Environment Variables

Producer Chris Skipper is joined by guests Marjolein Pordon of ladylowcode.com fame and Andri Johnston from Cambridge University Press & Assessment to discuss the sustainability challenges associated with AI's increasing energy demands and the role of data centers in addressing these challenges. Marjolein emphasizes the need for sustainable infrastructure and the potential synergy between low-code platforms and AI. Andri shares insights from CUP&A's efforts to understand and mitigate digital carbon emissions, highlighting the importance of transparency and accurate reporting from cloud service providers like AWS. 

Learn more about our people:

• Andri Johnston: LinkedIn
• Marjolein Pordon: LinkedIn | Website
• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn 

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• AI energy demand is ruining Google's environmental goals [06:06]
• How AWS helps reduce carbon footprint of AI workloads [12:58]
• Roundtable: Data Center Sustainability Plays for the AI Era [23:33]
• AI is starving for more power. Can quantum computing help? – Computerworld [34:28]  

Events:

• Metatalent.ai on LinkedIn: "Thought Leadership Webinar For AI: Your Replacement, or Your Advantage?" [40:10]
• Climate-Conscious Websites for a More Sustainable Net  [40:38]

Resources:

• AI water footprint suggests that large language models are thirsty [24:15]
• Underwater data center voyage hits the doldrums - Verdict [26:16]
• How data centers at public pools can keep swimmers warm - The Verge [26:36]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
  
  

In this episode we preview the first episode of CXO Bytes. Join host Sanjay Podder as he talks to leaders in technology, sustainability, and AI in their pursuit of a sustainable future through green software. Joined by Dr. Ong Chen Hui, Assistant CEO of Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the discussion focuses on Singapore's comprehensive approach to digital sustainability. Dr. Ong highlights IMDA's efforts to drive green software adoption across various sectors, emphasizing the importance of efficiency in data centers and the broader ICT ecosystem. Listen to the full episode via the links below.

Listen to CXO Bytes:

• Spotify
• Apple
• YouTube

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Chris Skipper: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables. This is Chris Skipper, the podcast producer, bringing you a very special episode of Environment Variables. Today, I'm excited to share with you a preview from our new podcast series, CXO Bytes. Hosted by Sanjay Poddar, Chairperson of the Green Software Foundation.

CXObytes dives deep into the intersection of innovation and sustainability within the tech industry. In each episode, Sanjay will be joined by industry leaders from the C Suite to explore practical strategies for greening software while driving enterprise growth. So without further ado, let's get started.

Let's listen in on a sneak peek of the first episode. 

Sanjay Podder: Hello and welcome to CXO Bytes, a podcast brought to you by the Green Software Foundation and dedicated to supporting chiefs of information, technology, sustainability, and AI as they aim to shape a sustainable future through green software. We will uncover the strategies and a big green move that's helped drive results for business and for the planet.

I am your host, Sanjay Podder.

Hello everyone. Welcome to CXO Bytes. This is our inaugural podcast on how do you use green software for building a sustainable future. This is a new podcast series and the whole idea behind it is, you know, embracing a culture of green software, it needs to come from the top. And we therefore want to talk with decision makers, with business leaders, with leaders who are running nation states like Singapore, for example, at C level.

You know, how are they driving this culture change when it comes to digital sustainability and green software, for example?

Today I am super excited to invite Dr. Ong. She is the Assistant CEO of IMDA, which is the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore. And we are going to chat on how IMDA is championing digital sustainability as well as green software. Welcome, Dr. Ong.

Dr. Ong Chen Hui: Thank you for having me on your inaugural podcast on green software.

Sanjay Podder: And you know, I had my own selfish reason for inviting you because while the Green Software Foundation has been interacting with many, many large businesses across the world, IMDA and Singapore GovTech, these are two members of Green Software Foundation who represent the government, right?

And we all know the very important role that government will play in sustainability in general. So I wanted to understand from you, you know, how are you looking into this space? So we will talk a lot about that. The other aspect is probably to begin with, for our audience, a perspective on what is IMDA.

You know, what is your specific remit, what you are trying to do in Singapore, if you can give us, you know, a few insights into that.

Dr. Ong Chen Hui: Okay, so here in Singapore, of course, climate change is actually something that is a bit of a existential thing for us, us being a small nation state and we're also an island, to us, climate change and the associated rising sea level is a matter of concern. Right? So, as a result, we have put in a green plan that states our, sustainability goals by the time we reach 2050. And this is actually a whole government effort. So, I don't think it is a case where it's one ministry or one agency that's responsible for the whole world. It is about the whole of government working together in order to make sure that we meet the goals of our Green Plan.

Now, what are some of the things that we are doing? Many things, for example, the National Environment Agency is actually rolling out some of the regulations. We have things like e-waste management, for example. Just now you mentioned GovTech, which is our sister agency. GovTech is also rolling out green procurement when they're actually procuring software solutions. Within IMDA, we are responsible for some of the industry development. We're also what we call a sectoral lead of the ICT sector. So, our own green strategy, comprised broadly of three different strokes. The first is about greening ourselves as an organization.

The second is really about greening the sector that we are responsible for, that we are leading. So, in that case, there will be things like the telecommunications sector, the media sector. And the third thing we want to do is to enable our ICT solution providers to provide green solutions to the broader economy so that we can scale the adoption, we can ease the friction out there in the ecosystem.

So essentially, that's greening ourselves, greening the sector, as the lead. And the third is really to kind of provide solutions through the ecosystem so that the wider community can actually benefit.

Sanjay Podder: Now this is really a full 360 degree kind of approach and it is phenomenal. And, I was, I was wondering, you know, and you mentioned briefly on Singapore being an island state. I was thinking, why digital sustainability? What will happen if Singapore decides not to do it, for example, right? Do you have a point of view, say, because, you know, there are many different levers of, sustainability, you know, I can understand the larger sustainability, but what is the importance of digital sustainability?

Do you think it's an important enough lever or maybe you can look at nature biodiversity or something else, right? So specifically for digital sustainability. What is it that triggers IMDA that this is a important initiative? And I'm, I'm seeing this is my second year in Asia Tech that, you know, this is something you give a lot of importance to.

Bringing in leaders from various organizations. Doing deep deliberation. I also remember last year, you brought out your new data center standards, I think increasing the temperature by one degree that has an implication. If you could throw a little bit more light on digital sustainability in particular,

Dr. Ong Chen Hui: Mm hmm.

Sanjay Podder: why do you feel that's a very important lever for a country like Singapore and maybe for many other countries around the world?

Dr. Ong Chen Hui: Yeah. Well, I think you're actually exactly right that when we are trying to drive sustainability, actually there are many different strokes. Some of it includes looking at energy sources and all that, which actually is also very important for Singapore because we are small. We do, have to look at, different kinds of energy sources and how we can potentially actually import some of them, right?

Now, when it comes to digital sustainability, actually our journey, I would say started many years ago. Maybe more than a decade ago, when we started looking at, some of the research work within the research community about, making sure that our data centers, can operate more efficiently in the tropical climate.

Now, data centers, comprise of almost a fifth, of the ICT carbon emissions. And because they are such a huge component of the carbon emissions, of course, their efficiency has always been top of the mind. Now in the tropical climate like ours, a large part of the energy sometimes is attributed to the cooling systems, right?

The air conditioning that's actually needed to bring the temperatures down. So as you rightly pointed out, what we found out is that actually if you were to increase the temperature by one degree, that can lead to a savings of between two to five percent off. Carbon emissions. So, and that as a result, we have been investing in research within our academia, funding some of the innovation projects with our ITC players, in order to look at what actually works and what doesn't.

Because I think in Singapore, regulations always need to be balanced with innovation. So that have kind of, led to what happened last year, which was that we released the first, standards for tropical data sensors. But we wanted to go a lot more, right, because some of those standards, around cooling and all that, that's kind of like looking at how efficient the radiators are in a car.

But we also need to look at how efficient the engines are. And the reality is that, if you look at the trends of ICT usage of software applications. I mean, so much of our lives, whether it is watching videos, watching TikTok, right, our education, around all that, most of this have moved to become, to be enabled by digital technologies.

And when we look at the consumption of, data centers and the kind of workload in it, it is increasing year by year. Now, with the explosion of AI, we know that the trend is probably that there will be more consumption of digital technologies. And those are the engines that sits withinssb the data centers.

And we need to make them efficient. And as a result of that, we have decided that we need to also get onto this journey of greening the software stack. And greening the software stack means a few things. The first is, of course, I think this is still a fairly nascent area. How do we make software more measurable, so that there's a basis of comparison, so that we can identify hot spots that I think is important.

The second part that I think is important is also, given all the trends today, GPUs, CPUs all needing to work together, how do you make them work efficiently? How do you process data efficiently? How do you make sure that the networks and the interconnects within the data centers are efficient.

I think all of these are worthy problems, to look at. Some of it will rightfully stay, still in the research stage. So we'll be funding, research programs, called the Green Computing Funding Initiative around it. But at the same time, we also think that there are some practices that may be a bit more mature already, and we should encourage companies to actually innovate on top of it.

So we're also conducting green software trials.

Chris Skipper: Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that preview from CXO Bytes. If you want to listen to the rest of the episode, please go over to the CXO Bytes page on wherever you find your podcasts. Just search for CXO Bytes and enjoy the rest of this insightful conversation between Sanjay and Dr. Ong Chen Hui of the IMDA.

And to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables, Please visit podcast. greensoftware. foundation. Bye for now!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain to dive into the complexities of AI's growing energy demands and its environmental impact. They discuss innovative approaches to sustainability, such as using fungi to manage building waste in data centers and the potential for greener materials and practices. The conversation also covers software optimizations to reduce AI's carbon footprint, emphasizing that energy inefficiency cannot be outsourced. They highlight the importance of integrated sustainable practices in tech development, particularly in the face of increasing AI power consumption projections.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Mushrooms eat building waste at Meta's Gallatin data center - DCD [03:35]
• Building with Mushrooms to Reduce Drywall Waste — or Cooking Up a New Future for Data Center Construction - Meta Sustainability [06:59]
• Solutions for AI's Energy Inefficiency Can't Be Outsourced - Bloomberg [15:42]
• BitNet: Scaling 1-bit Transformers for Large Language Models - Microsoft Research [16:34]
• Balance effects of AI with profits tax and green levy, says IMF | International Monetary Fund (IMF) | The Guardian [31:09]
• Fiscal Policy Can Help Broaden the Gains of AI to Humanity [31:24]  
• [2406.09645] Carbon accounting in the Cloud: a methodology for allocating emissions across data center users [37:52]

Events:

• HotCarbon - Workshop on Sustainable Computer Systems - July 9, 2024 [48:33]
• IEEE CLOUD 2024 International Conference on Cloud Computing - July 7 to 13 [48:53] 
• Masterclass: Become a Sustainable UX Designer  - July 8 [49:44]
• The Software Measurement Landscape - Workshop 2 - July 9 [50:12]

Resources:

• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification [10:58]
• Episode 56 - Mushroom recycling with Joanne Rodriguez, Mycocycle - DCD 
• Mushrooms eat building waste at Meta's Gallatin data center - DCD 
• Options to make software greener without changing the code, and how to remember them | Chris Adams [30:17]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Asim Hussain: And now there's a big hoorah in our space because like AI's now gone and

our automation has now gotten the point where even our jobs are now we're all really like nervous and upset and but you know this has been the pressure that we've been applying to the rest of the world with all the industry for decades and decades and it's just now coming to us and affecting us so you know we don't really have a leg to stand on I'd say.

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 Environment Variables; 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. Today, in our news roundup, we're diving into some of the pressing issues at the intersection of AI and sustainability.

So, with AI rapidly advancing, the energy demands of training and running these models are also seen to be skyrocketing. Posing significant challenges for the environment. We'll also be touching on some legislation for promoting sustainable business practices amongst AI companies and the potential for a green levy to drive investment for greener eco-friendly technologies.

We'll also be talking about some of the latest papers that have been published for people trying to understand and get grips on cloud carbon emissions. And finally, we'll touch on some of the exciting events in the green software community, including conferences, workshops, and masterclasses aimed at fostering sustainable development practices.

Joining me today for today's news roundup is my longtime friend, Asim Hussain of the Green Software Foundation. Asim, for people who've never listened to the podcast before, can I give you the floor to introduce yourself and some of your background? 

Asim Hussain: Yeah, sure. So my name's Asim Hussain. I am the executive director of the Green Software Foundation. And yeah, I've been at the intersection of sustainability and software. I've been very lucky to be thinking about the same question about the intersection of sustainability and software for quite a few years now. And yeah, I've been well, mate. I've been, I've just come back from a vacation, which has been long time coming. I do have a little bit of a, cold, so that's what would explain the slightly nasally, annoying nasally sound the audience members are going to have to experience for this podcast.

Chris Adams: So this is with your hot beverage and Nurofen chaser 

Asim Hussain: hot beverage. Yeah, that's what I like to do. That's how I like to start every podcast episode is a coffee and a Nurofen, every conversation with Chris Adams has to have a, both a coffee and a Nurofen.

Chris Adams: Wow, that's, one thing to take away with me. All right, folks, I should just briefly introduce myself before we dive in. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. It's a small Dutch nonprofit based, well, in the Netherlands, where we are working towards an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030.

I also am one of the hosts of this podcast here. As well as one of the organizers of ClimateAction.tech, which is an online community, where actually me and Asim first met online before he basically headed off to set up the GSF in its current state. Alright, Asim, are you sitting comfortably?

Asim Hussain: I'm standing uncomfortably.

Chris Adams: uncomfortably at your swanky standing desk.

That's good enough for me. Should we start with news then?

Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's go for

Chris Adams: Alright, okay, so Asim, I was thinking of you when I saw this paper, this story. The first one is a story about mushrooms eating building waste in data centers. So this is a link to the Data Center Dynamics website talking about specifically the use of these, of essentially building-waste-eating mushrooms at the Meta data center and other ones.

And the general spiel of this is that there are now a number of companies which are, essentially deploying fungi, various kinds of fungi, to deal with all the building waste that ends up being created when you might kind of read, when you're essentially demolishing a building or creating a new one.

And, it essentially takes all this waste, and the fungi are able to Essentially, deal with the toxins, and then create something like, kind of, fungi-style bricks that can then be used as a kind of circular building material going forward. And Asim, given that you're our kind of resident mushroom fan, I wanted to just like, see what you thought about this, or if you had any particular immediate like, hot takes or things when you saw this one? 

Asim Hussain: No, that's all. it's a great application. In fact, it's not an uncommon application of, you know, what people are applying, you know, fungi in this technology for. It's actually one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the very exciting kind of broader sustainability solutions in this space that there is.

I mean, there's a couple of different types of fungi. You're going to have to pause me at some point. There's a couple of different types of fungi, but there's one particular type was kind of saprophytic, which is effectively what Fungi, the purpose it has in kind this life that we lead is it basically, it's the thing that destroys things that have died. And if it didn't exist, then we'd be basically living on top of this massive mountain of logs that aren't decomposing. So that's one of the things that they're really, really good at. And it's been, it's, there's been a lot in many different spaces, been a lot of active research, a lot of startups, a lot of organizations exploring how to use Fungi to decompose things that they don't normally decompose. And it's actually quite an interesting technique. Because even people, what's so fascinating about the the fungi space is it's, driven in large part by citizen scientists, which is one of the things I love about it. And there's a lot of citizen scientists out there who are doing things like trying to find a strain of fungi, which can decompose certain types of plastics and you would literally do this. You would literally grab a selection of these plastics. You put them in a, you know, you can go online. It's as simple as this. You put it in a blender, you blend up a plastic in your home blender. And then you just have like, as you can probably see behind me, I have lots of jars out there, which have like different strains of fungi, and you would just put that with other material in the jars.

And then you'd collect lots of different strains. Like. Every single kind of mycelium is like of a different strain of it of the same one. So you can have like millions and millions of different types of strains. You go into the forest and you see a type of mushroom you've never seen before. And you're like, ah, maybe that will absorb this plastic. And so there's a lot of interest in this trying to like find those strains of fungi that can kind of absorb and transform, you know, different materials. Obviously certain fungi only in the forest, they only work on certain types of trees. They have like a relationship with them, but you can actually find strains of fungi, which do different things. And kind of the interesting thing about it is about turning them into, bricks like that as well. There's actually organizations out there trying to replace packing material for boxes. But what you do is you basically, you create like, so you take some time. It's not like a foam that you stick in and like 30 seconds later, there's a thing you basically have to Have the thing you want to pack in a box Inside the box you put like a substrate which can be the thing that mycelium grows on you then like almost like impress inside this substrate the shape of 

Chris Adams: like the

Asim Hussain: book or something the mold and then you inject it with the mycelium and you put it in basically an oven for like a month. And it comes back out and then you basically spray it off and like the actual mycelium has grown into the shape of the thing. And then you've got something which you can put in the packing crate. And then at the end of the day, you just, it's a mycelium. You just break up and put it into your garden and you, and it decomposes.

There's lots of like wonderful stuff. There's a, great guy called Paul Stamets, who's quite a character. But he's done a lot of, he's done some great TED talks in the use of like fungi and mycelium in, kind of waste and getting rid of waste even getting rid of oil and there's a lot of kind of very active stuff in this space.

Chris Adams: Can I stop you one second there, mate? Cause, cause there's, so you just said Stamets, right? So Stamets hit, so in real life, there's someone called Stamets and in the whole, and that's, so the whole, when they had this whole Star Trek discovery thing, where there was this guy called Stamets who was using like the mycelial internet space thing, that's a direct reference to this dude, basically.

Asim Hussain: That's a direct reference to Stamets, which is kind of, which joins two of my biggest nerd bubbles together in the most beautiful way, but yeah, there's the engineer, and in Star Trek Discovery, how they, instantly, there's a new type of drive, and they instantly can, move to one part of the universe to another, and it's called a spore drive, and you need to kind of enter this kind of psychedelic realm to connect transmission, so yeah. 

Chris Adams: My word, Asim, I was not expecting us to dive down that myco rabbit hole for that, but that was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. So you basically said. By doing this, so in this case of packaging, this basically removes the need for like, say, fossil-based expanded polystyrene in packaging, and in the case of materials here for buildings, you would use that instead of having to get a bunch of virgin materials, for example.

This would be like a circular, that's the approach that they'd be using here, right?

Asim Hussain: So what, so the specific approach they're using in this particular article is, I believe it's more about, it looks like they're using, basically trying to get rid of the drywall that they have inside the data centers. So I don't know if it's a particularly from a decommissioning a data perspective or renovating a data center perspective, but they're ending up with a lot of material, which typically you would just dump in a waste fill, but now they've basically got a form of mycelium, which can eat drywall and generate something that's, decomposable, maybe edible.

Yeah 

Chris Adams: All right, cool. And so we, this is, mentioning, referencing the metadata center in, I think, Tennessee. But we've also seen Microsoft, as far as I'm aware, Microsoft has also been a bit of, it's been dipping their toes into this field as well. And one of the reasons why you might care about this is that, well, last year, Microsoft's reported emissions, when they released their sustainability report, it was like, up 30 percent and a significant chunk of that came from buildout of data centers.

So we are now starting to think a lot more about the embodied energy in the facilities that are created so that we can actually have data centers, so we can actually use compute, a lot of the kind of compute power available to us, or even some of the AI power, or the kind of sources of AI and stuff like that, because you need, they need to be in a building somewhere to get this stuff built.

And like, this kind of made me wonder actually, Asim, surely I imagine some of this might show up in an SCI score, a Software Carbon Intensity score, if you're purchasing cloud from a certain place. If you've seen a massive buildup of data centers, surely that might have an impact on the embodied carbon for the compute you might be using, right?

Asim Hussain: It could do, it depends on what your, cause in the SCI, there's kind of two components. One is the software boundary, which is "what are you going to include and not include in that score?" I remember us having quite a few conversations in the early days of the SCIs, which "should you include the, like the concrete that was used to pour the floor of the data center?" And I'm not too sure we really, I don't, think anything particularly made its way into the specification, but it has to be, if you're measuring something, it has to be something which drives a choice or a behavior. So, you know, I suppose what I'm going to with this is, if there was a data center, which was particularly built like a zero carbon, maybe built with mycelium or something.

I don't know, but like, if there was a data center, it was particularly built with that choice, then maybe it is something you want to include in the score, because then that can drive an action of choosing one option over another. But if every single data center is effectively built exactly the same way, the discussions we were having was, well, that's just overhead of adding a sec, effectively a coefficient, which wouldn't really drive a decision-making factor. So, I suppose as what I'm going to this is excitingly, if there are data centers that are being built, which are going to have

vastly different embodied carbon profiles, and then you, and then if that was included in an SCI score... and I think as we move forward with SCI, because one of the things that's happening... SCI on its most, we, launched kind of the version one and now 1,1 of the SCI and it's, and it was, it's very bare, very basic. It's designed to be built upon. And so now what the teams are having conversations around is like, if you were to apply SCI to AI, specifically, what does that include? And one of those questions

they want to answer is what, 

Chris Adams: building, 

Asim Hussain: yeah, like what you include so, so when someone reports an AI score, we can actually start getting to like some apples to apples comparisons. So that's, a conversation that, you know, it's interesting. Maybe we should bring that, bring it up again is do you include the embodied of the data center? But then you also get into the headache of "my God, it's hard enough trying to figure out what the embodied of a chip is."

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: And now going to ask to figure out like what the embodied, so there's has to be some practicality aspect to this as well.

You know, you know, we have to, there should at least be some models. I don't know.

Chris Adams: So there are models that, as I understand it, there are models for working out the, essentially like the carbon emissions for a kilo of concrete, for example, or stuff like that. Some of these exist. And,

Asim Hussain: exists from a

LCA, 

Chris Adams: and there are companies, and we know there's like, in Europe at least, I know there's a company called LeafCloud.

That are explicitly using, are doing, making reused, or, they're reusing heat, but also a very specific kind of data center, which isn't like a very large outta town thing. They have like essentially shipping containers put into places like say greenhouses, where the heat is being reused, for example, and where they're not having to build a whole bunch new buildings. There's also, I think in Switzerland, there's one company, because we maintain, where I work, we maintain a directory of green data centers. And one of them is a, they basically reused a old factory building with a waterwheel that used to be kind of like a clothing factory, and now it's a data center.

So they've essentially reused the whole building shell. They haven't built a load of stuff as a result. So this is one place where this might show up, but in order to do this, you need to have access to the numbers for this. And that's still a bit of a challenge because, yeah, we don't have the, we don't have easy access to these numbers, and like you do say, it's a challenge just thinking about chips, let alone expanding the boundary to the actual buildings instead.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. I mean, at least you have some information when you're running software, like what, you know, you can, now that we've done, a lot of that workings out so you can figure out, you know, perhaps it's this chip, but I think given the secrecy around data centers, I don't know, I think there's going to be,

I don't know. 

Chris Adams: It's gonna be a challenge, because while we have this practice of, essentially, water usage and electricity use, so many things being under NDA, it'll be very hard to come up with some numbers without using, like, a basic number. Okay, alright. We have totally gone past talking about mushrooms and data centers into all these other things, but I guess this is part of the whole thing about sustainability and technology.

It's all interconnected.

Asim Hussain: It's all interconnected.

Chris Adams: Shall we go to the next story?

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Let's go for it. 

Chris Adams: So this is a piece from Bloomberg, actually, so this is the topic of this is Solutions for AI's Energy Inefficiency Can't Be Outsourced, and this is an opinion column from Bloomberg talking about this projected demand some of the figures which are pretty, pretty impressive, they basically say, in the US at least, it's, there's a projection saying that AI, the growing demands of energy are like, is projected to make up around 8% of the US' power consumption, electricity consumption up from 3% in 2022.

Now these numbers seem a little bit high and they are citing a kind of this arms race of different kinds of organizations, essentially building out these massive data centers but also buying loads and loads of chips, but it does talk about some of the approaches that we're seeing now to kind of rein in some of this growth.

So one of the things was this idea of one-bit architecture, which is essentially, I'm not going to pretend to understand it. And I'm not sure if you are similarly informed in this one, but

Asim Hussain: I'm going to definitely pretend to understand it.

Chris Adams: In that case, I'll hand over for you to confidently bluff it around, just like a ChatGPT would actually, Asim, the floor is yours.

Asim Hussain: I'm going to, I'm asking GPT. No, I'm guessing, and this is, I haven't really, I've, seen it, but because it's one bit and a bit can only be one or zero, I'm guessing what this is, that, you know, instead of like pumping in a number between one and 256 as one of the inputs to a node in a model. Maybe you could just try one or zero. And then output one or zero and then see if that actually still gives you some pretty reasonable results and from what it looks like it might do and you know for those of us I kind of it's like there are extreme inefficiencies you can do when you're working at the bit level in terms of programming and computation and instructions on the chip and things like that because it's so much lower level than the architecture.

I presume that's what it is, which actually to me is. It's really exciting from a, from the level of, this is a software architectural solution, which is effectively, I think what we've been advocating for, a large part of the time, which is, you know, we do need to I hate to use the word code because I don't want people to dive down the, you know, building more. I, well, AI is one of the, one of the few areas I would say where actual code efficiency is extremely important. But yeah, this is kind of, it's interesting. Now that there has been a pressure applied to optimize, the optimization has happened.

Chris Adams: Yeah, that's, so basically, Asim, I think you're about right. Now, when I, remember when I skimmed over this paper before, one of the key ideas was, the one bit approach was, essentially, when you, would be able to, you would use this to encode the difference between different parts of, like a dataset rather than showing absolute numbers.

And one of the things that this allowed you to do was allowed you to just use addition rather than multiplication in some cases. Now, I'm not an AI specialist and I'm not a hardware specialist, but the general idea was by representing things in a more somewhat simple fashion here, you avoided having to make some of the expensive calculations that you would otherwise need to do.

And this basically reduced the energy that you might need to run some of these calculations. So this was like one example. I was quite impressed to see this inside Blumberg because it was a very quite new research, but also really, technical and actually quite promising. So yeah.

Asim Hussain: It's, it, the title is interesting though, isn't it? Cause it's not like, it's not like software making, it's kind of talking about energy inefficiency can't be outsourced.

Chris Adams: Yeah,

Asim Hussain: I just thought it was an interesting, it's like no one really knows or cares or thinks about the software side of the, this whole equation.

To me, this is just like a software optimization. So you would just say like software can be optimized to reduce any AI's energy footprint. It's not, not expressed in that way. It's interesting. Kind of expressed 

Chris Adams: there's a couple of things that I think are also really interesting about this piece, in my view, was that it talks about the kind of economics around some of this, and basically the idea of outsourcing this is essentially how we have a bit of a tendency in the technology industry to say, "well, we're just going to have, like, We realize that data centers use loads and loads of power, so what we're going to have to do is just somehow get loads more power."

And so you basically have people talking about, oh, obviously the solution is to deploy loads and loads of nuclear, for example, right? Never mind that these take between minimum 10 years to get built, right? So, what are we going to do in the meantime? A lot of the time it's likely to be coming from things like gas, if you're going to be using something like that.

So that's an issue there. But it's also worth thinking a little bit about these figures that were mentioned in this story. We've seen numbers like 8 percent of the USA's energy consumption by 2030. It's worth bearing in mind that these numbers are often coming from the utility providers in various states, all right?

So like, say, in, say, Virginia, I think it might be, I forget the name of the actual monopoly provider, but there's only one provider over there. And basically I think that's Pacific General. I think that's actually on the, other coast, basically.

Asim Hussain: We've played this game before where you can name all

Chris Adams: was Caiso last time, which was, which is, that's the Independent Systems Operator, which is not the energy company.

The energy companies are somewhat different because it's a, because in many, because they have very specific, if you're in a state where you've got a single provider, they are allowed The only, the reason you only have a single provider is that you have basically had that state agree to have a, what's referred to as a natural monopoly.

So, they basically, the agreement is, we will give you a guaranteed 10 percent net profit plus for your organization, alright? But you need to basically, yeah, as long as you agree to share your plans, For the new infrastructure you're going to build over the next few years, but also you need to justify this in each of these cases.

And when you think about this, if you're going to get a 10 percent net profit from that for any of the energy you, get. Now, what you, if you want to increase your profits, what you need to do is you need to say, "well, I have loads more demand coming. I need to like double my expected demand to double my profits inside this."

Asim Hussain: Oh, I see.

Chris Adams: is one of the things, because this is a lot of the existing providers, they're used to saying, "well, we've got all this extra demand. What we need to do, we need to build a bunch of new gas, fired power stations. And 'cause we know we're gonna make a 10% guaranteed profit on all the infrastructure we, build.

That's basically, you know, we are incentivized to say it's gonna be really, high" basically. So. You, it's, really worth looking at a paper by one, one gentleman, John Kumi, who's actually, who's spoken a lot about this, because 20 years ago, we had the similar thing when you had people in the coal industry saying, "well, coal was what powers the internet, so you need to have more coal fired power plants if you want more internet."

We have a very similar thing happening. In this case as well actually. So it's worth bearing in mind that yes, we do see these kind of apocalyptic forecasts for energy, but you also see that when you do have constraints on this because it's so difficult to build, then we do end up with a renewed interest in energy efficiency.

And even at the kind of like energy level, right, there are different ways that you can basically meet demand. You can meet demand by adding new supply, but you can also meet demand by investing in energy efficiency. And that's, and this is very much what it looks like, so a lot of the ideas you might see at the energy sector, I think, are at least applicable, or at least relevant in what we talk about with cloud, because essentially you're looking at a kind of commodity that you pay for on an hourly basis, or something like that.

Asim Hussain: Well, that's kind of one of the... All I see is there's, a significant amount. There's not a significant, there's a fixed amount of investment and focus that organizations can put into something. And if you present them with an option, either put all this engineering effort to make something more efficient, which costs 10 or buy renewable energy, which costs five and then, well, I'll choose the five one. So I think that's kind of, that's. That's why kind of investment goes in one way or the other. Whereas I suppose what's happening now is that energy is now, we're reaching the point where energy is, and I'm just throwing out numbers here for energy is now costing 12, but the development still costs 10.

So like, well, maybe we'll put some money into development

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: So that's kind of, and that's interesting that's why you want things like we were talking about levies and money last time. That's kind of why you want to change that balance of it a little bit. And that's also significantly why in the SCI specification, the decision was made not to include any energy offsets or anything like that.

Just because if you gave somebody the option of spending 1 instead of spending 10, they would spend 1. And we want people to spend the 10 to actually make things more

Chris Adams: Yeah, to address the consumption issue, rather than just think about the intensity. 

Asim Hussain: Exactly, yeah. But this is exa I'm really excited. And the other thing I was thinking about as you were talking was I was just remembering about my time at Intel. I think this maybe links a little bit to the Nvidia's statement as well. So, I think I might have, I always love telling people this story because I just think it's such a cool word and it's such, it tickles my sci-fi bone so much. But there's a statement they used a lot, which was dark silicon. Have I told you this? I

Chris Adams: No, you haven't. 

Asim Hussain: people. There's a dark silicon. And I was like, "Oh, that sounds good. What's the, what's dark silicon?" And what dark silicon is when they're kind of looking at a chip and they put load on it.

And the key thing with a chip is how much can it expel heat and still function at that level. So looking at heat on a chip. And so when they're running a certain software on a chip, they'll put like a, what you call the heat detecting camera on. And you know how they look like this. It's very red, it's very red on the bits that are hot.

And it kind of looks

Chris Adams: Ah, okay, yeah, look at a thermal house, 

Asim Hussain: Thermal imaging. yeah. Yeah. Even though the black might not be like ice

cold, quite hot, but like relatively it's cold. And so the things that they would be really like thinking through is like, how come this software, how come half the chip is black?

Like, why aren't you using the rest of the chip? Like you've maxed out the chip, but half the chip is black. And really what it kind of, you know, what it goes back down to is that, you know, we called it, I think I might call it the silicon gap, which is the gap between what engineers are building and what silicon manufacturers are enabling on their chips. And there's this disconnect between, you know, they're, all building, "why aren't you using this, these more advanced chip sets that are more efficient? Why are you using this stuff on this side of the chip?" And so I think that's something that we need to get down and tighten that gap to use this infrastructure more efficiently, I think over the years, from a developer's perspective, it's always been about time to market.

How do we beat our competition? It's never around, how do we use this chip more efficiently? And so I think that one bit architecture is, it sounds like an example of that. It sounds like an example of, we want to leverage the instruction set on this chip to be as efficient as possible. We need to change. Fundamentally how we're architecting and even thinking through algorithmically this code to take advantage of that. And that's, I think it's also like this, other area, which is completely, we're just ignoring, you know, there is this dark silicon and honestly, the silicon manufacturers are like, why are developers not, I don't understand, we put so much energy and time into like

building 

Chris Adams: we're only using a of it, right? 

Asim Hussain: a The percentage of it, and there's that also, and I'm going to, I'm rambling on for a second, but just one more, one more point. I thought it was really interesting. One of our organization's Entity Data, they did a really great report. It was kind of two years ago now, I think. I don't think we really circulated.

I don't think we circulated that well. And it was, they just, they just looked at Java, you know, Java, like still, there's still a lot of very antiquated Java applications running out there in the world. And they just said, what is the energy difference if we just upgraded, not the code, but the JVM, the underlying JVM.

And that's all they did was I think they upgraded, I cannot remember. I'll find a link to the article and the paper. It was like several steps up. But they were like, "look, most apps are still running on whatever the JVM was they were built with like 10 years ago. And it was a seven, it was a 60 or 70% energy efficiency improvement.

It was unbelievable. The energy efficiency improvement just from grading the JVM. And that was

Chris Adams: Ah, okay. 

Asim Hussain: That, and if you think about what that means, what happens was the chips evolve to have different instruction sets. The JVMs, only the modern JVMs are built to the new one. And so if you're running on the old ones, it's just using the old instructions.

So you're not really leveraging the infrastructure the same way, which is why like recompiling software with like, you know, the latest version of the compiler against the latest version of the chip. It's really important. And it again, that was Intel's, when I was at the time, that was their big push.

They were like, "use the latest bits, use stuff that's compiled now using the latest optimizations." 'Cause they saw a lot of people were still just kind of compiling, leaving that binary, letting it run for like four or five years. And then, that's it. And yeah, I'm going to stop ranting now.

Chris Adams: No, that's actually, I didn't realize, I was somewhat aware of things like the JVM, there's like hotspot or different kinds of flavors of the Java Virtual Machine to run this code, and it's somewhat similar to like in PHP land, like when a new version of PHP came out, because it made much better use of the underlying code, the underlying hardware, you saw a massive increase in performance.

And like, you kind of see something a bit like that with Python as well, with the whole global interpreter lock. Like, I can have a piece of Python that'll be running, and it won't be able to use all the other cores in my machine, in my computer, right? So, rather than lighting up the rest of the silicon, it's got just, it's, most of my computer is dark, basically, in that same kind of approach.

All right, yeah. Cool, alright, so that's like one of the approaches that we have, and this is one thing that you could plausibly do. I've shared a link to a blog post that I've, I was trying to explore this to find a way to explain it, to basically explain the fact that you can reduce the emissions associated with code without actually changing the code, by thinking about what options you might have in terms of, like you said here, like you change the VM or something like that, or change when you run it, or anything like this.

And I'll share a link to that, because I've kind of framed it in terms of If, there are three, three things you can change, basically. You can change the time of running something, which is kind of speaks to carbon awareness. You can change the speed, the amount of compute, computation you might be using, the number of cores you might be using something, or you might change the place, like where in the world you choose to run this for the carbon intensity of the underlying energy.

So I'll add that to the show notes because it might be another nice helpful addition to this. Alright, okay, that was quite, that was fun. Shall we look at the next story?

Asim Hussain: Go on. Yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay, the next story is, this is actually from The Guardian, and this is talking about the balancing some of the incentives of the kind of profits that are projected to come from deploying AI with something like a green levy on these profits, basically.

And this is actually, came from that, Left leaning organization, the International Monetary Fund, 

Asim Hussain: Oh, wonderful. Great. Great to see them in this space.

Chris Adams: And basically what they are, the argument from the IMF is basically saying, well, you've got all these very profitable AI firms, and they, and we know there's both the social and environmental impact that's taking place here. So what you should actually have is some kind of green AI win for tax, essentially, that will be used to fund some of the, sustainability initiatives.

And like, to be honest, I have a lot of sympathy for this because what we've seen from the largest providers in the last like year is that given the choice between investing in efficiency or investing in more capacity and building loads more data centers, we've seen all the big providers go for building more capacity and like emphasize profits rather than the environmental impact here.

So it looks like we're not the only people thinking about this. The IMF is thinking about this as well. And they're saying, about this. You need something a levee to do this. Do you have any kind of particular thoughts on this? First of all, Asim, because I was really surprised to see this come up from the IMF of all organizations.

Asim Hussain: Yes, I thought it was a very important point. I love the fact because the use of the word levy, and I remember us having the conversation last podcast about like use of the term levy rather than

tax instead of, explaining it, but then in the article actually uses the word tax, like all over the place. Yeah, I think it's really important. Like one of the things I'd say is that like, why is everybody so excited about AI in the first place? In my most cynical moments as as a software engineer, I would say, Our purpose in life is to either find solutions that help people waste more of their time or get rid of jobs and automation.

If you think about kind of why we have been like one of the most highly paid sectors for quite a significant amount of time, it's because building automations, yes, you could argue and helps you deliver kind of projects faster, but it also helps you to do more with fewer employees. It decreases the.

You know, the earnings potential, the, a lot of this stuff from that perspective, and now there's a big hoorah in our space. Cause like AI is now gone and

our automation has now gone the point where even our jobs are now we're all really like nervous and upset. And, but, you know, this has been the pressure that we've been applying to the rest of the world with all the industry for decades and decades.

And it's just now coming, to us and affecting us. So, you know, we, don't really have a leg to stand on, I'd say. We also. There's nothing we can do. It's happening is the only other thing I'd say. There's no, you know, we have to just accept it and move forward. But yeah, I really liked the idea of that because like, let me put it another way.

Like there's this huge kind of bro down AI tech bro showdown with like, well, I think Sam Altman posted something a year ago now, which deeply disturbed me. And he said he wouldn't be surprised, I think within the next couple of years, if there's a one person unicorn startup, which is a single, like, billion dollar organization run by one human being. And I was thinking to myself, like, that might actually be true. And I would, you know, I do, there is a chance that would be true. might happen in the future, but how do I feel about that? What is the human impact to that? I mean, what is the green impact to that? So I'm now going beyond green because I think that there's like this AI is going to make a few people and organizations immense amounts of power and wealth. How do we have ways to, redistribute all of that and to kind of add a level of fairness to, the rest of society? Is it okay? And so from a green level, absolutely. But I'd also argue from a societal level as well, like, like, you know, like when we talked, you know, how about this? When we spoke about the green transition, it was impossible for us to have like a proper conversation about the green transition without having a real conversation and talking about how we're going to transition the people who are employed in the fossil fuel industry over to other areas. I don't see having, I don't see us having that conversation here as well.

