Environment Variables

Host Chris Adams is joined by Andri Johnston, Digital Sustainable Lead for Cambridge University Press and Assessment as they talk about using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing as well as news from the world of green software concerning one acronym; ESG and one portmanteau; LightSwitchOps. They also cover some upcoming events and we learn about Andri’s love of books!Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAndri Johnston: LinkedInFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:ESG as a lever for sustainability impact | Elise Zelechowski Thoughtworks  [2:49]Using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment | Andri Johnston & William Pickett [7:31]How Would the Business Benefit from Your Greener Java Application? | Holly Cummins at Devoxx UK [14:53]Resources:Thoughtworks.com/socialjustice [3:33]ShareAction [6:16]As You Sow [6:43]The True Climate Impact of Streaming | Netflix & Dimpact [8:49]Virtual conference carbon footprint revealed | Cambridge.org [11:23]David Hsu on mastodon.energy [13:53]The Baking Forecast UK [21:20]Effects of Internet-based multiple-site conferences on greenhouse gas emissions | Vlad Coraoma Events:Green Infrastructure Meetup GfK [x] Green Coding Berlin - 31 May 6:30-8:30PM | Green Coding Berlin [23:19]UN World Environment Day: The Green Software Revolution (Virtual Event) - Monday June 5th | GSF [24:02]LF Energy Summit 2023 (June 1 – 2, PARIS & Virtual) | Linux Foundation [24:46] If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript below:Andri Johnston: We have no control over what device people are using or what energy grid they're using, but we do have control over how we're building our software and making it as energy efficient as possible. And in my experience, the moment we were able to show that those numbers to board execs and that kind of level, it was like, oh, okay, so we actually can do something.Chris Adams: Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams.Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we'll be looking at the news from the world of green software that involves ESG and a portmanteau LightSwitchOps.Not only do we have this, but we'll also have some exciting events for you to attend. As always, we usually try to introduce our guests before we get started, and this week we have Andri Johnson joining us. Andri say hi.Andri Johnston: Hi. Thank you so much for getting me on the podcast. So yeah, I'm Andri Andri Johnson. I am the digital sustainability lead at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. And a little bit about me. I'm a very keen runner and gardener, however, that's taking a backseat right now cuz I am 36 weeks pregnant and I've deep dived into the world of sustainability and babies, which is a very weird world, but really exciting.So, yeah. That's me.Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Andri, you seem to be continuing our trend of guests who are just about to have kids before they disappear onto the other one. Yeah. Sara. Sara Bergman who was on before. She was also just coming to the end before she popped a sprog as well. And uh, yeah, uh, nice to hear. I wish you were the best for the second half of this actually.Okay, so for everyone who is, who listened to this first time, this is basically a news roundup show. So what we do is we look at some stories that caught our eyes, we share a couple of records about them, and then. Basically move on from there and if we discuss anything or any links come up that might be interesting.We'll make sure we add it into this show notes, so if there's any acronyms or anything like that, we'll work to point to some either definitions or lists for further reading. Okay. Andri, will that further ado? Should we look at the first of these stories?Andri Johnston: Yeah, sure. Let's go.Chris Adams: Okay, so this first story is ESG as a lever for sustainability impact by Elise Zelechowski at ThoughtWorks.Elise is actually the co-chair of the policy working group, and this is a blog post that she's written about some of the approaches that ThoughtWorks is taking around esg. ESG for the uninitiated stands for environmental, social and Governance, and it's a kind of set of terms or a kind of framework that people use to assess a company's performance in terms of sustainability and across a number of dimensions.ThoughtWorks has been talking about some of this for a while, and they've been probably one of the, in many ways, kind of leaders in this particular field. They've literally got a url, which is thoughtworks.com/socialjustice, to give you an idea of where they stand on a bunch of this stuff. And Andri, Andri, you had to look through this piece.Is there anything you wanna add on this one?Andri Johnston: Yeah, I found it really interesting and I'm really encouraged by the fact that especially on the tech side, more companies are starting to look at ESG. Not just reporting on carbon emissions. So at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, ESG is very important to us because we are linked with the University of Cambridge, we have to comply with a lot of social issues as well.And our environmental team and our EDIB team work very closely together. So for me, this was really interesting that Elise was talking about how companies need to evaluate themselves on all of these factors, and also working with your suppliers and that kind of thing, because that's, that's difficult.Like it's one thing, getting your carbon emissions from them, but really making sure you align with their ethics and it aligns with your ethics. I think that's really important. So I found it really interesting and very encouraging that more companies are starting to do that. Yeah.Chris Adams: I wonder how much might also be tied to, so ThoughtWorks went public this year and uh, there are over the last year or two, you have seen. A real uptick in ESG as a kind of buzzword in investment circles and in particular, say Europe for example, things you might consider kinda like green investments are able to get access to capital in ways that other groups don't.Particularly with something related called the European Taxonomy, which is specifically about saying, okay, these things which are green, Which we have decided society needs more of, get access to lower interest rates so they can borrow cheaper compared to other ones. And, uh, this is, there's a real push from investors asking about this in many ways.Sort of getting an idea of what they're exposed to from a climate point of view, but also from a kind of governance point of view and things like that as well.Andri Johnston: I guess there's also something around how this sits with your employees, because for us, we're technically a not-for-profit and for us, a lot of people come to work. At UP&A because of the ethics around it, the university, a couple of years had to de divest because of connections with big oil companies.And for us, it's the same. Our internal colleagues will ask us questions, who are we partnering with? What's their ethics? How does that align? So I guess there's both the investment part but also thinking about your colleagues internally and how they feel about your sustainability as a whole. So using this as a measure.Chris Adams: Yeah. This is definitely a thing. Actually, there's a few interesting kind of jump off points here that may be going outside the remit of green software, but a problem might be of interest. I know in the UK there's an organization called ShareAction that's been doing a. Bunch of really interesting work on employees and where their money's invested, because a lot of the time if you're working for a company where that you feel that you believe in or you want to be spending some time with, you'd, you'd like the the money that's being put aside for you to also be doing things that you also believe in, rather than propping up fossil fuels or doing things like that.Especially when the science is spelling out that we really need to not be involved in that as well. Okay. And there is also an organization called, I think As You Sow they've done some really interesting work with shareholder activism, specifically about putting shareholder resolutions to get a large organizations to move more quickly on sustainability.There's some really fascinating work that they did with Microsoft actually to basically really push for some more circular electronics. And what we'll do is we'll share a link specifically about how basically some engagement at a kind of shareholder level using the kind of shareholder resolutions mechanism was used to basically say, let's actually look at the environmental impact of say things like, say Microsoft Services lasting longer, and is that actually a net gain for us?And it turns out that it was, it's a really nice and interesting story because yeah, it turns out there are lots of ways that you can push for things rather than just coding. And I think that's gonna be the next thing we might touch on actually, which is the story about using DIMPACT. So DIMPACT. Or maybe you can help, how to pronounce this.What'sAndri Johnston: I think we just say DIMPACT, but yeah, it's digital impact, so it can be either, but yeah, DIMPACT.Chris Adams: All right. Okay, so this is using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. This is a story about the use of DIMPACT, which is a model that was developed by a consortium of different organizations, largely to understand the environmental impact of basically digital services and Andri just before we started the call, you were telling me a little bit about some of the origin stories of this and how some of this came about, and this is some of the work that you've been involved with, right.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah. DIMPACT was created by a consultancy company called Cornerstone based in London, in conjunction with the University of Bristol and their computer engineering department. And it basically, the first kind of version of it came from the BBC wanting to understand what the carbon footprint was of their online advertising.And from there, the tool is built with each different company using different model, and for example, there's a digital publishing module, which we use, but there's also a video streaming module, which Netflix, for example, used last year, Netflix and the Carbon Trust with Cornerstone published a white paper on video streaming, and it was really interesting debunking a lot of the myths around video streaming and where the majority of the carbon emissions lie.But the whole tool is based on the same kind of methodology. It's just different workflows depending on what type of business you're in. Advertising, streaming, or publishing like us. Yeah.Chris Adams: I see, and you spoke about this idea that there's maybe one model that's been published that, that we can, we're gonna link to, this is open for people to look at, but the idea was that get based on the use case, you might want to use a model slightly differently. So streaming might use a digital infrastructure in a different way to publishing, for example, because there's maybe a different environmental impact from watching something or streaming some files compared to dynamically generating a page every single time or something like that.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think what's fascinating and what I find really good about the tool is the granularity it can go into. So on a publishing side we publish the majority of our content online, so all of our customers access our books, our journals, our textbooks online, but there's also a content production kind of side to it, and that's what I find really useful about the tool.It doesn't just look at the hosting and the accessing of your webpage. It also looks at your entire workflow of your content production and storage, which I think is quite unique. And that's why we started using it because it allowed us as publishers to look at our complete workflow from the start of producing your content for book, for example, all the way through, let's see, someone accessing it online.So yeah, that it gives you a very good overview of your complete carbon footprint.Chris Adams: Oh wow. So that's quite a large boundary. So rather than just saying, I'm just gonna look at the website you're talking about, okay, if there's maybe another batch job, or there's another whole edit editing subsystem, you're keeping that inside your kind of boundaries at where, right. Okay.Andri Johnston: Exactly.Chris Adams: All right. Okay.What we'll do, we'll share some links to some of the underlying assumptions and ideas behind how these models work, but there's one thing I also wanted to actually talk about, cuz there's another link inside. This was this idea of using some of these related tools to understand the environmental impact of virtual conferences as well as the publishing part.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Yeah, because we'd partnered with DIMPACT to do the publishing side when I was doing the article that the will link to it was a pilot project that we did in the academic division for at CUP&A and in the academic publishing world conferences are huge and we had a lot of people coming back and saying, no, we should go back to in-person conferences.But at the same time, a lot of pushback and saying, no, we should do it online for environmental reasons. So we actually really wanted to understand what the impact was of a virtual conference. So we partnered with DIMPACT again and they. We're developing a module for virtual conferences. They're similar to the publishing and advertising module.They developed this module for virtual conferences and we took a two day online conference with about a hundred participants per session. We had eight different sessions and we had people from all over the world joining us. We had about 500 participants in total over the whole time. So it was quite big.Um, and we actually found that. Over the two days, the conference emitted between 15 and 20 kilograms of CO2. For the entire conference. We would've had at least 70 to a hundred people fly in from the US to the conference. It was just really fascinating to do that calculation and to see what the impact was and was never to say.In-person events are bad. It's just so you have the tools and you have the knowledge to be able to say, this is what the impact is of our online conference for this specific conference. We made the choice to do it because of this. So yeah, I think it's great to have that knowledge.Chris Adams: Okay, so in this scenario, Streaming is not the new flying. Flying is still the new flying.Andri Johnston: Flying is still the new flying. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. And what, you said 15 to 20 kilos of co2? Right. Okay. So if we assume, typically this is a kind of common factor that I've seen shared, and we'll share a link to. Typically if you have a cappuccino or a cup of coffee, you're looking at maybe between two to 400 grams of co2 just for that cup of coffee here.So basically the coffee break for a hundred people was roughly the same carbon footprint as the entire virtual conference, just for the assumptions are more or less in the same ballpark here. Okay. All right. That's a useful thing to bear in mind when we're looking at some of this then. Wow. Okay. Also, there's one thing I might share related to this, now that you've actually just spoke about this.There's a chap on mastodon.energy, David Hsu. He's done, he's actually been sharing some really interesting work about that's been happening at MIT about their approach with flying and basically academic. The whole kind of idea of, okay, if I'm an academic or I'm doing a bunch of, I'm involved in lots of conferences, where is the environmental impact?We'll share a link to that deck as well. Cause it's really fascinating and it shows a bunch of the ideas that are being used in MIT to basically get handle on the environmental impact from the whole life cycle of creating what we might refer to as knowledge products like this. And you talk about lots of measures, like say, applying an internal carbon levy the way Microsoft does, but they also talk about things like, say literally just public tracking of this stuff. So you get a rough idea of, okay, at a team level, these are the miles flown for this kind of work and things like that to basically make these things more visible so you can create, uh, an awareness of social proof around this stuff. Okay. Thank you, Andri. That was great.Andri Johnston: it sounds fascinating. Yeah.Chris Adams: All right.Should we look at the next story? Okay, so this is Holly Cummins at Devoxx UK. How would you or the business benefit from your greener Java application? So we spoke about a talk by Holly Cummins at Red Hat about greener Java applications. And this is a talk that Holly was speaking about and this is where this notion of LightSwitchOps has come up.I think she's also Holly's on a bit of a roll, cause she's mentioned she's come up with a bunch of really quite memorable terms like cloud zombies and things like that here. Is there anything that kind of caught your eye when you were reading this stuff?Andri Johnston: I think I really liked the idea of making colleagues more aware of greener Java and greener coat because, so taking it back a little bit to the work we did with the DIMPACT tool, as we know in the majority of digital products at the majority of our carbon emissions lie with our end users, and there's still a little bit of a back and forth whether we should be reporting on that, whether we shouldn't, is that part of scope three?But what we realize is that's the one place you can actually start making a difference in the way that you. Build your software and that, and especially the way that you are creating the content and these pages that people access. And I think this is a kind of thing that you need to provide to your teams as a tool to say, we can make a difference in how we're building our website.So for me that was a really easy way to say, here's a tip, here's a small thing that we can do as digital product people to make our websites more energy efficient at the end of the day. So for me that was really good. It's that, found it really interesting. I was like, I definitely wanna share this article with my teams.Yeah.Chris Adams: So I have a question here about borders, cuz I just, before this, Cost. I did a bit of research on the model, and there are various ways of modeling the environmental impact of a digital service. And the actual end user part is often one of the things which is can seen as a kind of stickler. Like for example, Mozilla, when they report on their emissions, 98% of their scope three, their supply chain carbon footprint came from the device of end users of this.And basically, this is an organization which reported their carbon footprint of around 800,000 tons. Where 98% of it came from end users, whereas large other organizations like say Google and Netflix, they haven't included these numbers themselves for some of this, and Digital Impact does, but it includes the usage, not the kind of embodied emissions that went into making theAndri Johnston: Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. But I think something that we need to take into consideration and why, I think for us it's important to report and to calculate those emissions is because, and Holly points to the carbon emissions of different regions for data centers, which is very true. But also carbon emissions are different for different end users depending on where they're based in the world.So we know that over 50% of all our customers are not based in the global south and don't have access to grids that are gonna greenify anytime soon. It's really important to understand that if that's where the majority of our carbon emissions lie, we have no control over what device people are using or what energy grid they're using.But we do have control over how we're building our software and making it as energy efficient as possible. And in my experience, the moment we were able to show that those numbers to board execs and that kind of level, it was like, oh, okay, so we actually can do something. So yeah, I think it's just important to keep that in mind and not just say, we're not gonna report on it because it's not our problem.Because I do think in some ways it's our