Environment Variables

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital, to bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. They discuss insights from The State of Green Software report, the cost reduction strategy of Amazon's Prime Video, Atlassian's sustainability program, Wholegrain Digital's Employee Activism Policy, the open-source Falcon LLM, and the innovative approach of heating swimming pools with servers. They also highlight upcoming events like the GSF’s UN World Environment Day Event (today!) and the London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup. Tune in for a deep dive into the intersection of technology and sustainability.

TWiGS host Chris Adams is joined by special guest Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital, to bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. They discuss insights from The State of Green Software report, the cost reduction strategy of Amazon's Prime Video, Atlassian's sustainability program, Wholegrain Digital's Employee Activism Policy, the open-source Falcon LLM, and the innovative approach of heating swimming pools with servers. They also highlight upcoming events like the GSF’s UN World Environment Day Event (today!) and the London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup. Tune in for a deep dive into the intersection of technology and sustainability.

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:

• State of Green Software | Green Software Foundation [2:54]
• Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% | Prime Video Tech [09:04]
• Don't F&*% the planet. | Atlassian  [17:58]
• Activism Policy - Wholegrain Granary | Wholegrain Digital [18:47]
• UAE's Falcon 40B is now Royalty Free | Technology Innovation Institute [26:28]
• New data centre turns waste heat into warm water for swimming pools | TheNextWeb [29:17]

Events:

• UN World Environment Day: The Green Software Revolution (Virtual Event) - Monday June 5th [31:27]
• London Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup | June 14 2023 [32:15]

Resources:

• Green Software for Practitioners (LFC131) | Linux Foundation Training [7:10]
• From Carbon Aware to Carbon Intelligent  | Environment Variables episode with Luis Cruz at TU Delft [8:03]
• So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story | Adrian Cockcroft [11:09]
• Grok Ventures | Mike Cannon-Brookes [15:42]
• Blueprint for climate activism policy | Business Declares [22:49]
• Climate Clauses | Chancery Lane Project [23:36]
• Learn About the Salesforce Sustainability Exhibit Unit | Salesforce [25:38]
• tiiuae (Technology Innovation Institute) | HuggingFace [28:51] 
• W3C Web Community Group [34:44]
• Curiously Green Newsletter | Wholegrain Digital [36:30]
• Oxymoron Newsletter | Tom Greenwood

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:
Tom Greenwood: There's no point people wasting time and money and energy, like reinventing the wheel. Somebody's doing something that might be useful to others. Put it out there, share it, and then we can all stand on each other's shoulders and go a lot further, a lot faster. I think.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we'll be talking about a few insights from the recent State of Green Software Report. A brief survey of developments of the environmental impact of large language models, unexpected news about monolith versus serverless for green coding, employee activism, policies for the workplace, and finally some events and opportunities for development from the world of green software.

But before we dive into this, let me introduce my special guest from Wholegrain Digital for this episode of this week in Green software. With us today, we have Tom Greenwood. Hi Tom. Why not introduce yourself from here?

Tom Greenwood: Hi, Chris. Yeah, I'm Tom and I'm co-founder of Wholegrain Digital and been the big proponent of sustainable Web design for a number...

This episode of Fact Check we ask the question, can AI always help us optimise the environmental impact of software? Host Chris Adams is joined by VMWare’s Colleen Josephson and Miguel Ponce de Leon to tackle this from their unique perspectives within the industry. They also talk all things sustainability in virtualization and networking and how this begins with green software. They also give us insight into how VMWare is tackling decarbonization within their own company.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Colleen Josephson: Twitter / Website
• Miguel Ponce de Leon: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• O-RAN SC Projects | O-RAN [6:34]
• Deep Cooling Solution in Data Centers | Office of the CTO Blog [19:45]
• RIC Radio Access Network Intelligence Controller [27:28]
• Kubernetes used in the O-RAN open source AI/ML Framework | O-RAN [29:32]
• HotCarbon 2023  [38:06]
• European Green Digital Coalition [37:26]
• Evaluating Coupling Models for Cloud Datacenters and Power Grids | Adrien Chien [39:35]

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:
Miguel Ponce de Leon: And the thing is, we're right in this maelstrom, this tornado of activity that's just got underway and just seeing how they fit together, it's not a perfect fit. I would say there. I couldn't give you, this is exactly the time horizon and this is how it's gonna happen, but I can tell with the level of funding, both from governmental agencies, from companies themselves, from research institutes to lots of public bodies and developers in their own time.