Like it's just ignored. And so I think that's something that we need to have is like, is if you're, if you want to have. The opportunity to get this much power and money and wealth, I think it should come with a certain amount of social responsibility to, you know, be a green levy in terms of the green ones, but I think it actually should be broader than that. It should be, you know,

Chris Adams: So address some of the. Some of the inevitable costs that might be incurred upon society to provide to, like, ease that transition. Okay,

Asim Hussain: yeah.

Chris Adams: I was not expecting you to go there, Asim, but 

Asim Hussain: Well, I feeling it. 

Chris Adams: Bang yeah, that's usually me kind of jumping up and down, actually. All right, okay, that 

Asim Hussain: How do you feel about it?

Chris Adams: I think, so you said this idea, like, I feel uncomfortable about a billion dollar startup with a single person.

And I, okay, how many, we're not that far from it, I think, because if, actually, no, we've been, so if you think, how many people work for WhatsApp? 

Asim Hussain: WhatsApp! I was WhatsApp, I think it 11 

Chris Adams: was purchased for $12.6 billion by Facebook a few years back, right? So that's not that far away on a kind of per person basis, but that's not a single person.

But you've got to realize that like, you know, if that was probably a lot better for the people who own shares in that than the people who are working for this. And we have seen multiple cases. We've seen cases like when a company has to choose between keeping on staff to work on something and getting rid of them, and then spending multiples of the staff's wages on buying their own shares to kind of in increase the cost, increase the share price. We've seen the decision that people have been taking, and there is the, I think that this is a thing that needs to be addressed. 'Cause the current, if we're going to assume that, if we're gonna accept that digital is gonna be the, this thing which is just as important to our lives as access to water or you to or energy or anything like that then you probably want to have a discussion about okay well how are the dividends shared well how is the upside shared in an equitable fashion so that we don't end up with people rushing outside with guillotines or in the very least right like it's not good for social cohesion basically so that's my the view that i might actually have on some of this

Asim Hussain: No, that's a, really, I think that's something that people, I've been, I don't know, should I say this?

Chris Adams: I'm going to stop you because it's coming up to 40 we've got one story, so we can, talk about societal accounting, all to carbon accounting, this new paper, which I think is really interesting and we both were nerding out about it before this call. So this is a new paper from Google, Carbon Accounting in the Cloud, a methodology for allocating emissions across data center users.

So, We can totally talk about the societal aspects of cloud computing here. But this one here is really interesting because this looks like one of the most interesting papers about how you apportion responsibility for your use of cloud services when, using these things. And for the longest time, we've had a real struggle because we haven't had access to any of these numbers.

And this paper really. Lays out a bunch of really interesting ideas with lots of really helpful diagrams, and it dies into how inside Google, people allocate carbon emissions for both internal use, but also for cloud customers. It's a really, fun paper, but it is also quite a significant piece of work.

Read. Like, me and Asim were quite excited about it, but we realized this is almost like a kind of book club kind of paper to read through, basically. 

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Adams: So, Asim, I'll hand over to you because, there's a couple of things I'd like to draw attention to, but I suspect there's some things that caught your eye as well, or at least maybe you might have some context about why the two of us might be so excited about this.

Asim Hussain: Well, I just think, I think it's really exciting. Well, I get really excited when any organization does such a deep, thorough analysis of their emissions. The thing I'm kind of like going through as I go through this is like, part of me is like, I'm going to try and like represent some of this stuff as an impact framework manifest File because I can read an impact framework manifest file and I can compare it and I can look at it and I can know what's going on. Like one of the first things that the paper outlines, the approach that Google developed to quantify location based emissions of its individual products. And now I'm now like, I now need to dive into this paper to understand, well, yes, I'm understanding the, my definition of location based. However, I'm also seeing references to CFE, which to me doesn't factor as

Chris Adams: CFE being carbon-free energy 

Asim Hussain: carbon-free energy So like, there's like a lot of nuance to this stuff. and yeah, I I would probably, as an experiment for me to try and understand the paper, I might try and represent some of this stuff as a manifest file. 'cause for me that's quite useful as a way of, learning something in, in a way, in such a way where I can compare and contrast it to other methods and methodologies as well.

But it looks very, interesting, very exciting. And when Google first worked on its carbon dashboard as well. They were the only organization to have done it the slightly different way, which is kind of like bottom up, like from products and services up towards the top, and now IBM has actually done actually to give IBM some credit as well. And they've got great white paper as well. If you're not ready, I'll send it over to you, Chris. they've done another approach is kind of bottom up as well. And so they're the only two organizations that have gone bottom up. The other ones have gone top down and I'm always excited when people go bottom up, because then you get the data with the granularity, the level of products and services that people actually use, which they drives.

Which is what you need to drive emissions reductions. So that's it. I haven't read, I haven't read almost any of this So I'm interested to get Chris's, if you've got any time, I don't know. What are your hot

Chris Adams: So, the thing that really caught my eye from this is that it talks about some of the ideas that Google has been doing that other organizations aren't so open about. So, for example, you have like a given amount of capacity that might be available inside this. Now, what Google have done previously is they've kind of said, well, We know that we've got a certain amount of, kind of, energy that's coming from green sources and we've said that we want to have a percentage of our energy that is always running at, say, 100 percent carbon free, for example, right, and they, Google have an approach where they say we count something as carbon free if it's matched at the time of use and if it's I think it's on the same grid.

So it's not literally a solar power, but a set of panels on the data center. It might be a wind farm that's where you could plausibly deliver the power to that place. And they use this to kind of represent the amount of clean capacity as something which they call a virtual capacity curve, because it changes over the time of day, basically.

So they talk about in this paper, there's some production, there's some production loads, like that always have to run and always have to respond very, quickly. And there's things where they've got a Bit of freedom in how they move it around and I think this is actually quite interesting because they talk about where they have some flexibility inside this and they talk about how they account for a bunch of that because it's the first time I've seen a paper, A, talk about this, but also talk about the fact that there's like, a set amount of kind of idle power then there's amount of power that will kind of ramp up and down based on the amount of use you're introducing they do they speak about a bunch of really interesting things inside this and the thing that i think there's like there's a couple of figures which i really find like really quite fascinating actually and the fact that there's like one thing like If you are at all interested in, like, Sankey diagrams, they've got this really cool Sankey diagram of saying, well, this is all the kind of power that goes into running machines, running the overhead.

This is how it gets proportioned across all the different services. And this is how these end up being allocated to both our internal use, but also cloud customers and stuff like that. It's a really, fun read. And I'm probably going to spend like, I think, an afternoon or maybe the weekend making some more notes on this.

'cause there is a bunch of stuff which is beyond my can, like some of the equations are. I, don't have the, I don't have the ability to kind of make sense of those. I am looking forward to reading this nonetheless, because it's really nice to see something like this, not least because by putting this into the public domain, it's now raised the bar for some of the other providers to be more transparent about this.

Because if you're looking at, say, Amazon, you're looking at Amazon's calculator, you don't have scope 3 emissions, so that could be up to 99 percent of your emissions not accounted for in the numbers. So if they look suspiciously good on the Amazon dashboard, maybe they are suspiciously good. But also you look at the resolution.

This is something where they providing information at both the location and a product line value. So let's say I'm using Cloud Run or one particular kind of storage. I can see it at that kind of resolution. And that's that kind of location. In some other providers, you might see Europe and then compute.

So, there is nowhere near that kind of resolution. So, people talking about this is how we do it. This is how it's possible. This is what you should be expecting from other providers. I think it's really, good. And they also do mention the fact that they're using high time resolution. So, they say, "We're using data from electricity maps to help us work out these hourly curves, so that we know at what times of day, what the kind of carbon intensity for the power might be, so that we know that we've got this much kind of green compute that we can plausibly use," and in a defensible and transparent way, say, "yes, this really is running on renewable energy, according to the way that we talk about this."

And like, they do refer to like, they, you don't need to agree with the approach that they use in order to at least understand where they're coming from, because there's plus points and minus points with using the approach here versus having something totally location based like we've spoke about before.

So, yeah, that's kind of my initial thoughts when I see this, actually.

Asim Hussain: We need to get this to the point where it's kind of easily absorbable and understandable by folks in such a way that they can actually, because you know, otherwise it's just, oh, right. There's a great paper we'll use, you know, but I think you need to understand the nuance of a lot of this stuff.

I don't

Chris Adams: Well, there's two things, but what I think, so... you know, there's a, the real time cloud working group that Adrian Corkcroft is 

Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. Yeah. 

Chris Adams: He's been really pushing on a bunch of this stuff. This feels like one of the abs, absolutely worth sharing to that group because they've been doing a really good job of actually collating this data so it can be used.

And like, a scene like that was the thing that kind of fed into the impact framework stuff, right? So there is a path for this. And like, There's a job to decode some of this and make it easier for lay people because, yeah, like, Asim, we've been talking about this for literally five, six, five years to get to, for us to understand why it was exciting.

But yeah, you do need a job to actually make this easier for people new to the field because there's lots of developers who are kind of coming into this kind of sustainable software field.

Asim Hussain: you know, we should also have and this, we're now talking about GSF work. I know I've actually got to drop like very soon, but this is interesting because as I just asked you that question, I think an answer came to my head as well, which is like standardization. So, you know, as we like to, even as a real time cloud project is kind of evolving, like one of the things it's trying to figure out and work through is like, like you mentioned CFE and your definition of CFE.

And I can tell you right now, I've heard different definitions of CFE from other organizations, which don't. Count the, it to be, it doesn't have to be the grid. It could be anywhere. So I think some of this stuff, it might be interesting to have conversation with Google, like other ways to standardize some of the terminology, the methodology, the equations to this, as soon as you can create a standard, maybe something we can push into ISO or something like that. That kind of also in a way also forces the, not only simplifies everything for everybody, cause they're like, "well I don't really understand what the standard is, but I can see that it's got wide adoption and it's a standard and competitors have got together and agreed on this standard." So I don't really, you know, and there seems to be a wide body of people who support it. I don't need to look at this. This equation is so thick. I'm staring at this equ

Woo! 

Chris Adams: it's quite a man, 

Asim Hussain: It's a quite, a yeah, it's quite a lot. Selecting it has like 43 components in the selection.

But... 

Chris Adams: the thing that we can maybe talk about is that there are standards. We don't need to be doing all this work ourselves. Like energy TAG is one standard that is essentially written into European law and American laws around hydrogen now, like hydrogen production. So there's things that, you know, we wouldn't be starting from zero.

We could be using some of that stuff, but you're right. 

Asim Hussain: We how we push 

Chris Adams: Yeah. I need to also. Thank you. Trying to rush us through for the last few bits, because there's a few things inside this that, as hosts, I need to be doing, and I sadly can't talk about the marginal carbon intensity of baked bread, because we had a really lovely follow from Dr Daniel Schien, who responded about the low carbon bread and high carbon bread thing. So maybe we'll, actually, we should commit right now to do an article about the, about how green the energy is, and how you talk about that, because this is what we just spoke about. Right now, Dr schien raised a number of really good points and linked it and shared some really helpful resources with us.

Okay.

Asim Hussain: we should get a proper conversation together with, if we can, like with maybe EM and some

Chris Adams: Yeah, we have some people inside the organization who've been doing that. Alright, let's look at events. So, stuff that's coming up. HotCarbon is a workshop on sustainable computer systems. This is happening on July the 9th. It's free to attend virtually. You can turn up in person if you're in California.

It's really, good. And I, there's, they have videos online and really fascinating papers. It's really worth reading. It's like absolute cutting edge stuff. There's also a, the IEEE. They have a cloud conference on the 7th through to the 13th. This is in Shenzhen, China. And for the first time I've seen, there appears to be something like a sustainable AI track, or sustainable computing. You are? Oh, 

Asim Hussain: to be there. Yeah. I'm going to be there. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to be there. I was invited by, well, the, anyway. So yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to be, I'm going to be over there. I'm going to talk about sustainable AI in the cloud. There's going to be a whole track, several panels, discussion topics.

And

Chris Adams: Oh, wow! Cool!

Asim Hussain: You know, I don't think we particularly speak too much to, I'm a big believer in that this is a global challenge and a global issue. And yeah, most of our conversations happen in the Western world. So one of the things I'm personally trying to do is to try and

Chris Adams: Bring the other 1,5 1 point something billion people into that. Okay, great. Okay, so other two things we had. There is a, so outside of programming, this was shared with us. The masterclass on becoming a sustainable UX designer. This is one thing that's been led, I believe, by Thorsten. Oh, Thorsten, I'm afraid I forgot your name.

Thorsten Jonas. He's been helping organizing Sustainable UX as a community, which has the unfortunate short name of SUX, S U X, but it's, this is a virtual masterclass you can join. We'll share a link to that inside the show notes that's taking place, and he has a number of these coming up. And there's also Asim, I think this is yours, right?

The Software Measurement Landscape Workshop on the 9th of July? That's something that you've got, you're looking at? 

Asim Hussain: That's not, well, no, not, it's yeah, it's not something I'm particularly involved with myself, but the green, the, we have a meetup group in Brighton in the UK, organized by an organization called Root & Branch, which do a lot of green software, the kind of green software startup, and they're doing a workshop on software measurement.

Chris Adams: Folks, ah, so Cardamon were the people behind, sorry, Root & Branch were behind the Rust based software tool called Cardamon? I think Cardamon, it's monitor for some of this carbon related things. Okay, that makes sense now, putting two and two together. Okay. And we have one last wrap up before I need to go, actually.

So, this is the, this week in Green Tech, where it's basically you and me, and occasional guests talking about the news. We have a, there's a new podcast, or a new podcast related to the Green Software stuff called CXO Bytes, and this is, I believe, Sanjay Poddar, the chair of the Green Software Foundation.

He'll be talking a little bit about some of this and speaking at the, I guess, CIO level, something like that. That's what we have. So, there's a first episode coming out in July, for this and, yeah, I figure we should tell people about that because it's something that's coming up too. Alright.

Asim Hussain: That will be, that's a separate, just everybody knows that's a separate podcast, so you'll have to find it and put it in the show, no late. We have to find it and subscribe to it separately. And as Chris mentions, like Sanjay, I'll be speaking more to the c-suite level of an organization and like one of his personal beliefs, and I do subscribe to this as well, if you want change in an organization, it needs to come from both directions or it will just stall in the middle. So he's very keen 

Chris Adams: Getting by on it at the management level, at the very top, yeah? The big cheeses, 

Asim Hussain: do is big cheeses and we do the witherbread whatever. That's 

Chris Adams: Or the mushrooms, if you prefer, the 

Asim Hussain: right. There you go. Wither, wither, yeah.

Chris Adams: breaking down barriers to adoption, like you break down dying logs, right? Okay. But Asim, really, enjoyed this, mate, I'd really love to see you again, and get well soon. I hope the Nurofen and coffee thing doesn't have to be a daily thing, and that you get better over the weekend, alright?

Take care of yourself, mate.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. You too.

Chris Adams: Okay, ta ra!

Asim Hussain: Catch you there.

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.

On this episode of TWiGS, host Anne Currie is joined by Navveen Balani of Accenture and fellow GSF member. This conversation navigates the landscapes of, and intersections between GreenOps, DevOps, and FinOps, as well as the vital role of Infrastructure as Code in marrying financial and ecological efficiencies in cloud operations. Lastly, they tackle the intersection of cybersecurity and AI development, emphasizing the need for green software principles to fortify AI systems while minimizing energy use. 

Learn more about our people:

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Navveen Balani: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Green coding - CloudBolt: Cloud efficiency... beyond dollars, pounds & pennies [03:17] 
• Why you should switch to green coding for a net-zero future [16:08]
• The role of cybersecurity in AI system development [31:28]
• Mexico elects Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female president [40:00]

Resources:

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation [14:36]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
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• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Navveen Balani: Definitely, I would say there is some synergy between security and green software and certain, I would say, features of green software principles can also be applied to security domain, right, to make it more energy-efficient.

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.

Anne Currie: Welcome to another edition of the Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. Today, I'm your host, Anne Currie. So you're not quite hearing the usual dulcet tones of Chris Adams. You will have to do with me instead. But as usual, we'll be talking about the world of green software and what's, what's going on at the moment.

And today we're going to talk a little bit about how being green matches with FinOps, which I think is very true. And I think that's a really important part of the story. So we'll be talking a little bit about that. We'll also be talking a little bit about code and code efficiency, which I'm much more...

You have to be very careful about code efficiency. So that's, that's the part that we need to be really careful about. What's the context there when we talk about code efficiency. And finally, we'll talk about the intersection of cybersecurity and AI developments, and we'll be talking a little bit about GreenOps.

And there is a new Green Software Foundation project, GreenOps project, which is aimed to look about how we can embrace AI and use AI without totally throwing all our green principles out of the window. And I think that is absolutely doable, but we need to think about it. We need to go in, in a very knowing way.

So as I said, I am your host today, Anne Currie. But first I'm going to introduce our guest, Navveen. Navveen, do you want to, do you want to introduce yourself?

Navveen Balani: Thank you Anne. Hi everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm the Managing Director and Chief Technologist for the Techno and Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture, working at the intersection of technology and sustainability. I'm also the co chair of the Standards Working Group and the Impact Engine Framework at the Green Software Foundation.

I'm a Google Cloud Certified Fellow, a LinkedIn Top Voice, and author of several reading books. Very glad to be part of this podcast.

Anne Currie: Thank you very much, Navveen. It's very good to have you. So just a bit of context for me. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the co-chairs of the community group of the Green Software Foundation. And I am also one of the authors of the new O'Reilly book, Building Green Software. So that's, fills you in a little bit on my background.

So before we dive in to the articles this week that we're going to be talking about, it's just a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes at the bottom of the episode. So you can, you can read the articles that we're talking about. You don't just have to rely on us telling you what was in the article.

So, well, let's, let's move first to the first article from today, which was in Computer Weekly. And it was called Green Coding. It was, it was a, basically a puff piece by a company called CloudBolt who do a look at code efficiency, cloud frequency. So taking it beyond FinOps, beyond dollars, pounds, and pennies.

So actually, but it was a very good article, I thought. I was very pleased to see it in Computer Weekly. So it was fundamentally, it was about how GreenOps and FinOps are very aligned. They're very combined. And, and I can, I'm in complete agreement on that. It's a good article. It doesn't say, tell you anything that you probably, that you won't know alreby knowingwing that FinOps and GreenOps are quite aligned and they're all aligned through the fact that in the end, being green, a lot of being green, not all of being green, but a lot of being green is about cutting down on how many machines you, and how much electricity you are using to run your systems, which, which generally speaking cuts down on the cost.

So cost is somewhat of a proxy measure. It's not a perfect proxy measure, but it's somewhat of a proxy measure. So the question that Chris Skipper, our excellent editor has left me and Navveen to discuss is about considering the role of infrastructure as code in enhancing cloud efficiency. How can developers ensure that their infrastructure as code implementations are aligned with sustainability practices to reduce both costs and environmental impact?

So Navveen. What are your thoughts on that subject?

There's, 

Navveen Balani: I think that's a great question. Yeah, agreed. Developers need to embed sustainability as part of the infrastructure as co implementation. And the frameworks that I suggest developers apply is based on our Software Carbon Intensity specification from our Green Software Foundation which also recently received the ISO standard recognition.

So, for those who does not know what SCI is, SCI is a specification to measure the carbon emission of any software application and it promotes three key levers. Writing energy-efficient code, using less hardware for same amount of work, and making applications carbon-aware. And if you apply this strategy to infrastructure and the code, first you start with writing energy-efficient code.

So developers can focus on optimizing resource utilization by right sizing resources and implementing auto scaling. This means allocating only what's necessary for each workload, and also adjusting dynamically based on the demand. Second strategy is around using less hardware for same amount of work.

This basically involves automating resource management like automating the shutdown of non-essential resources during off hours and starting them during peak times. Even conserve energy and cut cost. Also, tagging and monitoring resources usage helps identifying optimization opportunities and eliminates waste.

You can also go with serverless architectures in your ISE code, particularly, it's quite effective as they scale with demand and eliminate, let's say, any provisional requirements. And finally, the third strategy is how do you make applications more carbon-aware. And that's where, as part of your infrastructure code, you can say that I want to deploy a particular workload in a clean free region so you can basically take, apply strategies like region shifting and time shifting and selecting cloud regions which are running on renewables and also maybe deploying workloads or scheduling jobs when the carbon intensity is low.

So all of these strategies can be definitely applied and designed as part of your infrastructure code.

Anne Currie: That's a, that's a very thorough answer and there's loads to unpick in there. Lots of different things. And some things I think at the moment are very aligned with FinOps and cutting your costs. And some things are not aligned yet, but are almost certainly going to become aligned in the future. So for example, you talked about operational efficiency and automation, which is interesting.

Operational efficiency, if you use for your machines. And if you use less electricity, your bill goes down. So that's all good. So in that respect, your FinOps and GreenOps are really well aligned. You know, fewer machines, less stuff, less carbon goes into the atmosphere and it's all fantastically good. And in that respect, I would say that That, that FinOps, that, that, that, you know, your, your hosting bill is a really good proxy metric for your carbon emission.

But of course it's, it's, it's almost stupid, it's so obvious to say it, but it can't just use your cloud bill totally blindly as a, as a guide. Just, you know, what I, when I used to do start, startups in my youth, quite often Azure or, AWS would give you loads of free credits. And then of course, but that doesn't mean that it's carbon free.

So, so there are times when, you know, you just, but you just need to use your head, don't you? Sometimes, obviously, you've been given a discount, but it's not green. It's just a discount.

Navveen Balani: Yeah, yeah, I think that that's, that's a good point. Because if you look at cloud, right? Cloud has infinite resources, right? So, it doesn't mean that, so you have to use it responsibly, right? So, you can bake in energy efficiency and sustainability, right? So, definitely, you have to look at how can you lower the carbon emissions.

And now, and there are also dashboards available from cloud vendors, right? Which at least gives you, some approximation, right? How, what, what is your carbon footprint of your application?

Anne Currie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, they do provide really good tools and, and, and it's, it's a cut cost off really is the best possible metric you could potentially use, but it's where you've got the tools, it's where you've got the data. So, you know, it's, it's quite good from that perspective. Sometimes you just have to take what's good enough.

And, but so something else you mentioned is automation and obviously the, the really good operations is all automated these days. It's auto scaling and it's using the you know, not just in the cloud, but on prem as well, but actually I, in the. You can just do a lot of stuff manually, you don't have to leap straight, if you, if automation is too scary and you know, it's too much of a leap, just going through and turning off machines at the weekends, even manually, identifying machines that are over, that are over provisioned can actually, bizarrely, I think, I suspect in, well, and in fact, I've seen It might be the biggest carbon reduction you ever do, it's the simplest thing and the least techie thing.

So what do you think about, even for automation?

Navveen Balani: Yeah, totally agree. I would say even just turning off machines. Yeah. I mean, that's just manually, right? Would definitely save also the cost also, as well as the carbon emission also, right? Man, especially if you've turned on GPUs, that would affect. So, yeah, But actually, I think, also, I think if you look at the infrastructure, right, it's, it's, if you, if you break down the infrastructure in two parts, right, production and non-production environment, you can definitely have a lot of savings on non-production environment, right, because it doesn't need to be on always.

Production definitely needs to be on 24 by 7, but you are definitely have a lot of improvements that you can done on your non-production environment, dev environments, people, right, and I've seen customers having more non-production environments, right, than production ones. 

Anne Currie: Indeed. And it's so ungreen. It's there's, there was another interesting thing that you talked about in your when you were talking about the SCI, which is carbon-awareness, which of course we know is the most, it's actually the most, it That's the code efficiency and operational efficiency are all good for kind of short term mitigating the harms, but in, but to actually take full advantage of that, you know, the soaring production of cheap energy for renewables, we need to demand shift to when the sun is shining or the wind's blowing.

But the interesting thing about that is that although that's by far the most interesting thing in being green, I would say, it's the bit that at the moment doesn't really save you any money because most countries don't yet have dynamic pricing. So dynamic pricing, so, so what's your thoughts? What are your thoughts on dynamic pricing and when it's coming?

So dynamic pricing is basically when the price of electricity changes through the day, depending on how expensive it was to produce, which usually means, you know, at times when the sun's shining and the wind's blowing, the power is cheaper than others. And that's, that's now very common in certain countries like Spain, but very uncommon in other countries.

Navveen Balani: I think definitely that's a good concept that will promote more sustainability. Typically, if you look at cloud providers, like let's be, to give you an example of Google cloud, it at least gives you now, if you're deploying something on a region, it tells you that it's, it's a low carbon region and hopefully in future you will have the dynamic parsing also, right? It will also give you the time when you should run the workloads. And there are a lot of workloads we doesn't need to run 24 by 7, like batch jobs. We get a lot of emails, right? Of all those millions of emails, right? You'll be sending, right? For promotions. All those can be run on time where, where there is least intensity.

And definitely if you have, if you have a cost, if the cloud provider gives you a cost that this is a good time window, and this is less costly and then all, all, all the activity which doesn't are not critical enough can definitely take care of the dynamic pricing. So I assume in future, I mean, we can see the trend, right?

Maybe where you have, I mean, it's all about data. If you have the data from the grids available to the providers in future, then we can definitely definitely tap on it.

Anne Currie: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's, it's a bit of a shame. It's, it's where there's the hole in the, in the alignment of green ops and fin ops at the moment. That's, that is incredibly green to demand shift, but you don't necessarily get money off for doing that. You know, moving to that green region is incredibly green.

But it doesn't necessarily save you money, but it will do once dynamic pricing comes in.

Navveen Balani: I also, I think if I also feel if regulations also are there, right, with regulations around carbon emissions reporting. Especially, I think, the EUA Act just talked about reporting the carbon emission, but it's a dog bone mitigation. But at some point of time, I would say, when you have a reporting mechanism also, and everybody have to comply for it, I see a lot of these trends coming, right, a new innovative way, right, to lower the carbon emission, right?

So I think regulations at some point of time will also enable, right, a lot of these, I say, innovations, right, to come up.

Anne Currie: Yeah, I agree. Oh, I meant something I meant to mention that, that's aligned with what you were saying earlier about automation. There's the CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. So another of our, of the Linux foundations out there. They describe, and it's, GreenOps equals Fin, GreenOps equals FinOps plus GitOps.

So basically they're saying GreenOps is automated FinOps, which is an interesting one because it feels to me like they're really saying there that GreenOps is good FinOps. Uh, and oddly enough, FinOps often say, well, FinOps is just good ops. GreenOps is just good ops. It's, it's which is interesting, which I think that people often don't really appreciate. No, sorry, I'm taking the final word there and I need to, I will leave the final word to you, Navveen, on FinOps and GreenOps.

Navveen Balani: I'd like to end with what you said, right? So it's, we started with DevOps where you decide to automate something, then you, then the FinOps came, right? So we, because cloud resources were getting expensive, right? And now we have GreenOps, right? So all, we have to look at it in holistically, right? Across DevOps, FinOps, GreenOps, right?

And ensure you take care of both the cost and carbon, right? And keep it under control.

Anne Currie: Yes, totally agree. Totally agree. Right. So we're going to move on to the next. So that's the first article we're talking about there, I would say is extremely uncontroversial. Operational efficiency is like a total win all around. The next article, which is about why you should switch to green coding for a net zero feature, which is a LinkedIn article from the CEO of CSM Technologies, I think is vastly more controversial. Not because it's wrong that you should write a more code efficient, more efficient code. But because I think that there's a lot of context around it. So, so he's written a lovely article, links, as I say, links in the show notes, saying we should all be, be coding more efficiently, which is, which is nice.

But, and it ends with the, with the line, we should change, change, save the world one line of code at a time, which I find massively controversial because I think that when it comes to code efficiency, a lot of business, it's just not the right thing for a lot of businesses to do. It's too expensive. What they should be doing is putting pressure on suppliers to write their code efficient, you know, write the scaled code efficiency.

I think that it can really waste time going down, people going down that rabbit hole and their, their bosses were very right to say, "don't, I'm not going to do it" because it would put you out of business if you rewrote all your systems in Rust or C. So I think that is, it's, it's, it's an article that's true, but only true in certain contexts and not in others.

So Navveen, what's your, what's your thinking on it?

Navveen Balani: So I would say we need to look at this holistically, particularly around green software, focusing on, let's say... I would say three dimensions we have to take. First is having developer training and implementation of green software. Second, we need management buy-in. And third, I would say, it's the culture shift that needs to happen.

And if you look at green software, right, when we when we started, when you all started with the foundation, three years back, green software was a very relatively new area. So we need to provide training and certification in this area so that developers are aware of, right, how they embed sustainability in their day to day work.

Apart from, I would say, the training, a developer needs to have accessible tools, right. Now we have the SCI specification, the Impact Framework, Carbon-Aware SDK, right, which, and there are a lot of other open source tools also available now, which can make it more actionable and developers can actually embed them as part of their DevOps process.

And once the measurement is done apart from code, right, it's also the optimization piece we talked about, right in the infrastructure as code earlier also, right, how you take it all together, right, and try to optimize not just the code, right, but also the resources which are running the hardware, the resources which are powering those applications.

And as I would say green software practices gain traction, I would say securing management buy-in also is essential, right, for widespread production. For instance, highlighting the business benefits is crucial. For instance, implementing green coding, right, can lead to also significant cost savings by, let's say, reducing energy consumption and optimizing utilization.

And as you mentioned, right, it's not just Our footprint, but the scope, the footprint of our suppliers to ensure they also follow the same standard methodology. And that's where I think it comes to the culture change, right? That we all need to go through, particularly for, for green software. And we need to look at how we can embed green software, right?

Going forward in all our work, right? Similar to, let's say, similar, we do it for security, right? So when we, when we had security at 10 years back, right? Now we have security by default, right? We don't talk about that application needs to be secure. We assume application is secure by default. Similarly, if we embed green software, not just code, but across all, all the layers, then we can ensure maybe over the next four, five years where all applications, the new applications that we build, right?

Have a green software principles baked in. So I would say, I mean, it's basically a holistic approach that would be required, right, to, right, from enabling the development community, the tech community where the foundation also, like, for foundation, like, Green Software Foundation plays a critical role.

The management needs to buy in, and also the culture change that needs to happen, right? And the culture change also needs to happen, I would say, at the universities and schools, right, where they can start educating green software early on, right? Similar to the way we have learned object oriented programming, right?

That's by default. We have learned over the, I mean, over the last I would say decade, few decades, right? If we have green software, same as object oriented programming concept, then I think whatever application we build in future, right, we'll have green software baked in.

Anne Currie: Yeah, I, I may agree up to a point. I agree with you, but I think we, I, I'm a big believer in separating out two types of developers. Obviously there are loads of different types of developers in the world, but so, but two types of backend developers, so front end developers, this is almost a separate thing.

But backend developers, you've got people who just working in an enterprise and the code that they're producing is not going to ever be deployed. You know, it's, it's the code that they are writing is never going to be run by billions of people in their own data centers. And then you've got people who are writing platforms and the whole purpose of the platform is to try and get some billions of people to, or at least millions of people to write this code, to run this code.

And those people, they absolutely need to write efficient code. When I think everybody needs to, should be, could, should get used to getting out their performance profiler and just making sure there are no egregious performance problems with their code. Because performance problems are your code's slower and you're burning a load of carbon and it's total waste.

So all again, very aligned with the business. You want your systems to run fast. Your customers want your systems to run fast. So, so having a decently performance system is good. But beyond that, you probably don't want to be writing code yourself, which is massively efficient because that takes a long time, but you do want the platforms you're running on to have done, to have made that investment.

So it's, it's kind of like, there's a lot of context here, isn't it? Are you writing code for mass use or are you writing code that is not really for mass use, which is, which is interesting. I think that's a subtlety that we, like, for example, lovely article though this was, did not point out that difference.

Navveen Balani: That's a good point. So, yeah, especially applications, right? Package applications which will be used, let's say, by millions of developers worldwide or users worldwide definitely needs to make that in right to ensure that for instance simply like all the large language models a good example right all all generative applications will be used by millions of applications millions of developers so how can you make the AI more efficient right both on the user side who is creating let's say the prompts right to Create in an efficient way so that the round trip is reduced and secondly on the backend side, right?

How do you have a low cost efficient energy-efficient model? That's why you also seeing a lot of LLM models are now Talking about the small language models more energy-efficient more compact, right? There is a trend where I would say right where Organizations are now looking at energy efficiency also, right, as part of the applications or whatever work they have been doing.

Anne Currie: Yeah. And of course that's all driven by cost. It's taking us back to our previous thing about cost and cost and green are very aligned. And the good thing about, well, the bad thing about AI is very costly. The good thing is it's driving quite a lot of efficiency improvements. So, I mean, I talk about this every time I'm on here, that, that Python has got a lot more efficient because, because of AI, that they've rewritten all of the code, core, core libraries in Rust. And of course that's, that's a perfect example of they are the kind of people you want to be writing super efficient code. They can save the world one line of code at a time because so many people run Python. But you want to be getting that out of your platform and not having to do it yourself as a, as a Python user.

You don't want to have to change to Rust yourself. You want to be able to get the value of Rust whilst still using Python. But yes, yeah. So, so that is all very interesting stuff, but yeah, very nuanced. It's all at every degree of it. It's what my, to my mind is what makes green interesting, is it's not simple.

It's not trivial. You have to step back and you go, "where am I? What am I doing? You know, what's, where, what's, how do I fit into this? Where does mine, where is my effort best applied?" I mean, you're obviously part of the SCI, which covers all of the things, you know, operational efficiency and code efficiency and demand shifting and shaping.

What's your interest? What do you like the most out of those things?

Navveen Balani: I would say from a, I think from a developer standpoint, right, depending on your roles, right, so SCI, I would say is more inclusive in terms of, depending on roles, right, whether you are a developer, architect, data scientist, right. All are various parts to play, right, to reduce the carbon emission and make applications more energy-efficient.

So, depending on your role, for instance, if you are building, or you are a developer writing code, right, then you can really focus on energy efficiency. And it's not, as you mentioned, right, it's not just moving towards a C or C++ language, right, which is more efficient, but it's, so you have to basically look in the context of the work you are doing and trying to optimize it, right.

So you have to do that trade off as a developer and how, what libraries access to make it more efficient. Second, I would say the whole hardware optimization, I think in terms of where all the DevOps, cloud, cloud architects comes in. How there are various custom chipset from various vendors, right? How can you best utilize from an infrastructure point of view?

And third, I would say is more strategic in nature, right, in terms of how do you bake in the whole carbon away computing concept, because that's new. You need to have data providers, you need to tie up with various licenses which are actually costlier, right, if you look at getting the real time data, right, from various providers.

So how do you bake that in in the application to more of a strategy kind of work and thinking? So in that way, I would say it's, I mean, depending on your role and context, right? I mean, whether from developers to architect for data scientists, right? Each can find definitely a value for, in SCI and then try to reduce their scope of work.

Anne Currie: Yeah. It's so, it's interesting. When I first heard about the SCI, I was a bit, I was a bit dubious about its value, but I have completely changed my mind on that as time goes, especially because I teach, I teach people who are green software and, and, and. One of the things that often comes up is people wanting to be able to do like for like measurements.

And I think that I originally thought the SCI was about a standard that you could compare between applications. And that was where the value would lie. And I was a bit dubious that we could realistically do it. And, and now I've realized that, that I like that the SCI has stayed fairly woolly and loose.

It's more conceptual than it is a specific implementation. And I like that because really it means that companies could choose their SCI score, they can choose how to define their SCI score for their applications and choose what's appropriate. What it's going to, what it's going to, what the denominator is going to be.

So it's per user or per transaction or per, so everything, something that's specific to them, and then it's essentially for like, for like, so you can say, well, last year it was this, and the next year is this, and you can average over time so that you're, you, you know, saying you don't say, well, I'm comparing a sunny day with a non sunny day, or, you know, all those kinds of things.

What I like about the SCI is it's, is it's very kind of conceptual high level nature that forces people to think, "well, actually, how do these things apply to my system?" You've got to use your head. You can't just, you know, you can't just follow it. You can't follow it blindly because it doesn't make any sense if you do that.

You have to say, how does this apply? Forces you to think, which I like.

Navveen Balani: Yeah, I think that's a good concept. Particularly if you look at SCI, right? It's for an application, so you have better control rather than giving you the carbon emission of all the applications. Right. Which typically is given by various cloud providers given an application, then you have a better control, as you mentioned, right?

You can define your own boundary and architecture and calculate the SCS core, right? And the intent is to. Basically, as you deploy new versions, right, the intent is the SCI, you should look at how you can reduce the SCI score, right? We can't achieve zero, but definitely across releases, right? How can you make it have a lower SCI score?

And the point you made about the comparison also, right? So you're comparing your application versus your previous application that you have deployed. It's not about creating two applications from two different organizations, right? We're not there yet. It's about currently using this methodology, right, for your own application and trying ways to reduce it.

Anne Currie: Yeah, which makes all the sense to me. So many years ago in my, when I was more youthful, I used to work in retail and in retail, like for like comparisons are very important. You want to be able to say, well, this year we've made more money than last year, but you can't just say this year we made more money than last year.

You can, but it's not all that useful. What they actually want to do is say, it's per thing. So in retail it's often the kind of per square foot of retail space, balanced for kind of like, well, how expensive was that retail space? You know, so you're not comparing it and say, well, this year we made more money on the same on, on the same amount of floor space, but, you know, it was in London versus it was in the middle of, you know, of the desert. It's, it's kind of like you, you've got to, you've gotta come up with your own, like, for like measure so that you can say, well, is our business improving or is our business getting worse? And the SCI is exactly the same. It's, it's the concept of like, for, like, it's for you to check Ron North's for you to check against other people.

So yeah, it's yeah, I, I, I, I've been completely won over to the SCI. I was highly dubious to start with. Right.

Navveen Balani: Good example. Yeah, that's a very good example of a retail. I'll also use that.

Anne Currie: Right. So now we'll go to the final, the final thing we're going to talk about today, which is, we just touched it from a slightly, again, a slightly more holistic perspective. So this was an article in a Silicon Republic and it was a Q&A with the chief security officer of a, an AI company. It was talking about.

Basically, her premise, and I totally agree with it, is that security, cyber security is very aligned with being green. It wasn't, it's not, it's a bit thin as an article, it doesn't give you an awful lot of information, but I think basically, yeah, that there's the, the idea that, that I think we should be discussing is, is security and, and green aligned?

