Environment Variables

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 th...

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 cultu...

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
• 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:
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 sustainabili...

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 Gre...

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams engages in a fascinating discussion with Marjolein Pordon, a quality consultant at Praegus, about the exciting synergy between sustainability and low code platforms. They explore how low code tools not only streamline software development but also play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions. Marjolein shares insights into the early integration of sustainability considerations in the development cycle, and together, they demystify the misconception that companies' unique needs necessitate custom software solutions, highlighting the efficiency and environmental benefits of leveraging shared components in low code environments.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Marjolein Pordon: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

•  Introducing Flowty - Build low carbon, self-hosted Webflow sites - Fershad Irani [23:22]
• Data Center Factsheet [29:36]

Resources:

• Introduction to ESG [11:51]
• ESG and Climate Change | Coursera
• Mendix [14:32]
• WordPress [14:39]
• Zapier [14:49]
• Creatio [14:50]
• N8N [15:39]
• Windmill.dev [22:42]
• OutSystems  [34:15]

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:

Marjolein Pordon: With all the emails we send, inclusive, reply all, the, "yes, I'll see you in a minute." All those kinds of emails, there are 12 000 times from earth to the moon with a car on carbon emission. That's huge.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Environment Variables, the podcast where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. When we talk about green software, we often talk about optimizing code we already have, or finding out ways to make the energy we use less carbon intensive.

So for the computation we do end up using, we end up with less pollution in the form of greenhouse gases and so on being emitted as a byproduct of our work. However, there's another way to look at this. If we accept that the most efficient database query possible is one that you don't have to make because you've designed a system not to need them,

then you can argue that the most efficient system can be one that you haven't had to spend loads of time, energy and money building, building an entirely custom version of, because you found an existing set of components that work well together. This is essentially the argument made when people make the case that a technology stack containing open source software can be more sustainable than a closed source one.

In that the cost gone into building the various components is shared across all the millions of people who would otherwise be duplicating all this effort, building their own versions of these open source, the components. But does this apply elsewhere as well, though? Low code and no code environments have grown in popularity over the last few years, and one argument in favor of using them is that by building the system, or building any system from a set of existing components offered in a kind of visual, low coding environment, you avoid the need to spend so much time, money, and yes, energy, building your own custom software in the first place.

This brings up all kinds of interesting questions. Does this just mean that we end up with more software in total, because more people are building their own software, rather than a relatively small number of professional developers? And are the needs of organizations so sufficiently generic that you can use low code environments for this kind of stuff, to avoid needing all that custom code?

And if you're stuck using providers who are moving slowly to transition from fossil fuel in their infrastructure, what are your options? With me to explore these ideas today is Marjolein Pordon, one of the few people I've seen talking about both sustainability and low code at the same time. Thanks for joining me today, Marjolein.

Marjolein Pordon: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Adams: Okay, you're welcome, Marjolein. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself and what you do? And because you're the first Marjolein I've ever met, if I'm mispronouncing your name, could you please just share the pronunciation so I can use it properly when I'm later on the call? Because I'm trying my best, but you're the first Marjolein I've ever met.

Marjolein Pordon: Yeah, Marjolein is a Dutch name and you're pronouncing it correct. It's like Mar and then Yo from the rapper, Yo Yo, and then a line, like a thin line. So, Marjolein, that's, that's completely correct. Well, I'm Marjolein Pordon. I'm, 38 years old. I live in the Netherlands and I'm a quality consultant for the company Praegus. Praegus is a test consultancy company, and we also have a branch that looks into low code. And one of our CEOs is very much into sustainability. So I'm really in my place there. She also thinks that we should move to an office with sun, sunlight energy, and wind energy. So it's not just me, but also in the company I work for that we have these standards and I'm now, I...

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams delves into the fascinating topic of the rebound effect with Vlad Coroamă, founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability. They discuss how improvements in efficiency can sometimes paradoxically lead to increased consumption, using examples like teleworking and online shopping to illustrate the point. Through their conversation, they explore why this happens and what conditions make it more likely. Their insights shed light on the complexities of balancing technological advancement with environmental sustainability, offering valuable perspectives for anyone interested in building greener digital services.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Vlad Coroamă: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Assessing the Potential Energy Savings of a Fluidified Infrastructure | Computer [14:40]
• Digitalisation and the Rebound Effect - by Vlad Coroama (ICT4S School 2021) [22:45] 
• A Methodology for Assessing the Environmental Effects Induced by ICT Services | Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability [32:20]