responsibility too, to still work on it.Chris Adams: Yes. There's also one thing you just mentioned actually just springs to mind how there's actually a paper from, I think the Limits conference a couple of years ago that was, that came up in some of the discussions of the Green Software Foundation. When we're trying to figure out, okay, where should the boundary be for some of this, there are decisions that can be made at publishing level that will basically induce people to upgrade or use one device over another device.We might know this is premature obsolescence, but a lot of the times you might see it when if you use Slack or tools like that, you might see how. You stopped being able to use certain browsers with Slack, for example, or even if you tried to use a browser, like say, Firefox might be the browser that I use by default.I can't use Firefox on some tools because they assume the use of Chrome or certain tools like that. And there's a whole thing about, okay, well how far are you gonna actually be supporting a, and what happens as a result of you choosing to support certain devices over another one? All right. Okay. There's also, the other thing that we're gonna talk about with this was this idea of LightSwitchOps.I really like it. It cuz it feels like it captures, and we've spoken about, there's an idea in tech where people talk about things like serverless, whereas there's an idea of things being switched off that when you stop using them. But the idea that we don't have service is a bit of a kind of, It's a fiction that is cool, but let's be real.We're not really, we know their service still there. Whereas LightSwitchOps, the idea of switching things off, it makes it feel much, much nicer and it feels easier to say than scale to zero. So once I kind of get your take on LightSwitchOps as a kind of low tech and, but a friendly way to talk about some of this stuff here.Andri Johnston: I think that's exactly what it is. It's a friendly way to explain to people how we can build our products and how we can make sure that they're energy efficient. So just to give a bit of background, I don't come from a tech background at all. I come from a publishing background and I taught myself all of these things and I got fascinated by it.And it sometimes gets quite overwhelming when you are talking about, especially things like around cloud hosting and serverless, and it's becomes very techy. But the moment you can simplify it, Then it's almost like you can say, oh, okay, yeah, I can make, I can do this. Anyone can change the way that we're creating our products.So yes, I think that's exactly what it is. It's simplifying tech for everyone to understand and digital sustainability, because it does still seem very farfetched in, in some ways. If you're not super techy.Chris Adams: Yeah, I'm with you on this. Are you familiar with the baking forecast, by the way? Andri. Okay. The baking forecast is the way I talk about carbon intensity to people who are not really already really into this stuff. At the baking forecast, you, I think it still is a Twitter account that basically will tell you, when the electricity is gonna be particularly green in the UK, so if you're gonna bake a delicious cake or loaf of bread or anything like that, it'll be a particularly green cake, which means that you'll feel particularly good about yourself.And as opposed to if it's a really fossil fuel, heavy, heavy moment of the grid, maybe on a wait a little while, probably don't bake today or bake tomorrow, and they just provide little forecast just like we have the shipping forecast, which is a well loved. Institution in the uk you now have the baking forecast to communicate the idea of carbon intensity of electricity.And that seems to be pretty intuitive to a nation that is a fan of the British, the Great British Bake Off or anything like that. It seems like a really nice way in to talk about something which is gonna become more and more of a kind of staple or a regular constant. Uh, and as we move away from a kind of fossil fuel kind of based grid to something which is more in tune with the natural cycles and rhythms that we see of like sunlight and wind and things like that.Andri Johnston: Yeah, it feels more natural in any case, isn't it like to live with nature in that way?Chris Adams: Yeah The approach that I found as well, like when you talk about grids having a kind of cycles, then it's a little bit like really sped up seasonality for food. Uh, that's how I try to explain that to other people as well. Cause once you've. People have some notion like, yeah, okay. Things come into season, there's cycles you can use there.And if you think about grids and electric, that's like the equivalent for people who work in technology is basically like chefs might have seasonality. We have grid intensity for what we do.Andri Johnston: Yeah, that's a really good way to see it. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you. Alright. Should we look at some of the events here to see what we've got coming up?Andri Johnston: Yeah.Chris Adams: All right. Okay, so there is an event that's listed below here. This is the Green Infrastructure Meetup by Green Coding Berlin, and it's about, there's a guy, yeah, Arne Tarara. He, he works at the imaginatively titled Green CodingBerlin. They're basically a a bunch of people in Berlin who really into green coding basically, and they're presenting and running an event that's happening in Berlin on the 31st of May. So that's what's happening there. And there's a, there's some talks that they have, Arne Tarara and his little gang of people, they have a bunch of open source tools, which they make available for everyone to use for free and to basically try using some of this stuff.And the other thing we have is UN World Environment Day. This is on June the fifth as well, actually.Andri Johnston: That looks really interesting. I was looking at that. I was like, oh wow. Like I really want to attend that one.Chris Adams: Yeah, and the people speaking here. So we've got Asim Hussain, who's a regular on this podcast. Anne Currie, she of Space Death Rays and data centers in space. There's Tamara Kneese she's actually one of the lead authors on a report about. Basically cryptocurrencies and the environmental impact of grid cryptocurrencies for the Linux Foundation, but she's also doing a bunch of work with the Green Software Foundation on upcoming green software report and Pindy Bhullar, this CTO for ESG at UBS and a PhD researcher.This is an online event for anyone who's interested on the 5th of June. The other thing they don't have mentioned is the Linux Foundation Energy Summit that's taking place in Paris where it's a two day long conference with a bunch of events that I'm hoping will be shared afterwards because, well, I'll be going there in person to see, and I've seen a bunch of tools and talks coming upcoming, specifically about various kinds of open source tools that you can use to quantify and understand the environmental DIMPACT of the digital services that we use in on a daily basis.Andri Johnston: Sounds really interesting. I have to say, I'm definitely gonna share the UN one, the online one as well, because I am a bit biased towards online events. So having, coming from South Africa, I always had this feeling that there's not enough opportunities to go to things like this. And one thing that I really love is how there's more and more online events like this for people who can't travel all the way.Yeah. So I, I think that's really great to have more of these.Chris Adams: I know what you mean. I'm really with a bit of luck. What I'd love to see as a follow on from some of this stuff, we've seen people understanding the environmental impact of entirely virtual events, and we see a significant amount of information about the impact of in-person events where we see that most of the time, the road to the impact is around 80%.Basically of flying people to and from an event a lot of the time. But this idea of kinda like hub and spoke or kind of hybrid events, I haven't seen that many published reports or things to help us understand if there is a way to have some kind of interim here. Because there is something to be said for high bandwidth interactions with other people, but there is also a significant environmental impact associated with that.And, uh, there have to be some alternatives to this. What we'll do, I'll share a link cuz anyone I know about is a piece by Vlad Coraoma. He's shared a paper about this from a couple of years ago, but beyond that though, ah, Andri something we could, it'd be really nice to see. So if few folks are doing that anytime soon or doing any kind of hybrid events, do please let us know and it'd be really lovely to hear about that.Andri Johnston: Yeah, it's definitely something that we're interested in looking into more, so I'll keep you in the loop.Chris Adams: Cool. All right, Andri, thank you very much for this. We're just coming to the end of this, which is time for the kind of closing question. I suppose you work for one of the most well known publishers in the UK, and I guess I should ask you about books in that case, where do you tend to get your books? Do you buy 'em secondhand in shops or do you read on Kindle, or is there some particular channel you into?What would you recommend?Andri Johnston: I think I am a bit of a book snob. Previously I worked in trade publishing in Penguin, so I'm a little bit of a book snob if I'm just reading something. Quickly, then I get it on my Kobo because I'm also very aware of the actual impact of a physical book on the environment. But when I do buy physical books, I usually go to indie bookstores and buy the hard cover version because I know how much goes into producing it as well.I don't buy that many books, which seems shocking, but working in publishing, but it's just because I've become very mindful of what I do buy. So if it's a quick read, I read it on my Kobo, but if it's, it's like a book I really want in paper, I'll go to a very indie niche little bookstore and support that way.That being said, secondhand, old secondhand book stores that are very dusty are definitely one of my favorite places in the world. So yeah, I'm definitely a little bit of a book snob, but that's to be expected.Chris Adams: That's so good. The problem, I think that's fair. If you work with books all day long, then you get to have opinions about books. All right, Andri, thank you so much for coming on for this little session today and uh, yeah, I've really enjoyed this chat, so thank you for coming on for this week in Green Software and hopefully we'll have you on again sometime soon.Andri Johnston: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's really great and thank you for the great podcast. I really enjoyed and I always learn a lot, so thank you so much.Chris Adams: Cool, thanks Andri Andri. See you around. Bye.Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation In any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Host Chris Adams is joined by the GSF’s Asim Hussain on this episode of The Week in Green Software. They discuss some interesting news about Amazon, AWS and their scope 3 GHG protocol emission data. We also find out how Python has got its Mojo back and we have a very exciting tool from Catchpoint WebpageTest for measuring site’s carbon footprint. Finally, some great green software events that you can be part of! Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:AWS confirms Scope 3 GHG emissions data will be made freely available to customers in ‘early 2024’ | Computer Weekly [3:17]Amazon’s SusScanner for CloudFormationTemplates | Charles Roberts on LinkedIn [13:22]Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades | Fast.Ai [16:28]Measure & Improve Your Site's Footprint with Carbon Control from Catchpoint WebPageTest | Catchpoint [22:14]Resources:Picture of Coffee Analogy with GHG Scope Protocols | GHG Protocol [8:24]Survey on Need for GHG Protocol Corporate Standards and Guidance Updates | GHG Protocol [10:25]Adrian Cockcroft’s Monitorama Talk | Vimeo [24:41]Carbon Impact | Dynatrace Hub [24:58]Is data transfer the best proxy for website carbon emissions? | Fershad Irani [28:23]Learn.greensoftware.foundation | GSF [31:55]Events:Ottawa GSF Meetup (May 24 at 9:00 am EDT): | GSF [31:00]SDIA Hackathon on the Environmental Impact of Software (May 24 at 1:00 pm CET, Berlin): | SDIA [32:47]London GSF Meetup - Anniversary Special  (May 25, 6:00 pm BST) | GSF [36:04]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Asim Hussain: I think in an organizational perspective, scope three is turning out to be quite an amazing lever to drive change cuz by calculating the scope three, they're also applying pressure to their suppliers and saying, reduce your scope three, reduce your emissions, reduce effectively your scope one and two and your three or our go to another supplier.Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to another episode of this Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we have interesting news about Amazon and AWS. A programming language with a lot of Mojo and some exciting events coming across from the world of green software, as well as some interesting news with WebpageTestbefore we dive in though, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of this week in green software, which we sometimes call TWiGS, today we have Asim Hussain. Hi Asim.Asim Hussain: Hiya. So my name is Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel.Chris Adams: Cool. All right. And most recently, learning about throat singing to go along with your mushroom collection.Asim Hussain: I'm also becoming quite musical, so I've actually bought, I've actually got two flutes since we've met Chris. I've bought two flutes, a guitar, and, wait, what else? Oh, there's another musical instrument I can't quite remember. Anyway, yeah,Chris Adams: That's three musical instrumentsAsim Hussain: my voice. My voice. That was it. I've been taking singing lessons. I knew there was a third I.Chris Adams: that's pretty cool. My wife is a trained musician and she's been teaching me the spoons, so that's basically all I have forgot to go with.Asim Hussain: My wife is also a classically trained musician. She speaks it very hard to be somebody who's learning music inside a house because yeah, anyway, there'sChris Adams: Wow. I did not know.Asim Hussain: yeah, yeah. Both quite musical. Yeah. We've got, our partners are quite musical. There you go.Chris Adams: Okay. And if you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I too am one of the directors of the Green Web Foundation, a small nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. So before we dive into the rest of this show, it's worth sharing. All the links and all the discussion we do, we will share it in show notes with this.And the general format is to basically look at some stories in the news relating to green software and share a few reckons on them. And you're very welcome to come chime in with your comments, uh, afterwards as well. Okay, Asim, should we start?Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's go for it.Chris Adams: Okay, so story number one is AWS Amazon Web service confirms Scope three GHG emissions data will be made freely available to customers in early 2024.This is a story from Computer Weekly, and as Amazon is one of, is basically the largest provider. This feels like a fairly big deal Asim, especially when you bear in mind that this may bring AWS's Customer Carbon Footprint tool up to kind of parity with some of the other providers like Google and Microsoft.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I remember when AWS first came out with their tool. Probably there's a lesson learned here for cloud providers when you come out with carbon measurement tools, make sure it's got scope three in it, because almost all the news are like, great, but where's scope three? Because it's so essential and it's such a large figure cloud providers.I've heard an argument for smaller cloud providers where they don't own, physically own the data centers with which they are providing services, that an argument can be made that it's so much more challenging to obtain the Scope three data there. But when you own your own data centers, the expectation is that you're going to be able to have to provide that, that data.Cause it is such a significant number.Chris Adams: Hi, I'm so sorry, Asim. I realize we've just dived straight into a jargon without even just telling it all what scope one, two, or three might actually be. So I'll just quickly, for those who are new to the subject, or folks who have never heard of the GHG, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, essentially this is a way.The kind of defacto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or any activity. And, uh, you typically split it into three kind of buckets of emissions. And because we are nerds or developers and drink coffee, we can use hot beverages as the mechanism from standing. The difference between scope one, two, and three, you can think of scope one, which is from combusting fossil fuel.That's a bit like. Turning on gas to heat up water so you can have a nice cup of coffee. Alright, scope two. It's like turning on an electric kettle so someone is setting fire. Something to heat up some water somewhere to generate electricity so that you can heat up a kettle. So it's all the emissions associated with electricity that you might purchase, for example.Now Scope three is a little bit like walking into a Starbucks or a third wave coffee shop, and then. Buying a cup of coffee. So you are not involved in actually farming beans or burning anything, but there is definitely a supply chain associated so that you can have coffee. So these are the three kind of scopes, and typically Scope one and two are quite the common ones that organizations tend to report on. But for these, for lots and lots of organizations, scope three can make up 80% plus of the environmental impact. And this is why we've been talking about it as being quite a big deal because if you do not have 80% of your reported numbers, they may look somewhat different to the other providers.Asim Hussain: And I, that's a really great, is the word analogy or metaphor? AChris Adams: Analogy I think is you.Asim Hussain: yeah. And I'm gonna use that as well. That's wonderful. And I also realized, as I was saying that I think I may have given the impression in my previous statement that Amazon just made the casual choice not to include Scope three, and I don't think that's, that was the point.Scope three calculation is hard. It's extremely hard. It's extremely hard to get right. There's a lot of error bars. It's really obvious a lot of the time what to choose, what values to choose, what to input, and so that's why perhaps Amazon's taken this long to come up with the Scope three data because they've been spending a lot of time making sure they wanted to provide Scope three data that they were comfortable with providing.I just wanna state that it's quite complicated cause as you can imagine, going into Starbucks and trying to figure out. How much a coffee with all the components you can imagine that come up to delivering that coffee to Starbucks, the shipping, the person in the farm, making it, growing it, all of that stuff is someone needs to calculate all of that stuff and it's very, very hard.Chris Adams: This is indeed true, and even when organizations are reporting Scope three, there's sadly 15 separate subcategories beneath it, which makes it even more complicated a lot of the time. And there is another thing which makes it even harder, is that when you're trying to record Scope three, it's one of the parts of this protocol where.There isn't the same concern about double counting in other places, cuz initially when the GHG protocol was actually put forward, the idea was that you would use your own scope three figures as something that you wouldn't necessarily compare to another provider, but you could compare to your own performance over time as a way to track your glide path to something which might be avoiding climate apocalypse at an organizational level. However, this is one of the things that has actually made Scope three quite difficult for people to understand because this double counting issue is prevalent in this kind of scope and not so much in some of the other parts.So yeah, that's