And you, you, Navveen, you've talked a little bit about that, about in terms building security in is, is like, it is, we've, we've learned to do that and we should learn to do green things, build green things in, in, in the same way. But separately to that, are there security benefits to being green? What do you think?

Navveen Balani: I would say, yeah, definitely there's synergies between security and green principles. So I like to again give that example of SCI, right, if you want to break down the methodology into three parts, right, making applications more energy-efficient, right. So, if you look at the security algorithms, right, how can you use, how can you basically optimize the security algorithms to, let's say, use fewer computation resources.

Particularly, if you look at the security stack, right, they also have evolved from various encryption and cryptography software, right, and now I think you have various key ciphers available across different dimensions. So, they're already following this, I would say, backtest, right, of making encryption security, right, more performance and more easier to adapt. So in that case, I would say it's more aligned towards the algorithms that they're using are more efficient, right? As compared to what it might be, let's say five years, 10 years down the line for, for security protocols. And similarly, I would also say new strategies can also be applied for security scanning.

For instance, vulnerability scanning is one commonly used, right, to identify any threats, maybe in cloud or maybe in desktops and other systems, right, that can actually run, take the advantage of running it on a time, right, where the carbon intensity is low. So in that way, it can apply certain green software principles.

To run all those scans where the carbon intensity is low and also save on the carbon emissions. So, definitely I would say there is some synergy between security and green software. And certain, I would say, features of green software principles can also be applied to secure the domain, right, to make it more energy-efficient.

Yeah,

Anne Currie: And so, so something that actually I'm, I, well, you did mention a little bit earlier is, is security is the perfect example of where hardware, using the right hardware for the job massively cuts your emissions. So dedicate the right kind of chips that are designed for for encryption are just so much more efficient than using general purpose or CPUs for, for that, for that.

So, yeah, we wouldn't be able to do what we do these days if it wasn't for dedicated chips. Oh, and so, and oddly enough, this does also map to some of the stuff that we said at the beginning about manual ops and manual FinOps, that's, it's amazing how many systems are through machines that are kind of like, nobody's, everyone's kind of forgotten about them.

They're not keeping them patched. They don't really do anything useful anymore. Those are your backdoor. Those are the ways that people break in and they're just wasting electricity. So even in building green software one of my co-authors, she, she brought up the fact that, that it's interesting that security, well, that are very much an example of a waste of electricity.

They, they're, they're wasting. So, so something like a denial of service attack, the whole purpose is to burn your electricity in your systems and burn your system so that your systems don't have anything, any time to do the thing that they're designed to do. You know, the thing that has value for you, instead, it's just burning your systems up burning electricity, running up all your bills to do something which is bad for you.

So having a secure system that, and things like applying the latest patches so that you're less, less exposed to denial of service attacks is green because denial of service attacks are very ungreen, they are very dirty. Same, it's, it is quite interesting, isn't it, from that?

Navveen Balani: Yeah, that's why I think the provisioning the right hardware, virtual machines, especially, right, provide various cloud providers. Right. They all, they now provide a managed services, right, to detect various denial attacks. And I assume, right, the underlying hardware that they are using, which is, which should be used by millions of applications, right,

would be definitely more sustainable, more energy-efficient, right. And, and more scalable.

Anne Currie: Yeah. Yeah. Securities are really interesting in that, that's it. So FinOps is just really a, a, a pretty much, except with, for, you know, your free Azure credits or whatever, is pretty much a group, the direct proxy measurement for carbon emissions. And, and likely to become more so in the future when we get dynamic pricing.

But security is not a direct proxy measurement is just, it's just that there are a lot of, you know, best practice in ops is also best practice in secure ops is also best practice in green ops. You know, they're, they're, they're kind of like, you can't use the number of hacks you have, then the number of attacks you, you fall foul to as a proxy measure, you, well, maybe you could, I think that would be a bit complicated.

Proxy measures for carbon is how many times your data gets stolen, aligned rather than proxy. It's interesting. I mean, so we just, we've talked about those, those three things, but have you run across anything interesting at the moment that's, that you think that our listeners should, should hear about? And

Navveen Balani: So, yeah, I would say for the, on the Green Software Foundations, specifically, right, we are working on green AI and so we are trying to look at how we can extend SCI to take I mean, how we can do SCI measurements for large language models generative AI models. So this is something we are actively, I would say, working towards from the foundation perspective.

And if you look at from an SCI perspective, right, we want to have various extensions to SCI, for instance. How do you do SCI for web applications, backend applications? And make it more easy to measure, right, different parts of the code and make it easily available to developers so that developers can measure their, their part of the overall carbon footprint, right so we can make it more accessible.

So that's, that's one thing I think we had from a foundation perspective, looking at how we can make it SCMO extensible to various other use cases.

Anne Currie: That's, that's very interesting. That is the, yeah. 'cause obviously Ai, AI is the, is the workload of the, it's on everybody's lips at the moment. It is... and so I, I saw very interesting charts from all the, the Economist, I think the, the other week that, that said, you know, that's, that showed the enormous amounts of power that was currently being used on ai, but still less than the amounts of power being used on Bitcoin.

So it is just worth reminding. And of course, bitcoin is very aligned with our last conversation about security and what people wanting and people who are attacking you wanting to run up your energy bills, because quite often what they want to do is mine Bitcoin on your, on your machines that you're not properly watching.

So security sweeps are a pretty good way of identifying machines that are burning power totally unnecessarily. From political... I, I quite liked to keep my eyes not just on the Al news, but the really good news news last week from a political rather than a technical perspective was the world's just got its first climate science trained president in the new female president of Mexico is a, is a climate scientist by, by trade and training.

So, I, I, I would be very interested to see what affects that out on the country. Any other interesting political news that's good news, do you think?

Navveen Balani: No, I think I've yet to catch up on,

Anne Currie: Well, I'm quite nosy, so I keep my, I keep my eyes open on all things. I would say there's, there's loads, actually, there's, there's a lot of good news going on at the moment. Texas is now a massive solar producing state. It's, so, yeah, there, there is, it's, The world is changing in a positive way. I, I like to, to, to keep reminding everybody that we are not doomers at the Green Software Foundation.

We, we are doing this because we believe it will have an effect.

Navveen Balani: I totally, I would say, especially with the foundation, right? It's all our collective journey that we've gone through. I mean, we started three years back, we didn't have, we didn't have any specification tools, right? Three years down the line, we have the first specification tool. Software carbon intensity specification, which is now an ISO standard.

We have various tools now, carbon SDK, impact engine framework. And I, I know that 1230 projects already in the pipeline on the foundation, right, which will make the world, I would say, a better place, right. In terms of sustainability, right. For all the work that we do. So, yeah, it's basically a shared responsibility, right.

Climate change is basically a shared responsibility, right. And from our perspective, developers, all we can do is contribute, right, by using the three SCI principles, which I talked about, right? Which I again repeat is either write better energy-efficient code, use hardware wisely, and make applications carbon-aware.

Anne Currie: And of course, actually, not just write it, cause you might not be the one who's writing, it's more important that you use it. So as I'll, I'll constantly, cause Python is such a good, good example of the moment, at the moment, because of their big, big revising stuff. If you people who upgrade the latest versions of Python that are much more, more efficient will be saving a lot compared to people who don't upgrade.

And that's, those kinds of things are the kind of things that will immediately be unearthed by running the SCI like for like. I mean, a really big change might be on your like for like is that you upgraded to more recent versions of a particular library or a particular set of tools that you're using that are more, more efficient.

SCI isn't just about what code you write, it's about what code you use. And that is almost certainly going to be where you get the biggest, biggest value, the biggest return. Anyway, sorry, now I'm doing my, I'm trying to take the last word again, and I'm going to leave the last word to you, Navveen.

Navveen Balani: So yeah, very happy to be part of this podcast. Enjoyed this conversation talking about, I think, three different aspects. I would, I would say. And to all the viewers is, yeah, thank you for listening in and have a good day.

Anne Currie: Navveen, awesome. Thank you very much for coming on this podcast. And a final reminder that all the resources are in the show description below, and you can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. And see you all soon at some point, if they ever let me back in again as a guest host.

Good bye.

Navveen Balani: Goodbye. Thank you, everyone.

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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain the executive director of the GSF to talk about the recent hackathon hosted by the GSF : Carbon Hack 24. Asim goes through some of his favourite projects that featured work with the Impact Framework including some surprising choices! They also cover some interesting news from the world of cloud service providers and the new CSDDD developments. Asim also talks about how mushrooms are out and bread is in!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Tom Greenwood: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News & Topics:

• GreenOps, FinOps, and the Sustainable Cloud | Forrester [6:03]
• EU: New CSDDD compromise finally accepted by Member States | Linklaters [30:02] 
• Carbon Hack 24 Recap: Asim’s Favourites: [50:12]
  • Facebook Open Sourcing the code behind its Power and Water Efficiency Dashboards [51:40]
  • Grasp [52:22]
  • Amazon Packages for Delivery [56:08]
  • Kubernetes Focused Project [56:40]
  • GreenerMeet: Assessing Energy Usage & Carbon Emissions in Zoom Conferences [57:04]

Resources:

• The Baking Forecast | ShouldIbake.com [2:57]
• Hetzner [17:09]
• DigitalOcean [17:32]
• BackMarket [18:04]
• Sesame Open Hardware [20:32]
• DjangoCon [23:18]
• Green Metrics Tool [23:57]
• How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? | Environment Variables Ep 4 [36:49]
• Green Digital Coalition [44:15]
• In-depth Q&A: How does climate change drive human migration? [54:32]
•  All the winners of Carbon Hack 24 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Asim Hussain: And I'm just sitting there thinking, we are old. These are the kids of the future, you know, maybe gave me so much hope, like these are 16 year old kids, and they were doing some incredibly advanced green software measurement, reporting, zoom, understanding curtailment, understanding like how to measure this stuff.

And I was like, ooh, we've got a, we've got a good future ahead of us.

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 Environment Variables, the podcast where we talk about sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. This week, our format is This Week in Green Software, where rather than doing a deep dive into some of the specifics of green software, we're going to look at some of the news stories that have been making the rounds and provide a bit of commentary and analysis on this. And joining me today is my good friend Asim Hussain, the executive director of the Green Software Foundation. Asim, I'll hand over to you to introduce yourself a bit more than what I've just shared so far, if that's okay with you.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Thanks. I really love these, having these podcast episodes with you and talking through this material. Asim Hussain, Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation and been, you know, lucky enough to be at the intersection of sustainability and software for quite a few years. So based in the UK and excited to be on the podcast again.

Chris Adams: Thank you, Asim. And when I last spoke to you on the podcast, the recurring thing is your history of growing all kinds of delicious mushrooms. How are the myco friends doing?

Asim Hussain: Not good, not good. I've lost, my green thumb or my blue thumb. Maybe if that's how you would, talk about it. But yeah, no, I've lost my, I've lost the thumb. I now bake bread is, the thing that I do, which is equally disappointing, to be honest with you. I just love doing stuff, which is like very, the people, you put a lot of effort in and then you get kind of like middling results is kind of my, seems to be my hobbies of, the day, hobbies du jour.

Yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay, so you've been culturing um, what's it, butter, sourdough and things like that?

Asim Hussain: Yeah, sourdough right now, yeah. I do have a sourdough starter that I, was gonna say keep refreshed, but I probably should say like, keep on the verge of starvation all the time. But yeah, no, it's actually quite fun. I make, I bake bread every weekend and I give it a go. Yeah.

Chris Adams: you for sharing that. Presumably, this is going to be carbon aware bread that you're using, that you're baking when the energy is green, because in the UK, you have the baking forecast. Are you familiar with the baking forecast?

Asim Hussain: I am not aware of the baking forecast.

Chris Adams: Ah, dude, this is so cool.

Asim Hussain: Now that you've said it, I can't believe I'm not using the baking forecast. Because it is, a lot of, that's the thing my wife questions me on. She's like, does the financials of this work out? And I'm like, I don't know, but there's healthier bread than the stuff you get in the supermarket.

Chris Adams: So for those who are curious, and I promise we will talk about green software, this is a kind of segue towards some of the ideas we might talk about later. In the UK, there is a website called the Baking Forecast, named after the shipping forecast, and the idea behind it is to look at the carbon intensity of the electricity that might be going into the oven when you're doing any kind of heating.

And this means that you can then decide to time your baking to be zero or very low carbon bread by making sure you bake when there's lots of renewable energies on the grid. Or, alternatively, if you are not paying attention, you can end up with very, high carbon bread by baking when there's lots of fossil fuels on the grid.

Now fortunately, sunnier, we've got some more solar and wind coming in, it's not like the depths of winter, so it's probably greener breaking today than it was in November or December. But yeah, this is one thing that we should, that I think is, only the UK has this right now. And we'll have to share a link in the show notes because it's a really, cool project.

Asim Hussain: That's cool. You could also end up with really high carbon bread if you leave it in the oven for too long.

Chris Adams: Oh yeah,

Asim Hussain: wait, wait. Oh my God. Where is it? Where is it? I don't know which one it is. You do it.

Chris Adams: I think I know what you're after.

Asim Hussain: Oh, there we go. Oh no.

Chris Adams: This is what you're after?

Asim Hussain: That was it.

Chris Adams: Yes, it, yeah, as, you, Asim has discovered the sound effects on the, on Riverside, the podcast platform we're using. So-

Asim Hussain: You told me about it.

Chris Adams: Yeah, I do apologize. So if we have, we might be like two children at the front of an aircraft playing with this, flip, flicking all the switches, but we'll try our best to not make listening to this too insufferable.

Okay, so we've, mentioned about the baking forecast as a way to talk about carbon aware use of electricity and things like that. Shall we look at some of the stories together, Asim?

Asim Hussain: Yeah, let's do it.

Chris Adams: Oh, if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams, or if I'm in trouble, Christopher Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a small Dutch non profit focused on reaching a fossil free internet by 2030.

I'm also one of the chairs of the policy working group inside the Green Software Foundation. The other thing I'll share is that at the end of this show, we'll be showing a link with all the show notes, and it's usually written in Markdown, and we do accept pull requests, so if there's a thing that we've linked to that you think is incorrect, or if there's things you'd like to add, then it's open source and you can do that.

And I think that's the main thing I'll share. The stuff we talk about will be linked. And I guess we should probably find something to talk about then, shouldn't we?

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Something that's not bread related.

Chris Adams: Alright then, well in that case, shall we move on to, I want to make a joke about biochar, but let's just move on from, yeah, alright, so let's, focus on the first story, which is GreenOps, FinOps, and the Sustainable Cloud.

This is from, uh, I think it's actually originally from Forrester, a big analyst firm, who have now kind of woken up to this idea that If you're tracking cost, in many cases you might be tracking carbon. And this is the main thing they're talking about here. There's a few kind of key takeaways and key points inside this.

And this basically does talk about things like, say, you can reduce emissions through kind of looking at kind of existing cost bills, for example. There's different steps you can take. They talk a little bit about some of this stuff. And they also provide a very, high level idea that Right now, we do have inconsistency across the large cloud providers, so Google and Microsoft, they might report all of the emissions, or all of the emissions according to the kind of GHG protocol, which is like the gold standard of reporting, giving you scope 1, 2, and 3, where the majority of the emissions for what we do is probably in scope 3, and talking about how Amazon is doing this, and they've recently, we now know on the grapevine that they've started to rehire people.

But at present, if you look at the dashboards or the calculators of Amazon, you're only going to look at scope one and two, which on average means that you're missing a significant chunk of the picture. So that basically means if you dashboards, and you think, oh, my numbers are really low, that might not be the full story.

All right, Asim, I trust you had a chance to look over it. So are there any particular takeaways or hot takes you had on this one that you might share with us?

Asim Hussain: Well, I don't know if I had any particular hot takes is stuff I've heard before and kind of stuff I've heard mentioned kind of in quite a few times over the past few years. And what I was actually interested in is perhaps just having a more. I'd actually love to hear your thoughts and maybe we can like walk through some of the ideas and some of the question marks I have are just about the whole premise of this link to cost and carbon and like, there's a few things I think of when I think about that.

One of the things I think of is, well, isn't, the cost of things the reason why we're in this problem in the first place? You know, how can costs, how can money both be the cause of the problem and the solution to the problem at the same time? And then, like, you know, you know, yes, there is this argument that kind of reducing cost reduces carbon, there's this kind of correlation.

I've spoken about it extensively, in my past, but kind of I'm trying to refine my thinking in this space. We know that there's somewhat of a correlation there. But we also know there's things you can do which can dramatically reduce carbon, which don't affect your bottom, the cost at all in the slightest.

So what is the, how big of an opportunity is that and is therefore focusing on cost kind of distracting us from things that we can do, which can dramatically reduce our carbon that they've got nothing to do with the cost. And another thing just kind of pops up in my mind as well, which is I remember I was speaking to just the energy purchasing department at Microsoft years and years ago. And I actually asked them, can I quote, quote you on this.

Chris Adams: And this is because you worked at Microsoft.

Asim Hussain: I used to work at Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. And a rule of thumb that they gave me was, which was the, this is pre AI, was that the cost of running a data center is only 10 percent energy. The actual dollar cost, 10 percent energy, 50 percent depreciation of assets.

So you bought some chips, and they're gonna be worth zero in five years, so they're depreciating of assets. And everything else was like, you know, people and everything else was number one. And so like, when you think about that, certain parts like that emits carbon into the atmosphere, all of those-

Chris Adams: The creation of, oh, each of these, right?

Asim Hussain: The energy emits carbon, but it's only 10%.

You know, the human beings running around emit carbon, the actual physical infrastructure like emit carbon when it's created. And then what happens in an organization is you normalize that into a dollar value, which you then charge for services that run off there. But does that dollar value, like represent, you know, accurately, you know, like the carbon emissions put it that way like there's probably a lot of nuance here yes. Reducing your cost reduces emissions, but maybe reducing costs In this way has unbelievably emissions reductions and reducing, you know, reducing $10 in another area, eh, probably doesn't have that much impact at all.

So I'm kind of a little concerned with how I don't really think the link is kind of that well understood and I'm worried a little bit that if we focus too much on cost reduction, we might be able to reduce costs in ways that have no impact on carbon emissions reductions. That's kind of like where I'm thinking about.

Chris Adams: Mm.

Asim Hussain: I was just wondering what your thoughts were, actually.

Chris Adams: So, I think there's two things. I'll share a question to that, but you said two things which I think are really interesting there. First of all, the cost of energy as, like, that's a part of what the data center might be, right? And you also said, like, depreciation of assets being one of the big costs.

And that, I'm assuming that basically means, like, I've got a server, it's going to last over, say, three or four years, and because of that I split the cost over four years, and that's how I, that's, you know, it's-

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Accounting wise that let me see exactly how they figure out accounting wise. Yeah.

Chris Adams: All right, so there are two things. Most of these discussions seem to be about energy usage, with the idea being that, I think you're right, there's totally mismatch between these two things, because we are, in many ways, we don't see any of this stuff, we don't have the visibility in a bunch of these things.

And one thing that we've, one thing that I guess we've seen a number of large companies start talking about now is saying, well, we are looking to extend the life of our servers, and we're doing this as a way, as a green measure, right? That sounds great, yeah? But if you extend the life of your servers, you've gone from 50 percent depreciation to maybe 30 percent or 40 percent depreciation, right?

I mean, from a financial point of view, that basically, I mean, Amazon did this. It put like billions onto their, on to their balance sheet because they now look way more profitable than they were before because they don't have to kind of write it off. So, yes, there are some things being shared for this but whether how that actually factors into some of the calculations people use.

I mean, I don't know. There was an announcement there. We haven't seen any changes whatsoever in any of the kind of cloud dashboards, so you would have expected that to make a difference if you did have, if we did see that, and both Amazon has done this, Google has done this, and Microsoft had done this, right?

So, I would argue that looking at calculators, there's a gap here between what we're seeing here and what we are being taught to optimize for. And there's also another question. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, no, it, and there's also, I remember just as you were saying that, I remember this, and this is years, this is information is years old, but I was chatting to the, uh, the Xbox team at Microsoft and like one of the things, I mean, I still, no, I don't have an Xbox. I finally got rid of it. That initial estimation

Chris Adams: You sorely miss. Your love to Xbox, that is. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, love.

Chris Adams: Oh no, you don't work for them now. You're okay. You can say anything.

Asim Hussain: I'm okay. I can, get rid of it, I think. I think. Yeah, you wouldn't get, you wouldn't get a free Xbox if you went to Microsoft, and I always thought they should give you one. But, it was, like, they assumed that it would only last, like, four, three or four years. I can't, I'm, don't quote, no one quote me on this.

But the actual lifespan of kind of these consoles turned out to be a lot longer. And people, I don't know how old Xbox is now, like, it must be like six, seven years. But it's still, like, pretty, you know, still pretty active. The decision was to kind of still keep, from an accounting perspective, still keep it kind of three, four years, even though the reality was it was being used for longer.

So those decisions are being made as well. But it's interesting that's part of the, yeah, I suppose that's part of the story we don't really, The point I'm coming from is this, is a $1 reduction in your costs, how do you link that to an actual carbon emission? Because coming back to my point of like the energy versus the embodied, like how much of the emissions is linked to the energy versus the embodied and therefore how much of your cost is linked to reducing the energy versus reducing the embodied?

Does that make sense? It's

Chris Adams: This comes to basically disclosure of cost structure, which is a bit of a kind of like jargony term but basically without having visibility into how this stuff is paid for because in many cases we have very proprietary services, it's really hard to basically, be sure, like, is this really happening?

And even when we talk about things like, say, cloud, moving to cloud compute, moving to, say, serverless, all these other tools, which are kind of higher up the stack, right? There is, it's not like the profit margins for cloud at the very bottom, like paying for compute per, on a per hour basis, will be different from things higher up.

And we don't have much in the way of visibility into any of that stuff. I mean, I, as I understand it. The higher up the stack you go, the more value you add. A bit like if you're buying refined, if you're buying oil, and then you're selling, say, refined kerosene or something like that, it's going to be a different price, right?

So you can think of, I think we have maybe some mental models we can apply for some of this. And this is actually possibly one way that you can say, well, if we have If we're running a bunch of companies, and we have a set amount of resources, and we cannot use more resources, like more inputs, there are ways to still continue to increase the amount of kind of value and profits being made by shifting people to kind of go higher up the stack to get them to purchase, maybe say, a serverless thing, or something like, something which allows you to kind of cram more stuff onto the same infrastructure.

But the problem is, In order for you to do that, you need to not build more infrastructure. And what we've just seen is the opposite of that happening right now. And I think this is what, I think you're somewhat right. It's easy to talk about cloud costs because it's, you've already got the numbers there and you don't have to, yeah.

Asim Hussain: It's like one of the most obviously disclosed, like, facts about your cloud usage is how much it's going to cost you.

Chris Adams: Yeah. And like, if you're in an organization, it's probably easier to start optimizing a number that you already have than to pay for someone to, or even pay for a solution for someone to do this stuff. Because I've invested like. We've, uh, okay, I promise we'll get back to the other stories a little bit later on, all right?

But inside the Green Web Foundation, we've been looking to, like, audit all of our own services recently, or just, like, work out our own kind of, look at our own annual emissions. And the thing we found is that, let's say we've, uh, the majority of our impact, because we're a quite small organization, comes from, not necessarily from the services we're paying for on an hourly basis, like, we use Hetzner, and we don't, Which we're spending maybe, I guess, maybe a thousand euros a year on Hetzner in total?

Asim Hussain: What's Hetzner?

Chris Adams: Hetzner is a German cloud computing service. So, about half of all of Mastodon run on Hetzner service because they're so cheap. So much cheaper, and in Europe at least. They've been one of the greener ones to use, because they build all their own software. And if you look at their prices, they're typically, like, you know how DigitalOcean will sometimes be cheaper than, say, the big cloud providers?

They are cheaper than DigitalOcean, once again. So as a result, we're a cash strapped non profit, we're going to go for the cheapest green, option we can find. And the cheapest green option that We can find that has cloud like APIs and is used and works quite well. So we've been using those ones, and as a result, cloud makes a small amount of our kind of digital estate.

What ends up being a larger thing is the infrastructure we use, like the laptops and the monitors we have inside our own houses, inside our own offices. But, even if we buy those from circular providers, so my laptop is from BackMarket, which is like a kind of second hand provider, and likewise, Hannah does the same thing with hers, and all this.

Hannah's my, she's my colleague who's been leading on this work here. We've done this, but under most of the ways there's no guidance on, okay, is it someone else's carbon? Do you know, has someone else banked it so therefore it's free for you because they've depreciated the carbon there? There isn't much in the way of guidance or real stuff that you can adopt.

Like, you can might, you might be able to sight a paper, but that's not the same as there being, say, guidance that you might use for your own reporting to say, this is why we've chosen these numbers here, for example. And like, this is what, these are some of the problems. There isn't this recognized way to account for circular versus buying new stuff, for example, and this does speak to this idea of, well, okay, how do you estimate this stuff and work out what is the most effective thing, which, you know, which levers should you be pulling if you want to reduce the emissions from software or digital services in general?

Asim Hussain: So that would be like an example of, well, yeah, cause I've even had these conversations before we're talking about like, what'd you do? I think with all these like hyperscalers, like once they actually reach end of life, they're not broken.

Chris Adams: Mm

Asim Hussain: the, equation that they're running is like, we've got per square foot of infrastructure, of real estate, what is the profitability? And at a certain point, it becomes more profitable to take out this old server, which is perfectly fine.

Chris Adams: Yeah, usable. Working.

Asim Hussain: But you can just put something else, which is more profitable per square foot for that given situation. So that, I mean, people think these things are breaking and then no, they're not, they're just perfectly fine and working.

They might be more inefficient. Then we've had like conversations in the past with, I've had people going, well, if I was to take that server. End of life server and build my own data center. Could I argue that is zero? Could I argue that it has zero embodied emissions? Is that like a reasonable statement to argue?

And, I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that question is.

Chris Adams: The question, the answer is likely to be about, oh God, this is so nerdy, mate. I'm so sorry. But like, what is the depreciation that we've just spoke about now? You said half of the cost in a data center is a depreciation. What's, how do you split that? How do you kind of, Amortize the carbon over these years and then how do you then share that with someone else?

So there's a company called Open, I think they're called Open Sesame or Sesame. They basically build data centers or like racks and stuff out of all of the, uh, Yeah, decommissioned stuff from Facebook and all these open compute projects, because all the companies, because you know how these servers are designed, and know how they're specced, it's actually quite common to buy these, and these tend to be cheaper than what you might have elsewhere.

And in many cases, it's not like, It's not like they rust, right? They really, they're, kept in kind of quite good con condition and they are working in a lot of cases, but the, they make the argument that, well, this is circular, so this is gonna be greener what you have, what you've been using elsewhere, but whether you are able, but yeah, it's, a number question.

It's an open question about how you account for that stuff inside, if you're purchasing, say, computing from these folks compared to people from somewhere else, because a lot of the time, order for in you to do this, you probably need organizations to be really transparent about where they got their servers from, and that's not always what companies are incentivized to do, basically, right now.

Asim Hussain: but then we get to that same argument of like, at the end of the day, that's going to be sold to somebody as like a dollar cost, like dollar per hour of a CPU. and if we just look at cost as a proxy for carbon, then you could argue there that will, they might have to end up selling that service at a rate that is actually quite comparable to a brand new server.

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: This is where I think there's this kind of, I don't know if it's a breakdown or there just needs to be a lot more thought put into it. It's almost like there's a, that you pay a dollar value. There's a black box. And then at the other end, we know there's some sort of carbon emissions. And I think there's a lot of nuance there.

And maybe what I'm saying is that actually cost isn't a great proxy for carbon. Because really, maybe that is, I'm kind of refining my thinking as I'm talking to you. Maybe cost isn't a great proxy for carbon. Or maybe you put it this way. Three, four, five years ago I was advocating for it because we had nothing else.

Chris Adams: Mm.

Asim Hussain: There were so few other options, but I'd actually argue now, we have the capacity and capability, even if a cloud provider, somebody themselves don't even know what the carbon emissions are. There are models that now exist where you can estimate from what you can see about. But the infrastructure that you're using and make your own assumptions and make your own judgments as to what the carbon emissions are.

So I think I suppose where I'm thinking now is we can actually move beyond costs. I suppose that's where I'm thinking.

Chris Adams: Well, the thing I might share with you, and if you forgive the plug, so I've just been travelling all around Western Europe by train, and I literally started on the 31st of May, and I arrived at this conference called DjangoCon, which is a conference all around DjangoCon, Django, which is a very popular framework that initially powered, say, Instagram, and like, part of the NHS website, all this stuff here, yeah.

Asim Hussain: I used to be a Django developer. That was like my job. Yeah. My job, my paid for profession for quite a few years was a Django developer.

Chris Adams: Wow, I did not know that. Okay, no, that's a, okay, that's a story I'm going to use then, because I think we can bring this back to the cross thing for a second. Anyway, I did a talk, I, there was very short notice, I was going to deliver a workshop about how to, basically, how to use some of the tools available to kind of green your Django stack.

Right, so we were using a tool called Green Metrics Tool, which as Ana, one of the, like, I guess the founder of this, the guy who, the lead maintainer, he says the name is descriptive more than creative, but you kind of know what it's for, right? I quite like that. Anyway, that does give you figures for energy usage and embodied carbon and it does provide these and even provides like SCI figures. So there's now like a workshop and a deck and I will show a link to it to see how you can take an existing project and come up with SCI figures for various user journeys and things that you do have. Asim, I didn't have time to talk about the Impact Framework, and I, once I know enough about the Impact Framework, I'd be really up for using it.

But one of the key things I had to do was I was doing this workshop and then literally the day before I arrived, we had someone with a visa problem, so they couldn't do their talk. So basically the organizers asked me, said, Chris, are you, do you have a talk ready or are you, would you be up for filling this spot?

We have a 30 minute slot to talk about this. And I basically had 24 hours to take the workshop, turn it into a presentation. And the thing, the reason I'm talking about this is that I presented a kind of taxonomy of ways to think about these tools that you have. And I described things in terms of usage based and cost based specifically for this reason.

So you would use cost based tools to do your first round of disclosure or to work out like a baseline because until you, and until you've been able to demonstrate any value from doing this, it's going to be really hard to argue for like weeks of developer time to come up with some numbers. Right?

Whereas this at least gives you a number that you do have. And then I spoke about how you would use usage based tools to start figuring out, okay, well, what changes can I make to reduce some of this stuff? And yeah, I'll share the link to the deck, because it's, it allows us to create the, you know, we need, like, taxonomies to realize that we're not conflating these ideas too much.

Because a lot of the time, you're doing different jobs, and you're asking, you're being asked by different people. So, like, for example, the whole kind of Software Carbon Intensity thing, initially, it was, as I understand it was created partly because the sustainability, like the head of sustainability asks for some numbers, and if you're going to report along these numbers, you don't really see much in the way of incentives to show how you're changing in future, right?

it doesn't incentivize changes at the engineering level.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Adams: right? So therefore you need a, you know, one of the thrusts would say, well, let's come up with a metric to show that we are planning forward. And we're taking some steps so that if you're an engineer, you have an idea of what's, what, you can do rather than just outsourcing all to energy procurement, because that-

Asim Hussain: Yeah,

Chris Adams: isn't necessarily the full solution, for example.

Asim Hussain: I mean, the way, I mean, I really love your taxonomy of cost based versus user based. I think that, yeah, I like that actually. And user based being more, perhaps more, more granular and more action. Cause it kind of gives you more, more specific things you can do. Whereas cost is like this really high level thing.

Just to bring it back to what you said about the SCI, the, one of the things, And I really, I didn't coin this, uh, but when it was coined, I loved it, but they described it as measurement for reporting versus measurement for action. And that's, I think, an interesting way of looking at kind of the different measures, uh, in this space.

And, you know, we talk about regulations. We need to talk about regulation. We want regulations a lot, but once you start talking about regulations, the measure that you have is a measurement for reporting and the, behavior it triggers is what, number can I disclose that I can defend? What can I defend? Whereas a measurement for action is kind of what number do I need to drive action change. And that's when we think about the SCI, it's a measurement for action. I don't know whether, where, it will need to land to be something, you know, to be, you know, To be, you know, defensible.

Like, I don't know why I'm gonna go off on a massive tangent right now, but-

Chris Adams: Go with it, let's go with it.

Asim Hussain: Go with it. Let's go with it. We know Krav Maga. You know Krav Maga?

Chris Adams: Wow, yeah, the Israeli martial art you're talking about?

Asim Hussain: The Israeli martial art. Like, I've always, there's actually a place nearby and I've always wanted to learn.

Chris Adams: I did not expect you to go in that direction, let's go with

Asim Hussain: Well, but let's just go with it.

Because here's an interesting thing about it. And one of the things that the founder of Krav Maga said, this is will never be allowed to be done in like a competitive environment. There will never be the world championship of Krav Maga. There will never be like this, you know, global Krav Maga, blah, blah, blah.

Because by, by that's when you start bringing in rules and the actual nature of the sport changes. So it doesn't become good at what it's supposed to do.

Chris Adams: Ah, yeah, so for people who are not familiar, Krav Maga is, it's like, oh, it's like punch him in the love spuds and all the stuff like that. It does all the kinds of things which you wouldn't do in a, kind of formalized mode, because they are, they're basically weapons of war, rather than actually weapons of art, right?

So it's more like, there's more martial than the art part, perhaps.

Asim Hussain: I mean if I'm gonna learn a martial art, it's gonna be there so I can like actually get out of trouble, so I don't mind like poking somebody in the eye or kicking them where they shouldn't be kicked.

But like, but I think that might, that's just one of my thinking and I'm, and I, this is just my thinking and this is a consensus based organization, so I just want to really be clear that I'm just expressing kind of some thoughts have and they might change in the future as well. You know, can you have both things?

Can you have a measure which is good for action and good for reporting? Or does, you know, as soon as you bring a regulation into a measure, does it then transform the nature of it, so it, you know, it doesn't become good as an action driving measure and it can only serve as a , as a measure for reporting.

That's kind of some of the thinking we've gone, I don't know how we got to this.

Chris Adams: No, this is a graceful segue into the next story, Asim, don't worry. All

Asim Hussain: But yeah, that, that's some of the thinking I had.

Chris Adams: I don't have a, I won't try to directly answer that, but what I will do is name check the new story, the next story we have, which is from Linklaters, the law firm, and they talk about, so this is going to be a bit of jargon.

Asim Hussain: Oh, yeah.

Chris Adams: I'm afraid, so this is a, this was a new story from actually a few weeks back, say, the new CSDDD compromise finally accepted by member states.

That is impenetrable to most people who are programmers, but the short version is that there is a piece of law. called, we already have a piece of law called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which is a bit like, which essentially compels organizations of a certain size to disclose their carbon emissions on an annual basis, just like they disclose their financial things and their financial figures.

Different parts of the European Union are now, okay, for want subclassing the directive and turning it into their own law, right? So, France has been the first of the countries in Europe to actually do this. And Egalité, CSAD, yeah, like, they have a really hardcore version of the law, where if you are a corporate director, and you don't disclose, and you take steps to block disclosure, You have jail, you know, there are jail time sentences and stuff like that now.

There's some really, hardcore things, right? And that's like the disclosure thing. But the thing that's interesting is that this plays nicely with this new law, which is the Corporate Sustainable, Corporate, I think it's Corporate Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive. And this introduced some new demands.

So you basically need to like, as you'd imagine, Have some due diligence in your supply chain, but they also need to demonstrate how this fits into some of the laws or some of the kind of longer term goals of being a company active in, like Europe, where Europe has set targets of saying, well, you need to reduce emissions by, you know, we aim as a kind of union to reduce emissions by 55 percent and who knows, maybe even 90 percent by 2040.

And as a result, you know, you now have to publish a climate transition plan, which shows what your steps are to actually help get there. And, uh, this I think is interesting because this now means that you have basically a mechanism for accountability each year, I mean, kind of anyway, but you've also got something to show that you're looking forward.

So you've got forward looking and backward looking. And I think this is quite helpful for the conversations around, say, a consequential model like The Software Carbon Intensity thing, plus some of the kind of somewhat backward looking models that you might have with the GHG. And I think the GHG protocol, and this is how I now think about this, you will say that you might use the SCI to plan forward and say, well, am I going to do this versus that?

And that allows me to talk about, it's not just my organization, like, uh, are there places where impact is taking place where I don't have to put it on my books, but I know it's a significant problem, right? Because the current state of the law doesn't actually incentivize you to do that. And, uh, particularly if you're like, say, a media company, for example, where, you know, most of the impact is in a router in someone's home, or in someone's end user device, like their big ass television, you might not try and tell someone.

Hey, can you please stop using your big ass television and use a, tablet, right? Yeah, you might do that, but like, it's, that's going to be a hard thing for you to kind of argue is inside your kind of organizational boundary, for example, for, reporting. So this is why having two ways of looking at this is actually quite helpful.

And this is how I've expressed the difference between an SCI and the GHG protocol. The fact that they are complimentary to each other, but very but different.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, and I think that's, I never meant to throw shade on any kind of measurement for reporting, like it's all, needed. it's just different audiences. It's just different audiences, different needs, different, other things. So would you say the CSDDD is, because I just think the way you just described it, there's, it's, different to how some of the ways I've heard it described, but the, does it go beyond the organizational boundary?

So the climate transition plan that you have to expose, is it how it supports the EU's aggregate goal, or is it just how you, your organization plays, how its emissions has to reduce? Because if, it's an aggregate goal, then the kind of debate that you're just describing, which is like, I'm making my TV more efficient, but who cares? It's not part of my or something. That's not part of my effectively changing Help showing how you're helping the climate transition by things outside of your value chain.

Chris Adams: I need to stress, I'm not a lawyer. All right. Okay. And uh, I think I see, I think you mentioned that there might be someone who is a lawyer who does look at this, that I think it would be really nice to have someone who, with that deeper domain expertise to kind of talk about this 'cause. I'm mindful that because I have an English accent, it sounds like I know what I, that I am confident and, uh, about what I'm talking about when I might not be that well informed.

Asim Hussain: In a lot of you're very well informed in a lot of areas. But anyway, yeah.

Chris Adams: Alright. So yeah, I'm definitely not a lawyer in this con in, this context. Uh, but the, I guess the key, you know, your question is do you use 'em differently and would you be, I mean, is that the question that you had? Like, uh, uh, is that, maybe you could just repeat that to make sure I understand the question.