It's a great time to be in and around this space of developing software, but specifically for the delivery of green technologies as we see it.

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 am your host, Chris Adams.

Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we have two very special guests for an episode of fact check on Environmental Variables. From VMware, we have Colleen Josephson, and Miguel Ponce de Leon. Hey guys.

Miguel Ponce de Leon: Hey Chris. Hey.

Chris Adams: Okay, so for our listeners who are unaware, VMware has been a member of the Green Software Foundation since January, 2022. And we'll be talking a little bit about AI and the environmental impact of cloud. And we figured VMware spent a lot of time working in this field. In fact, they're synonymous with virtualization, but they also work in a number of other fields.

One in particular is networking. So this is where our backgrounds come from. Before we dive in, let's just actually give a chance for our guests to introduce themselves properly so they don't, so we know who they are. So I think, Miguel, if you just introduce yourself and what you do, we'll hand over them next to Colleen afterwards.

Miguel Ponce de Leon: Very good. So my name is Miguel Ponce de Leon. I'm director of Distributed Edge Intelligence in the office of the CTO here at VMware. So it's very much looking at research and innovation that happens from cloud. Towards enterprises and towards telecommunications. So networking, which is a topic that we're gonna talk about here, and very much looking at what it means and the impact of having the edge of the network and sustainability and connectivity to the cloud have had an impact on our products and services.

Chris Adams: Thank you, Miguel and Colleen. I'll give you a bit of space to introduce yourself as well. For folks who missed your inaugural podcast last year.

Colleen Josephson: Thank you very much. Yes. I'm Colleen Josephson. I'm a senior research scientist at VMware. I'm on the same team as Miguel, and a bit of news is that I'm actually transitioning to a full-time academic position at UC, Santa Cruz, where I'll be continuing to. To research sustainability, particularly in the space of low power in distributed systems.

Last time I was a guest on the podcast, I was the org lead for VMware, and I'm very pleased to share that Miguel, uh, I've passed on the torch to him, so he's very qualified and excellent, so I'm really excited to be doing this podcast today with him.

Chris Adams: Thank you, Colleen. All right, so for folks who are new to this format, Fact Check is a kind of format we use where we basically take a statement that people. Put into use in discussions around sustainability and software and we basically dive into it a little bit more to actually examine some of the assumptions because a lot of the time it really helps to really understand what some of the nuances behind this.

And today, the fact check statement we are looking at is this one, can AI always help us optimize the environmental impact of software? And Miguel, I might invite you to talk a little bit about this part first actually, because this is something I think you've heard at least one time before.

Miguel Ponce de Leon: More than one time, actually, I just as part of the introduction, just again, to say, look, I've been in and around telecommunication systems over the last 25 odd years from analog systems to two G, 3g, 4g, 5g. I know all these Gs that people hear about, but essentially it is and about looking about op...

Host Chris Adams is joined by Andri Johnston, Digital Sustainable Lead for Cambridge University Press and Assessment as they talk about using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing as well as news from the world of green software concerning one acronym; ESG and one portmanteau; LightSwitchOps. They also cover some upcoming events and we learn about Andri’s love of books!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Andri Johnston: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• ESG as a lever for sustainability impact | Elise Zelechowski Thoughtworks  [2:49]
• Using DIMPACT to calculate the carbon impact of digital publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment | Andri Johnston & William Pickett [7:31]
• How Would the Business Benefit from Your Greener Java Application? | Holly Cummins at Devoxx UK [14:53]

Resources:

• Thoughtworks.com/socialjustice [3:33]
• ShareAction [6:16]
• As You Sow [6:43]
• The True Climate Impact of Streaming | Netflix & Dimpact [8:49]
• Virtual conference carbon footprint revealed | Cambridge.org [11:23]
• David Hsu on mastodon.energy [13:53]
• The Baking Forecast UK [21:20]
• Effects of Internet-based multiple-site conferences on greenhouse gas emissions | Vlad Coraoma 