Events:

• ICT4S 2024 [41:36]

Resources:

• Roegen Centre for Sustainability [03:00]
• https://pythonspeed.com/articles/software-jevons-paradox/ [05:36]
• The Coal Question | Online Library of Liberty  [06:34]
• Khazzoom–Brookes postulate - Wikipedia [10:02]
• Sustainability in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review
• https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lET2Yco=/?moveToWidget=3074457359170346418&cot=14  

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:
Vlad Coroama: When there is rebound, but if your digital service makes the activity sort of more affordable or simply more desirable, and it will be consumed more, but it will have changed in such a way that the footprint of the new activity, the modified one, is much smaller than the original one. And then although you might have rebound, the overall balance will be net positive.

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. When we talk about green software, the notion of efficiency comes up quite a lot. Take two forms of efficiency explicitly called out by the Green Software Foundation, software efficiency and hardware efficiency.

In the first case, you're talking about how much energy is needed to perform a given amount of computation. And in the second case, you're talking about how much hardware might need to be created by extracting material from the environment, refining it, then turning it into electronics that we run computation on.

In isolation, it's quite hard to argue against efficiency, and we can point to literally years of data showing how increases in efficiency in computing have blunted what might otherwise be eye-watering increases in the amount of energy consumption and other resources we have gone through in absolute terms.

Thing is, efficiency has second order effects too, because making things more efficient can make them more accessible too. Increasing the number of people who can use them. And we can point back to published work in 1865, observing this happen with coal-powered steam engines. So the common term for this is the Rebound Effect. And joining me today to explore what it means for greening digital services is Vlad Coroama of the Roegen Center for Sustainability.

I first came across Vlad's work when at a green cloud procurement workshop in 2019 held by the European Commission in Brussels. And over the years, I've had his writing and presentations about the rebound effect and digital sustainability, some of the most incisive and accessible work on the topic, on the subject.

Before I embarrass him further though, I think it might make sense to give him a bit of space to introduce himself. So Vlad, thank you so much for joining. I've been looking forward to this. Can I give you a few minutes to introduce yourself before we get into the meat of it?

Vlad Coroama: Hi Chris, many thanks for your kind intro, of course, for having me on your program. So I'm Vlad, the founder of the Roegen Center for Sustainability, which is a small company based in Zürich, Switzerland which tries to do a research, actually, more research than consultancy in the field of computing and sustainability, or if you want more from a, more from a deployment perspective, digitalization and sustainability.

Actually before that, this quite recent and before that for my entire life, I've been an academic and I've worked in the fields of computing and sustainability and also the more technical one of smart energy for about two decades now. And with both these hats on, so both with the more sort of hands on engineering system developing hat on, and with the more theoretical hat, what my work, which of course in the beginning, it was not so clear where the path leads to, but it became more and more clear that I want to understand how we can both make computing more sustainable, which is if you want p...

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams is joined by Rachel Tipton, a full stack developer at Open Climate Fix, to delve into the intersection of AI, green software, and electricity infrastructure. Rachel emphasizes the increasing demand for electricity due to factors like server centers, EVs, and electrification efforts. They explore the concept of carbon awareness and its implications for software development, shedding light on the complexities of optimizing energy consumption and reducing carbon emissions. Through Rachel's journey into coding and her work at Open Climate Fix, listeners gain insights into the critical role of technology in decarbonizing the electricity grid and mitigating climate change.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Rachel Tipton: Linktree | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• FOSDEM 2024 - Quartz Solar OS: Building an open source AI solar forecast for everyone  [2:23]
• Quartz Solar [15:09]
• Starting a non-profit research lab to help fix climate change ASAP | Jack Kelly [22:52]
• Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML | MIT Technology Review [42:05]

Resources:

• The Tech Generalist | Rachel TipTon [04:06]
• Women Who Code [04:08]
•  Subak [14:09]
• GitHub - openclimatefix/Open-Source-Quartz-Solar-Forecast [15:09]
• Real Decarbonization: How Oil and Gas Companies Are Seizing the Low-Carbon Future | Tisha Schuller [41:29] 
• html garden [42:36]
• https://sceneries.site/#home [42:49]
• https://github.com/search?l=&p=1&q=user%3Aopenclimatefix+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22&ref=advsearch&type=Issues&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=open 
• openclimatefix (Open Climate Fix) 

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:

Rachel Tipton: I think it's really important that people are aware that our electricity infrastructure is going to have to handle a lot more electricity, whether that's going to be like server centers, like computers in different places, but also like EVs. If we're going to electrify everything, we're actually going to be using much more electrical energy in the future because it's going to be replacing those carbon-based fuels.