Asim Hussain: Well, I think it's interesting. I think it's, I think, because a lot of these questions are kind of like insular to an organization. Like what are you doing? What's your organization? How is your organization reducing its own like emissions? And then the conversation is basically coached around, "well, that's not my problem. That's not me. I, even though you could do something materially to reduce those emissions, it's just not part of my value chain. So I'm not going to be focused in on it." Is it, I presume because it's a business reporting directive. It is kind of very much like how, like you've, made, how are you as an organization going to your emissions in line with the EU's target by 2040?

Chris Adams: So, okay. That's, yeah. I think I understand your question now. So, uh, as I'm aware so far. The CSDDD is basically, they're still all focused very much on your own organization, right? So it, I think most of the supply chain due diligence part is about your upstream, right? Not necessarily so much stuff that you have downstream, for example.

So, you know, you might talk about who you purchase things from, but it might not be about to what extent am I incentivizing or am I accelerating the production of fossil fuels, for example, right? So right now, let's say, when we saw this, when we saw, I think Will Alpine, you know, he was a guest before, and so, so, so, so, so he mentioned this a while ago, and I think way, way back in the first or second episode.

He spoke about, okay, we need to be doing, you know, we, need to be using, we need to be responsible for our use of AI. Yes, we need to think about the green part, but we also think about these parts elsewhere. He's been like really, he's been leading on a bunch of this stuff and talking about this. Yeah.

Yeah. So, the yes.

Asim Hussain: Scope 4, he got me onto the idea of scope 4 emissions, which is like Very interesting.

Chris Adams: Yeah, so he, so like, he's been talking about this in quite kind of clear ways for quite some time. So, the scope 4 stuff that you've just mentioned, don't know to what extent that's actually included in this right now. But if you're talking about your plan, it's likely that if you're going to have a transition plan, you probably would have very good reasons to talk about what your transition plan looks like because you're helping transition the entire economy.

So it may be that you might refer to this, but this is where I'm outside of my kind of comfort zone, basically.

Asim Hussain: We can, lobby right now for what we'd want. I mean, what the ideal solution I would say is not lobby. That's the wrong word. We don't, do lobbying, but you know, you know, There is this overall aggregate goal that we need to achieve. And that's it. I love this. It was Henry Richardson that said that.

I remember it so specifically. I know the person that said it. And I know in what meeting they said it. was such a great statement. We were talking about the SCI. And we were talking about this whole idea of double counting. You know, double counting, when it comes to reportings and all this stuff, it's so significant because you're an organization.

You don't want to, you know, You don't want to be responsible for somebody else's emissions. You don't want double counting. But he said, actually. As a humanity, we want double counting because what does double counting mean? Double counting means that there's more than one person incentivized to reduce that emissions, right?

That's, the advantage somewhat of double counting. And actually, if you think of scope 3 in a way is double, counting across the board because somebody's scope 1 and 2 is somebody else's scope 3. But I actually completely forgot where I was gonna go with this.

Chris Adams: I'll try and rescue Asim before we move to the next story. So, we were talking a little bit about, and bring it back to digital services, right? The, so, I can't name the organization that we did some of this work for, but we were talking about a large media company, we were talking with a large media company, and we were helping them understand this, because some of the jargon, I'm afraid, that people use for this is like an attributional approach, which is like, are they my emissions? Versus a consequential approach, which is, do these emissions, you know, is this activity going to increase or reduce emissions? And when you're looking at media, for example, essentially, if you look at the attributional part and the GSG protocol, what you have to report on, right, you are incentivized to care about the data center more than anything else, right?

Because that's kind of inside your boundary at the moment, or what. Most organizations report as their boundary, right? Not every organization. But if you were to look at the consequential approach, you'd be looking at, yeah, all the things mentioned before. And like, the, this is quite a significant thing because for consuming digital media for consumers, the data center's making, Less than 10 percent, right?

It's tiny compared to the, well, the energy use at least of the, yeah, and uh, if you look at the energy use, it's going to be, you know, more than two thirds is coming from all the stuff at the end users, which is outside of your, you know, it's not on your book, so why would you care right now?

Asim Hussain: Well, it's an externality in a way, isn't it? Yeah.

Chris Adams: So this is, this is why I think it's interesting to see these two things have some interplay, and we, I think we need some wording for this right now.

Like, the one I'm trying to popularize is, you have climate disclosure, Which is one of my missions. And then there's climate response. What was my plan to reduce this? Right? Climate disclosure, you want your missions to be small. Your climate response, you want it to be really big. really, like, massive and ambitious and, like, loud and everything like that.

And that's what I think you can get behind.

Asim Hussain: But I think that's what Scope 4, that's why I think Scope 4 is a really interesting concept. It is, I've forgotten how it's defined exactly, but you know, things like your response, like things that you are doing outside of anything to do with making money or products, like that is what's counted in Scope 4.

But also it's like the impact you're having, the impact your, business and the work that you're doing is having on the fundamental problem of climate change. So, i. e. like, if you're enabling something which helps people to find another oil reserve, that's a massive scope for. That would like overshadow anything that you're producing in this world.

But scope for could also be negative, because if you're doing lots of work that actually sucks out carbon from the atmosphere. You can actually have a, like a, scope four, which a note, scope one, two, three, can't be negative, like, unless you're not doing, unless you're just not breathing or just sitting very still, but like, it can't be, but scope four could potentially be positive or negative and it shows your, like, how you, really like impacting the world, like.

Chris Adams: Yeah, so the thing we could possibly link to, I'm going to add to the show notes the episode we did, the podcast episode, which was all about AI and ML impacting climate change way, way, back in the day, I think June 13th. Oh wow, it's literally two years ago.

Asim Hussain: Is it two years?

Chris Adams: Yeah, we're recording on June 12th.

Asim Hussain: About AI?!.

Chris Adams: No, we've spoken about it before, but this is the, this is one I'm really, actually, I really loved this one. This was recorded on June the 13th, and this included, it was Abhishek Gupta, who's now, like, inside CAT, inside Climate Action Tech, which is a community that we're both part of. He's being funded on a micro grant to come up with some sustainable AI principles, but Will, Will Alpine, he, well, Will Buchanan is what he, before he got married, he was called Will Buchanan.

He mentioned a bunch of this stuff. And we also have Lynn Kaack, who was one of the co founders of Climate Change AI, which is another one of the really, in my view, really fantastic organizations who have real authority in talking about that. They mentioned a bunch of this stuff, so if you want to know a bit more about AI, look at these things from two years ago, because a lot of that still stands, and it's very, it's, I, learned so much from that one, basically.

So yes.

Asim Hussain: I get pinged by organizations all the time going, "oh, we want to talk about, or media, we want to talk about AI and, oh, AI and sustainability is suddenly a problem." And I'm like, we've been talking about it for a long time, like well before chat GPT came on the market as AI being a, hot topic of conversation in sustainability circles.

Chris Adams: Well, maybe the thing we should also link to in then Asim is, A, there's, so the GSF has actually started to endorse some existing legislation in America, to make this a bit clearer. But also, in Europe, I think something like a million and a half or a million euros, there was a tender a few years ago, to basically start researching some of this stuff that you might refer to as Scope 4, basically.

Like Scope 4 is, it's an idea, but it's not, there's no standard around it right now. So there was some work there to start looking at. This to see how you might quantify the positive and negative impacts of various steps. Now, because you've got, this was funded by the Green Digital Coalition explicitly to kind of measure the positive impacts, it's not surprising that every single intervention is only positive.

So it's not like there's a methodology for talking, oh, if we use AI to extract oil and gas, does this mean that we've, you know, there is nothing like that. And I would be very happy to see something like that because those climate emergency, see all this stuff here, right?

Asim Hussain: Well, that's one of the reasons I was thinking about this recently is kind of where we're starting to, well, we've somewhat measured our emissions. I'm starting to like, now that we're growing, right.

Chris Adams: This is the GSF you're about?

Asim Hussain: GSF. Yeah. And I suppose the green web is the same, isn't it? Like if you were to employ just one more person, your emissions would jump up significantly.

And so like, how do you meaning, meaningfully have a plan? Or what do you even say when you're like a very small organization that's just growing? Like, I mean, forget if you're

Chris Adams: If you hire five people, you've doubled your

Asim Hussain: have like you've doubled your emissions and you've set yourself a target to reduce that, what does that really mean?

And I think for, especially for organizations like you and me, like Green Web and Green Software, like if there was a scope for, our scope for is significant. Because the activities that we do as an organization, I don't mean scope 4, our negative scope 4's are significant. Because the act, us existing, arguably, hopefully, reduce the overall emissions of the world.

And so in a way you could, you know, it'd be interesting to look at organizations from their scope 4, because then you're investing in kind of a different component. There could be like startups out there who aren't like in the green software space, but have a negative, if you have a negative scope 4.

The more you grow, the more emissions get reduced from the atmosphere. It's interesting.

Chris Adams: I'm I'll be honest, dude, I'm a little bit I'm sceptical of this scope 4 idea because it very much, when I've seen people talk about it, they use it as a way to either say well this is why it's okay for us to deal with these really damaging things elsewhere, right, it's used to basically draw attention away from other things, or I just don't think like It's not, it's never going to balance out.

It's okay for things to be like, orthogonal, in two different, moving along two different axes, right? And I think it, that makes more sense. What you can do instead, is actually be responsible about the impact that you do actually have. And the, there's a, an approach used by the New Climate Institute, who I think, which I think is really interesting.

What they do, they basically say, look, We're a small non profit, our job is to be at, say, COP 28, 29, 26 or something and essentially work with policy makers to set the rules that end up impacting, influencing ginormous organizations that are way, larger than us. And what they do instead, they basically say, well, we have to fly there, we have to do something like this, we're going to impose an internal cost of maybe 100 euros per ton that we put into a kind of, I forget the term they use, Let's just call it a carbon war chest, right?

A climate war chest. And then they use that to fund other systemically effective things. And, like, this feels like a much more sensible way to do it. And this dude, like, dude, like, you know how the GSF, where the GSF came from, right? The funding for the GSF came from the internal carbon levy inside Microsoft.

You told me this before.

Asim Hussain: Well, actually, no,

Chris Adams: Oh,

Asim Hussain: I didn't, get there. No, there is an internal carbon levy in Microsoft, which is then used, to fund green measures but the actual, like, technically the money from this actually came from a different bucket.

Chris Adams: Ah, dude, I, ah, that would have been such a good story.

Asim Hussain: It's unfortunately not a good story, yeah.

Will Alpine, a lot of his work he did at Microsoft was actually funded from that war chest. He knew how to navigate that space and get money from that war chest.

Chris Adams: So this feels like a more sensible way to do it, right? The idea of saying, well, you're not trying to say, you're not trying to get back into eco heaven, you're being an adult about the emissions, and about that there is an impact being caused, and then you're talking about, well, what is the way that I can do it, which doesn't give you my sugar rush of saying, I'm carbon neutral again, but says, well, we have a societal goal to get to, so let's think about it in that sense.

I'm, this was, I mean, Microsoft is using an internal carbon price. It's not the same as a carbon tax, but it does revolve like, it's a discussion about how you allocate time and money to projects, rather.

Asim Hussain: It's a tax because different departments have to pay different amounts depending on how much carbon they've been deemed to have omitted. So it is kind of like a tax.

Chris Adams: Yes, this is something we can-

We don't want to use the word tax? Oh, is this another topic?

It's not so much that, it's, I mean, it's more that, yeah, you might not want to use the word tax in various places, because certain people are in favor of tax, certain people are not in favor of tax, right? And like, there are loads of ways where people allocate funds to various things inside this.

I mean, like, there's a reason inside Microsoft they use it, they called it a levy, right?

Asim Hussain: Oh yeah.

Chris Adams: But like, we, you know, there are loads of places where we allocate a percentage of some funds to funding something else. So this is why I've stayed away from using the term tax inside this, because in the way I see it, governments get to levy taxes, they get to like raise taxes and stuff like that, but organizations don't necessarily, and there are loads of cases where if you're inside an organization, you're going to allocate this much to kind of keeping your staff happy.

Is that a staff happiness tax? Or if I'm paying for cloud, right, and it's a chunk of my, let's say I'm building a digital service and I'm paying Amazon a chunk, or Microsoft, is that a Microsoft tax? I'm not sure it is. It's, I'm paying for something, right? Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Good point. Now that you've said the word tax like five times, every time you said it, I get a-

Chris Adams: You, sir, have said the word tax. I have not used the word tax at all.

Asim Hussain: Have you not? Okay. Well, I think it, I think anyway.

Chris Adams: I talk about internal, I talk about internal carbon pricing, because this is internalizing the costs that are otherwise being shifted onto society, and that seems a kind of economic and kind of grown up way to think about this.

Asim Hussain: Yeah.

Chris Adams: Yeah, uh, yeah, I'm not using that word either for very good reason, because there's another thing. Anyway, we've totally gone off script. This has been fun, though. Let's, should we go back to where we are? So we were going to talk about CarbonHack, some of the aftermath and learning points from that before we wrap up.

So are there any particular projects? So maybe it might be worth you just briefly summarizing what CarbonHack actually was, and then maybe if we talk about one or two projects. So, two projects that really caught your eye, then we can wrap up after that because we've this, has been, this was going to be a short, one and we're running about 50 minutes already, basically.

Asim Hussain: That's okay. People must have some long journeys ahead of them. Summer holidays coming along. Yeah, no, it was really good. So CarbonHack this year, we focused on Impact Framework, but more specifically focused around measuring, like how do we actually measure software, so it's really exciting. So, I'm really excited to be here where we can actually talk about this.

So, really quickly, Impact Framework is a framework that we've been building here to a very low level. You can measure, print, kind of most things with it, but also provide that evidence of the measurement in this impact manifest file. So there's a couple of, we had a couple of prizes. We had the ones I was very excited about.

I was inspired by all of them, to be honest with you. But the one I was really keen to see what people It was we just threw it out there. We were like, well, let's just see how people respond to this one. And it was beyond carbon. Because we've talked about carbon all the way through this episode.

But, you know, as we know, the sustainability challenge we had to have ahead of us is actually far bigger than just carbon. And we just left it fairly open. Kind of anything that kind of measures the environmental impacts beyond carbon was effectively it. And there was some really interesting submissions.

Like the one that won was, as we might guess, like water, like they, they measured the impact of water. And it also triggered some like really interesting conversations around, you know, the, I know there's been some research in this space, but like, at what level are you measuring it? Are you measuring the water impact?

Like at the data center? Kind of like primary. Primary and secondary, primary water and secondary water kind of was like the concept and it was just exciting. But now, what that means now is that there's now a plugin for Impact Framework where you can just, there's actually two, but you can drop it in and just say like, I just want to estimate my water impacts of my workload.

You can just drop it in and do it. Another, team was from a team called Grasp and I loved it because, you know, one of the things that plugin measures. Actually does a couple of different beyond carbon categories, but the three main ones are death.

Chris Adams: Okay.

Asim Hussain: Premature death, social cost of carbon, plus a dollar value on like the carbon emissions and displacement, which is kind of interesting as well.

Like how many people and all this stuff is like one of the, you have to submit like citations and research to prove and evidence kind of where these numbers are coming from. But yeah, you know, like social cost of carbon, we know like what is the cost of carbon as we take it down through the generations and, you know, all this other stuff

Chris Adams: So that's the harm caused by, on society, by the people, right? And like, this is what the, that was 50 under Barack Obama's time in America, went down to 1.

Asim Hussain: No, I think it's two.

Chris Adams: or 2, and then that's gone up to 190 now. No, I think it's actually back to 50. But there, I think the, it's now shifted to a very, a much, Like, fourfold increase, or nearly a fourfold increase in the US, for example.

But this is like, and in Europe it's around 100 right now, that's the figure.

Asim Hussain: I don't, yeah. I don't believe they use what Biden decided and wrote on an exec. It's it was more, more from research.

Chris Adams: Oh, I'm not saying that's like, that's not Biden saying this, that's like, the group who was allocated to do this work, these are the things they've recommended for this. And that's how they've, that's what the number looks like is being mentioned. I'll share a link to that as well, actually, because that's actually This is, really helpful for the internal carbon pricing stuff we discussed before.

If you're going to think about, okay, how do I create a carbon war chest to fund the work like Will Alpine did, or founding an organization, or doing any kind of systemic work. Yes.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, but I think that's kind of like where it's interesting. cause you know, sometimes I do feel that. We sanitize this conversation too much. Like it's too sanitized. Like we talk about carbon, we talk about this, talk about that. But actually, the reason why we're here is this is there's a lot of human suffering that is happening and will increasingly happen because of the work that we're doing and the work. There is, that value in this whole, whole question.

Are you trying to like add a cost to carbon? How many people will likely be displaced because of rising sea levels

Chris Adams: Always like climate migration being informed.

Asim Hussain: Climate migration. Yeah. so like, and of course there's also research which talks about what is the increased death rate, you know, You have to look at kind of, not just carbon emissions, but air quality and things like that.

So there's these, so these are the impacts. I mean, I, and I know it's kind of, it can be hard for some people to swallow, but it is, you know, something I think about a lot. I actually have a big skull next to me. It's like, I'm very stoic.

Chris Adams: You are full of surprises. Wow, you've got kind of Shakespearean kind of Wow.

Asim Hussain: A little

Chris Adams: Alas, poor Yorick. Wow. I did not see that coming at all.

Asim Hussain: Well, you, it's a stoicism thing.

It's like, if you, contemplate death a lot, you, live life more. But those are two, two, two, two really good plugins there. But there's just been, it's hard to like really pick up on the rest. There's some really good work done to using Impact Framework, not as like, not building a plugin for it, but just leveraging it to examine what the emissions of machine learning is.

 And the important thing about that is, is the output of it is this kind of very standardized manifest file, which anybody can read. You're

Chris Adams: Like an auditable or repeatable

Asim Hussain: audible, readable, and you're just reading this manifest file. And as soon as you look at this manifest file, if you know now how to read these manifest files, you can go, Okay.

So, straight away, I know you did this, you used that coefficient. I get the kind of measurement that you are. I can, that's an interesting number you generated. So that's one of the things we want to drive from it. And the best, yeah, there's some great work from, I've forgotten the name of the team now.

But the, they did work on the, trying to figure out the, using impact frame in a very In a usual way, which is like in logistics, can you drive, can you create a manifest file which represents the emissions of like a fleet of cars, like delivering Amazon packages all over? Can there be a manifest file for that?

And, uh, I think the winner was they built, it's called green. Oh, no, I want to mention two other teams and they both got the same name, which is very confusing in the hackathon. Find a called green and meet green. Oh, I forgot the actual name of the team. It was green something, but they, uh, they built Kubernetes.

So an interface into Kubernetes and the reason why it won, it was just like Kubernetes is so ubiquitous on the internet. And now if you've got, and it wasn't using, there was a separate one for Kepler, but this is very specifically for Kubernetes, independence of Kepler, taking the observations from there.

And you can compute the, environmental impact of that. And I think, actually, I shouldn't have mentioned it, that my favorite solution was a team called Greener Meet. My absolute, I all, I'm sorry, all of the rest of you, you all weren't my favorite solution. My favorite solution was a team called Greener Meet.

Chris Adams: Green Me, as in, like, Greener You, Greener Me, or Greenami, like Konami?

Asim Hussain: Greener Meet, as in having a meeting.

Chris Adams: Oh, Greener Meet, as in zoom, not like.

Asim Hussain: Zoom. And it was exactly

Chris Adams: Okay.

Asim Hussain: And we had an under 18s prize, which we really spent a long time with lawyers trying to figure out, can we do an under 18s prize? But we managed to get one together. And it was a team of 16 year olds from school in California.

And they created, they used the Impact Framework to actually measure The environmental impact of Zoom. So they literally like they, they got Python libraries. They, ran Zoom calls. They could get the utilization. They compared it to Watttime and they even found they were like, they even switched on and off features of Zoom to show like how that changed the emissions profile of your call.

And even I loved it. They found a curtailment that they were having a meeting and cause they're in CAISO. They

Chris Adams: CAISO being Californian Independent Systems Operator.

Asim Hussain: I knew you'd know that.

Chris Adams: And that's basically the grid operators in California you're talking about.

Asim Hussain: And California has a lot of renewables, as you know, so they had a moment in the meeting where they curtailed, which means that the emissions are effectively zero for the call now because they're factoring that in.

It was really good work, and we tried to give them the prize on the call. They, we were delayed. They had to go to class. So we couldn't give the kids the prize, and if we can, maybe we can bring them on this podcast. I'd love to speak to them. I just, it gave me such, honestly, you watch this, And I'm sorry to the rest of the prize winners, but I think this was the best video.

It was the best presented. And I'm just sitting there thinking, these are the, now we're going to, now we're going to, " the kids of today!" - we are old. These are the kids of the future. You know, maybe it gave me so much hope, like these are 16 year old kids and they were doing some incredibly advanced green software, measurement, reporting, zoom, understanding curtailment, understanding like how to measure this stuff.

And I was like, ooh, we've got a, we've got a good future ahead of us. I think, I don't think, yeah.

Chris Adams: Asim, this sounds really cool, but I have to ask, right, why are we relying on a bunch of literal children to do this work when Zoom is a multi billion dollar publicly traded company that does have to report on its own figures like this, and they are doing, Zoom doesn't expose these numbers themselves, right?

Like they will tell you how much you've saved, but you can't see the figures from this. We're relying on children to do the work of essentially publicly traded companies here, right? Right. This feels like a, we, I think this is really, cool. But this has an open question about what they would do maybe Zoom or they might join an organi organization like the GSF and say, well, this is how we do measure this stuff. And, uh, 'cause if not, I think we might need to refer to the work of children until that happens. Because this is just like, I mean, if, this embarrasses them to actually being more transparent about how this is being used, I think, we should be doing it because it's kind of bonkers that you are relying, like, it's nice to have like youth of today, but one of these groups has literally access to billions of dollars of capital and one of these groups is doing it in their spare time and couldn't even accept the thing because they had to leave for class. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: For class. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a fair point. But at the same time, I mean, I want to counter your point for a second as well. I mean, I'm, you know, I have multiple views. Like, do you really want to be waiting all the time? Like, we're just waiting all the time. We're just sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting, for everybody to be transparent about all of their emissions all the time.

If we can just take that power back into our hands, And we why not wait for people to be transparent, but actually like, look, this is a model that I've created. I think this is the emissions profile of your product. I'm going to publish it. If you feel somewhat different, that's the beauty of open source.

If you feel somewhat different, create a pull request and be, as transparent as me. I think in a way we, it is good. That we're leading the way, it is good that the kids are leading that way in the future because it kind of brings power back into our hands, if that makes sense.

Chris Adams: I think what it sounds like you're suggesting is in the absence of information, it might be worth using the age old internet trick of ask a question on Stack Overflow, answer it with an incorrect answer, then hope that people will actually come up with better answers, because that's the tried and tested way to get a good answer on Stack Overflow.

You answer it incorrectly, then someone goes, no, you're getting it wrong. Now I'm doing it, because they're so incensed that someone is wrong on the internet. So this basically, I think what we can use that, we can harness this natural resource and we can say, we're only going to use the worker of these children, and we're for talking about Zoom calls until someone comes in with actual better figures and ideally the organizations with full access to this, like maybe Zoom themselves, or maybe a competitor of Zoom.

So if you'd like to do this, I'm [email protected], no, I'm very happy to have this conversation because this does feel like it's necessary. Anyway, oh, blimey, I've just seen the time. Asim, we've, gone a bit over, but this has been really, fun and,

Asim Hussain: Yeah. It has been!

Chris Adams: I, this is, We've got another one of these in a few weeks time.

So, Asim, really lovely chatting with you, nice to catch up, and sorry to hear about the mushrooms, but I guess the Mushroom Kingdom's loss is the Bread Kingdom's gain. So, I should probably wrap up now. Folks, if you've made it this far, we will be sharing links Pretty much everything we've discussed and which you can find at podcast.greensoftware.foundation. And thanks again for listening. My name is Chris Adams and this is Asim Hussain of the Green Web Foundation and Green Software Foundation respectively. All right. Thanks, Asim, mate. Take care of yourself. Okay. Bye.

Asim Hussain: Cheers. See you later.

Chris Adams: Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser.

Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of the TWiGS, host Chris Adams welcomes back Anne Currie, Sara Bergman, and Sarah Hsu, authors of the book Building Green Software. They dive into the latest updates and hot topics at the intersection of sustainability and software engineering. The discussion highlights the importance of making software and hardware more efficient and explores cutting-edge topics like serverless computing on Kubernetes with WebAssembly, the circular economy for electronics, and the potential for dynamic pricing in cloud services based on renewable energy availability. The episode emphasizes the ongoing energy transition and the need for innovative solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of technology.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
• Sarah Hsu: LinkedIn 
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Introducing SpinKube [04:11] 
• Staggering quantities of energy transition metals are winding up in the garbage bin | Grist [10:25] 
• THE GLOBAL E WASTE MONITOR 2024 [10:50] 
• Analysis: Fossil fuels fall to record-low 2.4% of British electricity - Carbon Brief [16:27]
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/issues/2020 [23:03]
• Explore Traces | Honeycomb [24:40]
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/report?icid=SustainabilityHomepage01Report2024 [30:20]

Events:

• https://ndcoslo.com/ [47:55]

Resources:

• Building Green Software 
• Environment Variables Podcast | Ep 67 Building Green Software 
• https://links.danielle.fyi/ [05:55]
• Working toward a net zero future: Evolving our work with energy companies - The Official Microsoft Blog 
• https://grist.org/accountability/microsoft-employees-spent-years-fighting-the-tech-giants-oil-ties-now-theyre-speaking-out/ 
• https://www.scaleway.com/en/ [37:54]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Anne Currie: That is the nature of renewables, is that they are variably available, and we just have to, we have to take advantage of that, not fight against it, and not constantly wish we were in the fossil fuel age.

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 the Green Software Foundation podcast, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we welcome back the authors of the book, Building Green Software, Anne Currie, Sara Bergman, and Sarah Hsu, for an episode of This Week in Green Software,

our roundup of what's happening and hot at the intersection of sustainability and software engineering. So Anne, Sara, Sarah, I know that you've been on the podcast before, but I wanted to just provide a bit of space for people who are new to this to let you introduce yourselves. Anne, it's okay if I give this floor to you before we run through the usual roster?

Anne Currie: Yeah, thanks Chris. So, my name is Anne Currie. I am the CEO of a training company, Strategically Green, and I have been in the tech industry for pretty much 30 years now, and I am one of the co-chairs of the Green Software Foundation Community Group.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Anne. All right. Sara, is it okay if I hand over the floor to you next?

Sara Bergman: Sure. Thanks for having me back. I always enjoy being on the podcast. So my name is Sara Bergman. I am a senior software engineer at Microsoft, where I work with the Microsoft 365 products, which is very fun and exciting. I'm also one of the co-authors of the book Building Green Software. And other things that are new in my life is I'm recently back at work after maternity leave.

So I'm still figuring it out, you know, what is life now?

Chris Adams: Well, welcome back and congratulations on, yeah, the new instances of Sara, I suppose. Yeah.

Okay. And moving on to other Sarah. Sarah Hsu, if I give space to you to introduce yourself.

Sarah Hsu: Hi everyone. It's nice to be back. So my name is LSara Hsu. I am an SRE working for a financial institution. I'm also a project lead for the green software course for the GSF and similar to Anne and Sara, we recently just published a book by O'Reilly called Building Green Software. Very excited to be back.

Chris Adams: Cool. Nice to see you again. And Sarah Hsu, we met in person for the first time when you were in Berlin delivering a keynote for, was it CamudaCon, the conference there?

Sarah Hsu: Yes. A Process Orchestration Conference, which is exactly what we need, right? Because their motto is automation. And automation is the foundation of modern software systems. So...

Chris Adams: thank you for that, Sara. I was also pleased for us to both realize that we had arms and legs and were more than just a YouTube square, basically, or a square in a Zoom call. So yes, that was lovely as well. Okay, for folks, if you've never been listening to this podcast before, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation.

It's a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching a fossil-free internet by 2030. I also work as one of the policy chairs of the Green Software Foundation Policy working group as well. And before we dive into some of the stories, that's the format of this show, we'll be sharing links to the show notes and all the stories that we do discuss.

So there'll be on GitHub and Markdown, what else, for you to look through. Alright, so the format we normally do is do a round up of news stories, but you three, because I have the pleasure of speaking to people who've written a book about green software, we figured we'd make it a little bit more interesting for listeners and touch on some of the topics in the book, so we've got a bit of a kind of nice way in to cover some of that content. Does that sound okay to you folks?

Anne Currie: Great.

Chris Adams: Alright then, so the first story that we have is actually about a new project called SpinKube. So this is hyper efficient serverless on Kubernetes powered by WebAssembly. Now a few podcasts ago before, we did a whole story all about Wasm, WebAssembly, and why it's an interesting piece of software. But, previously, back then, it was only available on Nomad, which is a similar scheduling tool, but not the same as Kubernetes. And this story, as I understand it, is basically the idea of providing some of these kinds of tools for Kubernetes, the most popular scheduling tool for this. This basically means that if you thought that was a cool idea, you've got access to it yourselves. And Anne, I think I might hand over to you for this, because this really touches on some of the things you spoke about in your book about operational efficiency versus coding efficiency. Maybe I will hand over to you here.

Anne Currie: It really does. So Wasm is something that I find absolutely fascinating. It's both, as you say, both from, at the moment, the operational efficiency perspective, because they're really focused on how you can bin pack as much work onto each machine as possible. So you can reach that magic 50 percent utilization number and then get even higher, which is very hard to do without a tool to help you.

Very hard to do. But beyond that, what also is, is they have ambitions even further, which is that they want to start actually optimizing the code that you write in WebAssembly as well, so that under your feet, it will become more efficient. And we all know that writing efficient code is really, really hard.

There's a, there's a huge impact on developer productivity. And we, we cover this quite a lot in the operational efficiency and the code efficiency chapters of our book. And one of the senior engineers, Danielle Lancashire at Fermion, who's behind all this Wasm, one of the, one of the groups behind all this movement in Wasm came and talked to me, talked for me at a conference in London a few months ago, and she was actually talking about code efficiency, the code efficiency improvements that come from Wasm.

Now they're a bit down the road. The moment they're focusing on operational efficiency, but I really like to see a platform with a vision for, because in the end, we're all going to have to run on much, much less power at times when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. That is the nature of renewables, is that they are variably available and we just have to, we have to take advantage of that, not fight against it and not constantly wish we were in the fossil fuel age.

And so I really like to see a platform which is thinking about operational efficiency now and also thinking about code efficiency down the road. So I was, I like Wasm from that perspective. I think they're doing a lot of nice work.

Chris Adams: Yeah, we have some nods here. I just realized when I spoke about this story, I dived straight in without really explaining why some people find this actually exciting in the first place. So when we spoke about things like, say, serverless, and one of the, as I understand it, one of the key things behind this tool is it's like a very fast version of a serverless platform that spins up and down quite quickly.

So we've had previous generations where you might need to have a bit of a wait before a piece of software can start running before you can really use it. And this is like one of the key things that Wasm has made available. And that allows for, like you said, time, it basically means that there's less wasted time, but it also provides, opens the door for newer, more efficient platforms like this. Okay, before we move on to the next story, Sarah, Sara, is there anything that you want to add to this?

Anne Currie: Actually, before we move on, I'm going to just hark back to something that Sarah said just before this, which is that the benefits of modern ops and automation is that a big part of automation, of modern automation is the ability to spin up quickly because things like auto replacing, just having stuff sat around waiting and for you to fail over to with autoscaling, which is vastly more operationally efficient, relies on things being able to spin up fast.

If you can't have fast instantiation, you can't have a lot of these modern automation, this modern progress in automation. So yeah, it is a really good thing.

Sara Bergman: Also, I think one thing that has been said before and can always be said again is the benefit of the sort of platform that makes it easier for people because people want to be green, but sometimes it's a lot of work and anything that can make it less work to be greener is a great thing and should be celebrated.

And on the ops side of things, not every software developer or software person is like, highly interested in that. There are some people who love it and like go all in, and there's some who like, "I just want to write my code and like deploy it in some way to my users." So therefore things like this is so important to, to help bridge that gap in a green way.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah, yeah. I a hundred percent agree. Like software engineers, we're inherently lazy people, right? Like none of like, not speaking for you guys, I'm not a security expert, but I know how important a secure application is, right? I'm waiting for this tooling framework and best practice from the security people. So I think that's the gap we really trying to fill, that "how do we make everyone else have that ability to be green at their fingertip without having all the knowledge of like being really green?" And like, yeah, I feel like we can talk about operation efficiency to... I mean, to, 'til tomorrow, yeah, because it really is the lowest hanging fruit and people don't realize how many things we're already doing or have like knock on green benefits, like exactly what Anne said about reliability and resiliency.

Yeah. They all like come down to like automation and how do you utilize automation? Right. Anyway, I think we should stop. We can always come back to it. Let's get through all the other stuff. And then we come back to talk about Green Ops.

Chris Adams: Okay, all duly noted. All right, so we've spoken a little bit about operational efficiency, which is the running of servers. Spoke a bit about coding efficiency, which is what a lot of people might reach for first, or people wouldn't typically think about. And, but there's other ways you might talk about this.

So let's move to the next story. Sara, I might actually ask you about this one. So this one is a story from Grist magazine, which basically is talking, it covers the staggering quantities of like, Transition metals that we're currently throwing out when we could be mining them. And while we'll share a link to this in the show notes, one of the key things that the four of us can see right now is a chart showing some of the minerals that we hear associated with a transition away from fossil fuels to greener forms of power. There was a report by the UN called the Global E-Waste Monitor and they've shared some of these stats for the first time. And one of the key things is basically that we are throwing out something in the region of 62 million tons of electronics. And when you look at the actual mineral content of that, in some ways it's actually comparable to the demand for new kinds of metals that we have.

So the charts that we'll link to here, things like, say, copper, it's not that, it's quite similar to each other. Some things like cobalt or neodymium. These are, we're basically looking at the amount of minerals that could be circular. Some cases are not the same. So things like lithium, for example, we still, there's still a lot of demand and there's not nearly enough that's in circulation. But this feels like this provides an interesting flip side to the whole discussion around what we do with our stuff. And I think the term that I saw in the book, which was hardware efficiency. So I kind of wanted to like, see what you folks thought about this, in particular Sara, because this is one thing we spoke about in a previous podcast, like, this feels like there's more than just "hold on to your kit," for example, there's maybe a chance to talk about things in a more circular fashion.

Sara Bergman: Absolutely. And I think the key word there is circularity. E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world, which is saying a lot. And it is growing for several reasons. Like we consume more, we have more devices, like more devices are smart devices. My, like kitchen fan has an app. I don't know why it needs an app, but you know, there, there are an increasing amount of what can be classified as electronic, not what can be classified, but what is electronic.

I see the same with like toys and things. So that's one thing. And also we crave the newer and the newer things and things have shorter and shorter Life cycles or the use phase is short and shorter. So it's, it is fast growing and before, in a time before time... 

no, but when it was not the case that it was so fast at growing, we could maybe afford to mine everything.

But now when the consumption is so high and the throwout rate is so high, we really need to start thinking in a circular way. Because, in the end, there is only so much metal in the ground and our earth is finite. It's not something that grows back, at least not very quickly. So having this thinking, I think it's going to be, it needs to be a game changer.

And I know several countries have adopted what's called the right to repair, which is basically that you 

Chris Adams: is big thing in Europe. 

Sara Bergman: Yeah, it's a big thing in Europe. China has, no sorry, not China, India has a similar legislation. New York has a similar legislation. And that's really good. And that's about what you said, holding onto your kit longer.

But that's really only one side of it. I think the right to recycle should be equally hotly debated, perhaps even more hotly debated. Because we, the hardware industry has been forced to make hardware kind of hard to recycle because we are demanding better, yet smaller devices, or bigger screens, but thinner, lighter hardware.

And that's really complicated to produce. And it makes it really hard to recycle. Also in this article that you linked, let me find the number. But, what they said, the percentage of ethically recycled waste was also staggeringly low. It's like a business as usual case was only 20%. It's, well, you're all going to have to go to the show notes the article for yourself to find the percentage.

What I'm meaning to say is that this is incredibly important and something that is an additional dimension to the conversation beyond holding on to your hardware. It's also the reuse and recycle part of the story.

Anne Currie: It's a sales feature as well. It's recycling and it's a sales feature. I just bought a new phone, new, it was an old Pixel 7a, because my previous one had run out of security patches, the classic way that you have to throw away a working piece of kit. So I was quite annoyed because I was having to throw away a perfectly working piece of kit.

So I bought 7a. But the 7a sent me all the stuff to do a, to send my old phone back, and I got 25 percent off and I thought, "well, actually, that was pretty good." I actually felt quite good about that in the end. I thought, well, it's going to be recycled. I got 25 percent off. All right. That was, it was, it felt like a feature that they were offering me.

Chris Adams: Well, this is, maybe this touches one of the key ideas that, if you're moving away from linear economy, once you've, dug these minerals up once. One of the ideas is that once they're in the kind of sphere that we are in, right, you don't need to have, it's not that going into the atmosphere like say fossil fuels for example.

You can have these things circular. Now, this is one thing that we don't have quite the policy support for yet, but this is one thing that we could definitely be seeing more of in future, and this feels like the direction we might be heading towards if things work out, basically.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah. I also think it's an age old thing, right? We should find the thing that fits your purpose. It's similar to say, we want to find the VM instance that fits my purpose. I feel like people shouldn't want the latest and the greatest. Like my laptop is not that great, but I don't do that much on my laptop.

So like, I think people also need to start having that mindset. Like, "Oh, I don't need like the fastest, like the most, you know, cores, power laptop, choose to go on Zoom call, do a little bit of coding." And yeah, I think that's another bit of the things that also really fit into operational efficiency, you know, where you want to find things that fits your purpose.

And I think that applies to hardware as well.

Chris Adams: I agree, actually. All right. Thank you for that, Sara. All right. So, we're going to move to the next story now. This is a story from Carbon Brief. And, Anne, I'm going to hand over to you for this one because this is one thing we discussed before. So, this is a story from Carbon Brief who basically mentioned that earlier on this month, no, last month, actually, now.

The UK's electricity grid operated for a whole hour with just two, almost no power coming from fossil fuels. Now this is a record low for the country and this hopefully is a sign of things to come. So Anne, I know that we discussed this here, but maybe you could talk, touch on like why you found this interesting and what it's kind of telling us as software engineers perhaps.

Anne Currie: Yeah, I mean, obviously this is an incredibly positive story, and it's actually the direction that almost everybody's going in. If you haven't had a play around with electricitymaps.com to have a look at how green all the grids of the world are, it's absolutely fascinating. You'll learn a lot. And if you step back in time, it shows you what the carbon intensity, the average carbon intensity is of every grid in the world that they can get data on, which is a surprisingly large number of grids.