Events:

• Green Infrastructure Meetup GfK [x] Green Coding Berlin - 31 May 6:30-8:30PM | Green Coding Berlin [23:19]
• UN World Environment Day: The Green Software Revolution (Virtual Event) - Monday June 5th | GSF [24:02]
• LF Energy Summit 2023 (June 1 – 2, PARIS & Virtual) | Linux Foundation [24:46] 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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:

Andri Johnston: We have no control over what device people are using or what energy grid they're using, but we do have control over how we're building our software and making it as energy efficient as possible. And in my experience, the moment we were able to show that those numbers to board execs and that kind of level, it was like, oh, okay, so we actually can do something.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we'll be looking at the news from the world of green software that involves ESG and a portmanteau LightSwitchOps.

Not only do we have this, but we'll also have some exciting events for you to attend. As always, we usually try to introduce our guests before we get started, and this week we have Andri Johnson joining us. Andri say hi.

Andri Johnston: Hi. Thank you so much for getting me on the podcast. So yeah, I'm Andri Andri Johnson. I am the digital sustainability lead at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. And a little bit about me. I'm a very keen runner and gardener, however, that's taking a backseat right now cuz I am 36 weeks pregnant and I've deep dived into the world of sustainability and babies, which is a very weird world, but really exciting.

So, yeah. That's me.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you. Andri, you seem to be continuing our trend of guests who are just about to have kids before they disappear onto the other one. Yeah. Sara. Sara Bergman who was on before. She was also just coming to the end before she popped a sprog as well. And uh, yeah, uh, nice to hear. I wish you were the best for the second half of this actually.

Okay, so for everyone who is, who listened to this first time, this is basically a news roundup show. So what we do is we look at some stories that caught our eyes, we share a couple of records about them, and then. Basically move on from there and if we discuss anything or any links come up that might be interesting.

We'll make sure we add it into this show notes, so if there's any acronyms or anything like that, we'll work to point to some either definitions or lists for further reading. Okay. Andri, will that further ado? Should we look at the first of these stories?

Andri Johnston: Yeah, sure. Let's go.

Chris Adams: Okay, so this first story is ESG as a lever for sustainability impact by Elise Zelechowski at ThoughtWorks.

Elise is actually the co-chair of the policy working group, and this is a blog post that she's written about some of the approaches that ThoughtWorks is taking around esg. ESG for the uninitiated stands for environmental, social and Governance, and it's a kind of set of terms or a kind of framework that people use to assess a company's performance in terms of sustainability and across a number of dimensions.

ThoughtWorks has been talking about some of this for a while, and they've been probably one of the, in many ways, kind of leaders in this particular field. They've literall...

Host Chris Adams is joined by the GSF’s Asim Hussain on this episode of The Week in Green Software. They discuss some interesting news about Amazon, AWS and their scope 3 GHG protocol emission data. We also find out how Python has got its Mojo back and we have a very exciting tool from Catchpoint WebpageTest for measuring site’s carbon footprint. Finally, some great green software events that you can be part of! 

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / 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:

• AWS confirms Scope 3 GHG emissions data will be made freely available to customers in ‘early 2024’ | Computer Weekly [3:17]
• Amazon’s SusScanner for CloudFormationTemplates | Charles Roberts on LinkedIn [13:22]
• Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades | Fast.Ai [16:28]
• Measure & Improve Your Site's Footprint with Carbon Control from Catchpoint WebPageTest | Catchpoint [22:14]

Resources:

• Picture of Coffee Analogy with GHG Scope Protocols | GHG Protocol [8:24]
• Survey on Need for GHG Protocol Corporate Standards and Guidance Updates | GHG Protocol [10:25]
• Adrian Cockcroft’s Monitorama Talk | Vimeo [24:41]
• Carbon Impact | Dynatrace Hub [24:58]
• Is data transfer the best proxy for website carbon emissions? | Fershad Irani [28:23]
• Learn.greensoftware.foundation | GSF [31:55]

Events:

• Ottawa GSF Meetup (May 24 at 9:00 am EDT): | GSF [31:00]
• SDIA Hackathon on the Environmental Impact of Software (May 24 at 1:00 pm CET, Berlin): | SDIA [32:47]
• London GSF Meetup - Anniversary Special  (May 25, 6:00 pm BST) | GSF [36:04]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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: I think in an organizational perspective, scope three is turning out to be quite an amazing lever to drive change cuz by calculating the scope three, they're also applying pressure to their suppliers and saying, reduce your scope three, reduce your emissions, reduce effectively your scope one and two and your three or our go to another supplier.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to another episode of this Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we have interesting news about Amazon and AWS. A programming language with a lot of Mojo and some exciting events coming across from the world of green software, as well as some interesting news with WebpageTest

before we dive in though, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of this week in green software, which we sometimes call TWiGS, today we have Asim Hussain. Hi Asim.

Asim Hussain: Hiya. So my name is Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel.

Chris Adams: Cool. All right. And most recently, learning about throat singing to go along with your mushroom collection.

Asim Hussain: I'm also becoming quite musical, so I've actually bought, I've actually got two flutes since we've met Chris. I've bought two flutes, a guitar, and, wait, what else? Oh, there's another musical instrument I can't quite remember. Anyway, yeah,

Chris Adams: That's three musical instruments

Asim Hussain: my voice. My voice. That was it. I've been taking singing lessons. I knew there was a third I.

Chris Adams: that's pretty cool. My wife is a trained musician and she's been teaching me the spoons, so that's basically all I have forgot to go with.

Asim Hussain: My wife is also a classically trained musician. She speaks it very hard to be somebody who's learning music inside a house because yeah, anyway, there's

Chris Adams: Wow. I did not know.

Asim Hussain: yeah, yeah. Both quite musical. Yeah. We've got, our partners are quite musical. There you go.

Chris Adams: Okay. And if you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I too am one of the directors of the Green Web Foundation, a small nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil free internet by 2030. So before we dive into the rest of this show, it's worth sharing. All the links and all the discussion we do, we will share it in show notes with this.

And the general format is to basically look at some stories in the news relating to green software and share a fe...

Host Chris Adams is joined by Max Schulze from the SDIA (The Sustainable Digital Alliance) and they discuss three stories from the worlds of IaaS, PaaS and Saas! While these three acronyms are more than likely ever present in most digital people’s lives, we might not know about the environmental impact that they have. Chris and Max cover stories from the CNCF, Google, CIODive and OpenJS as well as upcoming events in the Green Software community. 

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Max Schulze: LinkedIn / Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• CNCF: Sustainable Software Projects Breed Eco-Sustainable Computing Systems: / Forbes [6:52]
• Google: We have no moat, and neither does Open AI the story of open source vs openAI / Simon Willison [14:37]
• Technology pulls enterprise green ambitions within reach: / CIODive.com [20:57]
• OpenJS Foundation Receives Major Government Investment from Sovereign Tech Fund for Web Security and Stability / OpenJS [30:41]

Resources:

• Microsoft scales cloud-native workloads with carbon awareness / SDX Central [7:02]
• Kepler / Red Hat Emerging Technologies / [7:33]
• ECO-Qube / SDIA [9:25]
• Environmental Data Agent (EDA) / SDIA [9:55]
• Carbon Aware Scheduling on Nomad / Green Web Foundation [12:37]
• Vicuna: An Open-Source Chatbot Impressing GPT-4 with 90%* ChatGPT Quality / LMSYS Org [20:40]
• Unilever completes cloud-only migration to Microsoft Azure / CIO Dive [24:21]

Events:

• Rise of AI 23 (9 - 10 May, BERLIN ᐧ Hybrid) / Rise of AI [28:15]
• SDIA Hackathon on the Environmental Impact of Software (24 May, BERLIN) / SDIA [28:45]
• LF Energy Summit 2023 (June 1 – 2, PARIS & Virtual) / Linux Foundation [31:47]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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:

Max Schulze: It's important that we recognize that this is happening on more than just Kubernetes. That's why I think it's a movement that's happening.

Chris Adams: Absolutely. Yeah. Diverse ecosystems are healthy ecosystems.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

 Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software and software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we're gonna be covering three stories about green software and the acronyms, PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS.