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. When we talk about green software, it's common to start talking about energy efficiency, i.e. how much energy you need to perform some computation, or even hardware efficiency, i.e. how much physical hardware is needed to perform that computation. One idea that is less easy to understand is this idea of carbon awareness, an idea based around the fact that depending on where you are in the world or what time of day it is, the amount of fossil fuel being burnt to power the grid we rely on can change, which means the energy could be greener or less green.

This is because beneath the stack of technology that makes up the internet, there's an entire energy system that is at least as complex as the internet. And if you have visibility into that system, there are ways you can operate your systems at the level above to take advantage of these changing conditions, often to save on carbon emissions, and in some cases to save on cash too, as the price of energy can often change based on the amount of cheap renewable energy being fed into the grid that we draw electricity from.

As I mentioned before, this is an idea that takes a bit of getting used to, and when you hear it from publicly traded trillion dollar companies whose own reported emissions have only grown in the last few years, you may be right to be skeptical about carbon awareness. Now at FOSDEM, the largest open source conference in the world, in February, my guest, Rachel L'Abri Tipton at Open Climate Fix presented a fascinating talk about solar nowcasting, something we'll cover later.

But crucially, as someone who recently switched careers, both into software engineering and into working with grid operators, she seemed a good person to talk to, to learn more. Hi, Rachel. I've given you a bit of context about how we met. But I figured, can I just give you the floor to let you introduce yourself before we start?

Rachel Tipton: Hi Chris, thanks for having me on the show. I enjoyed listening to the other environment variable episodes

in preparation for the show and I think that I'm a convert. So I'm Rachel Tipton, I'm a full stack developer at Open Climate Fix, OCF, that's the shortening of Open Climate Fix, is a non-profit product lab, and we're developing renewable energy forecasts to decarbonize the electricity grid. We'll get more into that later, but I'm really happy and excited to be here speaking about my own coding journey today and my time at Open Climate Fix. In addition to speaking at FOSDEM, I was also part of organizing the energy dev room program that I spoke in, and that was organized by ...

This week, Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain and Anne Currie for an engaging chat on the present and future of legislation around AI and Green Software. Our guests share their hot takes on various topics such as the usefulness of proxies in measurement. With backgrounds in climate and tech, and a future full of green energy, they share their insights into what we might expect, and hope for, from the future. 

Learn more about our people:
Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Sustainability, a surprisingly successful KPI: GreenOps survey results [05:36]
• Cost as a Proxy for Carbon – the inconvenient truth | Kainos [13:41]
• Technology Carbon Standard [25:11] 
• Executive summary – Electricity 2024 – Analysis - IEA [32:15]

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24: Where measurement meets innovation, and impact knows no bounds [44:51] 

Resources:

• Amazon.com: Building Green Software: A Sustainable Approach to Software Development and Operations | Anne Currie et al. [02:20] 
• State of Green Software [06:25] 
• https://stateof.greensoftware.foundation/survey/ [06:30]
• GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/green-software-maturity-matrix: A green technology self-assessment tool for organisations [14:48]
• Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability |Chris Adams [23:52]
• Options to make software greener without changing the code, and how to remember them | Chris Adams [23:58]
• Nuclear? Perhaps! | Volts | Fanfare [37:37]
• JRC Publications Repository - Energy Consumption in Data Centres and Broadband Communication Networks in the EU [38:56]
• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7165707074901934082/ 

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: AI is eating the world, and it's incredibly requiring of energy. But I'm also going to come back to something that all three of us have said previously, which is, "does it matter if AI uses huge quantities of energy but it's all green?" Then it doesn't matter. And it's not, and that energy isn't necessarily being used for other things, because nobody wants it to heat their home in wherever it is, the middle of nowhere, where we've put our data centers.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. This podcast, Environment Variables, was initially set up as an example of what you might call pun-driven development between myself and Asim Hussain, back when we were both organizers at an online community called ClimateAction.tech. And, to be honest I kind of missed our chats, so I got in touch with him and asked if he'd like coming back on the podcast and talking about what he's been up to at the Green Software Foundation and I was very happy when he said yes. And likewise, Anne, our other guest today, she's been a fixture in green software for a while and has actually been working in the community working group as well as working on a book about green software called, unsurprisingly, Building Green Software.