You'll see that if you, and then you can go back in time and step forward and you'll see that everything is becoming greener and greener. The energy transition is happening. You know, it's not just something that will be happening in the future. It is happening, but it won't be easy. Oh, I saw an excellent Uruguay is apparently completely a hundred percent green for eight solid months this, this year.

So there are, but that is because, but the interesting thing on this is that every country does it in a different way and every country being the green intensity of their grid, it varies over time in different ways. It depends what you're using to generate the power. So places like Uruguay have loads of solar and wind, which is fantastic, but they also have tons and tons of hydro and the hydro is used to smooth out the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

In the UK, we don't have so much in the way of stored, so it's great if it's windy, and if it's sunny, but mostly in the UK, so if it's windy, we do an awful lot of offshore wind, rather, not onshore wind, but offshore wind.

Sara Bergman: I thought going to say, we don't do a lot of sun here.

Anne Currie: We do not do a lot of sunny here. It's actually, it's not as bad as, I've got solar panels, and through the summer, it's actually, well, through half the year, that will cover all my household usage.

It's oddly much better than you'd think, but nonetheless, in the UK, it's mostly wind. But there's not so much in the way of storage. So it's, the UK is an absolutely excellent example of we're going to have to get good at using power that's variably available and cheap when it's available and either demand shift or demand shape so that we are using the renewable power and using less of non renewable stuff.

So it is absolutely fascinating. It's a great story. It's a really good move forward, but not all grids are identically green. They all have difference. Different ways of doing it and results.

Chris Adams: Alright, I've got a pop quiz for you then, because you're talking about the fact that the grids change, and sometimes they're going to be greener because there's more clean generation on the grid versus other times, right? We know in the UK, for example, there's groups like Octopus Energy, who basically will change the cost of your power, depending on the time of day.

In some cases, they even pay you to use this. And we see this in other parts of the world. When do you reckon we're going to start seeing cloud providers do this in the net? Because we know it happens, and we see this stuff, but none of these signals are passed on to software engineers yet.

Anne Currie: No, and every time I'm speaking to somebody from a cloud provider, I ask about it. Normally the people are quite green people and they want it to happen, but I think it'll be a way off. Now, it's, it's interesting. I spoke to somebody who was working for a cloud provider, but was a software engineer who used to be in the insurance industry.

And he was saying to me, "Oh, well, you know, I can totally see it being to the advantage of the cloud providers to start doing dynamic tariffs, time of use tariffs, because then they have another product they can sell." So the people who can't do it, they will sell them insurance with a price cap. And obviously they'll charge a load of money for that.

If you know, but, and then that is a product. Now, well, is that what they're gonna do? They'd be quite sensible to do it. It's, you know, the cloud providers are very good at making money and it won't be cheap. So I would love to see it, but I think it's going to be years before it happens.

Chris Adams: Okay, so you're thinking three years at least for you, Anne, yeah? Okay. Any other takers for anything faster?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, no, I think, well, working for a cloud provider, I just want to say, I don't know. But what I think all, at least the major cloud providers are fairly open with their use of PPAs, so Power Purchase Agreements, as a way of, yeah, meeting the green energy needs, because they have data centers sort of where they need to have data centers and then use PPAs to, to handle their Scope 2 emissions.

And I think because all of them at least are so seemingly tied to those agreements, it is a contradiction between those and billing a customer for actual usage. So I think it could be like a complicated thing for them is what I suspect. But I also think it's something that customers would really appreciate.

So I'm hoping it will be sooner, but no, I'm with Anne.

Chris Adams: Okay. Years away. And Sarah, you've got something to say, it looks like.

Sarah Hsu: Oh, I was just going to say, probably not in the near future, but we just need one person, one cloud provider to do it and everyone else be like, "right, we need to do it too."

Chris Adams: Do you know what? I had a conversation from people outside of the big three, the big cloud providers. So, in Texas, there's a company called Build AI. They've been doing some work to basically, they'll provide you computing, but at certain peak times, you don't have access to it. And as a result, they're able to have much lower costs for this stuff.

So I'll share a link to that. And there's a company called Saluna, also in Texas as well. And what they do is they speak to generators, people who run like clean energy. And they'll basically say, we will give you a floor price under which you will never, you know, we'll always get give you something like that.

And using that, they are able to provide these kind of services. So we are seeing this start to develop, just not with the big providers. And we'll, I guess the next question will be, at what point do these new providers get bought by the big providers to protect the margins? Because that might be the logical thing to do if you have these kind of funds. All right, let's move on from that, because that was a, we spent a bunch of time talking about carbon awareness, and there's a few other stories that we have up here.

Anne Currie: But carbon awareness is the most important thing.

Chris Adams: It's definitely

Sara Bergman: And operational efficiency.

Chris Adams: Alright, ok, so let's move to the next story then. So, we have another story here, this is actually probably the nerdiest story we have here. This one is actually a link to an issue in the OpenTelemetry repository. Basically, there is a standard called OpenTelemetry which is designed to make it easy to understand what the, I guess it's to make Infrastructure Observable, and Sara, I might need some help from you on why observability is important.

But this one is basically put forward by, I think, one of the people who's inside the Green Software Foundation to start agreeing some sustainability metrics to expose in all the kind of tooling that we currently do have. This was really interesting because this feels like, A, this is something that I saw discussed in the book, but also for people who are not familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenOps, or even Observability in general, is anyone who might want to go, like, enlighten us or at least give us some points about why this might be interesting from a Green Software perspective? Sarah, I might hand over to you because you wrote part of this chapter for the book, I believe.

Sarah Hsu: Yes. So I guess observability was born out of necessity because things are so complicated now. Microservices is made out of our world. And sometimes one requests have to travel like the entirety of a street of like a hundred houses before they actually reach a part of their journey. And it's really impossible to figure out what and where things have gone wrong, right? Metrics is for when you know something is going to go wrong and then you set up a metric to monitor that. But then in this unknown world, it's really hard to figure out who is going to break, for example, like, oh, I can't, I forgot that guy's name, but someone from Honeycomb.

You guys know how much I love Honeycomb. He gave a really good example. Like if you're like a, like an iOS developer and you support like 10 different phones in 10 different countries, and suddenly one version of the phone in this country is going to break. How do you know to monitor that using metric?

So I think that's a really good example, like why we need observability and observability borrowed its thinking from control theory, which is like, we are trying to understand the internal state of a system by just looking at its outputs. And outputs here are like telemetry. And telemetry, you've got logging, you've got metrics, you've got traces.

And so basically OpenTelemetry is, it's like a set of framework. It's about the creation and then the management. All of those telemetry, it's actually not a backend. So it's not like Prometheus. It's not Jaeger. It's not like Grafana cloud. It's just a convention, which is really good. I remember when we were all in QCon a few years ago and Daniel was talking, Daniel from Skyscanner was talking about their OpenTelemetry migration plan or something.

They basically went from like 300 different components down to 150 because they used OpenTelemetry as a standard, as an auto collector. And then that's the way, become one stop shop for all the telemetry. It's like, you don't need developers sending three different telemetries to three different backend systems.

And then one big thing, everyone's being on call here. One big thing we find difficult is how do I context link everything? Why I need to basically, "oh, this logs happen at 1:21 PM. Right. Let me go find the traces that also happen. But what if time shift, right?" And sometimes like Something is in a different time zone.

So anyway, that's a massive rant about why we need observability. So it's, I know, sorry, it's my job guys. And then I guess one big thing we talk about in the book is that green software needs to be ready with observability. Like we need to be with it. Right. So for example, in this complicated microservices world, we want to be able to know which component, which process.

It's emitting the most carbon. Right. And that's where we want to be. And we need OpenTelemetry. We need people like OpenTelemetry to help us get there. So it's like absolutely amazing to see so many people are standing up and then it's like, Hey, we should add this like semantic thing.

Chris Adams: I'm really excited about seeing this because I've used Honeycomb to understand what was broken about some applications I've been running before. And I was always a little bit wary about saying, well, okay, I'm not sure about, I want to be totally tied to one provider. And this here seems, and we have seen some providers who have started to make some CO2 figures for this. There's, confusingly, a, so a company called Sentry that do provide this and they even propose like a HTTP header for CO2 per request, right? But to see this at a kind of standard level, this feels like it might make it easier for a larger set of providers to come up with and at least make it easier to kind of see some of this because I think this is something that came out the book was that we, you need to be, you need to observe this, but it's often quite difficult to get the underlying numbers from some providers, and this is something that we need a bit, we need some more work with, or we need some progress on, basically.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah. And I guess one big thing about OpenTelemetry is that it, because it is just a framework and it's vendor neutral, I think sometimes people forget how important staying vendor neutral is. So yeah, I think that's why it's so important that we locked in with OpenTelemetry now, because it is going to be the solutions for this observability space going forward.

Sara Bergman: Absolutely agree, because I think sometimes when people talk about software, they think of a specific type of software that runs in the public cloud. But that is not the entirety of software that exists out there. There's so much software who runs on different places and nowhere near the cloud. And that software is equally, equally important.

So, having something that fits more than just the one most popular scenario is incredibly important. And, and I just want to say that, I think this is important because I don't think anyone should get away, quote unquote, from doing sustainability work because, oh, I don't know my number. That should not be an excuse.

Anne Currie: No, I totally agree. But, but even if it's impossible to get your number, there's still so much you can do without the numbers. as well. And yeah, it's amazing how people go, "Oh, I can't get the numbers to get" well, just work on your operational efficiency.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah. Yeah. And like one of the biggest takeaway I gave at the CamundaCon in Berlin was that you can think of BinOps as a really natural evolution of DevOps and FinOps. FinOps is the optimization with money. We basically need to do the same for sustainability. And there are so many things we already can do and yeah, people should really pack themselves on their back because they didn't realize the transition is going to be much smoother than they thought.

I 

Chris Adams: Okay, I'm glad you mentioned FinOps actually, Sarah, because this is talking about OpenTelemetry, some ways to expose some of the figures into this. As I understand it, there is a is it focus, which is the standard that the FinOps groups are pushing for trying to come up with like standardized cost, cloud cost figures, because I understand, as I understand it, there are some people pushing to put some CO2 figures in those as well, so that you'd be able to get some of these ideas from not just billing, but also from operational figures.

So, because in some cases, one view will give you a slightly different view than the other, for example. We've got this, and we're just moving to the last of the stories that we have today. One of the largest providers has published their sustainability report. Microsoft published their 2024 environmental sustainability report in the last week or so, and there's a lot in it, actually.

So, they're one of the large providers, and they have various commitments about getting to net zero by a certain times, but there's actually quite an interesting amount of data for the nerds inside this. Sara, I might hand over to you, because I suspect that you've been poring over this in quite a lot of detail, actually.

Sara Bergman: Thank you. Yeah, I think I love it when this report comes out every year, because even though I work for Microsoft, there's no way I can keep up with everything that's Like, it's just too big. So I always learn so much. But I think for me, I'm a measurement geek, in case that wasn't obvious already.

So some of the things I thought was super interesting was firstly, that the PUE of the data centers was published. I don't think Microsoft has ever published that number, but they said that this year, the design rating of the new data center is 1,12. And I think that's pretty impressive. That's pretty close to 1, which is, you know, the dream where all the energy that goes in goes to actual compute and to know other resources.

Chris Adams: I'm glad you mentioned this, because I wanted you to actually just, for folks who are not familiar with what PUE means, maybe you could just, like, expand on that a little bit, and say why people, why you might even care about that number being high or low, for example.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. So P U E stands for power usage effectiveness. Or if, yeah, effectiveness. Yeah. I always mix up the E words. Power usage effectiveness. And I think in the sort of early days of green software, this was the number people spent a lot of time focusing on. It is a number that's higher than 1.

So it measures all the power that goes into your data centers and how much goes to actual compute. If, if all the energy or all the power that goes into your data center goes to meaningful compute operations, your PUE = 1. Only half of what goes into the data center goes to actual useful compute.

Then your PUE number is 2. 

Chris Adams: I see. 

Sara Bergman: There's been a race to get to one, where you waste basically as little power as possible.

Chris Adams: And when you say little power, you're talking about, like, keeping the machine from overheating and melting, or stuff like that, right? Like keeping cool enough?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, cooling is one thing that consumes a lot of extra power. It's probably the biggest consumption of power, but they're like, they're lighting in the data center also, that's also consumes power. So anything that's in there that doesn't contribute to compute, go into this rate.

Chris Adams: Do servers need to see? I mean, they don't need to be in

the, like, it's not like they have 

Sara Bergman: there people who work there.

Chris Adams: Okay, that's fair enough. Okay, so this is, so in this report, they're publishing this information, which has traditionally been a thing that you do not see, all right?

That's one of the key things from this.

Sara Bergman: exactly. And I thought that was interesting. And in the sort of early days of green software, this was a number of people obsessed a bit about because I think there was like this, I don't want to say miscomprehension, but this notion, at least, that if you just got the PUE to 1, all the problems would be solved, like, magically, everything would be so efficient that we would not have to care about everything else.

People were, like, hyper focused on data center design. And I'm not saying it doesn't matter. Of course it matters. Of course it's important. But it's an area where, over time, we paid down massive knowledge and spend time on. And in the end, that's only one side, because if whatever compute operations you run are vastly inefficient in themselves, it doesn't matter if all the power going in goes to compute if the compute is wasteful in its matter.

So it is one part of the puzzle, but it is not the most important. But I'm glad to see it getting so close to one. I think it was very impressive.

Chris Adams: Yeah, this is interesting to see this because there's a project called Realtime Cloud which is run inside the Green Software Foundation and one of the key things that people are looking to do is figure out the PUE for all the different regions from all the different cloud providers right now. And they've got a carbon intensity figures for each hour of compute. But now they're able to use, because there's this information published at a data center level or actually a region level, you've got a level of transparency that you don't see from the other two so far. I think. Google might be sharing some of this, but we still have a kind of like patchy spreadsheet listing this stuff.

What I'll do is I'll share a link to the spreadsheet for this, because this is one of the things that once you have this, that should allow you to start being able to kind of optimise what the carbon intensity and of the compute you're using based on these kinds of figures here. This doesn't touch everything though, and I wanted to just leave the floor open. And Sarah, is there anything that caught your eyes on this, because there is more to this report than just PUE, for example.

Sarah Hsu: Don't want to be the bearer of bad news, though, although I remember hearing this from Anne, so I'm just their messenger. I'm not the bearer. I remember you and Anne mentioned that because PUE has got a lot of branding around it at the moment, and people know that it's like the sort of like the efficiency factor for a data center.

So like people then don't want PUE to go up, even though they need cooling. So they end up using water to do the cooling. So they actually trying to get PUE to as little as possible, closer to one as possible as Sara mentioned, but then they compensate that with using water and water is another like sources that's just as sacred.

Is that how you say that word? Yeah. But anyway, I will like, and talk about this because I remember I heard this from you.

Anne Currie: Yeah, no, as you say, we do fetishize PUE a little bit. It's a measurement and everybody loves to meet it. But the other thing is it's not a carbon aware measurement because it's just a flat number. So it doesn't say, "Oh, well, actually, you know, this is what we did when the sun, when the carbon intensity of the grid was high.

And this is what we did when the carbon intensity of the grid was low." And actually you want, we need behavior to change. Between those two, two times. So it's nice, you know, it tells us something, but we need to make sure we, with all things, you know, it's context specific. We, it doesn't provide a lot of context and we might need more context.

Well, we will need more context in the future.

Chris Adams: Okay, so better than nothing. So two cheers rather than three cheers. So good to see this. But as Sara mentioned, I believe the technical term is impact transfer when you go from one factor like energy to impacting water, for example. And in some places, you may be, you may have data centers sited in regions of water stress or pulling power from like local aquifers and things like that. If that's used for drinking water or agriculture or things like that, that's not really ideal. But there's a big discussion about what happens with this water. In some cases, it might be, I think the term is withdrawn and waste and consumed. So you have water that might be taken in and some of it might be discharged, given back.

But if it's at a different temperature, that might not be ideal for fish. And stuff like that. Or if it's consumed and like just evaporated away, that's not ideal either. So there is a whole bunch here. And maybe this is one of the things we need, we should be hoping to see, or we should be looking to see more of. There's, okay, if we've got data center level PUEs, should we be thinking about water of usage effectiveness and other things like that?

Sarah Hsu: I think there's one, I don't know what to call them, but I know they're called Scaleway. And I think you did a thing for them that they, I think now they have like a landing page where you can see the PUE and the WUE. So I think people are start doing it, but again, like much smaller scale provider instead of like cloud providers, 

Chris Adams: I'm really glad you mentioned this actually, Sarah. So, the thing you're referring to, we'll share a link to this. So, Scaleway, they're basically one of the largest cloud providers in France, and they also operate in a number of other countries, but they basically do have these dashboards. But the thing that's, the thing about these dashboards, they were initially created by by Facebook in 2014. So there is nothing stopping every data center exposing these numbers from a technical point of view. And like, if you're looking at a policy level, what they have there is totally something that could be done. It's something that we could be seeing if people chose to be disclosing some of that. And we might see some of this come out as a result of new laws that may be landing or that have already landed in some countries.

For example, Germany has this. But there are more on the horizon, actually. Anything to add from there, perhaps, Anne, you're about to just say something, yeah.

Anne Currie: I am. So, so Scaleway, I think it's kind of related to stuff we talked about earlier. I was on this podcast with Scaleway where I learned a lot of stuff about what they were up to. And there's some interesting things that they're doing totally away from PUE and WUE reporting. So, in Europe, there's a group called the SDIA, which is an acronym.

I can never remember what it stands for. 

Chris Adams: Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance,

Anne Currie: Excellent. And their raison d'etre is to try and get European data, non hypercloud data centers to start learning from the American hyperclouds and actually delivering some of those services. And one of the, one of the things they're pushing for is actually starting to orchestrate and offer services on your data centers that will provide operational efficiency and code efficiency in the same way that the hyperscalers do. And that generally, you know, your bog standard data centers don't. And that's a really, that's a really bad thing about bog standard data centers.

They don't do this because it's very hard to do. If you can get your data center to provide it, then that makes life much easier. And interesting, on the podcast that I was on with Scaleway, they had a, one of their engineers on who was working on their serverless offering. So a bit like Wasm we were talking about earlier, services that improve operational efficiency and code efficiency provided through your data center. That's what we want. That's where the cloud is good with being, is potentially green, but only if you adopt them. And all these things, if you just lift and shift into the cloud, if you lift and shift into good data centers like Scaleway, you don't get any benefit really, or don't get much benefit.

You need to be moving over to efficient services.

Sara Bergman: Yeah. And I think that was another thing that Microsoft mentioned in the sustainability report that they are working on several ways to increase resource utilization. And just to mention too, they have these power aware workload allocations, and they're also like smartly allocating CPU cores for internal workloads.

Because don't forget Microsoft is also a software provider, not just a cloud provider. And I thought that was really good that they called out because sometimes when we say things like this, yeah, the hyperscalers are good at this, people question it, like, "oh, is it really worth their time?" So I thought it was good to see them calling out specific things that they're doing that can also hopefully inspire others to do the same with their data centers.

Chris Adams: So here's one question I have there about this report. So, yes, it's very good that you see some transparency here. And yes, there are definitely cases where moving to the cloud can be more, can be greater. But we've seen, both Microsoft and Google and Amazon, their emissions climb. Year on year. And this year, we're seeing emissions 30 percent higher this year than last year, which is not going to make it easy to get to net zero.

And this is one of the key things that Microsoft themselves have been talking about, saying, yes, this is a real challenge for us, and a significant chunk of our emissions are in our supply chain. Scope 3 is the largest source. So this is one thing that I think that it's, it feels like when we're talking about this, green software doesn't really have that much to say about right now in terms of the actual creation of data centers. And this is something that I kind of want to open the floor up, like how do we actually deal with this fact that things can be more efficient, but still growing in absolute terms? Is this something that we can be doing or do we need to be having discussions about absolute resource limits, for example, and things like this, or how are we going to get here? I'm going to hand to Anne because you've got something, but you're about to say something I think.

Anne Currie: I am always about to say something. I think this is a really, the whole, the whole thing of, you know, the degrowth, people shouldn't be allowed to, we shouldn't ban people from doing things, it's a very unpopular argument and it is why people, you know, are not, even though everybody now believes in climate change, they don't want to have to give up all the things they want in life.

Now, efficiency can often really deliver you the same standard or less. I mean, it's not all, I mean, Jevons paradox, we all know about Jevons paradox. The Jevons paradox is you, you, things become more efficient and where there's untapped demand, where people really wanted to use them and they couldn't previously because they were too expensive and now they can.

That's a, that's actually, that's a big improvement in life. But it's not a guaranteed lock in. Everything that you make more efficient doesn't always result in overall there being more usage. So we use a lot less electricity to run household appliances now than we used to. They've become more efficient and there is only a certain number of times that you can wash the dishes with the dishwasher or wash, you know.

At some point, demand does become 

Chris Adams: there's an upper limit to how often I want to vacuum my room, for example. Yeah,

Anne Currie: me, it's quite a low number of times I want to vacuum my room. I'm more worried about things like Bitcoin, where there is no upper limit. I mean, so what worries me about things like Bitcoin is there is no, literally no upper limit to how much you might want to do it.

There is no, there's no point at which you go, "Oh, do you know, I'm happy now, I've just done all the things I wanted it to do." So with those things, where there's no upper limit, I think. And they potentially don't have a great deal of benefit for most of society. We might want to go down the China route and start banning them.

But for things where eventually our upper limit will be reached and they are providing societal value, I'm minded to let them grow a bit, at least. I don't know. I don't know what everybody else thinks.

Chris Adams: No, this is actually, this is, you're right, this is a complicated question to deal with, and this is one of the things that we, one of the things that's probably bigger than green software that we need to be aware of when we talk about this, because if we make things more efficient, then we've got to figure out, okay, what's the flip side of this, like you mentioned with Jevon's paradox? We do have an episode with Vlad Kouraoume, where we dive deeply into this if you're interested in listening, and we'll share a link to that. There's a number of other things we might want to talk about for this, but what we'll do is we'll share a link to the report so that there's plenty for us to be discussing. All right, I think that takes us to the stories that we do actually have. We're coming up to time. Folks, I want to say thank you so much for kind of coming onto this. If people were curious about these terms that we've been using, like operation efficiency, coding efficiency, things like that, this is what's outlined in the book that you three have been working on.

Is that correct?

Anne Currie: It is indeed. Yes. Building Green Software, the new book from O'Reilly. 

Chris Adams: Anne, there's one question I want to ask because we spoke about this a few months ago. So this is currently available right now, and you can get it via O'Reilly, but there was a discussion about this actually going. Available into the commons eventually. Is there one thing we could just touch on some of that, because this is a really cool thing about this that I was really excited to hear about when you first shared this with me, Anne.

Anne Currie: Like, I feel terrible about this because this is, we just haven't had time to do it. 'Cause we're crazily busy. We've got to take the code, but we, we do have a license. We negotiated, O'Reilly very kindly allowed us to make it available under the O'Reilly Creative Commons license, which is a, a kind of read only license, but totally that's, that's still absolutely fine.

That's great. And so we just need to do it, but we haven't got around to doing it yet. Cause we have to do some tidying up and actually publish the thing, but it will at some point be available under a Creative Commons license.

Chris Adams: Cool, alright, brilliant. Well, thank you for that, Anne. Well, folks, this takes us to time. If people do want to find out about, if they're interested in what you have to say, or what you've been looking at, folks, are there any maybe just do a quick whip round of where people should be looking. Anne, if I hand it over to you first, then to the Saras. Anne, if someone has listened to you and they want to find out more about what you're up to, is there a website you direct people to or a network or anything?

Anne Currie: If you want to find out more about me, then LinkedIn is where I tend to hang out these days, and I'm very happy to chat to people and answer questions. And/or our website strategically.green will give us an idea, and I do an awful lot of public training as well, so you can always sign up for that.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Thank you for that, Anne. And I'm going to go for Sarah with an H, if that's okay. So where should people, if they want to learn about your things, or maybe hear about your talk, where should, where should they be looking?

Sarah Hsu: Similarly, LinkedIn, I call LinkedIn the grownup version of Instagram,

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Sarah Hsu: but yeah, LinkedIn and yeah, I do fair bit of public speaking. So if you're ever catch us or catch one of us, don't forget to come get the book signed and because it's such fun, who can get to collect all three signatures. Because we are never in the same place once.

Anne Currie: We're never in the same 

Chris Adams: Okay, sara, and over to you. If people want to find out some of the work you're working on or things, where would you direct people's attention to?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, I'm also on grown up Instagram, aka LinkedIn, 

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Sara Bergman: but follow me, don't send me a friend request because I'm terrible, or what's it called, a contact request maybe, because I've not been good at accepting or rejecting people, so now it's an uncomfortable list and I just ignore it, it's a red flag with me.

So yeah, you can follow me and that that's the best way probably. And yeah, I'm speaking at NDC Oslo in about, yeah, in June. So if you have the book, come and get it signed. It will be lovely to meet folks. I also have a few copies that I can hand out if anyone catches me. h 

Chris Adams: Ohere., exciting. Thank you for sharing that little one. All right, then. Well, folks, it sounds like I guess we'll see if people want to follow what you're up to. Millennial Twitter, LinkedIn is the place to go to. All right. What we'll do, if you have any of this interesting, folks, we are going to, and if you're listening to this for the first time, we'll be sharing the show notes with all the links to the projects that we've mentioned here, along with some of the other episodes where we touch on some of the things like Jevon's paradox, or some of the finer points of serverless. All right, folks, this has been fun. Thank you so much for giving us the time and,yeah, have a lovely day, folks. See you around, all right? 

Anne Currie: Cheerio everybody. Bye

Sarah Hsu: Bye guys. Lovely seeing you

Sara Bergman: Thank you. 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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

Join us for a special episode of Environment Variables as we celebrate over a year two years of bringing you the best insights on Green Software! In this episode, we explore the key insights and voices that have contributed to the weaving of sustainability through our conversations this year. Tune in for a refresher on the most interesting discussions on the progress, challenges, and future of green software development.


Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Episodes:

• The Week in Green Software: AWS & Scope 3 Emissions Data | Ep 27
• Fact Check: Colleen Josephson, Miguel Ponce de Leon & AI Optimization of the Environmental Impact of Software | Ep 29
• The State of Green Software Survey with Tamara Kneese | Ep32   
• We Answer Your Questions Part 2 | Ep 39 
• Sci-Fi Fantasies with Anne Currie and Jo-Lindsay Walton | Ep 42
• The Week in Green Software: New Research Horizons | Ep 47
• Decarbonize Software 2023: Recap | Ep 53  
• The Week in Green Software: Google, Grids & Green Software | Ep 55
• BETA Impact Framework | Ep 58
• AI Legislation | Ep 63

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
• Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Chris Skipper: Hello and welcome to this special Year 2 Roundup episode of Environment Variables. I'm Chris Skipper, the producer behind the scenes. As we mark the second anniversary of this podcast, it's a perfect moment to reflect on the journey we've undertaken with the Green Software Foundation over the last year, and how that has been encapsulated through our episodes.

From its inception, Environment Variables has aimed to be more than just a podcast. It's a platform for advocacy and education on sustainable software practices. Over the past year, We've seen the Green Software Foundation grow and evolve, and we've been right there to document and discuss each milestone.

This podcast has not only followed the foundation's developments, but also mirrored the broader shifts towards sustainability and tech, bringing these insights right to your ears. Today, rather than revisiting our top episodes, we will explore how the themes of sustainability have woven through our discussions.

Highlighting key insights and the impactful voices that have contributed to this dialogue. You'll hear about the progress, the challenges, and what lies ahead for green software development. For your listening pleasure, as always, links to each of the episodes will be down in the show notes below. Or, if you want to listen to all of the episodes of Environment Variables, you can head to podcast.greensoftware.foundation, preferably after this episode, please, to hear them all. So, without further ado, let's dive into the collective journey of the past year with Environment Variables. 

Chris Skipper: To kick us off, let's start off with an episode of one of our segments entitled the week in green software, or as we like to call it twigs,

This segment delivers a concentrated blast of the latest in green software news, keeping our listeners informed and engaged with current trends and advancements in the field.

In fact, it's a nice touch that this episode covers AWS and Scope3 emissions data, as the very first episode of Environment Variables way back in April of 2022 also covered Amazon's Customer Carbon Footprint tool. In this snippet, our host Chris Adams discusses a fundamental concept in environmental accountability, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is the de facto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or activity.

Chris breaks down this somewhat complex subject using a relatable analogy involving coffee, explaining the three scopes of emissions. He uses everyday examples to illustrate Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions, making it accessible for both newcomers and seasoned professionals, which has often become the role of twigs.

This approach not only simplifies the understanding of these emissions, but also highlights the significant impact of Scope 3 emissions, which often constitute the majority of an organization's environmental impact. Let's listen to Chris explain this in more detail.

Chris Adams: So I'll just quickly, for those who are new to the subject or folks who have never heard of GHG, the greenhouse gas protocol, essentially, this is a way, the kind of de facto standard for measuring the carbon footprint of any organization or any activity. And you typically split it into three kind of buckets of emissions.

And because we're nerds or developers and drink coffee, we can use hot beverages as the mechanism for understanding 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, right?

Scope two, it's like turning on an electric kettle. So someone is setting fire to 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.

Scope 3 is a bit like walking into a Starbucks or a Third Wave coffee shop and then buying a cup of coffee. So you're 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 kinds of scopes. And typically, Scope 1 and 2 are quite the common ones that organizations tend to report on, but for these, for lots and lots of organizations, scope 3 can make up 80 percent 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 percent of your reported numbers, they may look somewhat different to the other providers.

Chris Skipper: In the past year, Environment Variables has also introduced a new segment called Fact Check. This segment focuses on verifying claims and clarifying misconceptions related to the environmental impact of technology, providing our listeners with accurate and actionable information. In episode 29, Host Chris Adams discusses the role of artificial intelligence in optimizing the environmental impact of software.

He is joined by experts Colleen Josephson and Miguel Ponce de Leon from VMware, who delve into the intricacies of sustainability in virtualization and networking, as well as VMware's internal efforts towards decarbonization. In the snippet we're about to hear, Colleen Josephson highlights the challenges associated with training AI models in the telecommunications sector, a field where VMware has significant expertise.

She points out the substantial energy required to train these models and raises critical questions about the energy savings versus the environmental cost of AI, emphasizing the importance of evaluating the longevity and efficiency of AI models before committing resources. Let's listen to Colleen Josephson.

Explain these complex trade offs.

Colleen Josephson: Training is a very expensive process nowadays. Whether it's in the telco space, because, again, VMware, as you hinted, we have a long history of virtualization and cloud, but that also has become very relevant to telecommunications. We need to train the models that we use to make these decisions to try and save energy.

And the process of having so much data and training it, it can be really power consuming. So I think one of the things that stands out to me is, what is your anticipated energy savings? savings. Once you've deployed this model, how long do you anticipate that this model will be good for? And do you need to retrain it?

All of those you want to have some idea of so that you can calculate whether or not it was worth the energy to train this model in the first place.

Chris Skipper: Continuing the insightful discussion on the role of technology in environmental sustainability, we turn to Miguel Ponce de Leon, who shares his experience working on a collaborative project in Ireland. This initiative, a partnership between VMware and a local grid utility hosting a data center, focuses on integrating measurements from renewable energy sources directly into data center operations.

This effort not only enhances the understanding of energy usage within the data center. but also promotes actionable strategies for optimizing energy efficiency. Let's hear Miguel elaborate on how this collaboration helps data center operators become better environmental stewards by enabling precise monitoring and proactive management of resources.

Miguel Ponce de Leon: So one of the things I can mention is that we are working with a grid utility in Ireland and with that grid utility that also hosts a data center if that so happens. We're also working with an accelerator program, a program that is helping startups to look at how you can not just link but actually be able to take the correct measurements from the green sources, the wind farm locations, and the usage within the data center for its performance.

So, again, here it's about leveraging not just the research, we'd say, that would come from research performing organizations or from the offices of CTO of VMware, but also looking at start ups and start ups within the space and being able to link this. And that is helping the utilities. understand what type of usage, and imagine it's a utility that has their own data center.

So it's helping them be a good citizen even within their own environment, but being able to measure it and then being able to take action on it, right? Because that's the important thing is, okay, you've got your baseline, but what can I change about what I'm delivering within that data center? Even down to the containers, how can I move my clusters and pods over and maybe consolidate some of the pods?

We're even moving some of that research as well to look even with the pods. It's been available. How many of the CPUs are they using within the cluster? So again, it's about being able to help data center owners being good citizens around that space.

Chris Skipper: This next snippet comes from episode 32, which was all about the State of Green Software Survey, with lead researcher at the GSF, Tamara Kneese. The State of Green Software Survey serves as a political resource for the Green Software Foundation, offering crucial insights into the involving landscape of sustainable software practices.

By highlighting trends like the carbon footprint of crypto mining and the need for stringent regulations for generative AI, the report informs and influences stakeholders across the tech industry, from developers to policy makers.

In this snippet, Tamara emphasizes the report's role in enhancing the visibility of green software initiatives.

 

Tamara Kneese: So one of the main goals was really to raise the profile of green software. And I was really interested to see the percentage of developers who actually had some degree of awareness of green software. And so it makes sense that a lot of the people who filled out our survey already were somewhat aware of it.

and already interested. Although there were a number of people who replied in the comments that this was the very first time they'd been exposed to green software. And so by putting out this public report that can be taken up by the press, that can be taken up by policy makers, that can be taken up by academic researchers, it is a way of really getting the word out about green software.

Thinking about the reporting Court as a mechanism for evangelizing green software is really part of what we wanted to do. And we also wanted to understand after knowing that 92% of developers who surveyed said that they were concerned about climate change and wanna do something about it. So what do they need to actually make that happen?

What resources, tools. and other forms of support do they need to take action. And another key element of this is reaching out to ICT industry leaders to the C suite who really want to know how and why they should make green software part of their organization. And really trying to emphasize the business case for green software from their perspective was another really key part of this survey.

Chris Skipper: As we continue to look back on the previous year's journey, our next segment brings you insights from the Green Software Foundation's HotCarbon event, which took place on World Environment Day, June 5th, 2023. In episode 39, host Chris Adams, alongside Executive Director of the Green Software Foundation, Asim Hussain, Delved deep into a mailbag session, addressing questions that remained from this engaging live virtual event.

Their discussion begins with a look at the challenges of quantifying energy consumed by various computer components in the software carbon intensity specification, and transitions into real world applications of measuring SCI and CI/CD pipelines. The efficiency of GPUs and innovative uses of data center cooling water.

In our first snippet, Asim highlights a memorable talk from the previous year's Hot Carbon event, emphasizing the critical role of green software in managing the burgeoning demands on cloud infrastructure without the need to expand physical resources. Let's hear Asim explain this further.

Asim Hussain: It shows how important the work that we're talking about is. It's like, actually, it's one of the really great talks from last year's HotCarbon, which I loved, which was, I've forgotten, I've got to apologize, I'm not going to remember which one it was, but it was talking about how projecting forward kind of compute growth and how green software was a way of being able to handle the additional usage and load of the cloud without actually having to build more servers.

Because fundamentally we are constrained at the rate with which we can actually increase the cloud. But the growth is growing significantly as well. So like being more efficient actually allows you to, to deal with growth. So I think that sounds like what you're describing. So you have to be green, you have to use green software if you want a realistic chance of generative AI being as ubiquitous as you want it to be.

Chris Skipper: In this second snippet from Asim, he emphasizes the importance of broadening the dialogue beyond carbon to include other critical resources like water, acknowledging that managing environmental impacts often involves navigating trade offs between different sustainability goals. Let's listen to that now.

Asim Hussain: There might be situations where it's mutually the opposite, being more carbon efficient might actually make you more water intensive. Like for instance, doing things that reduce carbon emissions might require more water consumption, which is why I think it's exciting that we're actually are starting to have this conversation right now because I think we're so focused on carbon.

And we're optimizing for carbon, but actually the landscape is much more complicated. It's much more of a surface where you're trying to minimize the environmental impacts of your choices, and you might have to make trade offs versus one versus the other. If there's a water scarcity right now, you might have to increase your carbon emissions.

I'm excited that this is where the conversation is evolving to, because once we add water to the mix, we can add other things.

Chris Skipper: As we continue our exploration, our next episode takes a fascinating leap and dared to go where no podcast, or at least this podcast, had gone before, into the realm of science fiction and its role in envisioning a green future. In episode 42, host Anne Currie is joined by Joe Lindsay Walton, a research fellow in Arts, Climate and Technology at the University of Sussex.

Together, they delve into the imaginative horizons that science fiction opens for tackling climate change, the practical application of these ideas to green software, and the impact of speculative futures on our environmental strategies. In this snippet, Joe Lindsay Walton questions who really holds the reins in crafting a global strategy against climate change.

Let's listen to Joe's interesting take.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Are these orbital data storage facilities, are they going to Out compete the earthbound data centers that are using the dirty energy. Who actually holds the big picture of global strategy here, of addressing the urgent issue of climate change? Is it the conference of parties? Kind of, but they're mired in all these geopolitical rivalries.

Is it the scientists? The IPC? Yes, but they're constrained by the remit of political neutrality and face challenges around communication. Is it the finance and markets? They're waking up to something. They're trying to incorporate climate into these risk management methodologies that they don't really play all that nicely with.

Is it science fiction? Yes, we're drawing in a really interdisciplinary way. We've talked about Kim Stanley Robinson throwing everything at climate change, but it is ultimately a story. I'm not really sure who does hold the big picture. And if I was to try and summarize it in a crude way, it seems that we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game.

We haven't even adjusted them yet, but we're hoping to adjust the rules of the game so that Goods and services and enterprises and value chains and industries and sectors and whole communities and regions that are incompatible with a broadly livable planet are going to be destroyed in the Schumpeterian whirlwind of creative destruction, will crash and burn.

And I think there's a lot of emphasis. on the creation side of that, building data centers on the moon or in orbit, but not enough imaginative, creative, realistic thinking about the destruction side of it. There's this expectation that enterprises are going to snitch on themselves. Oh, we've tested for impairment.

We're reporting against this particular standard. All our assets are stranded. We're just going to shut up shop. Goodbye. So I think I would be interested in more science fictional Thinking about the potential pain of switching from carbon intensive activities to the sustainable ones. Not just the focus on the kind of shiny new possibilities, but also the focus on what it's like to shut up shop.

Chris Skipper: Environment Variables also dared to break boundaries on the academic front. Our next snippet comes from episode 47, titled, New Research Horizons, which takes us to the forefront of innovation in green software. Host Chris Adams is joined by Dr. Daniel Sheehan from the University of Bristol to delve into the evolving landscape of digital sustainability.