one we can dive into. And what I'll do is I'll share a link to that picture. Cause I've got a nice diagram for the coffee one I just shared with you. Yeah.Asim Hussain: that's the go. But also I think you raised an interesting point with the whole idea of double counting, cuz I wanna dive into that just a little bit more, think it's interesting, so for instance, it's quite easy with like scope one. Like you, if I have an oil drum in my front yard and I'm burning something in it, No one's double counting that.That's not in your yard. We know that's not in your yard. We know it's in my yard. It's very easy when I'm buying electricity because of the way that you have to trust the system works. The database is actually like allocating that kilo hour to me it only goes to one other person. Whereas with supply chain is quite interesting cuz your scope one and two, if you are a manufacturer, your Scope one and two will actually be another.Organization's Scope three.Chris Adams: Indeed.Asim Hussain: So I believe. The theoretical idea is that if every company, an individual in the world calculated the scope one and twos, that would all sum up to this wonderful total, which is equal to the total of carbon emissions in the world. And you're right, scope three is just, just nice to have.But I think in, in an organizational perspective, scope three is turning out to be quite an amazing lever to drive change Cuz by calculating the scope three, they're also applying pressure to their suppliers and saying, reduce your scope. Three, reduce your emissions, reduce effectively your scope one and two and your three or our go to another supplier and it's providing that pressure, which I think is really, I dunno if that was intentional or an accident, but it Yeah, I can see the, I canChris Adams: This was one of, this was one of the, I think this was one of the principles initially, and there's some very explicit principles designed for the kind of GHG protocol. The other thing that's worth sharing that we might refer to a little bit later before we dive too deeply, is that there is actually a whole process of redesigning how people measure this stuff.And what we can do is we can share a link to a kind of summary of some of the responses to the World Resources Institute saying, Hey, we're thinking of updating how we measure carbon emissions. Cause there are some problems with the current approach. What do you think? So there's some stuff there that we'll share to, but we'll share a link to, but we won't be able to dive too deeply into it because Asim, I think the two of us are getting outta our depth pretty quickly.Asim Hussain: that depth. Yeah. Um, but anyway, one of the, Part to this title that my mind zoomed in on. It says AWS confirmed scope three GHG emission data will be made freely available to early 2024. Why was the word freely added? It seems weird. A census could work without it. So the fact that freely is there implies that, can you pay for it now?Chris Adams: The reason is that if you are a publicly traded company and you need to do your own reporting, there's actually been a while where you. If you spend enough money with that with Amazon under an nda, you can get these numbers. Alright? Now the thing is that basically means that only people who are spending above a certain figure ever get to have an idea about this.And it also means that if these figures aren't in the public domain, then it becomes very difficult to have a data informed discussion about where we're moving with any of this stuff. And this is. Important when you have the largest provider, which has an organizational carbon footprint of 60, 70 million tons each year, which is, this is like a small European country level basically.So this is one of the things that has been problematic. So hopefully this may be a reference to saying it becomes available for everyone so we can finally have some understanding around this. But as opposed to just only the people who wanna do an NDA on that, cuz there is a kind of prisoner's dilemma aspect when you basically only get your own numbers so you can get your own reporting, but you make it difficult for anyone to have any kind of effective policy interventions on this at a kind of more wider and societal level.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah, very brilliant. So basically my personal website is hosted on Amazon s3. So I mean, I was always a major custom of Amazon's prior to this, so now I'm able, but even, I didn't even, I didn't classify, uh, to getting the data, but even now I'll be able to get, anybody can get it. Okay.Chris Adams: Yeah, next year, eventually. Yeah, soAsim Hussain: year, sorry,Chris Adams: we early 2024 basically just in time for the law to make sure it's absolutely essential anyway, so you do feel like, alright, organizations have to report this in 2024, so this May, maybe there's some link between that and all these new laws landing, which have reporting deadlines in May, 2024.Possibly. We'll see where that goes.Asim Hussain: it's weird. Weird cause and effect here, isn't it? I wonder. Yeah,Chris Adams: Oh, we'll see. It's good. It's good to actually see the progress and this does make it easier for any responsible professional to start understanding some of the impacts associated with their use of digital services. Alright, next one. Next story. Up.Asim Hussain: Yep, yep. Yep.Chris Adams: This is another one continuing our kind of Amazon tip, which is Amazon's SusScanner for cloud formation templates.This was shared by Charles Roberts, senior Security consultant at Amazon, and from what I can tell, this is now an open source tool, which can basically scan your cloud formation code to give you an idea of where you might make some improvements. And it's, this is largely referring to some of the kind of pillars, architected pillars, and sustainability from AWS.And assume, I think you folks might have done something like this in your old Microsoft days about having some recommendations and pointers for this, right?Asim Hussain: yeah. Maybe I'll just take a step back and talk a little bit about the well architected kind of framework itself, which is, Amazon's got one and Microsoft has one that's also called the Well Architected Framework.Chris Adams: Oh,Asim Hussain: I believe Amazon's came first. I used to think all that the well architecture framework was, cuz if you go to the website, you'll see well architected framework and they have I think four or five pillars secure to your reliability, this and that and the other.And it's advice for how. If you want to build a reliable cloud application, this is how you should build a reliable cloud application. Now, for the longest time, I just assumed it was just advice on our website, but it turns out it's actually a scoring system. And so what Amazon Cloud consultants do and so does Azure ones, is when you work with the customer is it's the scorecard.You go through and you ask 'em questions about their infra, about their system. Based on their answers, it gives you a literal score and you get a number afterwards. And that number can indicate how much work you need to do to rectify. And so when they added the sustainability pillar, what they also did was they added a bunch of questions.And if you don't, if you answered no or however it was structured to those questions, you got a yes or no, you got a certain score. And so from my understand from this is cloud formation, is there is what you call it now, infrastructure as code? Is that what Cloud I believe, yeah. It's infrastructure as code.So it's textual description in configuration files for how your application is defined, and it effectively runs it against that, those scores, and it sees what's your number, and it basically gives you a sustainability score, which is really cool. That's to say, yeah, automatic sustainability score. Yeah.Chris Adams: this is true. I think there are a number of tools that start, do start doing this, but having something riches in part of the ecosystem. Okay. It's better than not having this. So yeah, if you cut live it a Python, or if you ever have to manage anything related to some infrastructure as code and you're using cloud formation instead of Terraform or some other tool, then yeah, worth a look all.Asim Hussain: I think from when I, I had an original chat with the, with Charles. I don't believe Charles was the actual person who authored this, but he's the one who shared it. Currently. It's automatically scanning stuff and comparing it to AWS world Architected pillar rules, but you can create your own as well, so you can create custom rules for it, perhaps to your makeup or perhaps other people can come up with their own rules for what makes a good sustainable application, add it to that framework as well. So yeah, it can beChris Adams: Wow, I didn't know that. Cool. All right. Next story coming up is Mojo, possibly the biggest programming language advance in decades. This is a link to fast ai. Yeah.Asim Hussain: It's quite a headline. Quite a headline. Mojo may be the biggest programming language advanced in decades. Come on, let's talk about it.Chris Adams: Okay, I'll, I, I actually read through this and I, I'm actually pretty excited about this and I shared this before because I do a bit of coding in Python as my kind of main working language, and Python is often maligned for being a slow language, even if it is a relatively pleasant language to be using.Asim Hussain: Mm-hmm.Chris Adams: But the general kind of gist of this story is that it combines the ease of use of Python, and it's designed as a kind of super set of Python so that you would actually have all the syntax and all the kind of ease of use and the familiarity of using Python. But you have a really smart compiler, so normally.Like with kind of, you have different flavors of Python. So for example, there's like maybe Sea Python or Pi Pie or stuff like that. These take this and come up with some kind of much, much faster representation of that code, and there's limits to what you might have there. Now, Chris, what's the guy's second name?Who's behind this?Asim Hussain: Latner.Chris Adams: Thank you, Chris Latner. Yeah, so LVM is known for creating a kind of where you might have things that kind of create assembly or stuff like that. It creates what's referred to as an intermediate representation. So this is like a piece of language, which is easy to turn into, really fast code for hardware.One of the kind of innovations was that a project which he worked on was called MLIR, so a machine learning focused intermediate representation. This is particularly interesting because it means that you can have that same ease of use of taking something which is relatively easy to write and make something which is really easy to run fast on GPUs or TPUs.I forget what TPU stands for, but it's a transformer processor unit perhaps.Asim Hussain: Tensor processing unitChris Adams: Thank you. Yeah, tensor. So basically we fast AI essentially. And this essentially means that you get the speed of these really low level languages with a lot of this. And typically you could do bits of that. Like you might write something in Rust, which is like what the COR kids do, and then use some kind of bridge language.But this idea is that there's like a subset of just extra functions you might type. So rather than typing deaf my function, blah, you just do. Fn my function, which is somewhat Rusty, and then your compiler knows that this part can be super duper fast and they're promising hundreds or thousands of hundreds or thousand fold speed improvement on this one, which is mind blowing in my view.Asim Hussain: My initial first thoughts were, I've been a user of Python for a long time now, on and off, but it is been aligned for a long time for being slow, and I think that's unfair. Because you would never normally write the things that need high performance directly in Python. Like that's why Python is still used for machineChris Adams: Mm.Asim Hussain: because what you end up doing is you import NumPy or, or even TensorFlow or something like that, and then you actually, your code is executed using those libraries.Those libraries are written in C and c plus.Chris Adams: Correct.Asim Hussain: So a, I think it was off times maligned. And so I was like thinking to myself, is this really necessary? Because. You can still get that performance improvements. But I was just reading it again and I realized that it was a really important point here was that it's actually really hard to debug that.Chris Adams: Exactly. Yeah.Asim Hussain: And that's the really, I, as soon as I like read that, I was like, oh, of course. And now you can actually just debug Python code. It's not just gonna make a call to some external thing, mysterious black box that does something fast and you dunno what it's gonna do. You can step through, step by step.And I think that's very interesting. That's right. Cause that was a learning experience that's really gonna help people. Build performance systems. Yeah.Chris Adams: I am hoping this means that I don't need to learn how to try and learn Rust or something, to be honest, cuz there's lots of things which seem nice. But this basically is an alternative to having to learn yet another language because if it's gonna take me 10 years before learning Rust, then I'm not gonna be very far from retirement before I'm any good at coding in these new languages.So yeah, that.Asim Hussain: I never thought about it from that perspective, but you're right that a lot of people are gonna hate me for saying this. This could be a Rust killer. This could be like, there's a lot of people who know Python already and if this is gonna give you effectively Rust level speeds, which it would, it will do.Cuz it's a system level, it comp compiles onto system level. That's very interesting.Chris Adams: See now you see where I share that? See, kind of be exciting, right? Yeah. Alright. But for folks who are fans of Rust, it is the, I think, the most popular, most lovely programming language. This doesn't mean that you won't have a job. There's lots and lots of work for Rust, and I think Rust has actually been adopted in favor of C plus for a number of Microsoft projects now, cuz there's a lot to be said for.Yeah, absolutely. So there's plenty of life in a Rusty world. Absolutely. And this isn't really out yet as well. We're not even sure if we're gonna have this as open source yet, but it looks like it might be in all the previous projects like LLVM and so on were open source so we can hold our fingers and hopefully Asim, we can stay relevant for maybe a few more years before we are consigned to the aging programmer trash pile.Okay.Asim Hussain: know. There's, there's still people paid to code in a cobalt, so I think we're, I think we're all right.Chris Adams: You're right. Okay. That's great. Let's hope that stays there and we don't get replaced by some form of machine learning in the future. Alright, should we move on from that one? Because that feels like it's about to just, I can see it yawning open ahead of us.Asim Hussain: you mentioned AI. Let's close it down quickly and moveChris Adams: Yes. Okay. So the next story is from an organization called Catchpoint.And in particular there is a project called Webpage Test, which is an open source, a Web performance tool, specifically designed that's used by governments and lots of Web performance specialists to basically analyze pages somewhat like how we just described the well architected thing for Amazon Cloudworks.So this is interesting in my view because webpage test is one of the most well known uses like Web performance tools. They've started incorporating the carbon measurements inside this, and it's a really nice quote from. I guess what I'll refer to as the godfather of cloud or what, what would you call Adrian Cockcroft?Sustainability is becoming a higher priority for organizations globally. Not only is our ethical responsibility, but there are new regulations that will require companies to monitor and manage their environmental reporting, said Adrian Cockcroft, tech advisor and sustainability advocate. Carbon control is making it easy to take the first step by measuring the carbon footprint of a website, a Web application, whilst also providing actionable recommendations on actions that could result in improvements.So that was like major praise. I was pretty excited to see that actually, because this is, this was like one of the former VPs of cloud and he's very much someone who cast a significant shadow across industry. So yeah, I saw that showing up in LinkedIn. I was like, Oh sweet result.Asim Hussain: interesting. I remember he also mentioned, cuz Adrian was a year ago, he spoke, he gave a very, a really excellent talk, a very inspirational talk as in, I don't mean inspirational as in go and do it, but as in opening people's minds to the idea of monitoring as an action for this, it really helps inform something of me.So I think I remember part of the post was, The creator of Carbon Control saying that the idea for it came from meeting at that Monitorama conference like a year ago and how that idea kickstarted this whole thing, which, yeah, which makes me, I always say the most powerful thing you can have as an idea.So it's just goes to show, just having one one talk can lead to, yeah.Chris Adams: The thing I might share with you is that success has many mothers. And this is also using a library called CO2.js, which includes some of these numbers, some of the kind of conversion practice. So if you have an idea for how much, what kind of resources a webpage might be using, this is what it converts into carbon figures.So one thing I've shared a link to the Monitorama talk, cuz it's a really good talk and this kind of process from monitoring tool to carbon tracking tool. Dynatrace is another organization that does something like this. So there is a, it's a real kind of trend in my view, and it's really encouraging, I think.Asim Hussain: Has Dynatrace added some sort of energy carbon tracking? I haven't seen thatChris Adams: Yes, last week Max uh, Schulze from the SDIA, he referenced this and I didn't know about it before there. I'll share a link into their show notes. But yeah, they have their own carbon impact figures as well now. So.Asim Hussain: There's so much stuff happening in this space. It's so amazing. Just, yeah.Chris Adams: So who knows, maybe Datadog will do it and let's hope they don't charge 65 million per year for the privilege. Sorry, that's a nerdy joke about Datadog's recent investor reporting, realizing, and they mentioned that one of their providers was paying 65 million us.Asim Hussain: million for.Chris Adams: it looked like it was Coinbase.People weren't paying attention, and suddenly the numbers went up. And when Coinbase realized there was a 65 million hole in the reporting and they had to explain what happened, and they said, yeah, someone realized that they weren't paying attention to it. So if you ever feel bad about cloud spend, yes, they,Asim Hussain: So they literally, they, because of Coinbase's growth, they just hadn't factored in how much the observability was adding to the whole thing, and it just added toChris Adams: I think that was the idea. So this was like the, I think the canonical example of sometimes cloud can lead to people not paying too much attention to expenditure. But see, I've never done 65 million of spend before and I'm not sure I will, but that's now my kind of benchmark to make me feel better about myself if anything I have is not very efficient.Asim Hussain: that, that Datadog account manager is driving around in a new Ferrari, I reckon.Chris Adams: You hope so, or maybe not, because that's gone now. So they probably had a comfortable disc, had a discussion and said, Hey folks, are you sure you wanna be spending 65 million a year with us on tracking your logs and metrics? So there was actually something ongoing there. So there was some proactive outreach to say, folks, I'm not sure if you mean to do this.Are you sure you wanna be doing this? Apparently,Asim Hussain: We're just bringing it back to Catchpoint trying to, because you've been a Major S CO2.js, which is the Green Web Foundation's project. I did put the Green Software Foundation website through and fingers crossed and it, and we scored pretty well. I think there's still room for improvement. I thought believe we did score green, but why