It's nearly out, so I figured it was nice to kind of chat to her as well. So, that's what we're looking at today. Anne, Asim, lovely to have you on the podcast again. For people who've never listened to this podcast, can I give you the floor to talk about it? I'll go with you first, Anne, because it's alphabetical, and then I'll hand over to Asim.

So, yeah, Anne, the floor is yours.

Anne Currie: Hi, Chris. Thanks for that. My name is Anne Currie. I am one of the community co-chairs of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the CEO of a training and consultancy company in green software called Strategically Green. And as Chris said, things that I'm doing at the moment, I've been writing the last year, I've been writing with, with two co-authors, also from the Green Software Foundation, Sara Bergman and Sarah Hsu on the O'Reilly book, Building Green Software, which will be out next month. So that's all very exciting.

Exciting. It's very exciting.

Chris Adams: Okay. Thank you, Anne, lovely...

Chris Adams is joined by special guest Kate Goldenring, Senior Software Engineer at Fermyon. Together, they ask the real questions “is serverless computing the greener choice?” and “if so, under what circumstances is this true?” Tune in for an illuminating conversation on the current state, news, and future of green computing, digging into the topics of cloud computing,  soft allocation, WebAssembly, and more.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Kate Goldenring: LinkedIn | X

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/podcast-transcripts/pull/1 [09:00]
• PLATYPUS [09:30]
• Sysdig 2023 Cloud-Native Security and Usage Report [13:40]
• XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta | Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles [14:03]

Events:

• Carbon Hack 24: Where measurement meets innovation, and impact knows no bounds 

Resources:

• tag-runtime/wg/iot-edge.md at main [04:24]
• Bytecode Alliance [05:47]
• Basic Alpine Climbing Course - Seattle - 2024 — The Mountaineers [08:09]
• A greener, cost effective cloud with serverless WebAssembly [13:00]
• Surprising Scalability of Multitenancy - Marc's Blog [22:34]
• Introducing Spin | Fermyon [31:01]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [39:17]
• Take it to the limit: peak prediction-driven resource overcommitment in datacenters [41:06]
• GitHub - fermyon/spin: Spin is the open source developer tool for building and running serverless applications powered by WebAssembly. [42:36]
• Fermyon Discord server [43:09] 
• https://hotcarbon.org/assets/2022/pdf/hotcarbon22-sharma.pdf [43:30]
• Fermyon Technologies [45:56]

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:

Kate Goldenring: It is very clear that you reduce operational emissions by not running your application when you're not using it, so by leaving the gym. But actually, by oversubscribing, we're also reducing embodied emissions by having higher density and not needing as many servers. And so, I think this whole concept can help us decrease our software carbon intensity.

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. When we talk about reducing the environmental footprint of software, it's common to talk about making an application more efficient by using better algorithms or relying on languages that make more efficient use of resources than others.

However, the fact remains. That for most software in the world, most of the energy use comes from having millions of computers waiting for something to happen, rather than actively doing work themselves. So if you have software designed to let someone book a ticket, or buy a book, any time of day the transaction might only take a few minutes to complete, but the software still needs to be running 24/7 in a powered up state, constantly consuming resources to make that possible.

Now, common wisdom was that you need to design for peak amount of traffic you'd ever expect to see, and then just accept that paying to run all those servers all the time, waiting for something to respond was just the way it had to work. Serverless computing broke this assumption. Instead of paying per hour to have your software constantly running and available, waiting for responses, you'd design your software a specific way and pay to use it on a per request basis instead. When your software wasn't actively serving requests, it would scale all the way down to zero and you wouldn't be billed for these dormant periods. If an incoming request did come in, your software would wake up, serve them again, before going back to sleep.

And in aggregate, this would result in fewer machines needing to be run. Because computing resources were being allocated in a more efficiently across a large number of programs, running them only when they needed to do work. So that was the idea, at least. While we touch on the details later in this episode, there are definitely trade offs you need to accept when designing serverless programs.

And while the term serverless implies a lack of servers, there are still racks of kit required to run this infrastructure. So, is serverless computing the greener choice? If so, under what circumstances this is true, and what's the difference between a virtual machine, container, or even a WebAssembly runtime?