Their discussion spans from the implications of historical studies to the transformative potential of recent research, offering listeners insights into how new findings are reshaping our approach to sustainability in technology. In this snippet, Daniel discusses the nuances of energy consumption across different media delivery platforms, emphasizing the complexities in interpreting data that could potentially mislead consumers about the energy impacts of their viewing choices.

 

Daniel Schien: The academic publication that I'm sure you will link to it in the show notes. There's a graph that compares the energy intensity of those four different modes of delivery of television from the BC. So IP, cable, satellite, and terrestrial. And even though they, they differ. So between, if I remember correctly, between 60 watt hours to 180 watt hours, that's in the year 2016, there's a potential step in the interpretation of those results that consumers might take, that needs more support.

If you see this graph, you might I think as a consumer, if I change from streaming to watching something via terrestrial broadcast, I am going to save 100 watt hours per viewer hour. However, that would not be a correct interpretation because all of those delivery modes, they are provided by an infrastructure that is inherently inelastic in its energy consumption.

Chris Skipper: Jumping to November and Decarbonize Software 2023, an essential event for the Green Software Foundation took place. This annual gathering is crucial for those passionate about reducing the environmental impact of software. Bringing together experts, practitioners, and innovators worldwide to exchange insights, breakthroughs, and strategies for sustainable software development.

With COP28 kicking off on the 30th of November in Dubai, we wanted to highlight projects which are driving momentum towards a low emission and climate resilient world. At COP28, global leaders discussed how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent by 2030.

In sync with this ambitious goal, Decarbonize Software served as a vibrant forum to promote collective action and shared knowledge. in our pursuit of greener software practices at the forefront of climate action. In episode 53, I was joined by Sophie Trinder and Adam Jackson of the GSF to give a rundown of what happened.

 In this next snippet, Sophie gives a rundown of one talk from the event titled Responsible AI, a fireside chat in which Jesse Mccrosky, Head of Sustainability and Social Change at ThoughtWorks, talked about integrating real time environmental impact metrics into our everyday software tools.

 

Sophie Trinder: Jesse painted this hypothetical picture. What if there was a carbon counter or there was a water gallons clock at the top of ChatGPT? Would you use it differently? Would you only use it when it was essential? Maybe you would write shorter prompts? Would you ask it to write its answers briefer? Similarly, he painted another picture where, what if a software developer's screen went red?

If the developer made a decision that, yeah, might make them save some time, might make them slightly more efficient, but what if it came with a huge carbon cost? So their screen went bright red when there was a carbon cost associated with the code that they were writing. I think it was just a really interesting way to Start thinking about being more transparent with that data so that we can be more conscious with our decision making.

Chris Skipper: Continuing our dive into the impactful insights from Decarbonize Software 2023, next we'll hear from Adam Jackson. In this snippet, Adam eloquently draws parallels between well crafted software and green software, emphasizing the necessity of built in quality throughout the entire software lifecycle.

Let's listen to how Adam articulates the holistic approach needed to integrate sustainability into software development.

Adam Jackson: I often tell folks when they ask me what green software actually is, that there's a lot of parallels with well crafted software. So well crafted software like green software focuses on built in quality throughout the complete software life cycles and architecture, development, operations, and getting all of the stakeholders together to take responsibility.

And we need the same thing for green software. So at the GSF, we often talk about software practitioners. And this is a broad term that goes beyond developers alone. It includes product managers, uh, program managers, designers, UX, testers, IT operations. And what takes the time, and GSF does have some materials that can help here, is developing the best practice, the processes, and the learnings that bring all of these people together.

into a really holistic software life cycle and I think that's why we're really keen to get organizations to hear and listen to others even if they're competitors. What's the best practice that we can all share that's gonna deliver green outcomes?

Chris Skipper: Transitioning now to our next insightful episode of The Week in Green Software, we delve into the pioneering sustainability strategies at one of the tech world's giants and GSF member, Google. In episode 55, Chris Adams is joined by Savannah Goodman from Google.

Who shares the ambitious climate goals set by the company. Google aims to achieve net zero emissions by 2030 and to operate on 24 7 carbon free energy by the same year. Savannah explains the complexity of moving from annual global matching to local hourly matching of energy use. illustrating the innovative approaches Google is deploying to meet these goals.

This episode not only highlights Google's efforts, but also discusses broader implications for the tech industry's push towards a more sustainable future. Let's hear from Savannah on how Google is tackling these ambitious targets.

Savannah Goodman: Google has two main climate goals. One of them is to be net zero by 2030. The other is to be running on 24 7 carbon free energy by 2030. And just to clarify too, 24 7 carbon free energy is much more complex. And I'm going to talk to you about how we've been able to make this a little bit more complex than the annual matching schemes that have been most common to date, because we're essentially moving from global annual matching to local hourly matching.

And so you can imagine how, especially over a global system, how complex that is. And there's no playbook, but we see these goals as a way to actually help scale new global solutions that drive broader system wide decarbonization because we're actually aligning our own goals with what the grid

Needs.

Chris Skipper: Next, we focus on episode 58 that dives deep into the Green Software Foundation's impact framework, probably the biggest highlight of the previous year. Host Asim Hussain is joined by Srini Rakanathan and Naveen Balani. who are at the forefront of developing this transformative tool. They discuss the challenges and solutions in creating a framework versatile enough to assess the environmental impact of software across various platforms, from large cloud providers to personal devices.

This conversation sheds light on the critical need for standardized models that can adapt to different environments without compromising on maintenance and adoption. Listen in as Srini shares Insights into the decision to implement model plugins for more effective integration and broader applicability in green software efforts.

Srini Rakhunathan: With the original concept that we had, where we wanted to cover all, we would have had to build multiple flavors of the impact framework. And that would have caused issues in maintenance, that would have caused issues in adoption. I think the standardization of a model plug in was more important. a decision that we took once we realized that one model is not going to cut the cake for all of us and you had different models depending on whether you are hosting it on AWS or Azure or GCP or your laptop or even your mobile devices.

But if someone wants to just look at the raw emissions from the software, agnostic of the hardware, you could do that only if you have a very thin measurement tools.

Chris Skipper: Finally, let's finish off on another episode of Twigs. In episode 63, we focus In episode 63, Chris Adams, Asim Hussain, and Anne Currie delve into the evolving landscape of AI legislation and its implications for green software. This first snippet from Asim highlights the accelerating integration of AI technologies and their significant energy demands, which could dramatically reshape global emission profiles by 2040.

Asim Hussain: The growth in AI has been significant. We all know on this call that the previous dirty secret of data centers where most of those servers were idle, in a future of AI, those chips are not going to be idle. They're going to be running at a hundred percent. So like, I think we've spoken on this call previously about, you know, various previous reports that talked about, you know, given the current trajectory by 2040, the tech sector will be like 14 percent of global emissions.

I wonder if anybody's doing any analysis. To revisit, well, now, given what we now know about the complete AI will take over everything. It is taking over everything right now. How does that look now? Where will we be in 2040 with the current growth in AI? Will tech be half of all emissions? And will we just be sitting there, you know, being carried around by robots and being fed by little tubes like that robot show?

But I think, I strongly suspect that they factor that in, and I wonder if it's an underestimate.

Chris Skipper: Our final snippet comes from Anne as she contemplates the future of green software practices.

Anne Currie: All discussion we're doing around this is great, fantastically great, but I always think about taking it back to my Maturity Matrix projects on the GSF Maturity Matrix project. You need to do different things at different times, so this information is useful to you in different things at different times of your journey.

So for most of us at the moment, we're not doing anything at all. Just, you know, you really don't need that much data. You know, your scope 1, scope 2, scope 3 are not immediately critical to most people who just need to turn off the machines they're not using anymore, do a bit of right sizing, have a think about what they're up to.

To start to think about, are they in green regions? What are the future, what platforms are they choosing? Are they likely to be aligned with the green future? To start with, where most of us are at the moment, you don't need a great deal of data to, to really make a huge difference. So it's absolutely fantastic that they're doing this work and that every, that we're doing this work.

Everybody's doing this work, but we don't want to lose sight of the fact that. For almost everybody at the moment, we don't even need data. We just need to start to, to use best operational practices.

Chris Skipper: What does the future hold for green software? Is it all doom and gloom? Absolutely not. The GSF is actively working on expanding its initiatives, pushing for widespread adoption of sustainable practices across the tech industry.

You can expect this podcast to bring you all the significant updates showcasing both the challenges and the innovative solutions that are making a real difference. Thank you for joining us on this look back on the last year of Environment Variables. Make sure to follow us on your preferred podcast platform to stay updated on all future episodes.

And don't forget to check out the show notes for links to further information discussed today. A final reminder. You can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of Environment Variables. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now!

 

Joining Chris Adams today is Mike Gifford, an accessibility and open web veteran, to look at the drivers adopting digital sustainability in the industry, learn from the field of accessibility and inclusive design how we can further sustainable software development. Mike tells us about the wins from the accessibility movement that we can learn from in this engaging episode.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Mike Gifford: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 [28:04]
• https://w3c.github.io/sustyweb/drafts/star.html#considerations [42:44]

Resources:

• FOSDEM 2024 - Web Accessibility and Environmental Sustainability and with Popular CMS [11:10]
• https://github.com/GovTechSG/purple-a11y [36:23]
• https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/keeping-tech-sustainable [47:42]
• https://minumeco-99-preview.netlify.app/publications/ecodesign-framework/ 
• https://apolitical.co/solution-articles/en/keeping-tech-sustainable 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Mike Gifford: Yeah. So that's an interesting approach to structure content so that you're hopefully trying to go off and encourage your, the organizations to push themselves to better understand their users and be able to build a website that meet the needs of their users.

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 the Green Software Foundation podcast, Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we look at the drivers adopting digital sustainability, in industry. As much as we want to think people will build greener digital services out of the goodness of their own hearts, it's worth bearing in mind that in a commercial environment, other concerns frequently take precedence.

And if we want to see wider adoption of more sustainable practices in digital, a lot of the time we have to be somewhat strategic, learning from other fields, for example, and being thoughtful about how we spend the social and political capital we might have available to us. So where should we be looking for people who have done this before?

One commonly cited field is the field of accessibility and inclusive design, where over the last 20 years, we've seen accessibility move from a field where lone, heroic actions were the norm, to one where, in growing parts of the world, accessibility is a non-negotiable, mandatory requirement in new projects with the full force of the law behind it now.

So, are there wins from the accessibility movement that we can learn from to apply for digital sustainability? And where in the history of accessibility online should we be looking? With us today, we have Mike Gifford, an accessibility and open web veteran, to help us navigate these questions. Mike, thanks very much for joining.

Can I give you the floor to introduce yourself today?

Mike Gifford: Absolutely. I'm Mike Gifford. I'm a senior strategist at Civic Actions. I'm excited to be here. And this is, I'm definitely an active listener and I've really enjoyed all the. Discussions that have taken place from other leaders in this field. I'm also a Drupal core accessibility maintainer. Drupal runs about a million websites around the world.

And I've been trying to improve accessibility in that field. And increasingly trying to do work in sustainability there as well. At Civic Actions, I lead the accessibility practice area. I've also been involved in contributing to the W3C's sustainable web community groups, draft web sustainability guidelines.

That's a bit of a mouth mouthful, but it's essentially just a group of people within a standards body called the W3C that is trying to go off and create a set of best practices around sustainability, and I've also spearheaded the development of a tool called OpenACR. Which is a new way to try and help organize vendor claims around digital accessibility.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Thank you for that. And for folks who are listening to this for the first time, we do have a podcast episode specifically with the W3C, some of the other members, we'll link to that in the show notes. If you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams, as I mentioned before. I work at the Green Web Foundation. Foundation, where we are a Dutch nonprofit focused on reaching an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030. I also am one of the chairs of the Green Software Foundation's Policy Working Group, and one of the maintainers of a software library called CO2.js, which you can probably guess what that does from the name.

It makes it easy to work out the environmental impact of various digital services. Mike, before we start, I should ask, because when I have spoken to you before, I've generally assumed you're in Canada, but you mentioned you might not be, so first of all, where are you calling from, and how's the weather?

Mike Gifford: So I'm calling from outside of Carcassonne, France, and I've been here for just over five months and I've got another four months to go. My wife wanted to have a sabbatical between careers, and this was a good place for us to learn French and eat cheese, stumble across castles and explore the culture of Europe.

So that's why we're here. And the weather here generally has been really good, especially compared to Ottawa, but right now it really has been a cold, nasty week this week. And so it's not being very good and it'll actually be warmer in Ottawa later this week than it is here in, in, you know, outside of Carcassonne.

It's a lot of climate chaos is going on around the world. We're seeing it all over the place. It's inconsistent weather.

Chris Adams: Wow, I did not, realize that. I generally would assume that Ottawa and Carcassonne, I mean, they're more or less the same latitude, right? But they are definitely not the same temperature most of the time, and Ottawa's definitely colder normally, right?

Mike Gifford: Yes, absolutely. We can get down to minus 20, minus 30 Celsius in the winter. And in the summer we can get up to plus 30, sometimes 35 Celsius, but it's a, it's definitely, it gets much colder. It has a much heavier impact from the Arctic weather.

Chris Adams: Wow, so I guess, thank you Jetstream for the clement weather in Western Europe. Okay. Long may it stay, I suppose. Yeah. All right. So I think you're sitting comfortably. For folks who are listening, we have show notes, so we're going to mention various projects and we'll do our best to list every single project and website that we do.

So if you are listening along and you want to learn more about one of the things we have, please do check out the show notes at podcast.greensoftware.foundation for more. All right, then, Mike, sitting comfortably, I guess should we start, yeah? Okay, so I did this introduction talking a little bit about accessibility, but I didn't do a particularly good job of explaining what accessibility might be.

And I'm wondering, before we talk about sustainability, maybe you could just expand a little bit about what people tend to mean when they talk about accessibility in this context, because I think there are a few misconceptions that people tend to bring when they first hear about accessibility.

What is accessibility, and what are the kind of myths that we might want to think about that we should probably dispel?

Mike Gifford: First of all, people assume that accessibility is just for the blind and deaf community. Like this is who we're trying to go off and to meet. And there's just a small number of people who comply with that. Why do we need to really worry with this? This is just a, you know, a government overreach additional administration, but that's, it's actually not the case.

If you look at permanent disabilities, most countries in the Western world, a quarter of the population has some form of disability. That could be, and that's a permanent disability, so that could be somebody who's got low vision or no vision, people who have hearing problems, mobility problems, could be cognitive problems, people who have dyslexia, color blindness.

It's a whole range of different aspects. And I tend to think of it like just part of a human experience. Is it that, that when we're born, we have certain limitations and we grow up and we learn how to do things. And we have, you know, we have abilities that we have at this time. But they change over time, you know, when I have allergies, my eyesight isn't as good because I have blurry eyes because I've got allergies.

There's also situations where as we age, like as soon as you're over 40, your eyesight begins to degrade. Probably most people listening to this podcast have glasses. That's a form of assistive technology. If you didn't have glasses, you probably would, would have much more difficulty reading a book or reading a monitor or your phone for that matter.

There's also issues of, you know, temporary and situational disabilities. So if you're, if you're injured, for example, where you're carrying a baby or you're in a loud environment, it may be more difficult for you to go off and to hear the other information that's going on around you. The other thing is looking at people who might be in a place where there isn't a lot of internet, like where if you're using an older device, these are also places where there's limited elements people can access.

And if you're in, in, in rural Canada, you can have a lot of difficulty going off and getting the bandwidth go off and to download a web page. And that's not a disability as such, but it is a way that is people are being disabled because the assumption is that people who are using the technology are going to have super fast

Chris Adams: infinite bandwidth, newest iPhone, everything like that.

Mike Gifford: If you don't have the latest device and the highest bandwidth, then you're going to have a lot of challenges. And so many people outside of urban areas don't. And even inside of urban areas, there's places where you can get, there's dead zones in cities where there, or that the things are wrong or inconsistent.

So a lot of our assumptions are incorrect. And I like to think about it also in terms of just, ultimately, you know, the planet is going to be fine with, you know, with or without us, the planet will survive. It comes down to us as a species and as a species, as Western civilization or civilization, how do we want to organize ourselves to survive?

And the brass tacks is that we have to work on a very fragile planet and we have to work with the fact that we are fragile species and that we need to go off and think about it not us at the height of our abilities, 

Chris Adams: The whole gamut, 

Mike Gifford: abilities throughout the whole gamut of our lives, right? Hopefully we'll all grow old.

Hopefully we'll all be able to explore and experience worlds where we, we do have different abilities because we've managed to live to 80, 90, a hundred years old, but that will be a different experience for all of us.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, alright, that's actually quite an expansive and interesting way of framing it. I haven't actually thought about it in that way, and the idea of saying, well, accessibility is actually a kind of... the fact that you've shifted it somewhat to the situation you're in is actually something that I think that's that's quite helpful framing. Okay, so we've got a rough idea that accessibility isn't just about helping a small number of blind people It's actually a significant part of the population in many cases probably larger than 25 percent when you include the different situational aspects someone might actually be in.

Okay, and it sounds like you know, did you ever see the London Olympics opening where they've got Tim Berners Lee or like Timball to his friends saying, where he has this whole thing, like this is for everyone. He's talking about the web and the internet. There's a thing that it seems very much that you're kind of, there's a reference to that, I suppose.

So these sound like good things, right? But we know that historically, when people are working on digital projects, accessibility hasn't had the same kind of priority that say, shipping a new feature might be, or making sure a particular date is hit by a team working on something. So let's say that, as society, the things you've described sound like good things to be aiming for and wanting to include.

How has maybe the accessibility community made sure these do get prioritized? Because they don't immediately all sound like they would have an immediate short term kind of benefit, for example, or that you might explain to on an earnings call, for example. Maybe you could, say, lay some of that out there and we can explore some of that area as well.

Mike Gifford: You'd think that it really wouldn't take much more of a carrot than trying to go off and support your future self, because that's ultimately you're doing. It's just trying to go off and make sure whatever you, whatever abilities you wake up with tomorrow, which may not be the same as they are today, are going to be, but you're going to be able to use the technology around and interact with the world as best as you possibly can.

That's not much to add, but it's not how people think. People think, people are very much more geared on what's the sexy new thing. Like. At FOSDEM, I gave a talk on accessibility, or sure, on sustainability, and I was, I've given talks on both of them, but it was, and I think it may have actually been both of them, an integration of the two and that, that one.

But the previous two sessions were on AI and they were packed. Like they were, it was like standing room only. And then my talk came up around sustainability. I mean, the room wasn't empty, but it certainly emptied out. And yet this is one of the things that like, this is life. This is us. You know, AI is neat and all, but ultimately it's not the thing.

But in terms of answering your question, what caused accessibility to go off and actually become a, a thing that people are paying attention to is the efforts of people with disabilities who have lobbied long and hard and protested often with civil disobedience in order to go off and to make sure that their rights are respected, seeing accessibility as a civil right.

And so that they are able to go off and have the rights to access by law. And in most Western countries, people with disabilities have rights to work and to employment, to housing, and to be able to communicate with their government. But that process is not being well respected. The digital world is being very much a move fast and break things kind of world, and, and actually supporting the bulk of their users is something that generally most companies don't invest in, even most governments.

Most governments have, far less accessible websites than they say that they should or say that they do. and, and it's something that, that you know, it's only through protest and through awareness raising and decades of effort that, that we've been able to get to where we are right now. and, and that's something that is still not where we need to be.

We're still not at a point where there's a final site that we can say, "Yes, this is accessible." This is like, it is... sites are more accessible, there is more awareness, but it's, it's just like security. It's about perpetual vigilance. So how do we make sure that we're more accessible today than we were yesterday, and that people are pushing that, that type of a framework forward?

Unfortunately, many people have a checklist mind set. They want to go off and say, "has this been done? Yes, let's move on." And that just. Unfortunately, it doesn't help people with disabilities who are actually experts around their own experience of where they're facing barriers with digital interfaces and you know, they need to be able to find ways to engage with their governments or engage with their stores or their friends in ways that are just like everyone else.

But that has, that does require effort and maintenance.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so it sounds like there's a degree of, like, hard won essentially campaigning on various levels, and there's degree of, like, organ and there's maybe a degree of actual, like, organization with the people who are able to say, "well, okay, we need to find a way to translate these into concrete things you can ask for," or that people who do want to do the right thing, so they know how to go about doing that.

Mike Gifford: Right. Which is, which is how the web content accessibility guidelines. And the Web Accessibility Initiative from the W3C got that started because they saw that this was a need to try and, and provide some guidance and direction that everyone could agree on. And that would be a universal point that would allow everyone to agree that this is an improvement that, that benefits people.

And creating standards is a huge challenge, but it's been really important for organizations and governments to being able to lean on those and build legislation around that. Some of which actually have teeth for a lot of agencies or organizations around the world. So the, having legislation that requires accessibility is a, it's a huge deal.

Chris Adams: I see, and okay, so there's one thing that you just spoke about just there was this idea that, okay, you're essentially able to kind of capture this idea that society values this thing, which is not maybe immediately helping in a quarterly earnings call, for example, but it's still something that people tend to value, and that has ended up being translated into various forms of law, and one of the things that helped with the creation of that law was essentially things like the existence of some of these standards so that people could then say, "well, we want to have, you know, because we value access for everyone rather than just a very specific set of people, we're going to refer to these standards here saying you need to at least hit this kind of bar."

That's how some of it came about. Okay. And if I understand correctly, you, some of the examples you used earlier on about the situational example, like when you've got a broken arm or in your, I think I've seen some of that mentioned from Microsoft, actually, in some of their inclusive design things, so presumably there's an argument about the regulatory certainty that gets provided and means that organizations themselves might want to invest in saying, "well, okay, this is how we are competing in this by, you know, we're going to meet this bar when other people aren't," for example.

That's another kind of argument people take. Okay.

Mike Gifford: And Microsoft has had a great deal of leadership around the thinking around inclusive design and trying to think about how do we make sure that we are thinking about the whole self and not just ours, everyone on their best days.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. So it sounds like there is a bit of a push. And so one way that some of these were adopted was essentially going through the public sector route to kind of demonstrate that there's demand and there's something that people need to go for and that and by creating that demand that allowed people to then respond to this.

Okay, so I've, are there any like particular countries or examples you've heard of? Because I've heard of like stories like say, I don't know, the things that started in the public sector that then kind of, percolated down. So like maybe I think things with Kindles, Kindle books, for example, or something like that, are there any examples we might point to show how something that large organizations might have been prioritizing first, but this end up kind of shifting them to start prioritizing something in a way that they weren't previously prioritizing?

Mike Gifford: I think that one of the challenges has been that, that governments have initially tried to go off and create their own legislation and, and not to build on a common standard. And one of the issues with this is that the tech is often global. And so if you're trying to go off and create a legislation, like so many governments individually in government agencies just don't have the clout to go off and to go to Microsoft and say, "Yeah. We want you to go to this and implement these standards because these are, if you want to sell to us, you have to follow these standards." Like maybe Microsoft will say, "sure, we'd love to do that. We're happy to go from bend over backwards and make that happen." But most likely they won't. They'll say, "sorry, if you're, this is what the product is.

And if you try it, we'll charge you X amount to go up in additional costs to go up from to meet those standards". But it, but it's not something that, that we can cover because you're such a small entity, generally how, how government procurements work. But, but if you're able to go off and work on a global standard, then technology, and especially if technology companies are involved, like they are, they have been to the W3C, that there's, there's an opportunity to, to get them on board and make sure that a lot of the kinks are worked out of the process, when it comes to implementation.

So that there are things that we know that can be implemented and can be maintained by the technology that we work with, whether that's open source or proprietary, there needs to be an engagement around how we're working on those same set of standards.

Chris Adams: So, one thing that you've just spoke about there was this notion of, okay, you, there's some work that goes into creating standards, because that allows both organizations, at governmental level to say, "hi, we need you to meet at least this bar," but from the other point of view, for people who are trying to meet these standards, let's say like, okay, you're calling from Europe instead of Canada today, right?

Everyone having 28 standards per country in all of Europe, for example, having one makes it a bit easier for someone who's inside the company saying, "hey, can we even at least meet this bar? Because this one will mean that we can, we don't need to do it across all these other countries as well," for example.

That's one of the ideas around the kind of some of these global standards. Yeah.

Mike Gifford: Absolutely. Having a single standard is much easier to get compliance around, particularly if you get a few larger economies that are adopting it early. Like if the European Union is able to adopt a standard around digital sustainability, that's something that will have real impacts around the rest of the world, because a lot of people want to sell their products into Europe.

So. So that's just like the GDPR has had a large impact on privacy outside of Europe as well as inside of Europe because it was something that was, was agreed to amongst a larger group of countries that there was a, an opportunity to really make waves across the digital sector.

Chris Adams: Okay, so that's quite interesting. So we spoke, we were speaking a little bit about accessibility and essentially the same things, because there is maybe not a short term gain for this, you might talk about it in terms of, okay, there is, you're creating some certainty and saying, well, these are things you need to actually have, and I guess in the context of some recent laws we're seeing passed, you might see some of that start to play out in the form of, I think we have things like, say, the CSRD, the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive in Europe, as one example, but even in America, or even in, I think, California specifically, because California is a big enough economy in its own right.

You're seeing some regulations there which end up acting as a kind of driver to kind of move to rather than just have people inside companies saying, "we'll save you some money on your green service." It's like, "no, this is the thing that's actually going to be, this is the bar we need to meet if we want to kind of keep selling to these people here," for example, or "this is a risk that we can head off by making sure we're compliant with this."

That seems to be the argument you're essentially kind of making around that, right?

Mike Gifford: That's right. And I think that, that the, it'll be interesting to see as scope 3 emissions get, get, more closely monitored and evaluated the, the impact of digital, I think is going to be a lot bigger than it currently is because most people don't, don't own a data center, they use services. So if you're, if you're suddenly looking at those people who are managing all the different technology that we're engaging with our lives on a regular basis, that has a third party impact and in terms of virtual pre-emission changes, and I think that we, we're going to, it'll be more of a challenge to try and figure out how to regulate those and to address them.

The web doesn't really affect most people for their scope one or scope two emissions, but it will certainly affect for, for scope 3 emissions.

Chris Adams: Right, I'm just going to take a kind of step back out for this. So I just want to check. So when you've mentioned the words scope 3 and scope 2 and scope 1, I assume you're talking about, say, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This is a bit like an international standard for tracking carbon emissions for an organization, for example.

So where scope 1 might be me burning, say, gas and emissions caused from, I mean, I use the hot beverage example because that seems to be quite easy way to get your head around it. Scope 1 is me burning wood or coal to heat up a kettle so I can have coffee, right? Scope 2 is me consuming electricity, so someone else somewhere is burning coal or gas so I can have coffee.

And then scope 3 is the entire supply chain, so that's like me going into Starbucks so I can have coffee. And then, there's still a supply chain, but I'm not burning anything myself, but, you know, there is still someone accounting for the emissions that way, and that's what you're talking to when you talk about these kind of scope 1, 2, and 3 thing here, right?

Okay, brilliant. So, we spoke a little bit about how there are maybe some patterns, some ideas, and some lessons from the accessibility movement where, with the creation of some standards, we've then seen people tie this to, say, how projects get bought. Like, someone help people allocate time and money to do a piece of work and I think the one thing that when we spoke before you mentioned about how you saw this happen at a kind of public sector level first saying "we have to make this accessible because we have a mandate to serve all of our population not just the rich people basically or not just like the this one target market we've decided to segment and go after" essentially but that ends up creating a kind of norm which then is allows, say, other sectors or kind of more other private sectors to start looking for that as well.

And I think there have been examples of, was it the Domino's pizza, for example? The famous example where once people had set a norm that you actually had accessible websites, then was it, maybe you could expand on this one because I think I'm going to get it wrong, but I do remember like Domino's had to start rebuilding their websites and making sure their sites were also accessible to people because the norm had been set.

Mike Gifford: There's a, the US has an unusual piece around accessibility where if your website isn't accessible, you can be sued. There's people who've set up lawsuits and yeah, and some of them are not as legitimate as others, there's easy enough to find accessibility bugs in various different websites. But, but there are, there are people who are chasing the court system in order to try and get revenue from lawsuits.

So then that happens quite a lot in the states and that's a huge motivator around accessibility in the world actually, is the, the sphere of lawsuits from or within the United States. But domino's got sued and they were like, "we're not going to pay for this. We're just going to go off and channel just in the courts.

We don't think this is necessary." They did end up losing the case and they also spent quite a lot more in, in, legal fees than they did in actually hiring web developers who knew what they, they were doing and actually were able to fix the issue. But it was a, it was an interesting case in that, that they, just the egos of the senior management at Domino's.

Were like, "well, we don't want, we don't believe this is the right way to do it. So we're just going to do it our way." Even though they were explicitly excluding customers who could not, who were trying to go up and buy their services,

Chris Adams: Like, "hey, want a pizza." And they're

Mike Gifford: yeah, "I want a pizza." yeah, so I was like, why couldn't a blind person order a pizza through Domino's pizza only ordering system?

It seems ridiculous. They wouldn't want to go off and to address their customers, but that, that is the case for some companies. And having a hammer to go off at, to come down and for those organizations who are opposing best practices is sometimes needed. Unfortunately, you need to have the carrots and the sticks.

Chris Adams: Okay, so one thing you've said, there was basically an immediate harm that was being felt by some groups who were able to then look to some specific laws and say, "hey," this is, that was essentially the basis for that. And that's how you've been able to kind of maybe compel some activity from organizations who might not be prioritizing otherwise, right?

Now, I, for that to be possible, presumably, you needed to be able to demonstrate that a website was unusable, for example, or something wasn't working the way it would. I mean, are there any lessons that we might apply from how we think about maybe normalizing some things around digital sustainability for this?

Like, is there anything we can use from there? Because it sounds like there are I don't think anyone's been sued for not having a green website or a green digital service or anything like that. And I don't I'm not saying you should reach for that first, but It's clearly one of the techniques that people have been using in other fields to kind of compell action.

Mike Gifford: It's interesting though, that Europe is suggesting now that you can't claim to have a green, green product if you don't. You know, they're making greenwashing illegal, which is, it's similar in some ways, but so much around accessibility has been around the creation of these web content accessibility guidelines.

Which have been a set of best practices that have been created by people around the world. Very much like in the, the, sustainability field, the web sustainability guidelines are much newer and they're only being developed by a committee, so they're not something that is a full W3C working group recommendation, but it's something that is moving in that direction.

But I think that in terms of motivating people, you need to have some bar that you can say, how do you demonstrate what the expectations are, and that you're meeting those expectations. And then have a common bar to, from, and to, to compare yourself against 'cause, I mean, how many people have a website that is green enough?

There are not that many. And there, even when you're looking at trying to create the standards and look at, "well, how large should a webpage be?" There's a lot of different views. And the average weight of a webpage, we know right now is about, I think it's 4 megabytes is the average weight of a web

Chris Adams: Bigger than Doom, then, yeah.

Mike Gifford: so it's only the initial release of Doom after all, but it's still shocking that it's that as large as it is, and there's so much cruft that is not necessary. But do you think we can get a website down so that the average site is a hundred kilobytes? Well, maybe, but it's going to be a huge amount of effort to go off and remove all that cruft and advertising and layers of JavaScript and to weed out what is actually necessary to convey. And then there's also elements of how do we build society that, that is where there's, privacy exploiting, JavaScript apps that are adding to the bloat of the infrastructure that we're not addressing. Security issues 'cause, again, if you've got a lot of software, you probably haven't monitored it to make sure it is meeting best practices. And having secure, sustainable code is really a huge part of just creating quality code. If you just redefine it as part of quality, then that's something that, that is really an important way to reframe the advantages of building for accessibility and sustainability.

Chris Adams: So thanks for that. So there's a couple of things that we spoke about and I realize I'm showing my age I'm making a joke about Doom and I realize that most people for them to like get Doom they need to know what a floppy disk drive is and you realize oh my word we... I realized that ages me quite a lot.

So for anyone who... doom was a very popular 3D shooter, and it was, it's definitely smaller than most websites these days. Okay, all right, let's move away from that somewhat depressing note and try and get back to what we were talking about. So you're talking about, there was essentially a way of demonstrating that there are some expectations you have, and then you're able to demonstrate if a website was meeting a certain bar of accessibility and I think when I've heard people talk about accessibility they use this term POUR, like is it perceivable, operable,

Mike Gifford: understandable and robust. Robust is a tricky one, but basically trying to go up and make sure that you're doing this in a real world environment, that it's something that it's not just from set up in a lab, but you've actually got real people, real engagements, real user flows,

Chris Adams: I see, and these and so perceivable is like okay if you're not blind you can't see obviously so you should be able to perceive something. Operable, I get the idea that you can operate it, right? Understandable, self explanatory, and

Mike Gifford: Plain language, all that

Chris Adams: yeah, and then the robust thing is basically this idea that Okay, you've opened this discussion about saying in certain parts of remote Canada you can't access something.

For example, that's like robust, like something might degrade gracefully, so you can still achieve a particular thing even if you don't have like the latest greatest iPhone on the super fast Wi Fi or something like that, right?

Mike Gifford: Right, right. Exactly. It's, it's looking at what are people using, how are people engaging with your site and how do you train and address those? And there's, there's not as many success criteria for robustness because it is a trickier one. Perception is certainly one of the easier ones to address and that's mostly about trying to go up and have textual equivalents for non textual content and making sure that information is visible for people with however they're able to, with whatever senses that they have that they're able to perceive that.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay, so one thing that I guess One insight I'm taking away from that is that these don't necessarily have to be like a binary yes/no thing every single time. Obviously it helps, and it means you can automate things, but that's not an absolute deal breaker for creating any set of guidelines, for example, or something that you might write into a commercial agreement, or might say that, you know, every public website should at least be doing this kind of stuff.

It sounds like you don't necessarily need to have that kind of binary thing.

Mike Gifford: One thing that they've tried to, I mean, the courts definitely want it to be binary. and there's definitely things that, that are, there's different levels of WCAG. There's, there's level A, AA and AAA 

Chris Adams: Sorry, sorry, you said WCAG. Is it WCAG? This is Web Content.

Mike Gifford: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Chris Adams: got Okay. That's okay.

Mike Gifford: people just pronounce it WCAG, but I've gone with, with WCAG because that's.

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Mike Gifford: Somehow rolls off the tongue faster than, or easier than WCAG.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right.

Mike Gifford: The W3C three in general is good at many things, but not naming things. But the point of the level A, AA, and AAA is it's try to say what are the bare minimum things that organiza that things people should do.

Easiest stuff that affects the most people. What is sort of AA is what is legally required. So in most countries, it's WCAG 2.0 AA is the legal requirement and AAA is sort of aspirational stuff. So knowing that your users are at this base, if you're dealing with senior citizens, for example, you might want to go above and beyond what WCAG 2.0 AA provides, because you know that your users are going to have less perception of color. So you want to have higher contrast available for them than you might for other users. So it's really a, about stretch goals, for, yeah, so it's an interesting approach to structure content so that. And you're hopefully trying to go off and encourage your, the organizations to push themselves to better understand their users and be able to build a website that meets the needs of their users.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. So if maybe one thing I'm taking away from that is that first of all, okay, there's value in binary, but there's also value in certain kind of grades as it were. And that might be more useful for the specific, I don't know, set of audiences you're trying to reach or who you're trying to cater, for example.

And presumably this, by kind of breaking into something like this, kind of removes some of the need to be an absolute domain expert so that if you're commissioning some work, you can say, well, "you need to be meeting AA," for example, for this, and that's what you could write into, say, a procurement thing to make sure it definitely does happen inside a new project, for example.

Mike Gifford: I mean, and that's what what a lot of organizations have tried to do is they tried to go off and put in contracting language that their product or service must be WCAG 2.2 AA compliant. what the current best practice would be. But unfortunately, procurement officers often drop off the necessities that if, if the client says that the site is successful, they'll leave it at that, and that there'll be no, not necessarily any follow up.

If the project manager on the client side doesn't care or isn't motivated to address this or doesn't have a subject matter expert that they can evaluate, then it's something that that can be quite difficult to implement it. And especially since like so many things, if you don't think about it early enough in the process,

Chris Adams: easy to count, yeah.

Mike Gifford: yeah, so you know, so often accessibility has been left to the end.

And then, well, the budget's spent, the time has run out and now you've got these accessibility issues you've just now discovered. Well, guess what? They're not going to happen, right? They're going to be, or they're going to be done badly. And in a way that's more expensive because it's being done after the fact.

And, and that's often a more fragile way to go off and implement technologies. Think about it from the beginning.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so there's two things that come out of that that I think are possibly worth exploring in a bit more detail. One of these was this idea that basically, the cost of checking if something is still working the way it's supposed to. Like, you know, people say, "oh, it's totally accessible." But being able to check if something really is accessible, this is one thing that I think you've pointed me to some work where there's some software like Purple Accessibility, Purple A11y.

Yeah, Purple A11y, yeah. This is, I'm not sure where the A11y thing came from, but for people who are not familiar with the lingo, A11y is A one one y, which is the number of letters for accessibility, and Mike, you introduced me, what was the name of

Mike Gifford: It's a, it's a numerium. Anytime you go, you take the, the letters of the beginning of the end and you squish them together. Internationalization is I18N, localization is I10N. It's just, you squish them together and create a number of

Chris Adams: Ah, I see. And that would explain the whole S12Y that I think people keep trying to make happen with sustainability in the kind of digital world, right? Yeah. It feels a little bit mean girl saying stop trying to make, like, fetch happen, right? But this is something I struggle with as well. And if people who are curious why this episode is called A11y to S12y.

Now you know why. It's, numeriums at work, basically. Okay,

Mike Gifford: And they make a lot of sense, especially in Twitter, they make a lot of sense. But now that we no longer are limited by 180 characters, it's, and actually in some ways just complicates things because since sustainable development has been a term popularized by the Brundtland commission, I guess it was the eighties, the sustainability has been overused and generalized in a way that makes it very difficult to understand things and just sort of shortening it into, you S12Y doesn't actually make it more understandable or any more specific.

It's just made it more, added another, fewer characters and more confusion. So it is something that does happen.

Chris Adams: Does make for a cool hashtag, though, so I suppose, you know, swings around about. All right, so we digressed and the reason we mentioned Purple Alley or A11y was because I think this was something you were me about, how there are ways of, there are increasingly tools which, rather than just doing a one off check at the end of a project, might continuously be tracking some of this.

And this is maybe a way to kind of almost provide like continuous audit or something as one of the mechanisms that you might use to kind of maintain a level of quality, for example. I believe Wagtail is one example. They've built some tools so when you're editing a web page, they will basically give you a kind of check ahead of time.