don't you tell people what does it tell you?Chris Adams: So the main thing that webpage test does is it will look at your page and analyze it. And like we mentioned with Well Architect Checker, it'll basically. Tell you some things that you could improve based on what it's seen about your page. So if your pages are very large page and sending a bunch of JavaScript over the wire, which would result in a kind of poor experience for someone waiting for it to be loaded, it will say, maybe you shouldn't be sending such massive payloads over the wire, because it's not gonna be very much fun.And it also is gonna have a impact on your end user's battery as well. Now what it actually uses is inside the library that we maintain called CO2.js. There are a number of different models, and one of the models that is in use is called the Sustainable Web design model, which is based on some peer reviewed literature. Basically saying for this amount of usage, which is right now is basically the data center of the wire. It basically makes some assumptions about how much energy use happens on the device, in the servers and in the networks. And this gives you some idea of what the actual missions might actually be.So that's how it works, and you can link back to it and we can share a link specifically to see some of the assumptions for this. There's also a really nice post by one of the people who was actually advising on this and helping get this implemented, Fershad Irani, he's written about, okay, this is the things you need to make.These are the assumptions we've had to make here, and these are the alternatives we might use in future for this. So this is designed to be a first step that you could then start improving this, cuz as we know Asim, all models are wrong, but some models can be useful.Asim Hussain: This is the post that Fershad wrote about basically asking the question is network bandwidth the only metric we should be using andChris Adams: Yes,Asim Hussain: between? Yeah. I thought it was a very interesting, yeah, very interesting thought. Cause I think, not how CO2 JS works, but I presume it just says JavaScript is equal to this,Chris Adams: pretty much.Asim Hussain: Yeah. So he was thinking about what if you could split and you would give the same carbon waiting to a kilobyte of a JPEG image as you would give to a kilobyte of a video image, but maybe there's a difference.Chris Adams: Yes. So this was raised by Mike Gifford, who was. So he was a real kind of like sustainability and accessibility advocate based in Canada. He actually opened this issue in the CO2.js repository to talk about some of this stuff. So it's really worth looking and we'll share a link to that. But what we've done is we've shared a link called Is Data Transfer their best proxy for website carbon emissions?Where he explains this and talks about where this is good and why this is bad. Because very much, a lot of the time, the tools you use to understand an environmental impact of something, it'll often be impacted or influenced by what data you have available because not everything is instrumented to provide the kind of levels of num uh, levels of detail that you would like to have at the moment, but we're getting there.Asim Hussain: Yeah, like I think my response to him was like, like when it comes to models, as we just said before, like they have inputs and they have outputs, and you tweak the inputs to optimize the output. And so if the only input you have is bandwidth, that's the only thing you would tweak. If you separate it out bandwidth for image and video, and you saw that video is so much higher than image that would change the decisions that you would make, which I think is an interesting thing here cuz I, there's a balancing point between making something useful and ubiquitous and so everybody finds value out of it versus getting enough fine grain information. So the behavioral choices afterwards are the right or better people claim better choices.Chris Adams: Yes. This is actually a nice segue to some of the events we might be discussing. Actually assume So should we look at some of these on then?Asim Hussain: Let's go for it.Chris Adams: the first one is Ottawa, the Green Software Foundation Meetup on the 24th of May.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yes. I'm so excited about this one.Chris Adams: Abhishek's talking. This is actually exciting cuz Abhishek has been quite involved in this as anAsim Hussain: unfortunately he had to, for personal reason, had to pull out one at the last minute. It's, Henry Richardson is now giving a talk there, which is just as exciting cuz he's the, I dunno what his title is, at Watttime is Researcher.Chris Adams: Lord of beards.Asim Hussain: Lord of beards,Chris Adams: does have an impressive beard here.Asim Hussain: lord of beards, emperor of electricity, carbon emissions.That's what he is by anyway. He'll be giving a talk and I believe also, yeah, Tajinder Singh from GitHub will be giving a talk on sustainable DevOps. Oh, we never heard that one. Have we yet? Su No. Yes, we have SusDevOps. We've heard that one before. No, we haven't. We've heard DevSusOps.Chris Adams: no. Is this like the people's front of Judea? It does feel like it.Asim Hussain: one of them will win out in the end.Chris Adams: Oh, speaking of things with ops at the end, so Google and ThoughtWorks have a thing called green ops. That's their particular term that they use for this and on in Berlin, Google had an event talking about green tech and assume, do you remember your principles.green stuff?Yeah. I'll have to share a picture. They saw them sighting your principles green and their own internal stuff. It was pretty cool. I've got a really blurry photo. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share it, but I could definitely tell you. It was definitely in the kind of presentation that was shared with various people at it.Asim Hussain: Ah, brilliant. That actually I just checked now. We haven't actually deployed it. We're on the verge of deploying a change to principles.green. So actually all those pages are now going to get forwardedChris Adams: Oh.Asim Hussain: to the new learn.greensoftware.foundation, the new, I forgot it suddenly, can't quite remember what we called it now, but our green software training.But if the evolution of this page be.Chris Adams: All right. Here's the elegant segue I was gonna be mentioning. So the SDIA has a hackathon on the 24th of May. Also in Berlin, where this is actually some work with the German Environment Agency, the equivalent, the Umweltbundesamt. I think they are actually hosting this event. With the SDIA, A Green Software Foundation member to do a hackathon about trying to understand the environmental impact of software.And they have actually a whole set of tools and a hack day specifically for improving the environmental impact of open source tools. So there's a competition there. The reason I was mentioning this is because this was actually where the initial work with Mozilla to start exposing some of these numbers.It initially took place. I met some folks at Mozilla and they explained how they've been able to reverse engineer the energy usage figures for visiting a page. So you can actually get some of the numbers, like the environmental footprint for JavaScript versus videos or pictures and things like that. So maybe here's to actually extending it some more so we can make that more available to more people.So yeah, that's the 24th and available for everyone.Asim Hussain: I've gotta say, that's the wonderful things about hackathons. It's not even really what happens on, it's not even necessarily who wins on the day, but it's the work that happens. It's the connections you've make and happens after us. I did not know that that may work that you've done with Firefox.I don't think we've really talked in any great detail about at all. I think we definitely would love to be less deep dive on that, or even deep dive on CO2.js one day.Chris Adams: We should ask some of the folks at Mozilla because there's a bunch of other things they're doing and there's a bunch of really cool stuff they've been doing with telemetry that I think would actually fit into this. Cuz I think there's a chance to create a kind of public data set, specifically be used on actual observed data rather than the model data that you see, right?Asim Hussain: because they have dataChris Adams: Yeah, exactly.Asim Hussain: not in any nefarious way, but they must be collecting data.Chris Adams: Anyone who runs a browser, they gonna Google collect this, probably Edge, have this as well. They've got a rough idea of, cuz every single organization would have to optimize this and try to reduce the kind of costs imposed on their users.Asim Hussain: if it's anything like how it was at Microsoft, like you'd actually ask the users of the canary version of Edge and you actually, you would have a pop-up saying, do you want to give your data? And I go, 0.01% people say, yes, but that's enough to get like a significant amount data. So I imagine the firefighters doing the same out of, I just wanted to just make sure everybody's clear.There's a hackathon in Berlin 24th of May. There's a prize of 1,700 Euros. That's Space Shack Berlin, which sounds amazing. Chris will be there, Max will be there.Chris Adams: Yes, I am definitely gonna be there. Some, some of the Green Web Foundation, some of the SDIA folks will be there and I suspect some other people will also be around as well. So there's a nice group of people now said doing stuff in our little town, and I really like it. Actually. I'm very much enjoying itAsim Hussain: our little town of Berlin. Yes.Chris Adams: compared to London, where I moved from.It does feel, yeah,Asim Hussain: I always thought Berlin was huge. I've never really,Chris Adams: the population is definitely lower, but it feels a bit more spacious.Asim Hussain: Berlin. Anyway.Chris Adams: All right,Asim Hussain: Great stuff. So youChris Adams: back to London.Asim Hussain: Oh, back to London. There we go. Always comes back to London. Yeah, so there's a London Green Software Foundation Meetup happening the day after on the May 25th at 6:00 PM UK time.That is actually, I believe it's coming with the UBS offices in London, which have very cool offices actually. And it's also a special anniversary special. It's actually the two year anniversary of the birth of the Green Software Foundation, yet I will actually be there myself. There'll be networking, drinks and pizzas. Will there be a cake? We should definitely have a cake actually now that realized, yeah, there will be a cake. I dunno. Maybe there might be a cake.Chris Adams: If you've got 10 days, alright, you who knows, you might even have cake pops. Easy for people to eat.Asim Hussain: Great idea.Chris Adams: Cake on a stick is the future my friend.Asim Hussain: Cake on a stick. There we go.Chris Adams: Yes. All right. Okay, so I think that's it for our news Roundup and list of upcoming events. This is the part of the show. We have a short show closing question to ask to our guests.This is what we see. We've seen a number of meetups happening recently. If you could travel anywhere without too much impact in the environment, where'd you like to see, uh, meetup and why? I'll put that one to you. Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh, that's a great question cuz you know, I would actually really like to see meetups happening in places where it is typically been very hard for, not for us, but for people to discuss. Other, other people with an interest in sustainability and find each other. So I often find in, especially in Asia, it's in the larger cities, it's usually better.We've had meetups in Japan and some of the larger Indian cities, but I'd love to see, oh, I could travel. Oh, I probably wouldn't travel myself because there's a little bit too much impact, but I'd love for other people to go and travel locally to their local Asian GSF meetup.Chris Adams: Okay, cool. I'm gonna be really boring here. I'm gonna say something like Vienna. Because never been to Vienna. Sounds like a cool place. And what I've been told is that Vienna is one of the cities where if you had like electric scooters and things like that, you had dedicated places to put them rather than putting them in the middle of the pavement.So there are car parking spaces dedicated for that. And there's even an app in Vienna. So if someone has parked it in the wrong place, you can take a photo. Send it to it. And then the people who are allowed to operate the scheme, they have an SLA to maintain, so they have to get it moved within four or five hours, otherwise they get fined.This feels like a really interesting use of public space and I feel like, yeah, I quite like using some of these scooters, but I don't like how if you are in a wheelchair they can get in their way and it doesn't feel like it's the best and most equitable use of space. And this felt like a really nice a way to address some of those issues.Asim Hussain: That sounds lovely. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, so Vienna, that's what I would say. Alright. Okay. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources in this episode are in the show description below and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of our podcast. Finally, I think huge thank you.I've really enjoyed chatting with you again, Asim, nice to see you. So yeah, take care of yourself, mate. Lovely seeing you. Too-da-loo. Ta everyone.Asim Hussain: Bye.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

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

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

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

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

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

On this episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain discuss the latest research on streaming emissions from Netflix and DIMPACT, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, The European Commission's Right to Repair Law and their proposal for an Anti Greenwashing Law which is being echoed across the channel with the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill. Asim also discovers an alternative to central heating with his hot TV! The usual exciting resources and events in the show notes from TWiGS, Environment Variables and the Green Software Foundation.Learn more about our people:Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / WebsiteAsim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterFind out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:What the Latest Research on Streaming Emissions Tells Us / Netflix [2:39]The environmental impact of refurbished tech / Back Market [13:21]The European Commission's Right to Repair Law / European Commission  [17:58]Microsoft wants to export 'grid-interactive' Dublin datacenter setup / Microsoft [23:31]The European Commission's Anti Greenwashing Law Proposal / European Commission [36:20]The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill / Linklaters Sustainable Futures [38:06]Resources:Table that Chris refers to from ADEME [14:19]ADEME Study on the Impact of Refurbished Electronics / ADEME [14:19]The Restart Project Podcast [20:27]US Right to Repair Law from 2022 / Reuters [21:21]Balancing Power Systems With Datacenters Using a Virtual Interconnector Balancing / Conor Kelly [24:31]Ecovisor / Ecovisor [26:21]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Chris Adams: Turning bauxite into aluminum is incredibly energy intensive. It's in terms of density of load versus the area used. The only thing that is greater than it is data centers.Asim Hussain: Oh, alright.Chris Adams: Yeah. Or maybe Bitcoin mining, but you can, they probably count as a data center as well. But basically, yeah, incredibly dense load, which is why you see this, and this really spelled out to me just how big a player some of these large companies are now.Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and I'm joined here with Asim today. Hey, Asim.Asim Hussain: HiyaChris Adams: Oh, see, before we go further, we should probably introduce ourselves, shouldn't we?Asim Hussain: yeah. Sounds good.Chris Adams: Okay, so my name's Chris. I am the policy working group co-chair in the Green Software Foundation, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I'm also an organizer at climateaction.tech, and I think that's enough things for me to explain what I do. Asim, I'll hand over to you next.Asim Hussain: Yep. Hi name's Asim Hussain I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also a director of Green software at Intel and uh, ex-organizer at climaaction.tech, which is where me and Chris, we didn't meet then, but we first started working closely together.Chris Adams: Where we started working together. We met at OMG Climate, another conference based in London and Berlin, which was a successor to OMGDPR, which is a conference all about GDPR, which was considered quite an earth shattering thing to be thinking about back in 2018.Asim Hussain: I definitely shattered the earth a little bit, didn't it?Chris Adams: Yeah, a little bit. It definitely had an impact.So today, if you're familiar, if you're not familiar with the format for this show, we generally run through some of the stories that have come up and share some of the commentary and sometimes we invite guests on to talk about some of these. I think we've got a few stories here from link, stuff from Netflix, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, and some interesting news from the policy point of view with both the European Commission and stuff going down in the UK as well.Should we start Asim?Asim Hussain: Let's start with Netflix, should we?Chris Adams: Yes, what the latest research on streaming emissions tells us. So this is a piece published by Netflix and in collaboration with the folks at DIMPACT, which I think stands for Digital Impact. So this has a number of real kind of heavyweights in the field. Dr. Daniel Schien, Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Jens Malmodin and a number of other companies are sharing data along this like BT, Orange, TalkTalk, Spotify and Netflix themselves. Uh, they did a bunch of literature review about what the state of the art is for this, and they used some of this to work out some of their own figures themselves. Asim, I think you've had a look at this as well.What caught your own when you saw this?Asim Hussain: Well, what caught my eye was I've been hearing about DIMPACT. Is it DIMPACT or D-IMPACT?Chris Adams: I'm not quite sureAsim Hussain: DIMPACT for a while and Daniel Schien is Dr. Daniel Schien is a member of the foundation's, been active member of the standards working group amongst other things for a while. So we've been talking for a while and just really, and yeah, it's.Think the papers as well as the Litera literary Review does it in such a way where actually creates recommendations or what's it call 'em? Principles. Yeah. Which is a good way to go. It gives very direct feedback advice to everybody else for what to look at. See, they've got four principles. Should we dig into them?Chris Adams: Yeah, you can run through. These are the ones for the government. So as I understand this is basically the company saying, Okay, government, this is what you need to do so we can do our reporting properly. That's largely it. I think with the idea being that one organization is saying it's too big for any one of us to solve by ourselves, so you're gonna have to have government involved for this part here.That's the argument they're making, at least as I read through it. And yeah. Should we run through these cuz there's four and they're relatively catchy. Do you wanna start with number.Asim Hussain: yeah. Principle one, expand access to shared contemporary data that is no more than one to two years old, and which does not compromise competitive and proprietary information, which is interesting cuz that's actually oftentimes the feedback I hear from organizations regarding being more transparent with around data.It's that worry that you are going to be revealing yeah, competitive and proprietary information. And I don't know, I will say now I'm gonna be opinionated. I would say it's not even with the greatest understanding that you will, it's the worry that you might, because if you're an exec inside an organization, it's far easier.You're not gonna have a huge mistake by saying no to revealing some data. But the worry is that you are gonna say yes to something and then something will get revealed.Chris Adams: And then you publish your cost structure. Is that it?Asim Hussain: Accidentally. You don't realize if you divide it by five, it's your cost structure. Like you just don't realize that.Chris Adams: Fun factoid. 