would try to use less of it so that you're shifting your power through time or possibly through space so that the average carbon intensity might be lower than it otherwise would be.That's what I think you're saying, right?Tony van Swet: Yeah, exactly. So the two main ways to optimize your consumption here is over time or via location. Um, so we know that different grids are much cleaner and, um, some people have the luxury to be able to shift their consumption via location as well.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So. We've got the kind of general concept for this. Are there any kind of favorite examples that you might point people to of people using this to actually demonstrate their behavior, either at a personal level or an organizational level? Because yeah, having a concrete example would be really helpful for people who are listening to this for the first time.Tony van Swet: Yeah, I think, um, my favorite example is, um, looking at Google's use case at their data centers. They have the huge potential to shift their computation based on time or location. So this enables them to manipulate their energy consumption through using our API to increase their consumption when the sun shines and the wind blows.Chris Adams: Okay, so if I understand it correctly, they're like a client of yours or a customer of yours, they pay for this, and then they use it then to essentially either scale things up or down, depending on the amount of power they might be using, depending on where the data centers are. That's, that's what it sounds like, what you're suggesting there, correct?Tony van Swet: Yeah, definitely. So there is the location aspect and we see a huge variation of the carbon intensity throughout the day. So they also do time-based or scheduled computation based on the carbon intensity available to them.Chris Adams: Cool. Okay. I'm glad you mentioned this because this is something we've had people come on the show before to talk about some of this, but since we have spoken about this, there's actually, uh, some interesting data. Uh, there was a study published with TU Berlin where we're, I'm based in Berlin so we've, I found out about this study and, uh, there's. I found this actually quite a nice example of this to talk about, because a lot of the time, when you see companies talking about this, it's quite hard to actually find meaningful numbers to say, does this actually translate to a saving in carbon? Or does it translate to a saving in even money, for example? And this is the first time I've seen with really detailed information, which has been modeled through this. Um, we'll share a link to this paper, but there's a few kind of headlines that I saw from this. And as I understand it, one thing that Google is doing, for example, they've basically set a commitment to say, "we want to have the average carbon intensity of our power to be this much." So we want to have a certain percentage coming from what they call is like carbon-free or fossil-free sources of generation. And, uh, the study that I saw basically showed that by moving the load around, it reduces the amount of renewable energy, renewable kind of generation that needs to be deployed in the first place for this.So there's an embodied carbon saving in the, in not needing to have a bunch of wind turbines or solar all around the globe. And this study that I see, it was modeling five data centers. So five out of say 14 data centers that are around there. And there were. The savings are pretty good, or actually like measurable.I think with the combination of moving things through time and moving things through space, so moving a compute load to where it was going to be greener, the figures that I saw, some of the headlines were that they're able to reduce the cost of doing this by something in the region of a third of the amount of investment that would need to be possible. And, uh, they also, this is one of the first examples I've seen, which even explains like what the costs on a yearly basis might be for this. And, uh, I think the. There was a couple of scenarios inside this. So there's maybe with zero load shifting or moving, say, about 40 percent of the compute loads that to to different parts of the data centers, where maybe one part of the world might be particularly windy or sunny. When I look at the figures here, I see something in the region of, if you, the savings that are here and we need to, and I will share a link to this, to the actual study for this, so that people can look into this a bit more detail, but with the five data centers modeled in, I think, Germany, in Denmark, in Portugal, in Ireland, and in Finland they were basically able to model savings of around at least 200 million US dollars each year by, in terms of the amount of power that you would need to be, the amount of like generation you would need to match this, to actually hit those targets. Now this is, I think this is actually useful to understand because this actually speaks to the fact that there's economic drivers as well as actually just environmental drivers for this. And this kind of speaks to the wider kind of trend, but. I think it's useful to, for this to be, people to be aware that there's actually something in the public domain to interrogate and look at some of these numbers and see how some of these are modeled and what some of the assumptions are. So we spoke about that. Are there any other use cases that you might point to that may be a little bit more closer to home, for example, or something that you might, that people might experience on a more kind of daily basis or close to themselves, for example?Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have a few customers in the EV smart charging space, and we have also done some research with the Frederiksburg commune here in Denmark about the benefits of smart charging. And we... We were quite impressed to see a 10 to 15 percent reduction in carbon emissions if we have grid-aware smart charging products.So this is plugging your car in the evening and letting it decide when the best time is to charge the car overnight. And even with a small shift in that load, we see a significant reduction in the carbon emissions of the energy consumed. So we were really positive with the results of that. And particularly find it a very nice use case that you put the decision-making power in the hands of the consumers here.So people can choose whether they want to use these products or not.