So it's a bit like, shift-left, but for content editors or people who do this. So before you publish something, you'll see some of this and I would assume that other content management systems have these kinds of checks as part of the kind of workflow process rather than it being a thing that gets checked once a year, for example.

Mike Gifford: Right. Drupal has it with the, for the code level. We don't have it for the content level. There are plugins you can add in for modules. You can add in for Drupal that give the authors that sort of context, but we don't have it built into core. And that's something, so it's an effort to install that. It's hopefully it's something that will come into core at some point, but that's a much bigger discussion, right?

How that, how and what tool they use and how that would be implemented. But Purple A11y is a great tool for scanning websites and providing a, an understanding of where accessibility issues are across hundreds, if not thousands of pages, because there's a lot of tools that are built into your browser that you can use to scan a single page. So, like there's WebsiteCarbon.com and the EcoGrader from, which are great tools. But they're, they will evaluate one page and you can pay for services, certainly from EcoGrader that will go off and allow you to scan your site. They keep a sense of your site, but most people are, are not necessarily going to do that.

And not everything is designed for that. And site scanning tools. Yeah. It's nice to be able to have an open source solution that is able to give you a, a sense of the challenges and the barriers that you're running into as you're developing the site. They can see that you're making progress or your site is more accessible today than it was yesterday.

And the incorporation of something like CO2.js into that. It would be a really great addition and there's other tools that could be useful to go off and add to aggregate quality as well and get a sense of like plain language as a, as something that it's very difficult for people to go off and write.

People under think they understand it, but it's, it actually takes a whole lot of work to go off and write in plain language. But this type of language complexity can be evaluated on a code level, at least on the English language. It's more difficult for other languages, it can be. The more we can sort of build in testing early in the process, however, when a site's being developed, if it's built on a weekly or two week sprint cycle, the team, when they're doing their script planning, should know what their accessibility issues are this week compared to the last sprint, so they can see if they're actually making it more accessible today than it was previously.

And the same thing should be applying for sustainability, because there's things that do change in code, like a new JavaScript library is added. And things slow down or there's an image that, that somebody added and that's something that is not noticed by the development team and you want to catch that as early as possible, partly because it's easier to fix them because you've just added it, so you should be able to the issue and, and, and you're like, "Oh, it's just the last sprint.

We know we approved that" and you can learn from that process. I think much like, like spell checkers, like if spell checking was something that you only did right before you submitted your paper,

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Mike Gifford: like you're not going to learn, you're going to be frustrated by the process. It'll be something you ship off to somebody else to deal with and you're not going to go off and build that into your own practice.

But if you see the errors and you see them as you're writing it, eventually you will write better and you'll have a sense of what are the mistakes you often get and how do you try and avoid them going ahead.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so it's basically a piece of, like, incorporating into, like, your workflow, I suppose. You, you said one other thing that I wanted to unpack, if I may, which was a little bit about setting expectations. Like, talking a little bit about how, like, because you, you mentioned there's things you can do for, like, language, for example.

And we spoke a little bit about this idea that, okay, there's a certain level. I think you mentioned WCAG AA or something like that. And I know the one example I've seen from other places are saying "we aim to meet this level and this is how we check for this and here's how to actually contact us for any kind of breaches" for example like these seems to be mechanisms that i can see being adopted to talk about digital sustainability like one of the reasons i'm particularly interested about Purple A11y and that one there is a it's an open source so anyone can use it for free assuming they have access to like a computer to do that.

But also the Singapore government have been talking about using this to check their own digital estate as well. And that's how I know that in the public sector, some people are using these to do some of this kind of continuous monitoring, or at least some way to kind of flag things up to make some of this a bit more kind of observable and actionable, I suppose.

And like, as far as I'm aware, we don't really have any way of, do we have a way of checking that for accessibility when a... so, you know, you go to a website or a digital server, you say, well, do you, is there a way of seeing a kind of consistent URL, like wellknown/a11y or something to see where they say what they are, say what level they're trying to reach, and then how to kind of test about this.

Because this feels like something you could at least for certain things, be able to kind of verify, you know, verify the claims that you're making, basically. 

Mike Gifford: Right. I mean, I think right now for accessibility, the best practices is around trying to create an accessibility statement that's in the front of a web page. So if you go to any European government website, now you'll see a page that is about accessibility, that gives you information. And if it's properly structured, it'll say, it'll have a feedback form that allows you to go up and give feedback if you run into a barrier.

It'll tell you what they've done and how they've done it and get a sense of what some of those challenges are. Also, it's useful to highlight the, yeah, what are the processes that they've done to go off and assess accessibility. All of that can be built into an accessibility statement. And the same type of thing could, could very much be included as a sustainability statement.

And there are going to be pages, there's out,

Chris Adams: we target this, yeah.

Mike Gifford: That's right. I mean, there's no reason that couldn't be done the same, in the same way. You just have a little link in the footer that explains what the process is. And you evaluate that page on an annual basis to make sure that there are things that are being, so that if you're changing your processes, which they do, you come back and reflect on that and say, well, how do we make this better this year than it was the last?

Right. That, that reflection, I think is an important part of it, as well as the feedback with the users.

Chris Adams: Okay, alright, so there is a way, so maybe this is actually quite a nice segue for us to move from, okay so that's one pattern that we've seen adopted in the accessibility field where we know there's a tradition of being quite specific about things you're looking to purchase but also some ways of checking that people are actually like meeting the things that they're saying they're doing.

I mean, there's some parallels to the whole kind of green claims discussion I suppose and that you might see online where people are saying, you know, you can't mark this product as carbon neutral by buying offsets anymore, but they say like if you're gonna make any kind of claim you need to kind of substantiate these claims now rather than actually just having some woolly language around this.

So, okay, and maybe this is a nice way to talk a little bit about what that might look like for digital sustainability because I believe the I know there's these Digital Sustainability Guidelines. I don't, I, WSGs, I'm not quite sure what we would call them. I mean, in Germany, you might call them like WSG, as if it looked like a joke on ESG.

I don't, okay, ignore it. Like, we don't have a good word for them. I mean, nothing is, snappy as WCAG, yeah. So, come up with something for those. I do know that there has been some work to make some of these checkable. I think, I remember the name, it was Star, wasn't it? Star, which is. Sustainability, Technology, Accessibility, something.

Do you know the thing I'm to here?

Mike Gifford: I do. But I don't the 

Chris Adams: Sustainable Tooling And Reporting. This is what it was actually. Yeah. I just looked it up in a tab. Yeah.

Mike Gifford: There's whole, there's a whole lot of effort to go off and get a pronounceable acronym that is also somewhat meaningful and doesn't offend anyone. And that was, yeah, that, that's what we came up with STAR, because it's a generally universally appreciated type of thing, so.

Chris Adams: Okay. Well, this is good. And this is like machine readable things that you could check. So you could check it each year, but you could almost Yeah.

Mike Gifford: And that's it. The more that there, I mean, I think that there's always going to be things that are going to be, you know, there's some things you're going to check by machine, but you're not going to be able to check it all by machine. Like even with WCAG, that's being around for as long as it has, you can only catch about a third of the issues using automated checkers.

So with sustainability, there is going to be need to be manual but there's stuff that you can check, knowing where the site is hosted and where the third party libraries are that's stuff that's checkable because it's just an IP address you

Chris Adams: Look it up. Yeah.

Mike Gifford: against database and determine whether it's there.

And the same, the size of the pages and the, the, the use of JavaScript. These are all things that can be. evaluated in a very, black and white sort of manner, like compared year after year to see how, how are you doing or print after sprint to make sure your, your. We're actually making movements on this and just to make, for people to realize that these tools are things that have been hidden, like the weight of a page has been hidden for people for so long.

They're becoming much easier to evaluate and to track and to identify. So a lot of the stuff is, is going to be more noticeable for people and for them to say, well, "why is my page taking so long to load? Who's responsible for that?" Like that's, that is going to be an issue that, the people will start to pay more attention to cause they have to.

Because there will be legislation, hopefully, that requires an organization to demonstrate that they are improving their performance and have improved customer experience and making a more sustainable site.

Chris Adams: Okay, so I'm speaking to you with a, because you're in France, and I know that if we're talking about digital sustainability, France is currently one of the countries which is kind of at the forefront, and they, I'm going to butcher the, the, the RG... I can't remember what they're specific, and it's basically the French version of digital sustainability.

 I think it's Référentiel général d'écoconception de services numériques, but basically it's the equivalent to digital sustainability stuff. It looks a little bit like the digital sustainability kind of guidelines, but the French version that they've been written as a, and there's, as far as I'm aware, this is something which has been adopted nationally as a thing that you would actually include.

Now there's another discussion about how you might kind of maintain that and enforce that and make sure and what the remedy mechanisms are if you are in breach of that. But like, that's one of the examples there. I guess, you know, that's one people, one thing that people might be looking at as an example of, okay, here's some ideas, but here's what some of this might look like, for example.

Mike Gifford: Yeah, no, I think it's great. And there's things that I think would have been quite useful to have done for accessibility as well. For example, engineers are required to take a course on sustainability when they're getting educated in universities. Well, why isn't that part of how things are done in accessibility as well?

That's a big one. There's certainly a lot of elements around evaluating municipalities and evaluating other government agencies in terms of what their digital sustainability plans are. A lot of work around recycling, the recycling electronics, again, that's a big part of this puzzle is trying to make sure that the, all of the carbon and resources and energy that goes into these devices is managed as effectively as possible.

So again, that's really forward thinking stuff. And also it's wonderful that France has gone first on this and highlight that, that this is something that, that like somebody has to go first. Somebody has to demonstrate that it's a possibility. And France has legislation in place long before people are even thinking about it.

So it's been a real good thing for the Web Sustainability Guidelines to be able to look at and learn from, what's being done in France and, and to say, well, "how do we take this, this model that is being successfully implemented in France" and try and say, well, "how do we scale this to the rest of the world?"

Chris Adams: see, so like you said before about, okay, are there lessons you can make more general? We should probably give a shout out to the fact that, I mean, and one of the reasons I know about this is work, some work from Gautier Rosilla and also I think a gent, Thibaut Collas was one of the people who basically draw attention to basically a translated version of the old RGSN as examples of this and when I first read them, I was like, "wow, this is actually really, this is actually quite well written" and it kind of stays in its lane in the sense that it's just focusing on digital sustainability, it might refer to some other things, but it's not repeating too much of the other guidance that exists in other forms with other groups and other working groups.

Okay, cool.

Mike Gifford: Also, a shout out to Laurent Devenry, who's also been, I'll include a link to an article I wrote for Apolitical, talking about the, the French, the French legislation and trying to help make it more accessible to the English speaking world. Cause I think that's something that is often a barrier for good ideas is language and culture.

And so trying to encourage more, a broader adoption and understanding of what countries are doing effectively to make these changes.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right. Well, I think we're just starting to come to time, but it sounds like there are a few things we could learn from the world of accessibility, like it's not perfect, but yeah, the idea of like setting some basic standards that you can then write into procurement is one thing that we've got.

Like, we don't really have the equivalent to poor, like perceivable, operable, robust yet. I wish we had that for digital sustainability, and maybe one day will, but if that seems to be a thing, that would be helpful. But the whole notion of being able to like continuously check to see if something is or at least have a way of checking if people are saying something and then are they able to kind of deliver against that.

There's a precedent in accessibility that may also be relevant for sustainability too and we have a growing number of standards from outside of technology that we might even be able to refer to for the things outside of how a website is built that might actually speak to some of the kind of other wider sustainability considerations as well, by the sounds of things.

Mike Gifford: Absolutely. And, and I think that the more we can learn from other people's work, the better it is. It's not like we're anywhere where we need to be around accessibility, but there's been some advances around accessibility that are, that are, are useful to learn from. With sustainability, we just don't have the two decades or three decades of struggle to get us where we need to be.

We need to have countries very quickly taking on regulations or that, that allow us to quickly start scaling down the technology. There's so many organizations buy technology that is there for at least a few years, if not for a decade. And larger organizations are buying technology that, that is going to be in place for a long time.

It takes a long time to shift from one stack to another. So we need to be prioritizing sustainability in the procurement process as early as possible so that it's something that can be built in as we go ahead and as we're building towards a more sustainable future.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Well, Mike, thank you very much for sharing your perspective and your experience with us today. If people are curious about the, what you've been discussing or some of the work you're doing right now, where should people be looking? Where would you direct people's attention to if they wanted to learn more?

Mike Gifford: Right now that the best place to go from find me is on LinkedIn and it's Mike Gifford is the easiest way to access me. I'm also on a bunch of different Slack channels, like the Drupal Slack or the Climate Action Tech Slack is a facility to reach out. I do have other social media accounts like Mastodon and Twitter, but I generally don't use them as much as I do LinkedIn.

Chris Adams: Okay, right, and CivicActions, that's CivicActions.com, presumably, and if there's any of the other kind of user groups or working groups you're part of, are there any ones we should be thinking about? Like, is it OpenWeb? I forget the name of them actually, you said there's another CMS

Mike Gifford: Open Web Alliance that's, that's, that's coming together. That's, that's an effort to try and get, different content management systems to be able to support and work together to go off and build that more effective open web, so that's one group. Also the Susti Web Community Group is definitely something to consider joining if you're interested in sustainability.

And there's an effort to turn that into a full working group, which will require more effort and leadership for people to be involved. And so, yeah, those, those are definitely some of the main places to see. On accessibility, you can also find us on our accessibility sub site, which is accessibility.civicactions.com.

Chris Adams: Brilliant, okay, and I just realized, you mentioned something about FOSDEM in a talk, There's, I'll share the link to the FOSDEM, Sustainability and Accessibility Talk, which was what prompted some of these discussions in the first place. This has been fun, and I didn't realize that you were in Europe, so if I ever do pass through Paris, or pass through Carcassonne, or France, maybe we'll get a glass of wine or something.

Mike Gifford: That'd be lovely.

Chris Adams: Thanks a lot, Mike. Lovely to chat to you again. All right. Take care.

Mike Gifford: See you, Chris.

Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams explores the theme of Community Publishing and Greening Software, by talking to Branch Magazine’s Hannah Smith and Marketa Benisek. They discuss community publishing and the lessons learned from producing Branch Magazine, which supports sustainable digital practices and includes diverse voices from the Green Software Foundation. The discussion covers the complexities of adopting digital sustainability and how Branch Magazine, through its innovative, carbon-aware design, has been a platform for expressing these nuanced themes in sustainability and how finding beauty in the imperfect might just be the answer to all your problems! 

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Hannah Smith: LinkedIn
• Marketa Benisek: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Topics:

• Branch Magazine | climatetech.action [1:50]
• Designing a Grid Aware Website [13:09]
• Content Trends [20:38]
• Sneak Peek Preview of issue 8 [27:12]

Resources:

• Grid Intensity Library | Green Web Foundation [02:29]
• Green Web Foundation [3:30]
• Wholegrain Digital [4:04]
• WebsiteCarbon.com [4:07]
• Solarpunk [24:12]
• The Wabi Sabi Web - Branch | Tom Greenwood [28:49] 
• Embracing friction: A conversation with Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters - Branch | Marketa Benisek [30:08] 
• Talking it out: Restoring information ecosystems through authentic human connections - Branch | Bárbara Paes and Olivia Johnson [31:26] 
• Echoes of electronic waste - Branch | Joanna Murzyn [31:37]
• Connectivity, infrastructure and the defence of the Amazon's socio-biodiverse ecosystems - Branch | Hemanuel Veras [31:41]
• One Movement, Four Wings: Connecting climate strategies - Branch | Melissa Hsiung [32:47]  
• Ministry of Imagination - Branch | Rob Hopkins [34:58]
• Issue 8 community-assembled playlist - Branch [36:30]
• Curiously Green, the green web newsletter - Wholegrain Digital [39:59]
• co2.js | The Green Web Foundation [40:44] 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Marketa Benisek: Perfection is essentially the enemy of progress. So it doesn't really matter if something is imperfect, but we can build on it. That's when Hannah came up with the idea that actually we could collaborate on the next issue of Branch Magazine, and this could be the theme.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. The world of green software and digital sustainability has come a long way since the Green Software Foundation was created three years ago.

The Software Carbon Intensity Specification is now an international standard. All of the large hyperscale cloud providers in North American Europe now publish guidance about incorporating sustainability principles into building on their platforms, and we're also seeing unprecedented policy interest in both understanding and managing the emissions associated with digital services in general.

There's more to sustainability than just making our software greener, though. If we want a truly sustainable industry, we also need new visions of how we relate to technology and the role it might play in a more positive, regenerative future. One such vision. Is that laid out by digital magazine Branch, a publication featuring writing from many of the active feature figures in the Green Software Foundation and one of the first ever websites to pioneer a carbon aware design that changed in response to the carbon intensity of the underlying electricity grid that its servers ran on.

Originally from climateaction.tech and published by the Green Web Foundation, Branch is a twice yearly publication, and at the time of this podcast being recorded. It's now into its eighth issue. Now, in the interest of disclosure, I should probably share that I've written for Branch a few times and that I worked on the grid intensity library, the JavaScript library, that the site relies on for its carbon aware design features.

I'll try my best to keep my bias out of this episode, but it's worth acknowledging that before the GSF, The Green Software Foundation was as prominent as it is now, is one of the better known non commercial places to read about the intersection of software and sustainability and see how folks are doing it.

I'm joined today by two of the contributing editors, Hannah Smith and Maketa Benesek, to talk about community publishing as a tool for change and the lessons learned publishing a magazine that tries to walk the walk as well as talk the talk on sustainability in the digital realm. So, Han, Marketa, thanks so much for joining me today.

Can I give you the floor to introduce yourself and what you do?

Hannah Smith: Great. Well, thanks, Chris. Thanks for the introduction. And yes, you are definitely a little biased in talking about Branch. I think that's fair to say, but anyway, I'll introduce myself. So hi, my name is Hannah Smith. I am director of operations at Green Web Foundation, where some of you might know, I work alongside Chris and I'm very excited to be here.

I was a WordPress developer for a long time. I also run a meetup community called Green Tech Southwest. And quite recently, sort of over last summer, I was very involved in a project looking at grid aware computing as a, as an alternative or an improvement on carbon aware computing. So, Marketa, I guess over to you.

Marketa Benisek: Thank you. Thanks for the intro, Chris. So, my name is Marketa Benisek. I work as Digital Sustainability Lead at Wholegrain Digital, the authors and kind of creators of WebsiteCarbon.com, the online kind of first and original online carbon calculator. And I'm really, really excited to be here. And I'm super excited about this project. I also did a climate reality training with Al Gore, uh, during the pandemic and I'm a carbon literate professional. So that means that I essentially, I'm just really passionate about explaining people kind of the essentials and the basics of the climate science so that they understand the urgency of why we need to take action.

Chris Adams: Thank you for that, Marketa. Now, before we dive into the world of Branch and community publishing and all that, we normally ask where our guests are calling from to get a bit of background color, really. Han, can you just tell me a little bit about where you're joining me from? And then if I hand over to Marketa after that.

Hannah Smith: Yeah, so thanks Chris. I am dialing in from the temperate rainforest in Exmoor National Park, which is over in the southwest of England in the county of Somerset. And today, as I look out the window, all the trees are coming into leaf and it is a truly, truly glorious view.

Chris Adams: Wow, I spent 30 UK and I'd never realized there were rainforests. So you said temperate rainforest as opposed to a tropical rainforest. Is that how it works?

Hannah Smith: Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't know that temperate rainforest was a thing until I moved here either, but there is this growing movement to reestablish these, these ecosystems or, or just make people aware of them. It's basically a forest, which is on the coast and pretty wet, and that's how you end up with a temperate rainforest.

It sounds, it sounds exciting, but you know, you need good wellies and a good Mac and not to be afraid to get a bit muddy if you live here. Yeah.

Chris Adams: Marketa, over to you as well.

Marketa Benisek: I am joining this call from Prague in Czech Republic. That's where I'm based currently. I relocated here a couple of years ago from very busy London after having a kid. So yeah, it's just, it was a beautiful spring weather just about a week ago. And now we're back to snowy weather. So we got all of those like winter jumpers. And yeah, we'll see what happens.

Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. I did not know that you were in Prague actually, Marketa. I thought you were still in London. Okay. I should probably go myself and also introduce myself because I realize I've just done this massive introduction without saying who I am, what I'm here for. So folks, if you are listening to this podcast for the first time, my name is Chris Adams.

I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I'm also one of the organizers of Climate Action Tech, which is a online community full of essentially climate aware techies, I suppose. I also worked as one of the policy chairs in the Green Software Foundation, and that's partly how I know Han.

As Han mentioned, I did work on the Branch Magazine, a few years ago, basically. So I have some kind of background there. I'm calling from Berlin where today it's been sunny and hailing at the same time. So that's my kind of contribution to the meteorological diversity, I suppose. All right. Okay. So I think we're all sitting comfortably and we've got a good idea of where we're all kind of calling from today.

Maybe we should talk a little bit about Branch. So I understand there was a new theme for this that the two of you wanted to kind of talk about because it's, we've had different themes for publishing different issues, but the theme this time was I think finding beauty in the imperfect. And I believe this was on, this is a kind of reference to some of the struggles we see when people start trying to adopt digital sustainability principles or kind of working around that.

Would either of you maybe just explain a little bit about how this came about or maybe what drove you to kind of come to it from this point of view, actually?

Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. So I should probably start by saying that Hannah was one of the first to I met a lot of female voices that I came across shortly after I met Vinita Greenwood, the co founder of Wholegrain Digital. And she was one of the first female voices that I've heard talking about digital sustainability and digital carbon emissions and all that. And I introduced myself, this is it must be about six years ago, seven years ago, something like that. And then we kind of stayed in touch ever since, you know, we collaborated over several projects and we just stayed in touch and connected about once a month over a call just to catch up and talk about what's new in the digital sustainability world, so to speak. And about six months ago, we got together on a call. We were both pretty upset about some recent articles and mentions of the different tools and, and projects that people criticize for their imperfections. And it felt, it wasn't really the criticism itself that was so upsetting, it was mostly the fact that they made it sound as if there's just no point in trying

if it's not perfect in the first place. And so we got to talk over this and, and about this, and we just realized that this is something that we feel really, really strongly and passionately about, and we wanted to address it and kind of just voice out that, you know, perfection is essentially the enemy of progress. So it doesn't really matter if something is imperfect, but we can build on it. That's when Hannah came up with the idea that actually we could collaborate on the next issue of Branch Magazine. And this could be the theme that would kind of give the platform to lots of different voices in this field and to people from CAT community on like, what can actually be done and what is already happening in this space that is imperfect, but it's still very much meaningful.

Chris Adams: Okay. So thank you for that, Marketa. That does provide some of the context that makes it a bit easier to understand this theme. Han, maybe I could maybe hand this over to you to talk a little bit about why you chose to explore this theme using a magazine like Branch, for example, rather than trying to get a white paper written or something like that, perhaps.

Hannah Smith: Thanks, Chris. Yeah. So, so as Marketa has said, we kind of had these conversations and we kind of realized that we felt that this narrative, which can be quite dominant in the tech industry of, you know, of always having perfection in your data or, you know, always striving for everything to be a hundred percent accurate.

We kind of felt that we had a lot to say on it, and we also thought that there'd be a lot of members within the climateaction.tech community that would have a lot to say on it too. Perhaps they were in a place of work where they were having to overcome some of these, you know, some of this pushback from their own team, or perhaps they're in, you know.

Developer communities that were maybe not embracing these ideas again, for these reasons. So we kind of realized that Branch would make an absolutely amazing place to bring loads of different voices. From across the whole tech industry together into one place. And, you know, Branch is very much founded on this idea of bringing together different voices and perspectives from even different industries, not necessarily just the tech sector.

You know, we know that there's people working in research or people who work with tech. You have an awful lot to say here too. So Marketa and I were like, yeah, okay. Let's get the CAT community involved in this. Let's see if people want to tell stories from their places of work, or maybe there are founders of companies that want to talk about how they're embracing things in different ways.

Maybe there are some people who are, you know, uh, practitioners, maybe freelancers, maybe independents. Maybe people from research organizations. Let's get all of these voices together, let's get all of these perspectives together, and let's kind of create, we've been talking about it as a bit of a tapestry, a kind of tapestry of views that start to answer these questions or start to explore what it actually means in practice when you're working in digital sustainability to find beauty in the imperfect.

So what is beautiful, and what is imperfect? So yeah, we've kind of thought Branch just lent itself to be the perfect place for people to do that. And again, the awesome thing about Branch is it's a non profit magazine, as you well know, Chris. So that awesome, we thought made it easier for people that were perhaps within organizations that maybe don't have a platform to speak within their own organization.

They could come and use Branch. And be able to talk about things in an open way that perhaps their organization might not be so cool with them publishing on their own blog. So it feels like a great opportunity to bring a really diverse, in the biggest possible way, set of voices together, I think.

Chris Adams: Okay. I see. So you've got this idea of diversity. And one of the key things is that it's not just one person, you know, the internet isn't just for like developers, for example, there's other, there's users and there's other people who are affected by it that it's worth hearing some of their voices involved in it as well.

Okay. Thank you, Hannah. That does make it a little bit clearer, actually, since you spoke a little bit about Branch and actually the design part of it, maybe we could just switch gears for a second and talk a little bit about some of the realities of trying to make some of this, because one thing we mentioned before is that Branch was one of the early magazines that essentially changed this design based on how green the grid is, basically.

And I figured maybe we could just provide, have a bit of kind of catnip for the nerds talking about how that was actually done. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, okay, yeah, that's a cool idea, but. There's all these considerations from a production point of view. So maybe are there any kind of particular challenges you found or things we would have bear in mind if they're going to take their first steps into designing, say, kind of a grid aware or carbon aware design like this?

Hannah Smith: Yeah. Well, thanks, Chris. So Marketa, I might pick that question up if that's okay with you. Cause I

Marketa Benisek: Yeah, please do.

Hannah Smith: yeah, so, I mean, Chris, I know you were sort of involved in building the first issue of Branch. I came on board to help out on the second issue and beyond. And so I think it's worth saying that first of all, the way that Branch responds to the grid is that it provides a different experience based on what's going on, on the grid on a certain day.

So if you've got loads of fossil fuels on the grid, on a particular day, you don't see the images by default. So you have to actually opt in to see the images. If you've got a nice windy, sunny day, maybe then the intensity will be low. And so you will see the images. And then you've got this middle, middle scenario there, where the images are converted into a really fuzzy kind of web format so that you can see the images, but there's a clear and obvious degradation.

The thing I really, really like about Branch and the way it does that is that it's, it's giving you a different, um, experience based on the renewables that day and in that place. So it's, it's more responding to demand or, or supply really of what's on the grid. And I think that's quite clever. So rather than sort of doing stuff like shifting around location or time based. I find that that is actually a very, very visceral way that people can understand what's going on in terms of the supply coming on to the, onto the grid. Actually, I find it throughout Marketa and I putting all the articles up for issue eight, I found it brilliant. I've now know exactly what's going on on the given day as to what the renewables are, because the background color of Branch tells me, which is super, super handy.

But actually we did notice just last week as we were kind of finalizing some of the images that well I don't know if it's a new level of carbon intensity or if it's a just a level of carbon intensity we don't get very often in the UK. But I, to my absolute shock and horror, went on Branch and it was grey and I was like, oh, That's not a color Branch.

Chris Adams: What's going on here?

Hannah Smith: That's not supposed to happen. What's going on here? And we looked into it and realized that actually the grid was running at very low carbon intensity that day, which kind of made sense because when I looked out the window, it was super windy, yeah, super sunny day and we were like, all right, cool. So I guess like, that's quite a fun bug in a way, or a fun thing is that, you know, I guess our expectations over different carbon intensity levels can change a little bit, or, uh, you know, if you're connecting through to an API, something, something suddenly shifts and, and you get a bit of a surprise.

So that's definitely a bit of fun to be aware of on the production side of things.

Chris Adams: I remember you, I remember you talking about some of this actually, like, like, you thought, oh, the grid's never going to get that green, right? And then you see it changing, like, oh, Christ, you need to update the design because of this. Yeah. This idea of like having different thresholds was, you know, Yeah, that was, that was a new thing because I remember you asking me and like, it took scratching my head a little while because it doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the code.

And then you realize, oh, the API that tells us the carbon intensity must then have started to introduce some new levels that we need to design for. So yeah, that's, uh, that, that, that was, that was actually kind of a fun thing from this. Okay, cool,

Hannah Smith: Happy days though. I mean, I'm happy that we were running on very, very low intensity on those days of, you know, Hey, that's what we're here for, right?

Chris Adams: Yeah, that was, I guess, the technology being somewhat more enthusiastic than the design five years ago, or four years ago, perhaps. So that's like one of the examples that we need to take into account. And maybe one thing that I'm glad you mentioned the idea that when you first visit this, you don't see the images.

One of the things that I think is There was some fair amount of focus, which is often overlooked is the accessibility of this, like deliberately trying to make sure that if someone can't see an image, you at least have some way to make it perceivable to people, for example, maybe we could talk a little bit about some of that thing, because people tend not to, this may be a thing that is overlooked in publishing, that's actually, I guess, part of the web, maybe, and maybe you could expand a little bit on the accessibility aspects before we talk about some of the actual content of Branch, perhaps, Han.

Hannah Smith: Yeah, sure. So I mean, something, when you're uploading content to Branch, you realize just how important alt text is on your images. Because that's one of the key features of Branch is that if you have a very carbon intensive day, so e. g. there's lots of fossil fuels, bad, that's not what we want, you don't see the images.

And what you see instead is the alt text and a caption, which describes it to you. You do see kind of, you see a grayed out placeholder of the image. So you're very aware that there is an image there, but you can click show image and you can see the image and opt for that to get downloaded to your machine and opt for for that, that additional action to happen. So accessibility is a really interesting aspect here as well.

Chris Adams: Yeah. Cause I guess on one level you're, that's kind of like forcing how other people might perceive the web, if it might be, might be partially cited or something. It's kind of some of the decisions there to kind of foreground the fact that the way that you experience a digital service may not be the only way it can be experienced, for example.

Hannah Smith: Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I love the way that Branch does that. It plays with almost messing with your perception of what a website is and can be, and I, I mean, that was always one of the key ideas of it was to imagine different ways that a website could be, it doesn't always have to be the same, exactly the same.

It should be responding to different things. And also remind you that people interact with these things in different ways as well. As you rightly said there, Chris, you know, not everybody will see the images all the time.

Marketa Benisek: It's a great preview into someone else's world and how they see the world, how they see the digital world as well. I think this, this often doesn't really get enough attention. That not everybody sees the images in perfect high res, you know, some people might see it blurry, some people might see it, I don't know, pixelated, whatever, you know, so paying attention to these alt texts and, and just a different setting for people who might have different needs and different kind of health conditions is really important and the entire web. should be built that way. I mean, that's why we have this technology in the first place. So the fact that Branch has that is really important, I think. And I'm just, that's just one more reason why I love it so much.

Chris Adams: So, Marketa, you're right, actually, there is this notion about, I guess, the web being something that should be accessible for everyone, because, like, the internet is for everyone like this. Maybe we could talk a little bit about, actually, some of the high level themes in the content for this issue. Like, are there any trends that you felt really deserved attention or could do with more people writing more openly about, for example?

Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, first of all, you know, the, the theme, we were pretty set on, on the theme, Hannah and I, you know, since. The very early days, finding beauty in the imperfect. I guess as two women working in tech, you know, it may come across, it may have come across slightly more poetic or feminine to some. And I think that some people, there was a need to kind of explain what we really mean by this. So we spent quite a bit of time on this explanation, you know, through the open call page, just to really clarify what this means. And obviously it was an invitation for everyone, not just for women in tech. I just wanted to make that really clear, but yeah, I, I mean, after we set the open call page on Branch, we received a really great number of submissions that we carefully read through and selected the best ones that really spoke to the theme and then we narrowed it down to I think seven or even eight categories and we got super excited and obviously we wanted to involve everything and you know, we wanted to give a platform to everyone who even reached out and things like that. But then we got a bit more realistic and we realized that actually, you know, we really do need to narrow it down. So we narrowed it down to four key categories that kind of spoke really strongly to just new ways of building just and sustainable web that is also a humane web. And so now we have four categories that, that they are meaningful connection, kind of solar punk and imagining different future, new ways of looking at the design philosophy and how we might be able to build the web.

You know, that is not perfect or not in that kind of usual perfect way, seamlessly perfect. And then finally, obviously the perfection itself and just not letting it be the enemy of progress. So those are kind of the four key categories that were really, really, important for the theme, I think. And yeah, I just really can't wait to share that with the world.

Chris Adams: Okay, and that's presumably the logical grouping inside the content. So someone, when they go to the magazine, they'll see it grouped like that. So they might look at dive into one, for example, and then the other, right?

Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously this wasn't a straightforward process. You know, we spent a long time kind of going through all of those images, grouping them together. But shortly after we received all of the submissions, we could see patterns in some of these, you know, submissions and we obviously group them together and kind of organically these four key themes.

Chris Adams: Ended up being the logical group for this.

Marketa Benisek: And yes, ended up being the four categories, yeah.

Hannah Smith: And I think I might just add a little bit onto that as well, because the, the whole idea of this theme was that we wanted to explore the subjective ways that people Think about finding beauty in the imperfect in digital sustainability, whatever lens they're looking through, be that developing carbon calculation methodologies, be that designing things, being that the way that people use the internet, being that even questioning, should the internet even be a thing in the first place?

So we did throw it very, very wide and then as Marketa explained, you know, we, we grouped things. And then what we kind of discovered, the thing that makes me very happy because I'm quite nerdy and I do like everything to be neat and tidy, is that those four categories then yes, you're laughing because you know this is true because we then noticed that those four categories almost become a journey in themselves.

So, as Marketa said, that the first category we saw was around meaningful connection. And I guess the first thing that you ask yourself when you're Looking for beauty in the perfection when you're designing something is, why? What are we designing this for? And we realized that actually, at the very, very heart of it, what the internet should be about is creating meaningful connection.

Not just connection for connection's sake, but meaningful connection that's humane, that is just, and that is sustainable. And we kind of really noticed that theme. And then we kind of thought, alright, so you know what you want, So the next thing that happens is, well, in an ideal world, what does that success look like?

And that's where that imagination piece comes in, these ideas of Solarpunk. And if anyone's listening and hasn't heard of Solarpunk before, you're in for such a treat because it's just such a cool movement. It's all this idea of kind of imagining regenerative, renewable futures. So you kind of, once you know what you mean, you know what you want, EG, a meaningful connection, you start to imagine what it looks like.

And we had so much fun with all the pieces that imagined the future, like there's some absolutely amazing, beautiful, yet imperfect stuff in there. And then once you're imagining things, what we realized is the next step on your journey is the logical question is, well, how are we going to make it? And we realized then that we had this grouping all around design philosophy of people talking about all these different ways that they want to make this stuff, that they want to make things on the internet, that they want to design things on the internet.

And then we came to this fourth category and I wouldn't say it's the last one because the other thing we realized is that everything is just so deeply interconnected. And I think you realize that when you're doing anything in sustainability is that connections that are everywhere. It's never finished and it's never linear.

But we noticed this last question was around, well, let's talk about some of the things that get in the way of us designing our things or building our things. And we realized, well, perfectionism is this key thing that seems to come up and up again and is so often used as a kind of defensive measure for why we shouldn't bother.

We kind of realised that that was almost the last stop on the journey,in a way, probably before you go around again. So the categories do stand in isolation from one another, but can also be read and taken on a journey as well for kind of completing a whole process here as well. So when, when that kind of made itself obvious, I was very happy cause that, that felt very neat, very neat and tidy, so-

Marketa Benisek: Yeah that was a beautiful day that one

Hannah Smith: It was a beautiful day, but obviously there's imperfections there too, even in that.

Chris Adams: I see. Okay. Thanks. Maybe I'll just bring, hand over to Marketa. So we've spoken a little bit about themes and like the kind of, the motivation for this. Maybe we could just move to like some of the concrete pieces, for example, if we would have like a preview of some of the things you'd like to draw attention to, or kind of give a sneak peek, sneak preview of this.

Are there any articles you particularly enjoyed or you found a lot of, that you, would like to draw people's attention to, for example, if I hand over to you, Marketa, first, and then Han, I'll give you a chance to kind of name some of your favorite children, as it were, or favorite babies, or whatever, whatever phrase you want to use for this, then we can see what we've got there.

So, Marketa, you first, if I can.

Marketa Benisek: Yeah sure so I guess throughout this process, what I enjoyed the most was seeing these kind of similar patterns occurring in different places around the world. That was really just fascinating to, to witness and to be a part of, because, you know, all of these authors are from different parts of the world. They are talking about different problems, different solutions. And yet they were using very similar language. So for example, we mentioned perfectionism as kind of one of the obstacles to building a more just and sustainable and humane web. And interestingly, several people, at least my authors, you know, the authors from my group, they kept mentioning friction and the need of friction.

Somehow it seems like friction and imperfection is what makes any experience more human. And the web and trying to make it kind of perfect and frictionless and seamless and everything like that, that goes against that human experience, that humanness in the first place, which was really interesting, kind of realization out of this whole process, this project. Some of the articles that I really love, obviously, there is Tom Greenwood's article, the co founder of Wholegrain, who talks about the Wabi Sabi Web. And I just really love how Tom thinks and how he articulates his, his thoughts. It's just, it's kind of like a beautiful journey through his mind. And so Tom picked a Japanese philosophy called wabi sabi, and he used several examples of how we might use it to build a more humane web.

So wabi sabi is a concept where you kind of accept the imperfection and kind of the fact that all things All of these are beautiful because they reflect the time and the experiences that they have been through, but we don't necessarily see that on the web. And maybe that's the problem. Maybe, you know, all of the data are kind of like set in stone and we don't see how the users behind the data changed and evolved over time.

So this is just a really interesting and very fascinating exploration of how we might. Imagine a different kind of web called the Wabi Sabi Web, so to

Chris Adams: S W S W, instead of dub dub dub, right? So, W W W, W S W, perhaps.

Marketa Benisek: Yeah. Yeah,

Good point. Then also just going back to friction, I actually, Hannah pointed me to a really fascinating project called Designing Friction by two artists based in the Netherlands. And I did an interview with them and they really very much go against this whole concept of what the web is becoming. You know, it's becoming this unhuman frictionless space that doesn't really allow for playfulness. And they are against it, not only as artists, but as parents, as human beings. And so it was really interesting to read through their principles of how we should kind of make friction part of the digital culture.