We'll also be discussing some exciting upcoming events in the world of Green software and talking about moats and open ai. Before we dive in though, please let me introduce myself, my guest for this episode for of this working green software to today we have Max Schulze. Hi Max.

Max Schulze: Hey Chris.

Chris Adams: Okay, Max, uh, although we've known each other since about 2019 when we first went to some Green Cloud procurement events back in Brussels many years ago, you may not be familiar.

Some other folks might not know too much about you. So if you introduce yourself, then we'll kind of jump into some of the stories.

Max Schulze: Thank you Chris, and thank you for having me as your guest today. It's always fun to to chat with you and debate with you. I'm Max. I'm the director of and founder of the SDIA Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance. That's why we never say that. We always say SDIA cuz it's unpronounceable.

Very excited to be here. I also talk about digital infrastructure all day. I write about it. I think about it. I talk about it, and recently I've been very involved in driving data centers to be more sustainable and more transparent through like the European energy efficiency directive, but also the code of conduct for data centers.

Chris Adams: This is something you'd be doing in not just German, but also in English. Is that correct?

Max Schulze: Yeah, I'm one of the very few Germans that can also speak very fluent English, so it's not a problem for me.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right, Max. Okay, so we've spoken about the format here and for folks who are new to this, basically what we're gonna do is look at a few stories that caught that kind of came up across our feeds and came up on our radar This week. We'll do share a little bit of reckons and share some extra context that you might not be too much to aware of, and then we'll look at some coming events.

So Max, the first story we have here...

Host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie on this episode of The Week in Green Software. They discuss the potential for data centers in space and how the use of potential death rays might be the way forward in powering these! Not only this, but sweeping changes in Reporting Law, and making Kubernetes clusters into Low Carbonetes clusters are covered too. Anne has a special report on her upcoming book and Chris finds his own variation of Boaty McBoatface!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Data centers move into space to mitigate power consumption and pollution / El Pais [2:41]
• Building Green Software Book Preview [14:43]
• Microsoft Scales Cloud-Native Workloads with Carbon Awareness / SDX Central [21:32]
• Solicitation for Public Comments on the Business Practices of Cloud Computing Providers / FTC [26:32]
• The SDIA welcomes the deal of the European Council and Parliament on the Energy Efficiency Directive / SDIA [30:16]

Resources:

• Community Clouds and Energy Islands with Dawn Nafus and Laura Watts about Data Centers in the Orkneys [6:26]
• White Paper that Anne’s Book is based on [14:43]
• Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick [20:43]
• https://github.com/Azure/carbon-aware-keda-operator [22:00]
• The Green Web Foundation’s Guide on Carbon Aware Scheduling w/ Kubernetes and Nomad
• Ross Fairbanks [22:18]
• Kube Green [28:17]
• Boaty McBoatFace 
• Culture Ship Randomizer

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: Data centers in Greenland are an obvious thing because there's tons of free energy, green energy from ice melt runoff.

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Anne Currie: But one of the issues there is that nobody lives in Greenland to man the data center, but even few people live in space demand the data centers. So I would, I would hope that you would solve the Greenland issue first.

Use all that enormous amount of energy before you,

Chris Adams: Okay, so our site, so before we reach for the sky, let's sort out things down here on Earth. Yeah?

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. This week we'll be talking about data centers in space, sweeping changes in reporting climate laws affecting the digital sector.

Making Kubernetes clusters into low Carbonetes clusters and a set of interesting looking coming events. But before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guest for this episode of this week in Green Software. This week we have Anne Currie. Hi Anne.

Anne Currie: Hello.

Chris Adams: Anne, would you just introduce yourself?

Anne Currie: My name is Anne Currie and I am currently one of the community co-chairs for the Green Software Foundation. I'm a software engineer. I was a software engineer for many years, many years and 30 years I've been in the industry. And so I date from the time in the nineties when we used to build software using the same kind of techniques that we might, that we are thinking about using to date for green software because machines were very weak then, and we had to handle that. So that's my perspective on this.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Anne. So if you are new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a nonprofit focused around us reaching an entirely fossil for internet by 2030. And I'm also the policy chair, the chair of the policy working group in the Green Software Foundation.