10 years ago I worked at a company called AMEE, Avoid Mass Extinction Engine. One of the ideas behind some of the carbon accounting was to work with organizations because if you are upstream and you have organizations sharing their carbon emissions to you, It does indeed give you some idea of what the cost structure is likely to be, and that gives you an idea of who you should be speaking to first in terms of trying to achieve some carbon reduction.So on one level there is this idea about a cost structure thing, but there's also this idea that if you have deeper supply chain engagement, then there's greater chance to have some mutually beneficial up collaboration there. And there were was one example of a very large soft drink manufacturer then working with their suppliers and they would basically say, A huge chunk of our supply chain emissions is from you guys having old fridges.So why don't we actually just agree with you to get so you buy better fridges. Cause it's gonna make us look better and you look better so you can you please change the fridges? That's literally how it worked and this is why I think it's quite interesting because it works both ways and uh, there is a kind of mindset shift that may be necessary for this.Anyway, we've got three more principles to look at here cuz this is quite exciting. Okay, next.Asim Hussain: You do the nextChris Adams: one.Yeah. Okay. Ensure appropriate modeling for decision making. This is through continued research to avoid oversimplified and biased results. I think this is actually a reference to the fact that in many cases there will be models which you say let's you looking at something like streaming, for example.This one here, if you look at the research, Netflix basically say, okay, for what we do, and we're looking at about 1% of the emissions come from the data center, 10% from the network, and nearly 90% come from the device manufacturers like at the end, which is like your tablet or your big screen, or your router, or like the wifi on your house, for example.Or maybe a TV or digital video box, whatever settop box you might actually have. And that's a different modeling from what you might see in other services. So if you have something which is entirely web based, where they're not doing so much streaming of video, then you might have a different setup because each request has a lot more work going on.You're not sharing the same thing. Cuz the whole point about things like Netflix in many cases is that everyone gets to see the same video, right? It wouldn't work if every single video was different, right? That would make for a pretty ropey shared experience.Asim Hussain: are they? But I think that's also speaking to the fact that, and I think there has been some pretty simplified, they call it oversimplified. I would also say there is a need for a simplified models here as well, but there are like simplified models. I don't wanna name a name, any names here, but there are simplified models that people have used for networking in the past, which have come under some criticism.And I can imagine if you're Netflix, those models would overestimate your emissions just, I know you just mentioned about the end user divide, but there just overestimate your networking emissions.Chris Adams: It's gonna make you look awful.Asim Hussain: for Yeah. Whereas the reality is, I think that's, what're talking about basically use good models.Chris Adams: Yeah, I think the, so the thing that's worth the thing,Asim Hussain: Revolutionary statement there.Chris Adams: The useful statement to reach for this is that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. So depending on what your resolution might be, it might be useful to use a quite high level model, say sustainable web design for Web design. But if you tried to use something like the sustainable web design model for Netflix might not give you particularly useful answers.So that's the second principle. Okay, number three, go on. This one is you. I think.Asim Hussain: Principle three. I love principles. Principle three, institutes energy efficiency requirements for devices and infrastructure, TVs, data centers, internet networks, home devices, et cetera, energy efficiency requirements. So it's like an energy star aspect.Chris Adams: Yeah, it does sound a bit like that, and I think this is, I think this is interesting for two reasons. So first of all, various bodies like the GSMA, I think, or GESI, which is G E S I, and I think the site's best Targets Institute. They've issued a press release in maybe 2020, basically saying if we want to hit two degrees of warming, we need to basically half the energy consumption of the entire sector, um, by 2030, and that's about a 7% reduction year on year.So that's what you have there. And uh, we don't have any kind of regulation for this kind of stuff. And in many cases there's a cadence for which when new bits of technology come in to allow you to scale some of this stuff. But back, for example, so like routers for example, when we look at this helpful diagram from Netflix, you can see a significant chunk is actually stuff which is on the subscriber's premises. So that's like your router in your house. And because they are always on and there's no real kind of sleep process, there is basically no relation there. And when that's taking up, maybe say a quarter of the impact they see here, that's like a, that's a space where you really would really would be helpful to have some kind of agreements on this.The good news is there is actually some of this described in the next, uh, draft of WiFi. I'll have to share a link with this to allow things to scale down.Asim Hussain: Oh really? That work is now actually becoming part of the standards.Chris Adams: It's a really early draft, so there I've seen some discussions where people were saying, yeah, maybe we should have a way to scale some of this back when we're not push sending data over the wire.You see the same thing with the deep connections as well. For some of the really fast connections, what you essentially have is when you have nothing being sent over the wire, to make sure that the system is very responsive. When data does come down the wire, you basically have messages saying, I've got nothing to send.I've got nothing to send. I've got nothing to send. So you're still sending stuff even when you're not sending stuff. So again, it's because people haven't prioritized energy usage for this. So there's a bunch of scope here. So yeah, that's a fun one to talk about.Asim Hussain: To drive that work, there needs to be kind of requirements for devices to be energy efficient. There's also a software, I just wanna be clear, like I don't think this is purely a hardware story. This is a software story. A lot of that story you just described it, uh, it could be implemented in the hardware, but it could also be software components to that standard as well.And there's a lot of stuff about switching devices off like this. This stuff is a software driven aspect of it. And there's also like your TV is oftentimes taking in a stream of data and un-decoding it and putting it onto the display. That's a software. We're in that world where you actually, like the boundary between software and hardware is blurred because you could actually like implement a lot of the stuff as a hardware aspect of it.But I think there's stuff there as well. You can implement energy efficiency stuff in in software as well. And just another random, my TV's hot every now and again. I go close to it with my hand and I'm like, wow, this is actually radiating a fair amount of heat. So I think that's something to think through.But anyway.Chris Adams: Yeah,Asim Hussain: don'tChris Adams: so,Asim Hussain: of your TV as a radiator, but mine acts like a radiator for my house.Chris Adams: So you heard it here first. If you want to reduce the environmental impact from your Netflix habits, use a smaller screen or turn on the big hot television that's attached to Asim's wall.Asim Hussain: Watch more Netflix shows in winter and reduce your energyChris Adams: bills.Yeah, there could be.Asim Hussain: in summer. Get out in summer and enjoy the sunshine and stop watching Netflix in summer is basically what- that's advice from Netflix apparently, according to the Netflix report.Chris Adams: Should we move to principle four? Assume before we get in trouble. Okay. Prioritize broad availability of low carbon and renewable energy for companies that operate large scale infrastructure and consumers since most streaming emissions come from inside the. Basically what they're saying is you need an entirely fossil free internet, which is what my organization cares about more than anything else in the world.Yes.Asim Hussain: A fossil free internet broad of low carbon renew- and that's so important. I mean, when we talk about the pathways to achieving the only viable pathway to achieving the goals of 2030, very fast decarbonization of the electricity grid is pretty much the only path these days, isn't it?I don't know if anybody talks seriously about another one.Chris Adams: There is a bunch of really useful work that's been published by Transition Zero and Ember Climate about this. We can share links to this, but let's not dive in too deeply because we end up being an energy podcast rather than an a Green software podcast. All right, so next one, the environmental impact of refurbished tech.This is a story from Back Market and uh, I think this is quite interesting. I've shared this Asim because Back Market, yes, they're in the business of selling refurb technology. So if you wanna buy an iPhone or an iPad or something, rather than buying it directly from apple.com, you can buy a refurb one from them instead.So,Asim Hussain: I've actually never heard of them before, so it's really, yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, they're available in quite a few countries, but they're not the only people. They work to look, work a little like a kind of two-sided market. So they speak to smaller shops that do some of the refurbishing and they connect buyers to this. So they're like right in the middle. And I've ended up getting into habit of basically purchasing most of my electronics through them now simply because there's a really interesting set of stats and research on this, which basically shows that the carbon savings are really quite substantial. So this isn't just like a puff piece. This is actually work from the French from ADEME, which I'm not gonna try to pronounce in French, but more or less translates as the French environment and energy management agency.They published a study last year to work out just how much of a impact having refurbished or circular electronics might actually be. And, uh, I've shared the table here from this report, from the actual link that's in here. And generally speaking, say, let's say you're gonna buy a secondhand smartphone and hold onto for two years versus hold onto a, bring a new one and having it for three years, there's every single saving here in terms of CO2 or water or e-waste, it's above 80 to 90%.Asim Hussain: So it's just so I understand this number correctly. I'm seeing a table, and for one cell it's saying smartphones, and then the otherChris Adams: Tablets and laptops and desktops. Yeah.Asim Hussain: from a smartphone carbon perspective, I'm seeing the percentage, 91.6%. So what I believe that's telling me is, I will save 91.6% of the emissions. Why wouldn't it be a hundred percent?It's a refurbished or something a little bit confusing in my mind.Chris Adams: There's still an environmental impact from taking something and refurbishing and doing some work on it.Asim Hussain: right, right. Okay. Yeah. So if I was to keep that, why'd they say two years and three years? That's a,Chris Adams: I think the reason this is because that's what they typically look at when people purchase a new machine. They might not hold onto it for so long. There's actually a link to this really detailed report from ADEME, the French agency, where they go into do this like 200 pages long, where they talk about every single possible scenario of one year ownership versus five year ownership.Are you buying a secondhand one that's two years old versus five years old? It's like every permutation you could imagine. But the high level stats here are basically the key takeaway is that buying something refurbished is a really effective consumer way to reduce the environmental impact of the electronics you have.Or conversely, how guilty you feel about your gadgets habit, basically.Asim Hussain: and I think it also speaks to the, I won't say fallacy, I will say the misunderstanding of the effectiveness of recycling. because recycling you really will not get anywhere close. I don't know what the statistic is, but it will be in nowhere close to 91.6% for a smartphone. Reselling something or just giving it to somebody else rather than throwing it away is one of the best things to do.It's actually, I still, that's why I love the, I've gotta really gotta check out black market. Sorry, I just called it, I just, I called it black market cause that's what I first read when I saw it. It's the black market, but it's back marketChris Adams: As in take back or give back or refur-. Yeah.Asim Hussain: it black market accident many times from this point forward, but I think that's a really important aspect.Cause I think one of the challenges people have for refurbished stuff is a lack of trust.Chris Adams: Mm-hmm.Asim Hussain: I buy stuff from eBay all the time, but I have it with this. Is it gonna, what's the mo- what I'm gonna get? Whereas getting some form of kind of trust out of interest do they offer guarantee or something when you buy it from Back MarketChris Adams: they do. And where are we of turning this into a advert for them? Because we, cuz basical. I purchased all these. I think I've pretty much got my phone, my an iPad and my work laptop through this one company. They're not the only company doing this. In the UK there's an organization called Tech Buyer.There's plenty of other ones, but I've been pretty happy with this and I've got a year warranty from this and basically because. Computers have, their speed is not improving at the rate they used to be. It's okay. So I've got a machine from 2020 that I bought secondhand and it's banging. It's really good.It's, I'm really happy with that. And that's enough to last be for the next few years.Asim Hussain: you just need a Web, what is it? 60, 70% of all apps is just Web. You're just browsing on the website. We've solved that. You've got a laptop that's good enough for that, and it'll be good enough for it for a long time.Chris Adams: And it's just as well, because there's changes in the law coming down in particular, this is the next story that is somewhat related to this. One of the reasons that has been a problem with getting these things like devices lasting longer is that if a single thing broke it, you basically didn't have an easy way to get it repaired or replaced or anything like that.And there's been some interesting new laws with a new right to repair law, which will require hardware makers to provide fixes for up to 10 years. From new, new electronics. So that's so much further for this, uh, basically the, it's still being drafted to some, when it comes to actually being implemented in different countries.So just because it's plaster, either European, European level, you still need someone to implement the interface, as it were in Germany or France or stuff like that. But generally speaking, yeah, things like, uh, hardware, cell phones, tablets. The goal is to have things at least five years and up to 10 years of there, and also providing clear access to all the bits that you might need to repair these.Asim Hussain: This is kind of like, I think iFixit. Is it, are they a non-profit or a for-profit? I can't remember, but this is, this is kinda what iFixit has been trying to do, which is figure out how to repair things. When manufacturers have provided no information about how to repair it, and they're just like smashing up 50 iPhones just to figure out how to repair an iPhone, and then they're publishing the information online.But this is saying, this is actually gonna have to be law. Oh, it looks like there's still some negotiation that needs to be done here, but it'll be law for organizations to affect even beyond the guarantee period. It same between for five to 10 years. Five to 10 years. You have to make something, somethings repairable. That's amazing.Chris Adams: I know it's pretty cool, right?Asim Hussain: This is, this is how the world used to be. The world used to be you. Anything. I don't feel old. I do not feel that old, but I do remember repairing things. Repairing things like a normal electric thing was a normal thing to do. You went to repair shops and you got things repaired and you brought them home.And these days it's almost impossible to repair anything. And the times when you do go and try and repair something, the cost of repair is so much higher. Not higher, just almost the point where you like another 20% more, I can buy something new and then you get that world. Whereas I love the idea of whole cottage industry of repairing things has almost been lost.And now that generative AI is gonna take the rest of our jobs, maybe we can just, maybe our jobs will be, maybe the only jobs will be left will be repairing the machines, which the AIs need to survive. Maybe we'll be in service of the AIs to repair the machines for them. Okay. There we go.Chris Adams: Topical. I like it.Asim Hussain: we go.Chris Adams: Okay. This is the thing. It's, we'll see how it shapes through. Before. For folks who are more interested in this, there's a really nice podcast from the Restart Project because last month there was London Repair Week where there's a bunch of interviews with people who actually are doing repairs of electronics and talk about how it's changed or what some of the trends might be.We should share a link to that cause it's quite fun. It's quite a nice kind of uplifting and happy story. When usually a lot of things around climate and technology can be a little bit hard work. All right.Asim Hussain: This is interesting. Do you think that there's? As Moore's Law and all this other stuff, it's not slowing down. I don't know. There's other things that are happening. The law's not that simple, but as technology moves, is the fast paced nature of technology, the thing that's made things harder to repair and now that maybe technology will move slower, or you just mentioned your laptop's gonna, it gives more room, more breathing space for people to try and repair things.Chris Adams: I don't think it's that. I think it's more a case of business models. Right. So even one of the things you did see, cuz in America recently passed a recent right to repair law themselves and organizations which have been moving, who have been pushing back against this one of the tactics. So if. Basically said as well, okay, what we're gonna do, we care about the sustainability of things, but you can only ever return things to us.So therefore we, we are gonna capture the entire value chain ourselves rather than share it with anyone else. And that's very much a deliberate decision that some people have made to say we are gonna be, and if we get devices from anyone else, we're gonna either withhold the parts, which means you can't create a whole kind of secondary market around this.You'll see things like that. And I think this is one of the issues. It's very much a case of. How people designed things. Because even if you look at, say a hardware point of view, there are examples like the framework Laptop in America, which is essentially a laptop designed to be the opposite of say, an Apple MacBook, which honestly I own cuz I'm stuck using Apple devices.But basically this is, this is the thing.Asim Hussain: You're in the ecosystem and that's how it's designed.Chris Adams: Exactly. So these are, this is very much a function of the, in my view, the business model for this. So even if I wanted to have some things which were not the same, the fact that I am locked in using the same operating system means that I'm not able to do that. And that kind of integration isn't really addressed with this right now.And I feel like in many cases it's case of which feudal landlord do you want? Do you want Microsoft? Do you want Google or do you want Apple? You can do everything yourself, but then you're open and vulnerable against all the bandits and everything like that. But then you have to realize, except that, yeah, maybe the feudal landlord has shareholders to return to, and the priorities are making sure those guys are happy rather than you are necessary happy.So that's some of the things you have to worry about really.Asim Hussain: Well, I think it's interesting. I think there's parallels here between the kind of the closed source and open source ecosystems as well. It's like those are huge, like what you just described about you can only return products to us is a closed source system. I think there's definitely cases where the open source model has been more successful than the closed source model. I'd also probably argue this case where the closed source model has been more successful than opensource model as wellChris Adams: I don't think we are gonna resolve this one on this call. We see not this one. I think there's plenty going either way for a bunch of this. Should we look at the next story of this one here?Asim Hussain: go on. Yeah.Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So Microsoft wants to export grid interactive Dublin data center setup. So this is a story that I think is interesting from the perspective of kind of green software developers because it's worked by Microsoft who have basically working with a power management specialist called Eaton to build kind of grid interactive UPSs into their data centers. So this basically means that rather than just having backup energy, which just sits there doing nothing, the idea is, is that the backup battery could supply it into the grid if necessary.So this basically allows you to kind of smooth out, say spikes in demand or stuff like that. And you can see it as a kind of compliment to renewable energy sources being somewhat variable and at times intermittent. And what they're doing is they, this is about them saying, we've got this setup. One, we're gonna do it in lots of other places, and we're gonna start with Ireland because Ireland only gets maybe 35% of their power from renewable sources, but there is a really aggressive growth in data centers plant in Ireland, or that we've seen over the last few years. So this is actually quite an interesting one. I think that the person that might have been related to some of this work a chap called Conor Kelly, he published a paper about this idea of balancing power systems or data centers.I think Asim this is my, uh, you used to work at Microsoft. I reckon you might have some reckons on this.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I know Conor. In fact, we should probably reach out to him, see if he wants to come on the podcast. Conor, if you're listening as you as of course you always listen to our podcast. Welcome to, to come on. Yeah. Conor's, he's been in this, I wouldn't be surprised this, this looks like it's got Conor's fingerprints all over it.Yeah, so I think for, for my understanding, so just so I'm gonna break it down for everybody, so. Data centers have a lot of backup power supplies. Sometimes actually diesel, but they sometimes actually are battery powered, sometimes actually hydrogen batteries, all, all sorts of stuff. But this is a battery powered backup.And the point here is can you reverse the energy back out onto the grid? And therefore be like effectively like a short term battery act as a battery for the grid and therefore make money. Which I think is a really not make, necessarily make, maybe, probably do or not make money, but I'm sure they have other relationships with the utility providers like a, I dunno, reduced fee or something like that.That's interesting. And I think it's also interesting cause I remember I was talking to somebody ages ago in this space about carbon aware computing and I was talking about shifting compute. And they raised the point, well if all of our data centers have batteries, like why not just shift the energy? Cuz if you shift compute, it's like if you take the opposite side, it's like you're shifting energy.So we've got batteries, shift the energy. And I was like, huh, that's actually quite a great idea. Actually just shift the energy from France to, well, wherever.Chris Adams: So this is the work that I think is most interestingly demonstrated by the work on some, I think Ecovisor is the name of this kind of series of projects where the idea was that rather than just having a rather software just knowing that there's power coming in, software has some idea about what quality of power that might be saying, this is the grid power and this is the carbon intensity of this. Or here's renewable energy that, that you might have attached to a data center. And this is what the carbon intensity of this is. And this is how much battery power is available and how many hours of battery is available.And also what the kind of intensity, carbon intensity of that might be. Cuz if you were to charge that battery when there's loads of wind on the grid, then you've got really green energy, which in many ways may be greener than the grid power that you have. So if you wanted to say optimize for the greenest possible power, you might choose to only run on say, battery when the grid I is particularly high. If you are able to figure out where you are pulling the power in from. If you're saying, don't feed me grid power, but please feed me power from the battery and from onsite solar onsite renewables, then you are able to control the actual power going into the system.And there is a, the thing that's really cool, I did a talk about this cuz I was so excited about it when I discovered it at FOSDEM. This idea of kind of virtualizing and different kinds of power, I think is one thing that if I wasn't doing what I was doing, I would try to build a service and build a company around it basically.Asim Hussain: Virtualizing. Describe what you mean.Chris Adams: So, you know, we have virtualized compute, pay for compute, storage, and network. Yeah, it's a big physical machine, but it's exposed to you in the form of a computer, which is just the right size. Just has enough memory. Just has enough of this right. Now if you know that, say your computing job don't need to happen right now, they're not time sensitive. Then you could say, okay, I only wanna be fed on variable power, for example, renewable power. I don't need it to happen, come from the grid because I value that it's greener and it's cheap more than it being available all the time and dispatchable. And I think that people who actually have batteries inside data centers, I think people will figure out how to turn that into a product that you can sell as make available inside this.Because I think that's a kind of value added thing that you could quite easily add to cloud compute to just say, by the extra green stuff inside it, which you know for sure has been come from the power that stored at certain times. Yeah. You could segment now the power that way.Asim Hussain: Cause I've always wondered about that, about battery, cuz if you're a wind farm. When I sell electricity, I can then sell like a rec and I, that's like how you signal that my electricity was green,Chris Adams: Mm-hmm.Asim Hussain: but if I have a battery on the grid, I'm currently, I know the grid is 50% green, 50% fossil, and I'm storing the energy, like the, like I know that electricity is like half green, but no one else would know.That's what I mean by virtualized. So if I was to then send that back out onto the grid, I could then give. like a half-rec here somewhere, or, I dunno how that would work actually.Chris Adams: You just don't decouple the greenness from the power. That's a whole kind of silly market construct that only happened because for historical reasons, right? If you actually just treat the power like it really is, yeah, then you could totally do stuff like this. And that is the premise behind this Ecovisor concept, which I think is super exciting and even has an API to implement.Asim Hussain: Oh, eco. Yeah.Chris Adams: Yeah, exactly. If you virtualize the compute, why don't you virtualize the power? And that allows you to purchase things differently because I think there are people who would basically say, okay, I'm using a bunch of cloud services. If there's a way for me to just purchase a kind of greener quality of power from this for certain parts than I would.Cuz that allows you some more tools as a designer of services, for example, if you know that like then maybe I can pay for say, eight hours of definitely green power, for example. Then I can redesign the rest of my time to either, I can redesign my compute to work within that budget, or I can say, I know I don't even have to see what I mean.Yeah. You could do a bunch. You could come up with all these new system designs. Yeah.Asim Hussain: completely not thinking about recs in the slightestChris Adams: Yeah.Asim Hussain: just, thinking about the whole, just like blank. Yeah. Interesting.Chris Adams: This is also why the discussions and if you look on the kind of, you look at the trends for grids, there's a huge amount of battery storage looking to be connected to the grid, both in the UK and in America. For example, masses. And it's growing so fast. So I think.Asim Hussain: As in it's there, but it's not physically connected to the grid. What do you mean? Or do you mean?Chris Adams: It's being connected or people who, cause you need to apply for permits for a bunch of this stuff. It's basically being permitted and being fit into the grid. So traditionally you might have had relied on say things like open cycle gas turbines, which have really this stuff. You as batteries come into this, that means that the kind of marginal intensity was you you don't have the same signals, basically, so you can't be sure that it's gonna be open cycle gas turbines that are powering that marginal power now. So a lot of the assumptions we make about marginal intensity may not be the same, which is why many cases open some of this up. And if you just look at the location based amount, then I think it's actually an exciting new horizon opening or opening up to us. And I reckon Conor's probably got something to say about this, cuz I, yeah, this paper I read, I thought, this sounds super cool cuz it basically uses data centers like CDNs, but for power essentially in the same way that CDN relieves pressure on network by rather than you congesting commonly used channels with lots of the same things being sent over, you're just getting it from somewhere nearby. So you can think of transmission in the same way. If you have a way to reduce the need to fetch power from somewhere else, by getting it from somewhere nearby, then you've essentially taken this idea of a CDN, but you've applied it to grid services.And I think that is actually, there are so many places, there's so much overlap in this stuff. There really is, and. I think more people should be discussing this cuz cloud is utility. Once you start thinking about these things as utilities, then yeah, all these ideas which have been developed for decades in other fields become applicable in our world as well.Asim Hussain: I'll just say one thing, and I think we were talking about gang Adrian Cockcroft in, but I listened to his talk at QCon last week and one really interesting statistic he said, which I thought was fascinating. But if you add up all the power from all the major clouds, it actually becomes one of the top 10 energy utilities in the world.Chris Adams: Well, it's not just that there's a crazy figure I saw recently. So if you look at, say, which companies have been purchasing all the kind of corporate green energy, power purchase agreements in Europe, right? Amazon is responsible for 19.9% of all the PPAs, the capacity. In the last 10 years, so 20 to 13, Google is 7.4% and that's like the next two largest organizations are Alcoa, which makes aluminium and Norsk Hydro, which is basically, it's really eye-opening seeing these numbers.So these are the stats from Wind Europe, and I will find a link for this. I didn't realize that nearly 30% of all of the PPAs, the power purchase agreements for renewable power has come from big tech firms.Asim Hussain: Which is just to be clear, you're not saying that's 30% of all energy or 30% of all. Energy, but 30% of all like this, these what these things called power, which we won't go into, which is still a significant amount just to go to some tech company perhaps how belittling of me just to go through a couple of tech companies.But you know, aluminum I've always heard is like quite significant.Chris Adams: Yeah. Turning bauxite into aluminum is incredibly energy intensive. It's in terms of density of load versus the area used. The only thing that is greater than it is data centers.Asim Hussain: Oh, alright.Chris Adams: Yeah, or maybe Bitcoin mining, but you can, they probably count as a data center as well. But basically, yeah, incredibly dense load, which is why you see this, and this really spelled out to me just how big a player some of these large companies are now in the kind of shifting of the grid and how that might impact what we do as developers and people building digital services.Asim Hussain: why like things like grid, what are we calling it? I've forgotten the term GridChris Adams: Interactive is what they.Asim Hussain: Yeah, grid interactive batteries. Yeah. That's why it's so important. Yeah. That's why it could potentially could be quiteChris Adams: significant.You say potentially one of the reasons you can get the idea that people are doing this just outta the goodness of their own heart, right? And the linked story basically says they're not just doing it out of the goodness of their own heart. They're doing it because it makes financial sense a lot of the time.So when you are a larger organization, you do a big power purchase agreement like this, you're gonna get power way cheaper than other people because you're buying in so much bulk. So yeah, you get to say that you are green and everything like that, butAsim Hussain: I gurantee if you are creating utility scale kind of grid interactive batteries, you are getting a better deal. There is definitely a financial, and I wanna say like one of the things that's quite surprising to me actually was to find out that the interrelation between gas and renewables, which is an unfortunate kind of temporary, in the decarbonization of the grid, you do need to be able to create electricity very quickly when the wind dies down.And currently for a lot of places that's now gas. Whereas that's why kind of battery solutions are so important, cuz we don't want that to be gas. We want that to be non fossil solutions.Chris Adams: Yeah, basically if you can find a way to avoid burning fossil fuels to quickly respond to changes on the grid, you need to generate power quickly or reduce power quickly, and this is what some of this stuff makes possible, essentially. So you can either reduce demand from data centers or feed power in instead of the gas.Yes.Asim Hussain: know how, how, how much we try every single episode to not be a podcast about the energy system. We end up being a podcast talking about the energy system.Chris Adams: We're talking about distributed systems in my view, and like the internet and the grid are, there's lots of similarities between these two things. So anyway, we can move away cuz we're talking about the idea that if you are prepared to be flexible on this, then you can get paid quite a lot of money for this.And that doesn't mean like it's okay for you to be doing this stuff. But if you say that you're only doing this for the goodness of your own heart, there may be changes in the law that mean that you're not really allowed to say that now. And this is some of the new stories. There's next story actually.Asim Hussain: The EU Commission's, anti-green washing law proposal.Chris Adams: Yeah, so this was published, I think end of March, was the draft version of this, which basically says that, uh, later on this year, pretty much all the, there'll be moratorium on new kind of certification schemes, if anything, marking something as green. And also you'll only be allowed to use a certain set of really explicit, like the greenhouse gas protocol and stuff like that.They're gonna say every single claim has to match up to this stuff here. So there's gonna be some really much more stringent stuff, and there'll be like injunctive things saying that if you don't, we can basically force you with the full force of the law to stop you talking about power being green, for example, or things being presented or things being ocean friendly, for example.Asim Hussain: Is that driving things more to certain well defined terms? Like academic terms? If you say the word when you say you're a hundred percent powered by renewables, I'm like, okay, let's break that down for a second. What do you mean?Chris Adams: Yeah,Asim Hussain: You know, like what does thatChris Adams: so the early version I saw in the stats basically is quite nerdy in terms of it's using all the kind of recent technical language, and there is probably gonna be a challenge in terms of how people communicate that because the good example of this is Ireland once again, cuz we're talking about Ireland anyway, right?What we saw before this was that the advertising agency in Ireland, Basically banned energy companies using the term a hundred percent renewable for power in Ireland, because Ireland only has 35% of its power coming from renewables. So therefore it can't possibly be a hundred percent right. And it has implications for all the people running data centers in Ireland, right?So suddenly where people have been talking about, oh yeah, our cloud super green, a hundred percent green. Now you've had the laws basically saying, no, that's not allowed to, you can't make those change. And this go next story has a similar thing to this cuz you are seeing a similar story in the UK the Digital Markets Competition and Consumer Bill is going through law, and this is a bit like the GDPR.The idea is that if you are making misleading green claims and you continue to make them, when you're told to stop, you'll be liable to finds of up to 10% of global turnover for misleading green claims. So this might explain here.Asim Hussain: say anything about green at all from this pointChris Adams: I think this is the thing that was interesting cuz back to the world of cloud recently Amazon used to have a hundred percent sustainable as one phrase that was used.But in the last year there was a change to say up to 90 x percent renewable instead. And I was wondering why they made these changes, cuz Google say we're a hundred percent renewable. Microsoft says we're a hundred percent renewable. Amazon has been really weirdly coy about this and I wonder if it's because they saw this lawsuit coming through. Realize that even if you are following the letter of the law and the way that you know, if you purchase enough renewable credits, you get to say your stuff is green. If it's seen as misleading to consumers, then you're still not allowed to. It may be that like organizations, they were being a bit careful about this stuff because yeah, there's a real shift in this stuff happening basically.Asim Hussain: Well I welcome this. I think one of the challenges that I see in our space, and it's something that I've railed up, talked about thing before, is the different languages that organizations use. Like I was picking something up the other day. I think it was some food and it had written on it carbon negative at the top, which is a term which has no legal definition, carbon. And underneath it in smaller writing, it wrote climate positive. And I was like, okay, so it's carbon negative and climate positive. What do both of those things mean? And it's like so much left to interpretation. Whereas if we landed on, you know, like we work in standards in the foundation, if you land on a very standard definition of this stuff, I think that's really beneficial to the end user.I think yes, it might take some time for them to learn the language that we are talking about, but they will bother to learn it cuz finally when somebody says something, they'll understand what it means.Chris Adams: Yeah, I agree. I think this is positive. I think it possibly suggests a problem for yourself as a director of the Green Software Foundation, and myself, a director of the Green Web Foundation. So we, we have to might have to end up with a much less catchy sounding name of our respective organizations, Asim.Asim Hussain: Oh my word. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. I'll take it.Chris Adams: Okay.Alright, so let's, we're just coming up to the end. Should we wrap up? Are there any events or things that we should be pointing people to or is there a list of up coming conferences we might tell people about?Asim Hussain: Probably as we get close to Earth Week, there's a bunch of meetups being launched through the foundation. People are running a bunch of things around Earth Week, but yeah, we'll talk on, talk about it at a future episode.Chris Adams: For next week. All right, then. That's it for our news and events roundup for this part, all the resources in this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below. If you're looking at this podcast, and you can also visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation In your browser.And if you did enjoy this show, please consider leaving a review on Spotify, apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And your feedback is very valuable. It helps us reach a wider audience and hopefully helps improve the content of this show. So thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.So bye from me.Asim Hussain: And bye for me.Chris Adams: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation In any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