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. If you're in the UK, I believe there's a number of companies that do things like this. Octopus is one of the better known examples of this. And I think under some of the tariffs, there are scenarios where you can actually be paid to charge up a car rather than pay to charge a car or to use a car.So the cost can go negative. Because there's maybe an abundance of power in the grid or like we have here. So that's actually, okay. That's quite useful. So we've covered a couple of use cases now. Maybe it's worth talking a little bit about, little bit about what kind of software supports the use of this data. So I know that at the Green Software Foundation, there's a carbon aware SDK, which is designed to allow people to embed this in some of their software. And where I work at my nonprofit, the Green Web Foundation, we have a library, a Golang library, which is used in a project called Carmado, which is a kind of federated Kubernetes operator. Could you talk a little bit about some of your experiences of what you've seen people use for some of this stuff? For example, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the pieces of software that you've seen in the wild using some of these tools or using some of this data, for example.Tony van Swet: Yeah, definitely. Firstly, yeah, we're hugely appreciative of the Green Software Foundation and their work to make it easier for developers to use data like this. We do our best to enable developers and hobbyists with our free data through our API. Previously, it was known as CO2 Signal and we've now incorporated that into the Electricity Maps API.And we see lots of amazing tools being built. We see people building dashboards so they can make decisions around which data centers they use. And we do see a big community from Home Assistant also integrating our data. So people can connect their smart homes to become carbon aware and give information on the carbon intensity of their homes.Chris Adams: All right. So we've got some, some stuff like that. And I think we've done a decent job of now establishing what carbon intensity is and how some people might be using it so far. And, uh, we spoke about this idea. There's a, like a free tier, which basically implies that people pay for a data service. But one of the things that we're here to talk about today is open data and this open data portal.And as I understand it, this is your baby, so to speak, right? So maybe you could talk a little bit about, okay. What is this that we, that that's actually gone live because I've got a history with open data, but I suspect it'd be useful for people who are coming to this to understand what this data portal is and why it's useful and what it lets people do, for example.Tony van Swet: Yeah, I was super excited to take the lead on the Data Portal project and really happy to come on the show today to talk about it. Providing free and open data really motivates me. And the Data Portal is a product on our website where anyone can download free carbon intensity data for over 50 countries in hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly for both 2021 and 2022.Chris Adams: Okay. So let me just check if I understand that. So, uh, if people want to start using or experimenting with this data, there's a free tier which you, which folks like yourselves provide. Uh, there's another provider called Watttime that does a, of a free, a free tier. And there's commercial kind of real time feeds from both yourself.And, uh, this part here is this high resolution historical data that has typically been quite hard for people to give access to. And this is openly licensed in the sense that people are free to use this how, however they wish, is that the case or is there any, or maybe we could talk a little bit about the licensing part so people understand how they could use some of this.Tony van Swet: Yes, so we have provided the data free for anyone to use. We particularly look at Carbon Accountants and researchers to use the data. People are welcome to use it under our license, as long as they, if they're building a new product with our data, then they'll be required to open source that new product, but if you're using this data for Carbon Accountant, then you're fine to use it and charge for that accordingly.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. Uh, what we'll do is we'll share a link to the message, to, to the licensing. So people have an understanding for this. So I think when I looked at it was the open database license. So you're able to use it for free in any, in any form, as long as, uh, you're prepared to share under similar terms yourself.That's basically the kind of general approach that I understand for that. And you, you spoke a little bit about there's an intended audience of people who might be carbon accountants or researchers or energy geeks. Can you talk a little bit about how this data gets published in the first place, where it comes from? Because as I understand it, the data can be quite messy to actually put into a kind of API for someone to consume.Tony van Swet: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a huge challenge to collect all the data. So we have an open source repository full of parsers that collect this data from TSOs and data providers around the world. We have an incredible open source community that helps us to maintain those parsers. We then process this raw data with the kind of smoothie idea that we talked about earlier, run data quality checks on top of the data, and then present it in a way that's easy to navigate and consume.Chris Adams: Okay. So you've used a bit of jargon that I'll need to unpack on there. So you said that you're getting data from a few places and you mentioned a TSO. I'm assuming a TSO is a transmission service operator, like someone who operates part of the grid and they publish information. So that's where some of the data might be coming from.Is that correct?Tony van Swet: Yeah. Yeah. Spot on.Chris Adams: Okay. And one of the challenges is that not every, so maybe I, as I understand it, when I've looked at this data, the data comes out in like grams per kilowatt-hour, what I would typically be paying for, but different places might have different ways of reporting it or different units. Is that the kind of stuff that you, that ends up having to be munged so that there's a kind of clean interface for people to consume?Tony van Swet: Yeah. So the data providers, the TSOs tend to give the data in the format of a energy breakdown. So the various production types, whether it's wind, solar, coal, gas, and we then process this data and apply emission factors. So we add a direct and life cycle emission factors to each of the generation types, and then compute that to give a final carbon intensity number for each zone.