It should be something that is celebrated and even sought for. You know, it shouldn't be something that we should avoid. And they give a whole bunch of examples of how we might be able to do that. And just to clarify, this is not to say that friction should make the internet slow or, you know, it's not about making the user experience awful. It's just about making the whole user experience more human. It shouldn't be about users, but it should be about people. So to speak, and then we've got a whole bunch of real examples. Uh, from authors who are actively trying to understand what the internet is like for people in different parts of the world. And yeah, for example, there's a really lovely article from Barbara and Olivia from the Engine Room who talk about their research on the information ecosystem in Latin America. And another one about e waste in India and another one from Hemanuel on the importance of the internet connection for the peoples of Amazon. In order to help them kind of defend not only their own rights, but also the nature around them that they are living in harmony with. So these real examples of what the internet is like in different parts of the world, not just in our kind of privileged, rich, you know, Europe or our part of the world, has been just really so eye opening and I really, really strongly recommend people to, to go and have a look.

Chris Adams: So you spoke a little bit about say, you know, friction, making things a bit more kind of legible or possibly understanding where it's not just kind of totally seamless, fast thing where there's no agency for people at the end use, but you've also spoken, and there's maybe some content about essentially this intersection of climate and technology, how it manifests in different parts of the world, like you just mentioned, those, those writers from various places.

Thank you for that. Okay, Hannah, can I hand over to you perhaps to talk about some of the things that have been catching your eyes, that you direct people's attention to now that you've been working on this magazine for the last, like, couple of months, for example,

Hannah Smith: Yeah. Thanks, Chris. I think there is a piece written by Melissa, who's one of the organizers at climateaction.tech. And she has talked about a concept using a four winged butterfly. And the idea of the four winged butterfly is it represents a social transformation. And I think if we're going to transform the internet to be a more healthy place, to be a more humane place, to be a more just place, to be a more sustainable place, I think this is something everybody should read.

She talks about the, it's not her concept. It's, it's a concept from somebody else. But she's put it into a digital sustainability context. And the basic idea is that you need these four different elements of change. So each element of change is a wing of the butterfly and a butterfly needs all four wings or all four parts in order to be able to fly.

So it's this idea of, yeah, it's a lovely idea. I think it's a really, really good one. And the way she talks about it is, you know, she says, well, look, if you're looking at something that somebody's trying to do, if you're looking at a project and you think, ah, this is rubbish, this is no good, this isn't, you know, perfect, what about X, Y, Z, she said, well, you know, you can look at these other wings of the butterfly or these other aspects and actually maybe understand that, you know, this particular change or this particular initiative you're looking at is only one part of the butterfly.

But if it's connected with other parts of the butterfly together, it actually makes a movement, you know, a social change that can move, that can fly. And I loved that practical toolkit that she was giving there to say, hey, you know, if you think something's imperfect, perhaps You're only narrowing in on a really tiny part of it and, and if you zoom out, there's yeah, look at the bigger picture, you might realize that this is an absolutely essential part of making other things move or, or of giving other areas flight.

So I loved Melissa's piece and I, I really recommend that for anybody who's, who's interested in, in creating change and, and making progress. And I'll say two other quick things. One that just, it was a bit of a late addition to Branch, but it's just absolutely captured me, floored me, is there, it's a piece by Rob Hopkins.

And he's just published something called the Ministry for Imagination, which is the work coming from a hundred podcast episodes where he invites people onto the podcast. To talk about the world. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So you've got a long way to go, Chris, a hundred episodes. So he has sort of through working with these different people, they're interviewing on the podcast, come up with this manifesto for what it means to imagine a better world.

And it's not really just tech related. It's far broader than that. It's across all of society, but it is an absolutely incredible example of why imagination is important. And how sometimes it can lack a little bit in the digital space. I think we, we can get a little bit narrow minded about things perhaps, or see things in a bit too black and white and maybe not, not be playful enough.

So here's Ministry of Imagination. I can't recommend strongly enough that everybody takes some time to have a look at that for like an absolute definition of the power of imagination and solarpunk. And then the last thing I'll, I'll mention super quickly. Is when Marketa and I were looking at all of the articles, we had a hope at the beginning that we would not just have loads of writing, but that we would have art and we would have poetry and music.

And we noticed that poetry and music was a little bit lacking in the edition. So we've set off and created a Branch issue eight playlist. Where we have asked a whole bunch of people from across the community to suggest songs that motivate them to take action. But then also pick out lyrics that really speak to them.

And actually I had a chance to listen to the playlist before launch. It is so eclectic. We've got rock, we've got classical, we've got trance, we've got acoustic, we've got reggae, we've got funk. We've got like, hardcore dance music. We've got all this stuff. And I think what that speaks to me is that there is no perfect music choice to get motivated by.

Everything is different. It's, it takes a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of, of vibes, energies to make change. And I think the playlist really, really embodies that. And I think it also speaks to. The wider movement as well around needing a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of cultures.

Songs are all in different languages as well, but actually you bring all of that together and you get a real tapestry. And I loved listening to the songs and I loved reading the lyrics that people highlighted and their reasons for including these songs. So it's, I know it's not that much to do with tech, but we are all humans at the end of the day.

And I think music is, can be a really, really big motivator and something that really brings people together as well. So I'm a big fan for the playlist as well that came about and you can find that on Spotify too.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. So it sounds like there's, okay. Let's say that we have prose, poetry and music and references and links to other forms of music as well. All right. This is, this is sounding quite rich actually. Okay. We're, we're just coming up to the end of time. So this is basically a kind of project. If there's something of a passion project, but there is still a focus very much on like digital culture and things like that.

I understand that you do more than just make magazines. So Marketa, we should probably tell people where to go to look for this. I mean, maybe is there a domain name or a search search term they should be looking for if they want to learn about some of the things we've been talking about?

Marketa Benisek: Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone is interested in reading any of these articles and much more, they can go to branch.climateaction.tech. They can find all the information there and all the articles, the playlist and everything else that we've been working on over the past four or five months, something like that. Yeah. So that's,

Chris Adams: so Branch. climateaction.tech is the way to look up, and that'll give you the most recent issue. So we're recording this on the 22nd of April, but I believe it's going to coming out in the next week or so, maybe the 25th, I think it was the date that I've heard. And presumably that'll be the big day.

Okay. So when this comes out. If you're listening to this, it's probably out already, so you can check it out yourself along with the other previous seven issues worth of content that you have there. All right, and if I understand it, this isn't all that you do, so maybe I could actually just, while you're here, give you a bit of space to kind of talk about some of the other things you're doing.

So, Marketa, for example, where else should people be looking if they want to learn a little bit about digital sustainability or some of the ideas or some of the kinds of things that we've discussed, for example.

Marketa Benisek: Sure. So we frequently publish new articles on our blog. So people can go to wholegraindigital.com and then go to our blog and they can find lots of stuff related to digital sustainability, humane web thinking, that sort of thing over there. And I'm also very happy and proud to be on the team that creates a monthly newsletter called Curiously Green. And that's all about. All the things, digital sustainability. So yeah,

they can just go to,

Chris Adams: I really like that as well, actually. I'm glad

Marketa Benisek: thank you

Chris Adams: And Han, if people are curious about where you've been coming from, I suppose, is, are there any projects or things you'd like to draw people's attention to in the last few minutes that we have for this?

Hannah Smith: Yeah, thanks Chris. So I guess my day job is at the Green Web Foundation. So you can head over to thegreenwebfoundation.org and you'll see a lot of my work represented there. You'll see a lot of blog posts coming out from me, where we talk about the Green Web Dataset. We talk about our open source co2.js package, and also there'll be some really nice work coming out soon.

With some really nerdy deep dive work into the practicalities of carbon emission estimates for digital. So Chris, obviously you and I are working on that together. Yeah, head on over there and I think you'll get a good insight as to what my day job involves on that website.

Chris Adams: Okay. And just before I go, I believe outside of life, you also have run, you mentioned Green Tech Southwest, that's another community that you're involved with.

Hannah Smith: Yeah, that's right. So Green Tech Southwest, it's, it's kind of location based. The community at its heart is in the southwest of the UK. Anybody is welcome to come. All of our events are online. We've got another event coming up in May the 2nd, where we'll be looking at a methodology for measuring CO2 emissions.

And we'll also be looking at some really cool visualizations of renewable energy projects in the UK. So if you can't make it in person, if you're not based in Bristol or near to Bristol, you're very welcome to join online. And that is applicable to anybody, wherever you are in the world. You're super welcome to come and be a part of that community.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you for that. All right. I think that takes us to time actually. So folks, thank you so much for giving me your time and talking to, and giving this sneak peek of a project that's kind of close to all of our hearts, I suppose. And hopefully some of the listeners who get exposed to this, I guess all we have left is to say, thank you very much.

Have a lovely week and yeah, best of luck with the launch.

Marketa Benisek: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Hannah Smith: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having us along.

Chris Adams: All right. Take care, folks.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show. And of course, we'd love to have more listeners.

To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundation. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode!

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams introduces the co-authors of Building Green Software - Anne, Sara, and Sarah. Through candid discussions, they explore the process of writing about green software development and highlight key insights gained along the way, touching on the interconnectedness between sustainability and existing best practices in software engineering, and emphasizing that embracing sustainability isn't about adding extra tasks but rather integrating it seamlessly into existing protocols such as security, resilience, and monitoring. Join for a thorough conversation on the lessons learnt writing the newest book on green software.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
• Sarah Hsu: LinkedIn 
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• Building Green Software [Book] [07:57]
• Amazon.com: Building Green Software: A Sustainable Approach to Software Development and Operations 

Events:

• QCon London [30:36] 
• NDC { Oslo } [32:00] 

Resources:

• What Adrian Did Next: 2022 Conference Appearances [17:53]
• https://github.com/adrianco/slides/blob/master/Carbon%20Moonitorama%202022.pdf 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Anne Currie: A lot of the best practice in sustainability is often also the best practice in other areas. So it's just one more good reason to adopt best practice in security, in resilience, in monitoring, you know, it's not something you're going "oh my goodness, mate, we have a whole extra thing to do." It's just another reason to do all the things that you should be doing anyway.

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, welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We talk about green software a lot on this podcast, but if you're coming to this from, typically, a background of software engineering, it can be hard to figure out where to go next after you've done some of the kind of free training or seen a few talks online. So, you might ask yourself, "how do you build green software?" Fortunately, today, I'm sharing a podcast with three women who've written a book called precisely Building Green Software. I'm joined by Anne, Sarah, and Sara. So, before we dive into this and talk about how you build a book called Building Green Software, I just want to give a bit of space for my co-host this week to come on. Anne, is it okay if I give you the space to introduce yourself and then hand over to the next of your little gang?

Anne Currie: Absolutely. Yes. So my name is Anne Currie and I am the CEO of a green training company called Strategically Green. And I'm also one of the co chairs of the GSF community working group, and I am the lead on the GSF's new Maturity Matrix project. So yeah, those things, and I'm one of the co-authors of building green software along with, and I will hand over to Sara.

Sara Bergman: Hi, my name is Sara Bergman, or Sara Bergman, Bergman. I never know how to say it in English because it's so different from the Swedish. But yes, I am a senior software engineer at Microsoft, even though I'm currently on maternity leave, hence why brain is not fully switched on, and one of the co-authors of the book Building Green Software.

Sarah, over to you.

Sarah Hsu: I've been waiting for that sentence for so long. Sara and myself have been working together, but we never really shared a stage. So Sara over to you, or Sarah over to you, has been our dream for a long time, and now it's finally happening. But anyway, hello everyone. My name is Sarah Hsu. Similar to Sara, my surname is actually pronounced very differently with an English accent.

So yeah, Sarah Hsu, it's fine. So currently I'm a site reliability engineer working for Goldman Sachs, but I'm also one of the co-authors of the Building Green Software book. And this is why we are here today. I'm also the project chair for the Green Software course that we recently launched with Linux Foundation a few years ago, and we currently have over 70 000 completion, which is amazing.

But yeah, anyway, that's me.

Chris Adams: Cool, thank you, Sarah, sara, and Anne. I'm saying hello from Berlin and Sarah Hsu, you're calling from London.

Sara, whereabouts are you calling from today?

Sara Bergman: I am in Oslo, Norway. So yeah, I am Swedish, but I live in Norway. This does not matter to anyone who lives south of Denmark, but for us Scandinavians, it matters a great deal.

Chris Adams: Cool, thank you. And Anne, where are you calling from today as well?

Anne Currie: I'm calling from London as well. So we're not quite as international as all that.

Chris Adams: Oh, well, it's not bad. Four different cities in three nations isn't, isn't too bad, I suppose. All right. Okay, so if you're new to the Green Software Foundation podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I'm one of the policy working group chairs in the Green Software Foundation myself. I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch non-profit focused on reaching a fossil free internet by 2030. And before we dive into what it's like writing books about green software, here's a quick reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes on this episode. And because we're a software engineering podcast, the transcript will be available on GitHub in markdown format. So if there's any typos or there's corrections, then we do accept pull requests.

And if there are pull requests that are accepted, we'll then credit you and shout you out in the next episode. All right, then. So, itooks like you're sitting with us comfortably, Sara, Sarah, and Anne. Should we get into it and talk a little bit about writing green software and or writing about writing green software?

Yeah?

Anne Currie: Absolutely.

Chris Adams: All right. Okay. I'm going to hand to you, Sarah, first. If I understand it, this is one of, your first book writing about green software. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you found that process, writing about, say, a developing field like this.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah. It's my first time writing a book and it's also my first time appearing on a podcast. So maybe we can make another episode on this experience. I'm joking. So what was it like writing a book on green software? Honestly, I don't want to sound too cheesy, but it has been a really fulfilling experience.

And why is that? It's because finally I can use what I'm good at, which is software engineering, and use what I've been training for the past seven to 10 years to have a positive impact on the environment. And it just, it's great to see that ripple effect from something I'm good at and instead of just individual actions.

So I feel that really, really close to my heart. And of course that Anne and Sara made, they're not, they're more than just the icing on cake. They're absolutely integral to this entire experience. I've always admired them since I first met them three years ago. And working with them has taught me so much.

Yeah, couldn't have asked for better co-authors. And, and thankfully we all share similar humor. So when one of us put a joke or put a pun in a book, it doesn't get like, "this is not funny," cross it out. So I think that's also another icing on the cake. Yeah. But yeah, hopefully that's not too cheesy of an answer... 

answer but 

Chris Adams: No, it's okay. It's okay to be genuine if you've enjoyed working with other people, especially if you're doing something you believe in. Absolutely. All right. So that's the skinny from someone who's basically been writing books like this for a while. Anne, this isn't your first rodeo, you've written a few other books.

And I know that you, and we've spoken a little bit about all kinds of sci-fi books before, so maybe you could, I could just touch on you about maybe some of the differences between writing about wacky sci-fi or writing about things when you're, if you forgive the term, at the coalface of software development trying to figure out what to do next here.

Anne Currie: Yeah, that's a good point. So this is my tenth book, eight of which though were sci-fi, were futuristic sci-fi, but kind of like more speculative fiction than hard sci-fi. So it was all kind of surprisingly similar to writing an actual book about stuff that's happening now. But oddly enough, writing the fiction is much easier because you get to make it all up.

Whereas, although I try not to make it up, I try to keep it quite, quite, quite,

realistic. It's hard sci-fi, Yeah. but the book was much more difficult because the book, I mean, I think this is true for all of us. It was really important that we got everything right and we, and we phrased it right and we made it so that people could read it. Which I also want to do with my books, but they aren't quite so important, if you know what I mean. This feels like an important book, or we need there to be an important book, so hopefully this will be the important book, because if it isn't, then it'll be quite a long time before there is another one.

It's a lot of work, writing a book.

Chris Adams: I can definitely concur with that. Alright, so, one thing I didn't mention was that this was actually published by O'Reilly, who have some form writing about sustainability in this field. There was a book by Tim Frick, in the mid 2000s, called Designing for Sustainability, which was focused on web. But as I understand it, this has more of a focus on parts of cloud, perhaps, or some of the other practices. Sara, you've been working with cloud for a good few years now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what actually the content covers inside green software, because it's quite a wide term and there are ideas like web for sustainability. Maybe you could just, maybe give a high level on some of the areas you focus on, then we can talk a little bit about how you folks work together remotely.

Sara Bergman: Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So definitely if you run on cloud, we have a lot of content for you, but even for people who have their own data centers or on prem and you're allowed to call like a few servers in a closet, a data center, as far as we're concerned, there are definitely material for those people as well. We all come from a more backend point of view, but there is.

Web and front end content as well. Some of the points are on a much higher level than this applies only to you if you deploy to this specific type of machine. We tried to go broader, so it's really for anyone who writes or works in the software industry. Not just for, for the engineer, but for someone who is in a role that's not so directly linked to, to code.

We focus a lot on ops as well. So if you are on that side, there is a lot of good content for people like that. And that was really important to us. We come from slightly different backgrounds and we don't want to exclude anyone. That was one of the things we talked about really early on in the process.

You should pick this book up and feel like there is something for me here. And that's been really fun, I think, to sort of go broader than maybe you do in your regular, like, nine to five job.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. Thank you for that, Sara. So, I now. If I may, I'm just going to touch on a couple of things that you spoke about there. You spoke about the idea that you're writing a book for a number of different audiences, so it's not just for people who are like optimizing code. It's not just about green code, there's maybe aspects of ops as well and things like that. And, given that you're not all in the same space, and given that O'Reilly has quite a, like, established kind of setup for writing books, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you wrote this. Like, was it like, you're using a bunch of GitHub together? Was it Google Docs? Or is there some kind of magic platform behind the O'Reilly firewall that you might be using to keep track of this stuff?

Because I've never, I've never understood, and we're a bunch of engineers here, or at least coders here, because I'm curious, I'm interested in it, and like, it seems a bit weird to maybe use like email versions of Word around to write a book about code, for example.

Anne Currie: Yeah, it was all Google Docs. Well, well, one of the interesting things is O'Reilly have a lot of different options for how you're going to do it. So they have a kind of, there are kind of GitHub integrations where you can do all through GitHub. But we decided to do it all on Google Docs because we were so remote. And in fact, we've only met all the three of us in person once before. So it was all, all had to be remote. So we would use Google Docs. And I think it went pretty smoothly. That was quite easy. I don't know what you two thought.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, I agree. And especially because all of us have been traveling at some point, or some of us traveled quite a lot, I've had, been very pregnant and then had a baby. And there are circumstances where you don't want to boot up a laptop and like sign into a Git repo. Like that's second nature to some, but sometimes it's very convenient to be able to do it from your phone at 3am, if that's when you have the time.

Chris Adams: All right. Okay then. So that gives us a bit of idea of like how the sausage was made, so to speak. All right, then. Anne, I'll put this to you first and then see who else wants to bite. Last time we were speaking, Anne, you were, we were talking about, I think, lasers from space as a way to power data centers, about whether that's a good idea or a bad idea. And I learned a bunch of things about there. So are there any particular things you learned about green software along the way when you're writing this book? Because you can't, you know, you can't be the expert automatically then, and it's a very, very fast moving field. So were there any things that kind of leap out at you or that you were surprised by as you were writing this, that you had to kind of change your opinion on or rethink perhaps?

Anne Currie: Well, probably my favorite chapter to write, which was, was the one that I had to do the most work on, the most research on, we only decided to add later on in the course of the book, which was the networking chapter. Because I was quite interested in what, how does networking fit into green software? You know, is it, where is all the electricity being burned?

You know, and I've, the, the most interesting thing I think in that was I interviewed a whole load of people and I did a lot of reading of papers and things like that to find out what was going on. And the interesting thing for me, I think was the last mile, comparing how good or bad, or green or ungreen all the ways means of connectivity are. So, finding out that that fiber is by far the best by a long chalk actually. So fiber is fantastic. So the backbone is pretty good. The Metro, which is what takes your data across cities, that's pretty much all fiber these days, it's pretty good. And The Last Mile, if it's fiber, it's pretty good to your house. That's the best, followed by Copper. Copper is actually pretty okay, if you're still, I'm still on Copper here, and don't, you know, don't feel too badly about Copper. But once you move into wire free stuff, then Wi-Fi isn't too bad, but 3G is absolutely terrible. 2G is terrible. 3G is better than 2G was.

4G is much better than 3G was. And 5G is much better than 4G. But one of the things that interests me about it is that the mobile generations are a classic. Something we talk about a lot in the book is Jevons paradox, which is the idea that as things get more efficient, you use more of them or to a certain extent, you don't use more of them because the, well, 

they, you, 

Chris Adams: The savings can be eroded by the increased amount of use in absolute terms. That's what you're getting at, right?

Anne Currie: Indeed. Yes. Yeah. And 5G, I would say is the classic example of that, which is it's much better than 4G, but you know, people didn't invent it for that reason. They developed the efficient 5G because they wanted us to be doing a lot more stuff on mobile devices, and we will use it. The whole point is for us to do more stuff on mobile devices, more mobile gaming. And so, yeah, 5G is vastly better than 4G, but it will drive massive increase in the use of mobile. And mobile is very energy intensive compared to a landline or Wi-Fi. It's different use case.

Chris Adams: So there's one thing I want to just check on before I kind of hand over to one of the... Can I say one of the Saras, or one of the... Sarahs, Saras, all right, yeah. I'll hand over to you if there's anything that you found surprising. So when you're saying better, you're talking about in terms of energy use per gigabyte transferred here. That's your use, like it's efficiency that you're referring to there, right?

Anne Currie: Bits per watt or watts per bit is the industry term for it. And it's something they really do focus on a lot. And the interesting thing is, yeah, I mean, obviously networking is there because everybody wants to do more networking. There's, there's so much untapped demand, which is a classic Jevons paradox issue, really.

Chris Adams: Well hopefully the fact that we've got a bunch of dark, do we still have significant amounts of dark fiber from previous dot com booms and busts where we've got all this stuff available for us to use? Surely that's one thing that we have been able to pick up on, right? Right,

Anne Currie: Well, yeah, there certainly would have been, but to be honest, the past is of no use to us really. It's all the stuff that's been, we're just still laying cable at an unbelievable rate to handle people's, the desire for streamed content.

Chris Adams: So there's an aspect of embodied carbon that we need to be thinking about as well then. So that's one of the things we've learned. Alright, I'll open the floor to, yeah, Sarah Hsu, in London. Are there any particular things that surprised you when you were writing this or caused you to kind of change your mind or think, "Oh. This is probably something we should be spending a bit more time thinking about," for example.

Sarah Hsu: Yeah, so we have a chapter called Core Benefits. And our initial idea was to basically examine green software from different perspectives in software engineering. We have like security, we have reliability, resilience we've performance, data, all that. But while we were writing that chapter, we realized, "hey, actually, this is all very important, but one thing that we're seeing is, because of what's going on around the world, there's so many other things going on. People really are not taking green software as seriously as maybe say 2021." So we actually wrote a chapter on like how we can help our readers to convince others that green software is not as difficult as it's thought out to be, and we came up with like a three bullet points on like how you can convince others. But most importantly, that we want to say in this chapter is that there are so many other knock on benefits from doing other best practices in software engineering already. Green software is not its own ivory tower, like people shouldn't be worried like, "Hey, like everyone is already so overstretched," you don't need to worry about. "Oh, now I need to have a whole new team just to work on sustainability." People who are already very skilled in security, very skilled in reliability, they all can help our software to be more sustainable. I think that's a really strong information we really want to send out there, especially to like the grassroots people and not fail them to be really helpless in the current climate.

So yeah, that's probably quite interesting realization we had later into the book.

Chris Adams: Okay, that's quite an empowering message, and that sounds like, there's a really lovely quote from Adrian Cockcroft, who's leading the Realtime Carbon Project, so he says like "carbon is another metric," and yes, there are other, obviously more metrics that you need to track, but it's not like people in software engineering have never had to measure something before.

So that's one of the things, like, obviously there's things about transparency that can help, but yeah, to an extent, there are lots of transferable skills that can be applied into this domain as well. That seems to be what I'm getting from you on that one.

Anne Currie: Yeah, I mean, I really liked your chapter that you wrote on that. You put something in, Sarah, about "it's not a new work stream." It's, you know, a lot of the best practices in sustainability is often also the best practice in other areas. So it's just one more good reason to adopt best practice in security, in resilience in monitoring, you know, it's not something you're going "oh my goodness, mate, we have a whole extra thing to do." It's just another reason to do all the things that you should be doing anyway.

Chris Adams: Okay, that's a useful framing actually. Sara, I, are there any things that you've learned, that you found, that you want to share, or that you would think would be salient for the conversation here?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, sure. I think, and that maybe goes back to the process is we interviewed people, a lot of people for this book and got their perspective. We also have amazing tech reviewers, and all those people have been very instrumental to the book as well. And, and that's something where I learned a lot from to reach out to people and how willing people are to help and contribute and share their expertise inside the community.

So the community is great. So that's not maybe a hard skill or a hard thing, but that's something that I really enjoyed about the process. And that's something I learned a lot from specifically around the hardware chapter, because I don't work with hardware every day. So. That was a lot of learnings for me.

And actually, I listened to previous episodes of this podcast, for example, the one about the Junkyard Data Center, which is very interesting to include as well as a way to combat e-waste and how big of a problem that is. And then you also get to sort of step outside your bubble and like, okay, but e-waste is surely something that concerns software people, but also other people.

And then you get to realize, okay, but there is lots of legislation around the world working to combat this. And like things are already moving in other sectors as well, which is really fun to see. And then you get additional knock on effects because industries and countries come together to work towards the same goals.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right. Thank you for that, Sara. So, we've, you've written about this, and the thing, you know, when you write a blog post, and as soon as you've done that blog post, you realize, "oh, there's a things, a few things I wish I'd couldn't have put onto it." I imagine it might be somewhat similar when you're getting a book out the door, because once it's out, it's not like you can push updates to a book the same way you can push updates, you know, hotfixes and things. And now the Building Green Software, the book has gone to print, are there any things that you wish you had a bit more time to kind of write about, or that now that you've seen it, go, you know, "oh yeah, we totally missed this," or "here's a thing we should, if I could do that again, I'd spend a bit more time writing about." Sarah, if I can, if I start with you, then I'll kind of go around and then we can round this up perhaps.

Sarah Hsu: I definitely had that same reaction, like two weeks before we were about to submit everything... And this is not a software product. We don't have a process on how to mitigate an incident. What if we wrote something wrong? How do we go about it? I remember just like panicking as well. But it is very interesting, like looking at publishing book.

And like managing a production system. But anyway, I think the things that really, I wish I probably spent a little bit more time on is like in the observability space, like, especially how not just in green software, but like the traditional monitoring metrics and logging really isn't doing what it's supposed to do in the modern software system management, right?

As our system gets more intricate, there's a lot more microservices. Sometimes like if you want to go from one hop, one request all the way for the request to come back to give you a response that can go through a hundred different systems, how do you know exactly where things have gone wrong? And I think I really wish I've spent a lot more time thinking how carbon and how environmental aspects will marry into this space and how do we actually make sure that we are not reinventing the wheel and once whatever metrics, whatever data we are ready, we can slot right into what the world of DevOps and what of SRE is already very good at doing, which is production system management, especially on how to make our system observable, if that makes sense.

Chris Adams: Yes, it does. So what I think I'm taking away from you is that we've got things like spans, and we've got ways to kind of understand the impact of a particular API request or something like that. But when you've got a distributed system, we don't have something like the equivalent to that right now for

carbon, for example. You can't track distributed carbon across all your systems to kind of sum it up.

Sarah Hsu: To find out exactly which system is the trouble one, like, I have a really good analogy. I was writing this the other day, like, you can think of, like, three different elementary data as like a murder mystery, right? Metrics will tell you when someone has died, right? And logging probably will tell you how someone has died, and traces will tell you where this person has died.

So we need to figure out how all these three things will match with, like, the environmental aspect. And hopefully we can have, like, traces that will tell you that's exactly where the bottleneck is happening within our system that, okay, system C.5 is the one that's emitting the most carbon.

Chris Adams: Okay, we're going down a rabbit hole here, but like, we already have all tools like Grafana and stuff like that that give that. Surely we can work out these numbers. This is like a problem that can be solved by,

Sarah Hsu: Yeah. Yeah. But we just need to make sure we are going in the right step. I mean, and not come up with things that ourselves, if that makes sense.

Chris Adams: yeah, that does, okay, all right,

Anne Currie: It is,

well, I'm going to say it is a bit, we'll just spend it, we'll blow all our time talking about this. We need another, we need another podcast to talk about the similarities and differences between carbon metrics and other metrics, because there is a key difference, which we can't talk about now because we're going to run out of time, but we should, we should have that in another podcast. The key difference between carbon metrics and other metrics.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right, that's definitely a thing to dive into, because it's easy to get focused on carbon, and it turns out, yes, we're in a climate emergency, but there's other things we need to be thinking about as well. All right, okay, so we spoke a little bit about what's on your lap next, I suppose, and Sara, you mentioned that there's a baby on your lap, or that's one of the things that you have and you're coming back to. Are there any, like, what happens next now that this is out the door? Because, as I understand it, the book, Building Green Software, is available digitally for people, so you could get it through Safari. But I understand there was quite an interesting approach taken about making this available to a wider set of people.

Does anyone want to take that at all, to talk about the kind of like open aspect of this book? Because this was something which felt quite exciting when I, when I first heard about it.

Anne Currie: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. So at the moment, the book is, it's available on the O'Reilly Safari site. So anybody who's an O'Reilly subscription, or if you're a fast reader, you can, you can trial an O'Reilly subscription and read the whole thing. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend that because the book's very intense.

I think if you just sit there and read it end to end, your head will explode. But so it's available on O'Reilly. It's available to buy from all good, well digitally, it's available on the Kindle at the moment, so you can buy it from the Amazon site. And in two weeks, I think it comes out in physical form, so available from all good bookshops. So you can order it anywhere you like and read it in real life that way. Or if you wait a couple of weeks after that, until we actually have time to go around and set something up, it'll also be available under a creative commons license, so under a, it's a, it's a fairly restrictive one.

It's the O'Reilly creative commons license, which is, so you can't take it off and then write your own book, you know, you can't, it's, but you have to attribute this and it's non commercial and it's, but you can read it for free.

Chris Adams: So, source available. You can read it.

Okay, that's, wow, that's really, really exciting then.

Anne Currie: Yeah. That will be available. I'll have it a copy up on my Strategically Green website first, probably.

And then we will, we'll see where else we put it as well. But yes, we insisted on that because it's just so important, you know, it's saying, "we hope this is an important book and it's really important that people read it."

Chris Adams: Great, wow, that's exciting. It's really useful to have something in the, so it's not quite public domain, but it's definitely available in the same way that you can have source available licenses that you can still benefit from and apply there. All right, then. Okay, so we spoke a little bit about some of the things we're covering inside the book, about how you can find this, and when it may be available, and some of the lessons learnt along the way. I've got a question, I have to ask now, like, what comes next, now that we've done that? Anne, I'll put it to you, and then, if anyone wants to take the question after that. So, Anne, you've written a book, or you, plural, have written this book now. Do you just sit in your laurels? Do you just like wait for the royalties to come in or does something else happen after this now?

Anne Currie: If only, if only we could sit in our laurels and wait for the royalties... I don't think writing a book is something you, you ever, unless you're J. K. Rowling, you never really make a, maybe, maybe a film wouldn't be made from this book, but I suspect that's not the case. So, yeah. So the next thing I'm doing is a whole load of training around this, this stuff.

So I'm, I'm doing that through Strategically Green. So started to do some public training and, and one of the things that I'm doing in the public training is, it's focusing on the thing that I would have liked to have put in the book that I didn't. Which is that it's not all bad, you know, there's just enormous benefits.

And one of the reasons why we don't have a whole chapter of like, "Oh my goodness, mate, this is amazing. Why aren't you just stopping and dropping everything and converting your systems to run on renewables? Because it's, you're crazy not to" it's because I don't think a year ago when we started, 18 months ago, when we kicked this whole thing off, that was the case. It wasn't so obvious that renewable power was, was the win that it is becoming. I mean, if you look now somewhere like Spain and Portugal, I'll pick them rather than Scandinavia because Spain and Portugal were doing it the total new tech way. They're doing it with, it's all wind and solar. They're now even in the winter this year, they've had huge, they've had large numbers of weeks when power has been free for the bulk of the business day. So, you know, it's kind of like, this is the dream of humanity that, you know, through, through the ages that we would have effectively free power. And it's looking like that is a possibility, but we will need to change our systems to run on top of it because it's not all the time it's variable. And that's kind of the key message of the book.

But I wish we'd hammered it home a bit more, the wins.

Chris Adams: Right, I'm going to put the question to Sarah Hsu next, but just before Anne, I just want to check on that. When you're doing some research for this, we know that the power, the cost of power changes depending on how available it is. Are there any cloud providers who are making that visible to people yet? Because have you found this? It feels like it's the obvious thing to have to incentivize the use of green power, but it's almost nowhere so far. And maybe you, you might've come across this as well, or maybe the big providers might do something like this because they clearly are making significant decisions about this as well.

Anne Currie: No, I don't, nobody is, but I have spoken to people at most, apart from Google, who speaks to anybody, nobody speaks to anybody at Google, but I've spoken to, spoken to folk who don't necessarily know and have no ability to affect it, but they are aware that eventually we know that the clouds will provide dynamic tariffs. There's no doubt about that because everybody's going to have to provide dynamic tariffs at some point. So, you know, I don't believe that anybody does it at the moment, but I think there's no doubt that it is coming.

Chris Adams: Okay, so not from the big guys, but it's something available coming from somewhere. The one company I've found that is doing this so far, there's a company called TriBuild AI. They're doing this in, I think they're based in Texas, and they're strategically placing things, but the idea is that you can use the power, but not between 6pm and 9pm, when everyone's using power, and that's how they make it like a fifth of the cost of everyone else.

So we are seeing early signs of this, and like, there's examples everywhere outside of technology that we could learn from as well. Okay, all right then, so Anne, that's what you've got on. You've got the maturity matrix to kind of maintain, and the training that you have going on. Sarah Hsu, if I hand over to you. And now that the book's out the door, what do you think happens next? Or what's, what's on your plate after this?

Sarah Hsu: Well, I'm just speaking for myself, but I'm pretty sure all of us are going to be rock stars and go on a tour, go on a speaking tour and book signing tour. So yeah, I think Sara and Anne are doing QCon in April and myself, I'm not speaking this year, but we will be doing like a small book signing there. So it'd be great to see a few folks there.

Myself, we'll be going to Berlin for a conference and then hopefully we'll do some book signing there as well. And one thing I really want to do is I just want to find some observability for who is also really passionate about sustainability and just see what It's just really, really chat it out about like how we can do all this is within observability.

How do we actually make something observable in terms of carbon or like any environmental aspects if that makes sense.

Chris Adams: Yes, that does. If you are not already speaking to some of the CNCF TAG ENV folks, I'm really excited about some of the work they're doing, and they've recently presented some stuff at KubeCon specifically about the observability thing that it's definitely worth chatting about, actually. Okay, and so,

Sarah Hsu: Yeah, definitely.

Chris Adams: And Sara, I'll hand over to you now. What, now that this is out the door, what's on the plate for you, now that you're coming back into the world of, like, software engineering, as opposed to looking after the little one?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, out of the diaper. Well, I guess there will be still be diapers for plenty of time, but yeah, no, going back to work and then being a rockstar going on a speaker tour, like Sara said, so QCon London, which will be very fun. This is the second time only all of us see each other like in person. So very much looking forward to that.

Speaking at NDC Oslo later this year. Also, the Green Software Foundation has a meetup in Oslo, which is very fun. And next, next one of those, I'll be speaking as well. So that would be really fun to like see folk on my own home turf. And yeah, after that, who knows, you know, this was so much fun. Do we do a version two?

I, you know, we'll see. Right?

Sarah Hsu: I think we should, I forgot to mention, we've actually have the book translated to both complex and simplified Chinese. So that's something very, very exciting. I was telling one of my best friend, my best friend was like, "Oh, now your parents don't have an excuse to not read your book," because now, my poor mother will now have to read this book.

Chris Adams: Wow, I did not, that's, that's, well, it's more than a billion people. There's a, there's a readership to, to reach, and people who speak Chinese as a first language probably need to be thinking about the environmental impact of software as well, given it's the second largest economy in the world now, basically, so we've mentioned there's a growing body of resources out there for people to be looking at this. So we mentioned things like, say, some of the free training that's available from the Linux Foundation that people can pick up. And there's a book which we've spoke about, which is Building Green Software by O'Reilly that is going to be available from a number of different places. So Anne, if people do want to, obviously they know about the book, but beyond the book, where should people go if they're interested in what you were talking about or some of the things you're working on?

Anne Currie: Well, at the moment, LinkedIn is, I find, is the new place where all the green chat is happening. But yeah, yeah, LinkedIn. It was lovely whilst Twitter still existed as a thing, and I'm still there, 

Chris Adams: drove it into a mountain, yeah.

Anne Currie: Indeed. It was, yeah, I'm still there. I still find useful things there, but it's not as active as it once was.

So LinkedIn is now my social media hangout.

Chris Adams: Okay, alright, and then Sarah Hsu, how about you?

Sarah Hsu: Similarly, I was never really on Twitter and I'm really glad I have persuaded Anne to move over from Twitter to LinkedIn. I also just can't I do want to quickly mention, we do have an email address that you can reach out to all of us. It's [email protected]. So if you have any feedback, any suggestions, or just want to say... please, please, yeah, just reach out to one of us.

Or if you want more direct response from one of us, reach out to us on LinkedIn. 

Chris Adams: So if you're a retired engineer and you're going to tell people "you should be solving this all with nuclear," obviously, that's the way to, that's the place to send emails to. Okay, alright, please don't do that, actually.

And, Sara, for you, where should people look if they want to keep up with some of the things you're working on?

You mentioned QCon and a few things like that, but if there's a particular URL or website people should look at, then, now is your chance.

Sara Bergman: Yeah, I'm also, also on LinkedIn, missing Twitter. I still hang around, or X, I guess it's called now, and feel sad about what it once was. But no, LinkedIn is the best place.

Chris Adams: All right, then. Well, folks, thank you very much for sharing your time and sharing some of the insights you've learned along the way of building basically the first book about sustainability and stuff which wasn't written by men, because that's actually like about freaking time. That's very, very good. And yeah, lovely seeing you all again. Hopefully, maybe I'll see some of you in London if I get over there or possibly some of you see some of you in Berlin if you're coming over and maybe wonder if you might sign my copy if I can bring it. All right. Thanks, folks. This was fun. Really, really nice seeing you all again.

Sara Bergman: Thank you, Chris. 

Anne Currie: Thank you.

Bye bye.

Sarah Hsu: Bye guys.

Sara Bergman: Bye.

Chris Adams: Okay, take care of yourselves. 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.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.