We're gearing up for the return of Carbon Hack 24 happening from March 18 to April 8, 2024. This year we're focusing on the Impact Framework, aiming to innovate how we measure the environmental impact of software. It's a chance for engineers, designers, and creators to dive into challenges, ranging from plugin development to non-technical content creation. We're inviting students too, with special categories just for them. Join us to push the boundaries of sustainable software. For details on how to register or to become a sponsor, check out the link below:

Register at https://grnsft.org/hack/podcast 👈

Find out more about Impact Framework:

• Environment Variables Episode 58: BETA Impact Framework

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: Hey everyone, Asim here. Carbon Hack is back this year. The hackathon will take place from Monday, March the 18th to Monday, April the 8th, 2024. Carbon Hack 24 is all about redefining the way we measure software to reduce its environmental impact. footprint. At the heart of this hackathon is Impact Framework, an open source tool that lets you compute and report the environmental impacts of software applications accurately.

It takes observations you can easily gather about running systems such as CPU utilization, page views, or number of installs, or anything else, and converts them into environmental impacts like carbon, water, energy, air quality, in an auditable, replicable, verifiable, and transparent way. With Impact Framework, if we can observe something, we can measure its impacts.

If you want to find out more about what the Impact Framework does, you can listen to episode 58 of Environment Variables. 

Why the focus on measurement, you might ask? Well, we've learned that at the intersection of software and sustainability, measurement is the compass guiding our way. How we measure software's environmental impact is more than just a technical detail. It's the key to unlocking the magnitude of change we can achieve. 

Here's the challenge. Alone or in small teams, participants will have the freedom to choose from a variety of prize categories, including Best Plugin. Impact Framework itself is just very, very simple. The power of Impact Framework is its plugin ecosystem. We've got plugins which take CPU utilization and turn it into energy. We've got plugins that take energy and turn it into carbon. We need more and more and more of these plugins to be built for my statement I said previously to be true, to take any observation and convert it into environmental impacts. We need plugins for that. So one of our prize categories is best plugin. We want you to build the best plugin you can build. If you submit your plugin idea on the Hack website, We actually nurture you, we help you, we guide you towards designing a plugin which has the best possible chance of winning.

There's another prize category called Beyond Carbon, which I'm very, very excited about. If you can build a plugin which outputs an environmental impact that's not carbon, for instance, water. You can submit your solution to the Beyond Carbon prize category. We really want to move the conversation beyond carbon this year. That's my personal goal. 

This year, we've also got prize categories for non technical contributions. We've got a best content category. This is a category for people who would create the best piece of content, be it a how to video or a tutorial or a written booklet on how to use Impact Framework in any context, be it for a particular domain or in a generic sense, that's what best content is all about. How we're also expanding best content is if you're going to write a case study that uses Impact Framework to measure the impact of something and you write up that case study in such a way that it becomes a learning resource that also counts for best content as well. 

We also want to encourage people to contribute to the framework itself. The framework is a piece of code which sits on the Green Software Foundation's GitHub repository. And if you can contribute to that code by going to our GitHub repository and picking up an issue and saying, I would like to work on this issue for the hackathon. Please go right ahead and we'll nurture you, we'll guide you, we'll support you because we want to make sure your contribution is accepted. But that is how you can submit the best contribution category. 

And this year we're thrilled to open our doors to students. We have two prize categories for students. We have an undergraduates category. If your entire team is made up of undergraduates, you can then win a set separate accessory prize for undergraduates.

And again, if your entire team is made up of under 18s, we also have another prize just for you, an under 18s prize. 

So how can you become part of CarbonHack24? It's as simple as signing up on our website at grnsft.org/hack/podcast that's grnsft.org GRN SFT. org forward slash hack forward slash podcast.

There you'll find all the details about the event registration and upcoming live sessions where I'll be talking every single Monday, giving you an overview of the hackathon, what's going on the latest information and just taking you some of the latest projects. This is your opportunity to be part of a global movement that's shaping the future of sustainable software. 

We also extend a warm invitation to organizations that align with our vision to join us as sponsors. This is your chance to witness early stage innovations, connect with talented individuals, and showcase your commitment. If you're interested in sponsorship, visit the same link, which is grnsft.org/hack/podcast. 

I'm thrilled about CarbonHack24. We're going to explore innovative ways to measure the environmental impact of software. Join us for three weeks of exciting challenges where engineers, designers, and content creators will use Impact Framework to measure software's environmental footprint.

We can't wait to see what innovations and solutions emerge from this incredible event. See you there.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.