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So if I understand that correctly, you're basically saying we know what this kind of coal power station is likely to be doing for each unit of coal. And because we might have some information about it being an old machine, old one or a younger power station. So you'll have some figures like that, and you essentially run through every single form of generation so that you've got a kind of up-to-date, accurate number for that based on what, what people are doing rather than have to look that up because yeah, it's quite hard to find.So. You've, you've created this data portal. People are able to download it for a set of countries or different parts of the world, and you said that there's data for 2021 and 2022, and this kind of begs the question, what happens next? Is this, is the idea, is the intention to keep having this available on an, on a, on a annual basis so that next year there'll be data for 2023, for example?Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. I listened to your podcast a few weeks ago and I heard you mention that we were looking to raise the bar of energy data available out there. And I really like that term. It's exactly what we want to do. We plan to release new data early 2023. We want to enable carbon accountants to do granular carbon accounting based on our data.And we really hope that providing this data for free gives the industry a push to be more open and transparent around what energy data is available.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. So for the energy nerds here, I, it might be worth just briefly talking about the fact that this currently provides average carbon intensity data. Is that correct? So that's basically the kind of location-based figure. So there, this isn't trying to take into account water or anything to do with market-based figures at present.That's something that might be on the horizon in future. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what things are on the wishlist or what people are asking about What would they like to use in future from here? Because you alluded to some things about, uh, the life cycle intensity of, of, of energy, for example, and there's a whole other set of footprint impacts that people often ask about when they talk about carbon intensity, or even just the environmental impact of the use of electricity in any kind of service.Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. So carbon accountants are most interested in the direct emissions that we provide in this data because they're doing their accounting based on the Scope 2 emissions of a company. Um, we do also provide the life cycle analysis emissions for each zone as well. And this is taking a cradle to grave approach of the emissions.We use the numbers from the IPCC and the,Chris Adams: So IPCC in this case is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.So that's one thing. And then the UNEC, so I'm guessing it's United Nations.Tony van Swet: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Chris Adams: Okay, great. Okay. So, so that's basically the kind of bona fide place where you're taking some of these numbers from. And when you talk about the life cycle emissions there, that means that let's say you're talking about solar or wind, for example. That includes the fact that someone has to make the panels in the first place, and there's going to be some pollution that may be caused there, carbon pollution from making the kind of silicon panels or the turbines.Is that correct? And then the dispose disposal.Tony van Swet: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And even in the case of nuclear, the lifecycle analysis takes into account the storage and disposal of nuclear waste over hundreds of years and applies the costs of that to a carbon equivalent.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. So we've spoken about carbon and we will talk about carbon a bit more, but. It's very, one thing that has come up when people talk about the environmental impact of digital services, there's this term called carbon tunnel vision, where people only look at the one figure, or the one kind of dimension. Is this actually something that, is this on your wishlist, for example, because we know there's a, say, there's a water impact. People talk a lot about machine learning and AI and tools like that, having a water impact, and there's also an impact from the actual generation, for example. Could you maybe talk about a little bit like that?Is that something that you'd like to be heading towards, or is that on the roadmap, for example, in the, in the long run?Tony van Swet: I think we'd love to take a step back and, and have a broader look at the impacts. We're relatively limited with our capacity, so, so we do focus on what we know and what we're experts in. But I would love to see us work with partners to be able to provide our data alongside other sources to take a bigger picture approach to this.Chris Adams: Okay, cool, Tony. So back to carbon then. You spoke a little bit about working with other providers and I realized just as I was doing some research for this recording, this podcast, there was a new paper that came out from Electricity Maps specifically about, this is a, this is a really nerdy, I'm afraid, residual carbon emissions when you look at the environmental impact of electricity and If I understand it, I'm just going to try and run my understanding by you if I can, and then if you can give me an idea about if it's in the right direction, that'd be really helpful.So, as it stands, electricity maps gives you figures for location-based data. So you look at the carbon intensity of the generation all around the world through, and like dams or wind or solar, uh, you'll look at that part, green energy, they often talk about, say, using green energy in some parts of the world where they've purchased essentially certificates to count electricity as green.And this is a kind of like a market-based approach that people use. And this is the basis that various companies use to say, "we're using a hundred percent green energy," for example. Now, if I understand it, this paper that goes into this and basically says, if you're going to look at the carbon intensity of electricity, you need to account where these certificates that people use, where they're actually being used in various parts, because that's going to have an impact if, because if someone is claiming green energy in Ireland, for example, and they're claiming that on the basis of certificates that were traded from Norway, that's going to have an impact on how green the power might look in Norway compared to Ireland, for example. This is what I think some of the research is that was in this paper. Is that directionally correct? Is that moving in the general direction of correctness for this stuff?Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I think a lot of companies are buying renewable energy certificates and it has to be a zero-sum game. So the residual mixed paper that our policy team has just released goes into a huge amount of detail into how you calculate the carbon intensity after you have sold those renewable energy certificates for each zone.Chris Adams: And as I understand it, this is something that's on the roadmap that will be looked at is A, a thing that is unsolved right now, but people are looking to figure out how to incorporate into how they work. I know that in the Green Software Foundation, there's a group called Realtime Cloud, who are working to come up with hourly figures to make it possible to provide this kind of reporting. This seems to be one thing that comes up because when I was looking through this paper just last night, actually, there was a few things which are really eye opening for me. So Ireland and Germany are two large markets in Europe, for example. And as I understand it, something like eight times the certificates were consumed as were issued in Ireland, for example.So this basically means as I understand it, that eight times as much green energy is being claimed as is generated in Ireland. So therefore you've got a bunch of generation in somewhere else in the world that needs to be accounted for when you look at the carbon intensity of say, a place like Iceland or Norway, for example, but the same things seem to be in Germany as well. Germany has something like seven times the certificates consumed as were issued in Germany. So that suggests to me that seven times as much green energy has been claimed as is being generated. So if Germany had to have an entirely green grid, you would need something like a sevenfold increase in order for them to be saying, "yes, we're running entirely on green energy." That seems, this is pretty eyeopening. I'm really glad this is actually out there because I haven't seen this data provided in this resolution, particularly in hourly level before.Tony van Swet: Yeah, I think it's really fascinating and definitely highlights why we need the transparency around this market based approach. And it's very early days, so we are hoping to inform the methodology of how we approach this in the future.Chris Adams: Great. Okay. So what we'll do, we'll share a link to that. The things I've just shared are in the first 10 pages of this paper. It's about 80 to 90 pages long, and it's a really impressive tour de force. So Cyril, I'm really impressed with this work. Really mad props for you to actually get this together. Cyril is the policy lead, Electricity Maps, and he's also on some of these working groups, which is why it really caught my eye. So Tony, we've just spoken a little bit about Open data, different ways of measuring the carbon intensity of electricity here for informing your decisions as a software developer. Is there anything that you would like to draw people's attention to? Any projects or things that you are particularly interested or that you're excited about right now?Tony van Swet: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. First off, I'd welcome people to jump on and take a look at the data portal and I would appreciate any feedback around that. And. If anyone would like to contribute to our open-source work, we're also always looking for contributors there. To find out more, jump on our website at electricitymaps.com.Chris Adams: And if I understand it correctly, you folks are still, it's still mostly Python scrapers and a kind of React app that you had before. Is that still the case for people?Tony van Swet: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Python and JavaScript.Chris Adams: Okay. So common languages that people know their way around. Okay. Brilliant. I think that's pretty much it. I've, I've really enjoyed this, actually. Thank you so much for giving us your time and diving into some of the finer points of carbon intensity of electricity and, uh, some of the nerdery there. And, uh, Tony, thank you so much.I've really, I've really enjoyed this. Cheers, mate.Tony van Swet: Yeah. Thank you, Chris. It was really great to be here. I also wanted to say I went digging through our open source repo and found your name on there. So I want to give you a personal thank you for contributing in the past.Chris Adams: Thank you very much. Um, there, I think there'll be more PRs coming in future when I find the time. Okay. Cheers, Tony.Tony van Swet: Amazing. Thank you.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! 

Dr. Daniel Schien from the University of Bristol, UK, joins host Chris Adams to discuss digital sustainability. They cover topics such as streaming's environmental impact, the carbon footprint of digital services, and the importance of reducing carbon emissions in ICT. The conversation explores different approaches to measuring carbon intensity and emphasizes the need for long-term decision-making in green software.

Join host Chris Adams and Tereze Gaile, global Sustainability SME at MuleSoft, as they discuss sustainability tools, resources, and bringing sustainability into organizations. Topics include the Green Code initiative, Developer Carbon Dashboard, generating customer demand for sustainability, change models, measuring organizational emissions, and self-care in the sustainability space.

Arne Tarara, CEO of Green Coding Berlin, joins host Chris Adams to discuss Mojo, a new programming language that achieves a performance boost of 68,000 times over Python. They also talk about progress in Grid Forecasting and Apple's carbon neutral Apple Watch. The Wagtail 5.1 project's greening efforts and AVIF encoding are explored, along with initiatives for energy conservation and expanding the measurement of environmental impact in software lifecycle assessment.

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

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

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

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

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

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