Host Asim Hussain is joined by two of only a handful of people to try and calculate the emissions of software; Navveen Balani of Accenture and Srini Rakhunathan of Microsoft. In this episode of TWiGS Navveen does a deep dive into the processes behind Accenture’s use of the SCI Specification to calculate a measure to track and, ultimately, reduce the carbon emissions of one of its internal reference applications. Asim also quizzes Srini on the upcoming CarbonQL project by the Green Software Foundation which Srini is leading. We also get some links to great resources (particularly for UX folk) and some exciting event news!Learn more about our people:Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / TwitterNavveen Balani: LinkedInSrini Rakhunathan: LinkedIn Find out more about the GSF:The Green Software Foundation Website Sign up to the Green Software Foundation NewsletterNews:How Accenture Implemented the SCI Specification Score to Track Software Emissions / GSF [2:59]CarbonQL / GSF [19:49]Powershell Module For Watttime Emission Data / Watttime [25:15]Events:GSF London Meetup (Thursday, March 23 at 6-9pm GMT) / GSF [30:12]Resources:Circa by Andy Wood (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF[26:56]Sustainable Design Toolkits for UX Designers: / Vitaly Friedman [27:33]Sustainable UI (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF [28:27]Green Jobs Network / greenjobs.net [31:52]Branch Magazine / climateaction.tech [34:04]lowwwcarbon.com [34:32]If you enjoyed this episode then please either:Follow, rate, and review on Apple PodcastsFollow and rate on SpotifyWatch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!Transcript Below:Asim Hussain: Oh my God, that's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problemsNavveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable softwareAsim Hussain: as long as it's not my ops, as long as it's somebody else's ops, it's not my problem only joking.Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. Brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software and your host Asim Hussain.Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development, I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Today we'll be discussing the latest development from a bunch of people, but on the call we've got Navveen from Accenture. We're gonna talk about some of the work that they've been doing calculating carbon emissions are using what's called the SCI specification, which we've been developing, the Green Software Foundation, and we'll also be sharing some valuable resources and some exciting events to do with the world of green software. Before we begin, let me introduce our guest for the episode of TWiGS, with us today, we have Navveen.Navveen Balani: Hi everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm a chief technologist with the Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture. Very excited to be here. I look at innovation and creating assets at the intersection of technology and sustainability. I'm also a Google Cloud certified fellow and a published author with several technology books.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yeah, I did discover just how many books Navveen has been writing. You just, you go to his Amazon profile, there's quite a few there. I know how hard it's write one book, Navveen, so I'm quite impressed. Oh, it's you.Srini Rakhunathan: Hi, I'm Srini. I'm with Microsoft and I'm working for the sustainability division of Microsoft. Sustainable Software is something that, that, it was just a spark about three years back in January when the goals around carbon emissions were announced, and I immediately wanted to do something within the consulting space for which I was part of at Microsoft, but I'm happy to be here.And then Greens Software has started and I've been with them since I think the beginning and as far my interest with green software is going, I like to write a lot of blog articles because they're small and probably can finish it within a couple of weeks. A little lazy that way. But yeah, it's been exciting working with GSF, the different groups and I just look forward to learning a lot from this initiative.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. It's great. It's great to have you both here and you've both been involved in green software since before the foundation were born. You've both been involved since day one of the foundation, so yeah, really appreciate it. So let's go with the news. Let's start off with the first piece of news.So this is an a piece on our website, which is called How Accenture implemented the SCI Specification score to track software emission. We were gonna cover this last week, but we figured it made more sense to wait till this week so we could be joined by Navveen because Navveen, you work at Accenture and you are one of the authors of this post.So yeah. Why don't you tell us people a little bit about what the article's about, and I'd love to know what were some of the challenges you faced while trying to calculate the SCI specification. Just very quickly, just explain to everybody, and the SCI is something called a Software Carbon Intensity specification, and it's a specification being developed by the Green Software Foundation to measure carbon emissions of software.So yeah, over to Navveen.Navveen Balani: Thank you Asim. The SCI provided us with a practical methodology to baseline carbon emissions offer software application included embodied emissions and reducing the same. And when we started realizing the SCI specification, we found out getting accurate data for energy and embodied emissions was quite challenging.And as we were deploying the application on cloud, many of these details were abstracted by the cloud vendors. . So we had to change our focus from getting accurate data to probably approximations and work towards getting a baseline for our SES code. And once we had the SES code, we basically have a value to track.And as long as you use the same approximation, you could easily identify what caused the reduction in GI code, for instance, did you change the code to be more energy efficient? Or you did hardware optimizations and based on hard hardware optimizations, the energy estimation got reduced. So with SCI and using this SCIis a score, we were able to in our carbon emissions and once we had the score, we went about with various reduction techniques.Asim Hussain: So you basically, you calculated the SCI score using a type of ar, like a reference architecture. Could you describe the type of application that you were trying to calculate a score for?Navveen Balani: Yeah, so our reference architecture was basically a three tier application, which was deployed in the cloud we had using the interfaces create created using Web application. At the backend, we have developed all the application code was available as a set of containers, which was deployed on a container management.We had an API gateway, which all communications happened to the API gateway. And at the backend we had a few databases and no SQL and SQL databases, which stored the data for the application as well as alt-text information. And then we have other cross-cutting concerns like security logging, right, which is provided by the cloud vendors.Asim Hussain: So it's basically like the, this is, this is about 95% of all applications in the world. Is this basically right apart from a database, an api and some compute using one mechanism or another, virtualized machines or something else. And you mentioned earlier, earlier cause you, because I think the, the thing you mentioned at the start is the thing that comes up all the time, which is a data problem.It's a data problem. I think it's a problem that we've, we three have discussed for quite a while now. So what were the solutions like, how did you solve the data problem to be, to be good enough for you? As in like how did you solve getting good enough data for you?Navveen Balani: Yeah, getting data was a challenge because. Most of the data right, is currently not available, or I will say really available. So we have to look at certain approximations. For instance, the first was around energy calculation and the various approaches to calculate energy curves. Some are based on coefficient values, like how many Watt Hours it would take to run a virtual machine.Some are based on statistical methods and some provide methodology through a set of APIs. And most of the energy calculation strategies are based on certain approximations, so there is no single source of truth. And the intent here is to basically use the same methodology for any future calculation. So you could actually have a baseline and then you use the same approach again and again to find out the SCI score.Asim Hussain: So when you say an energy curve, you are talking about trying to calculate how much energy is actually consumed by a CPU because it's a curve, right? It's not linear. It's a curve. Yeah. And what did you land on in the end? So what, which solution did you land on in the end? You mentioned a couple of solutions there.Navveen Balani: We went ahead with a combination of a statistical based method and uh, APIs, which are provided through various third party sources, and we found out that we have to pick up one of the values. So we went ahead with a statistical based method, which provided in our instance, a better accuracy, I would say.So our concern was to find out, accurate method will we end up using? Right. So statistical based gave us a good, I would say benchmark, but even if you have picked up the API method also, it was not about more about accuracy, but I think it's more about getting a value, right? So that we could unblock ourselves to arrive at an energy curve.Asim Hussain: And so that's basically just a, just a sim- I'm, I consider myself the simplification. I'm the five year old on the call and you have to explain it. I'm asking the five year old questions. So you're basically talking about being able to provide some model with some inputs, be it. I'm guessing CPU utilization, maybe RAM usage, maybe.It depends how much telemetry you can gather. If you can gather as much telemetry as possible, I'm passing that into a model which then just pumps out for you. Given all these inputs, we guesstimate your energy consumption is that amount because you actually don't know, like I can tell you from like Intel's perspective, I'm with Intel now, so I can tell you from Intel's perspective, like we have certain tools, like for instance, Intel's RAPL, but Intel's RAPL only really gives you data at the socket level. The mechanical mechanism of being able to calculate electricity, we can only give it you at the socket level just cuz that's the pipe coming in and there's lots of model-to get that to the process level, you have to do lots of modeling to try and figure out how much of that incoming value do we partition off to all the processes running on a machine. So at some level you always have to use statistical modeling, even if you've got like a direct measuring capability. I'd say yeah.Navveen Balani: So, yeah, as you pointed out, right? So it was as long as you can get telemetry data, whether it's CPU, Memory usage, storage utilization, network input, and output bites. Right? You should then convert it into some energy curves, some statistical models, and get a value, which is, yeah, which is your energy curve.Asim Hussain: So what, let me ask you another question. So Srini, you and Navveen are just, there's a rare set of people in this world who've actually tried to calculate the emissions of software. I think you, there's probably, I used to say there's only two or three people who've ever attempted it, and now it's probably more like 10, 12.But there's a small like limited skillset. So, and I'll start with you Navveen. I'll ask Srini as well. So what are your key takeaways from implementing something like the SCI specification?Navveen Balani: Yeah, so that's a great question. So I would say we had three key takeaways from this case study one was around energy calculation, and as I mentioned, there were various approaches for calculating energy curves and there was no single source of truth. And the intent here was to use some method for future calculations to compare against the baseline.And we documented the various approaches as part of the SCI Guide project, which I worked with Srini. And this can be a starting point for all software practitioners to calculate energy of this software system, whether it's using surgical methods, coefficient, or API-based technique. The second takeaway was around embodied emissions.So the type of underlying hardware for running virtual machines and it's embodied emissions are currently abstracted by the cloud vendors. And we had to rely on certain approximations based on VM-type to calculate the embody emissions. And we relied on sources from the cloud carbon footprint, which had an Excel, which talked about for a given virtual VM type, what is the scope three emissions.And there's similar study from Vista also, which talks about the cal- scope three emissions for a given hardware type. And third was around the cloud managed services. Uh, so there were certain managed services and shared services like the API gateway, load balancer, where the type of hardware is not listed by the cloud vendor.In certain scenarios, we had to rely on certain approximation like we did with API gateway. We just assumed that 5% of our total carbon emissions goes to API gateway. And for serverless components, we relied on, uh, using, uh, a timeshare approximation and the utilization to come up with a carbon emission score.Asim Hussain: So you just, for serverless, you just assumed it was like a normal workload, but the just your time shared it just cuz underneath it's a normal workload. It's a normal server that's been using it underneath. There is a serverNavveen Balani: that's right. So we wanted to attribute some value to it because we thought, okay, maybe a 5%, uh, based on our overall load might make sense to at least give some emission value to the API gateway.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Good takeaways. Srini as somebody else who's been calculating SCI scores for a while, do you have any other takeaways from your experience implementing SCI scores that you think might be useful for other people to know?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks for the question. I think I completely echo what Naveen said about learning how to do embodied emission calculations as well as for serverless. Other couple of things that comes to my mind, the first takeaway I would say is from a, the case study that I picked up was very similar to what Navveen was talking about.Mine was a managed services set of application. I managed set of services combining to form a website. It's as simple as that. We had a Web application, you had a middle. I didn't even have an api. All that I had was a direct database, but to make things simple for me I chose managed services from a deployment standpoint, but from a calculation standpoint, it's the most hardest thing because a lot of abstraction is happening under the hood in terms of the, like Navveen has said, the database server, the front end server, and also if you talk about real production application.You have replication. You have active configurations, active passive configurations. So the first takeaway that for me was from an infrastructure standpoint, the complexities around the deployment will we take into account the development machines that help build that infrastructure in the place? What should be included?What should be excluded? So for me, the first and foremost thing is to define or be very clear. Around your software boundary, and that's where you need to make it iterative. Try not to boil the ocean in the first place. Say I've included everything. No, that's not how it works. Right? You need to iteratively keep adding and your calculation also ends up becoming iterative.Second takeaway I would say is the networking piece, which was, I think we have talked about it enough in many of our group calls. It may sound the easiest to measure, but the most difficult to calculate. I can just go in and say, this is my data in, this is my data out in bytes. Hey, gimme the number. There's no reference number at all.There's no reference multiplication factor that you can use. So I believe there are lots of studies going on and this is an area where we could do a lot, we could, we could invest in a lot of academic research to figure out what would be the best way to do this. And third, I think for me a revelation was I needed to brush up on my high school physics.I needed to understand what's energy, what's power, what's joules. It's very important. It's just not software development anymore. If you talk about sustainable software, you need to know your basics, and so you should study.Asim Hussain: I can tell you somebody's moved from like software development at Microsoft to Intel. I ask questions, which I think are just, I'm expecting an answer oh code it this way. Half my answers involve the word voltage. It's somewhere in the answer, and I'm like, whew. It's almost like a lost art. And I wonder if the secret to all of our world is this.There's like a lost art to programming back in the day, like what you described, and I talked to a lot of people at Intel who, who write software at the very low level. And the understanding of what you're saying is inherent, it's natural. We've become so abstracted away and the abstractions are useful because make for faster development, but there is a nature of understanding how the discipline programmer in silicon has become quite distant.Whereas if that reduced, that'll be something I think that interestingly might help us in our space. I've been thinking about this. I don't know if I've spoken to both of you about this yet, but this idea that I've had around, like you mentioned, software boundary Srini, and that's something we've spoken about a lot.I know Navveen, you've been driving a project for a while now. The SCIentology, which I, I think we should change that name. Navveen. It's just the suggestion cuz it's SCIentology. But anyway, you've been driving a project around like when someone saves my application. What do they mean? What do you include in an application and what do you not include in application?Because one of the things I've seen historically when people publish carbon footprints for applications is they conveniently cut out bits that they are either just inconvenient to calculate, but they are part of your application boundary. Like I've been thinking a lot more about monitoring. The monitoring of an application, like when you have these larger applications, you're monitoring all these different components of your software product.You're monitoring the database, you're monitoring the front end, you're monitoring this, you're monitoring that, and I've been having this idea that what if you defined your software boundaries, everything that you're, if you care enough about some software component to monitor it, is that philosophically part of your software application? Does that make sense what I'm saying here right now?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. And I think if you wanna make it systemic, if you want to make your calculation systemic and repeatable, you would. That's how we do, right? When we, when we want to calculate the number of users who are actually using their application, we fall back to telemetry, we find, and that's, we use words like user journey and scenarios, et cetera, et cetera.But then here, if you really wanna understand what are your operational emissions, you need that telemetry, you need that telemetry across the, all the software components in a system. So yeah, definitely it's, it's, it's a must have.Navveen Balani: I also think maybe if there is a simple way to calculate operation emissions and carbons directly from the data which has already been available or gathered, the whole generation of SCI's score might be very simplified. Maybe do whatever data you have, if you are maybe proxy data, cost data and some efficient way of converting that to a score because one of the challenges I would say is going through the SCI requires a fixed set of steps, right? Defining your boundary calculations, coming up with the conversions, and so it has sequence of steps, it takes time, but any available proxy, if you are able to quickly generate a SCI score, at least some benchmark.I think that would be an ideal scenario, and maybe it's integrated as part of your DevOps in future. So you don't need to do much, right? Just build. Get a score next release, get a score. Maybe you're not there yet, but hopefully that's the intent and direction.Asim Hussain: It's come up a couple of times on the podcast about the GreenOps, DevSusOps, that aspect of it, and actually monitoring is part of that. That's what you think of when you think of DevOps and is it, I think it is. There's monitoring. I hope it is. Someone should be monitoring my applications. It's not me. Hope it's a DevOps people.Maybe the DevOps people think it's me,Navveen Balani: Now we are giving more additional responsibility to DevOps. I would sayAsim Hussain: yeah, , that's just, that's just . Oh my God. That's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problems.Navveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So you integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable software system.Asim Hussain: As long, as, long as it's not MyOps. As long as it's somebody else's ops. It's not my problem, but I'm joking. So maybe let's bring it back down to an interesting, I think both of you also work on, I think I teased in a previous podcast episode this idea of something called the CarbonQL Project, which Srini you're leading, you both heavily involved in, maybe let's flip over into that and talk about this brand new project that we're launching in the foundation called CarbonQL.Do you wanna give it a quick overview?Srini Rakhunathan: Definitely. Thanks Asim. Again, this has been something that I'm really excited that there is going to, it's gonna change the way we look at carbon value or how are we systemically capturing monitoring data. The intent of the project is to be able to provide a value, a carbon emissions value, which you can use.It's more for action for you to continuously iterate and figure out where are you at a particular milestone after you have taken some of the measures provided as part of the SCI specs, which is around making it more carbon aware, making it more efficient or energy efficient, or all of it. So you need a way to tell whether you have progressively made or passed your different milestones, whether you're continuously reducing or you're stagnant or you're increasing because it's always possible that you need to pull all these parameters to make sure, because we are not building applications just to make it sustainable, right? We are building applications to make money for your business.Asim Hussain: Add value to the world, let's put it that way.Srini Rakhunathan: Exactly, and so you need a way to easily calculate across your different hosting infrastructure, whether you do it on the cloud or on frame. You host your app on your laptop. The project aims to tap into the different data sets available. And abstract away the calculation algorithm and just provide you a value, most intelligent value.That's what we would say when we were kickstarted it, and I think it's going good. We should probably have something really cool coming out of this. Navveen do you want to add anything?Navveen Balani: So maybe I think CarbonQL will be a Chat GPT of Sustainable Tech. You ask questions, what is your emission for laptops? What is your emission for mobile phone? What is the emission for your CPU? What is the emission for my software boundary? You give us spec, right? So can we ask easy as you just give us spec or a software boundary or the artifacts from SCI anthology if you define something and just please provide me a emission so it can make lives easier for people who want to calculate carbon emissions and maybe provide a simplified way of getting carbon emissions be for developers. DevOps, if they're able to provide that vision and implementation. I think the calculation journey would be quite simplified and more adaptable, right to all the development community.Asim Hussain: I think we've mentioned the chat GPT every episode for the last 10 episodes now. So it's come. It's come up again. Yeah. Just for the audience. It is not a flavor of chat GPT. You are not going to be typing in what is the carbon emissions of my three tier thing. I think what you're alluding to is there's quite a few different methodologies and data sets and models and statistical models you can use.And are you on a laptop and maybe you want to use this model. Are you calculating from mobile phone? Maybe use this model a server, use this model or this API or this data set. And I think what I've always found is that the set of people like you, two or two, a very rare set of people who've actually sat down and calculated this stuff manually.The knowledge that's in your head is rare. Actual, real experience. People can read like roughly theoretically how to calculate and sum it all together. But you've actually got like that real knowledge and what I see is CarbonQL is gonna try and codify that so that anybody else. Does not need to be an expert in this space.They can just say, I'm using the greenhouse gas protocol methodology. I'm running on these types of machines. This is the telemetry I've managed together, but I don't really have all of it. And then you'll just figure out the rest and like use all of your expertise and all of your best judgment to combine all the data sets into one, which I think is, yeah, it's been the number one problem.I've heard from everybody about the SCI since day one was data. It's really hard. There's lots of data sets out there. We don't even know if they can merge. I get this number from one dataset. I get a number from another dataset. Can I add them together? Is that possible? We don't know, so the set of people who know that is low and you're two of the sets of people who know that.Navveen Balani: I think the data, once we have CarbonQL implemented, right? I think through the data we'll get various insights across all data sources. Maybe that might be a good way to look at the various data trends, right across all these, um, APIs and SCI, right? Whether you want to use average value or which works for a given scenario.Asim Hussain: Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm really, really excited for this project. I think this is one of the projects we, we've, uh, it's been on the tip of our tongues for a while now. and it's just really exciting to get it and there's been a lot of interest from various organizations in the foundation from getting involved, so I'm, there's a lot of interest in this.So really excited to see what you both and the rest of the team deliver on this front, and we'll get you on the podcast again as things get a bit more mature to talk about kind of where the progress is. Let move on now to few of the other bits of news. One other bit of news that's happened recently is a PowerShell module for Watttime emissions data.So Watttime are one of the organizations that price carbon intensity for electricity. They are a member of the foundation. So Henry Richardson and the team at Watttime have released a PowerShell module that retrieves near real time emissions data from Watttime for a supplied Azure region during resource deployment, this is a really lightweight solution.It utilizes the limited functionality available with one of the Watttime's free accounts. Because it is a pay, they do need to earn money, and it's not really like a real solution for reducing carbon deployments of software. I imagine to get that data, you probably should pay for the full licensed versions of the data and get the more accurate data.But it does provide some nice real-time values to simulate the behavior of deployments and software based on emissions without the cost of a paid account. So all they need, they'll need an account on Watttime, and you'll need the AZ resources PowerShell module for Azure installed. I need to connect all to Azure account.This is a really great free resource, which we're gonna link in the show notes. Are any of you PowerShell users? Are any of you PowerShell users? Cause I've got to admit, I am not.Srini Rakhunathan: I have used it.Asim Hussain: You have used it. Srini's like, I work at Microsoft. I should know I should be a PowerShell power user. But you are like how I used to be at Microsoft, which is, I don't really use SharePoint, but yeah.Power PowerShell. Yes, I PowerShell is, it's like a command line tool from my understanding for Windows, isn't it? Yeah. So it's really exciting. Cause I know it's using a lot of DevOps scenarios. Pretty simple idea and we think so complicated about the world that we do. This is a really simple idea. Just bringing a lot of this functionality into the command line interface all by itself is, I think, quite valuable.Navveen Balani: No, I just remember we had a similar innovation right in the hackathon that we did some something around shell trying to get carbon intensity.Asim Hussain: Circa that was it! It was called Circa. Yeah, in the hackathon we had last year. That's a good, that's a good memory. We had a, yeah, I remember now. There was one of the submissions was Circa, it was one of my favorites and it was a command line where you typed circa. Then you type the command that you wanted to execute, and it would literally just do a sleep.Such a simple idea, just a sleep on the command line until the electricity becomes better, and then it lets the command run. So all these simple ideas. Very, very good. So let's move to the next one. So sustainable design toolkit for UX designers. This is from Vitaly Friedman. I've met him. We, I've been, I've spoken at his Smashing Mag conference.I've met him at quite, quite a few conferences. So Vitaly if I've got your frame name wrong. I'm really sorry. So he's released a really cool list of sustainable design toolkits for UX designers, all with practical guidelines, frameworks, and tools to focus on what matters and removes what doesn't. The list is really comprehensive and includes a UX checklist for sustainability. It looks really useful. Again the link's down the show notes. I took a quick look at it earlier on today. He posted it. If you know there's a big post on LinkedIn and there's a lot of great stuff, I get asked about this. I just got asked about it last week. I spoke at a conference and people are asking for like a UX framework.Because a lot of what we talking about starts at the UX level. We do need to build some of this functionality. I remember what there was one, again, like coming back to the Carbon Aware Hackathon last year, there was one proposal, which I thought was really interesting, which is like carbon aware components you can put into websites.So like a literal carbon aware, I think it was carbon video or something. You can type a HTML tag called Carbon Video. and it would play the video if it was electricity was clean and if it wasn't clean it was, I think it would just play the audio component of the video, save on energy or something like that.So I think a lot of this stuff, it all starts really at that stage. Before you even speak to a developer, it's probably the best time to do a lot of your sustainability thinking. Did you guys have a chance to look at this? Don't worry about it. If you don't, UX is for the other folks.Navveen Balani: I think given how the UX will evolve, right? Particularly new interfaces maybe in Metaverse, right? I don't know. We will have a lot of thinking to do to decarbonize the entire UX story. Not now. Maybe when you see a lot of emissions where everything is virtual. I don't know what kind of carbon emissions we would have, right?Maybe five years, 10 years down the line.Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting point. Or may, maybe the only interface with how five years down the line is a version of GPT that just work GPT or your laptop just opens up and it's a chat GPT, like command line at the bottom and that's it. There's nothing else left for us to do, do my work for the day.You know, I joke about this, I had to hunt around for it, but I actually found. Four years ago I was giving a talk. I think I tricked an audience into thinking I'd built an AI that could make a website. From a textural description, I tricked the audience. And then just last week it happened, and now the chat GPT four can see a picture of a website and code it for you.So I, I wonder how long we've got left. Probably not as long as we think, but while we're here, let's make sure we go out with the bang. Last thing, lemme talk very quickly about the really excited the Meetup program. So the Green Software Foundation has a meetup program, meetup program where we support meetup groups.If you wanna launch a meetup group around green software, In your region, or actually we've got like 20 regions where we already have members of groups, where we are actually missing organizers and leaders. If you're interested in launching a meetup group or or taking over or co-organizing a meetup group or even speaking at meet group or even being involved in any which way in a meetup group at all, go to meetup.greensoftware.org.I'm very excited cuz this week actually GSF the London Meetup, which the first one that we're launching now is having an event on Thursday, March 23rd at 6:00 PM GMT. It's at the MasterCard offices in Angel Lane in London. There's more links in the show notes. Chris Adams is going to be there, so he's visiting from Germany.I'll be Liya Mathew and Sarah Hsu from Goldmans is gonna be there. Daniel Vaughan's gonna be there for MasterCard. And big thanks to MasterCard for helping us host this event. And gen- are offering the venue. So if you're in London and you're listening to this podcast, pop over to the meetup. Thursday at 6:00 PM and if you're interested in launching a meetup, please reach out to us and we'd love to, uh, get your help and we'll to help support you launching a meetup.So that's it for our news and events roundup. As part of the new format of TWiGS, we have a short closing question that we'd like to ask our guests, and it's gonna be different every single week. So whilst I go and figure out my answers, question's going to be, I'm going to ask Srini, what is a go-to green website that you have booked in your, bookmarked in your browser.Srini Rakhunathan: So we are part of a sustainability action group within Microsoft and a couple of months back during one of the community calls, there was a website which is founded interesting. On green jobs. Yeah. And I don't think it's a carrier website or a job search site, but I found it interesting that it collated all types of green jobs.You know, it could be an electrical engineer, it could be as simple as a sustainability policy maker. So I think I have it in my bookmark. I keep looking at it and trying to understand what types of carriers are there in the sustainability space.Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Great. Send it over our way. We'll put it in the, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah. Navveen, what go-to Green website? Have you bookmarked in your browser?Navveen Balani: Interesting question. I would say, I think the simplest answer would be go to google.com. . I think from a, I think from a technology perspective also, and from a sustainability perspective, also, they have very simple interface where you can get whatever information you want, right? So I really love the way they have for the last 10 years.Made the search more. Yeah, minimalistic. I would say for the two decades, I would say I haven't seen it change much. And maybe through that I'll explore more websites, but. . That is what I think it comes to my mind. That's probably billions of people might be using.Asim Hussain: Just remembering, like back in the days when like search engines were like appearing, like there were just big messes on the screen, but Google's was just like this empty page. And then this thing in the middle, and it was like a breath of fresh air rather than all these other sites you're going to. So for me, I've gotta be honest with you, like my head is fully in the foundation and kind of the, the, the, I was just checking, I was just literally checking my history, my bookmarks right now and like we are currently like building out a wiki, so like pretty much every other bookmark right now on my website is a wiki page where we're trying to flesh out like every single aspect of, I, I joke that I manage kind of the, the operating system for the foundation and we're like building out what the operating system is and how we work and how to get involved and lots of information there.So that'll be coming up not right now, but in a future episode be released in the Wiki, but that's, that tends to be what I'm working on. The only other kind of, I think, website that I really love in this space is is Branch Magazine. , which is, uh, Chris Adams who's the other host who of this podcast talks about.He's built it originally, but it's a wonderful like magazine, which has like lots of articles about green technology and the really cool thing about, it's also carbon aware, so, when it, the electricity's dirty, that doesn't show images and when electricity's clean. So actually it kind of implements what it's, Oh! I have another one as well actually! I just remembered another website, but I'd admit I don't have it bookmarked cuz I just remembered it. But there's a website and I just discovered it the other day. I think it's very cool. It's low lowwwcarbon.com and it's a showcase of low carbon websites, how they've done it, and the case studies, how they implemented it, some examples.That's a pretty cool website I've got. So yeah, I didn't think I'd have any, but I've had, I've got a couple actually now just so it just goes to show. That's all for this episode of The Week in Green Software. All the resources for this episode and more about the Green, Software Foundation are in the show description below, or you can visit greensoftware.foundation. That's green software, one word foundation in your browser. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a five star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us reach a wider audience. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.Bye-bye.Navveen Balani: Thank you for listening.Asim Hussain: Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we want more listeners.To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

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