Each week we do a run through of stories that caught eyes, or that might be fun to discuss. And everything we do discuss, we share all the links that we can find for you to dive it down your own little Wikipedia kind of holes after this session. Alright, so Anne, should we look at the first story that came up here?

It's data centers move into space to mitigate power consumption and pollution. So this is the story from El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, and uh, they published this story I think of stem. It's about this program called Ascend, which is Advanced Space Cloud for European net zero emissions and data sovereignty program.

Anne Currie: That's not, that's not a little bit contrived at all.

Chris Adams: Yeah, exactly. And the Europ...

In this episode, we have a very special guest for an episode of Fact Check on Environmental Variables, Ola Fagerström from Microsoft Surface joins host Asim Hussain to talk about his work on the Microsoft's Surface Emissions Estimator - an important tool that helps measure the carbon footprint of the device. Ola talks about how difficult it was to take into account everything from materials used, to manufacturing, to packaging, and even end-of-life disposal to give an accurate estimate of the emissions produced by each device; and how these principles can be applied to other areas of green software development.  

Learn more about our people:

• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Ola Fagerström: LinkedIn 

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Microsoft’s Surface Emissions Estimator Announcement
• Ola’s Post on LinkedIn about Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator / LinkedIn [7:46]
• Energy Star Calculation / Energy Star [15:51]
• Microsoft Edge Green Tabs / Microsoft  [23:13]
• Internal Carbon Fee / Microsoft [37:12]
• New EU Laws on CSRD / European Commission [41:59]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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

Transcription Below:
Ola Fagerström: When is the first company going to start to say, we only allow eight tabs open? Because if you start to have, I'm just making numbers up, 16 tabs, you might run to your boss and say, Hey, I need a device with the 32 gigs of memory because my memory is constantly filled. Yeah, sorry. We put a policy that you can only have eight tabs open because that will save on the memory, and therefore we can buy cheaper or devices that are actually greener.

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

I'm your host, Asim Hussain.

So welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Asim Hussain. In this episode, we have a very special guest for an episode of Fact check on Environment Variables from Microsoft Surface. We have technology specialist Ola Fagerström.

Ola Fagerström: Hi there, Asim. What a nice, uh, way to get introduced as a special guest and.

Asim Hussain: Probably worse ways of being introduced isn't there? Not so special guest anyway. Ola, like it's great to have you on the show. Obviously we were colleagues at Microsoft, we're both circling kind of the sustainability space. I'm not at Microsoft anymore. So to give our listeners some context, could you please introduce yourself?

Ola Fagerström: Yes, I'm Ola Fagerström. I'm based and live in the fantastic country of Sweden, where probably some of you listeners have heard of a small girl called Greta. Which is also helping, pushing the environment forward and doing a lot of stuff. So part of, I can say part of that inspiration, but I've been with Microsoft for in, oh, what is it this week?

11 years.

Asim Hussain: Oh wow.

Ola Fagerström: So quite some time I've been with the devices and Surface family for the last, what is it? Eight, nine years since we launched Surface Pro Free back in the market. Way back in the days. So, uh, that is sort of my day-to-day job and then working with sustainability almost on a daily basis to make sure that we can.

Help and tell our customers what we actually do, and I report back to our dear engineers what they have to do better

Asim Hussain: Ah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. That

Ola Fagerström: as well. Sit sitting a little bit that in between of, uh, explaining difficult things to people on the simple way on one end and the other way around as well.

Asim Hussain: Yeah, and you have to explain the sustainability difficult things and even more difficult. So thank you for that. Yes, we've really great to have you on the podcast to talk about your work. So to just explain how this works to our listeners, this is a type of episode which we call Fact Check. It's slightly different from our typical Environment Variables or this week in Green Software TWiGS episodes.

We're first going to ask you a few questions about your background and experience in the world of sustainable software, on the world of sustainability, and then we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into your work with Microsoft and the Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator, and then we'll just see where that takes us.

Ola Fagerström: Sounds like a good plan, I think. Yeah.

Asim Hussain: Yeah. Um, just a, before we dive in, it's just a reminder for everybody that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So here's my first question. Can you tell me more about your background and how you became a device sustainability specialist at Microsoft?

Ola Fagerström: Yeah, so one of the things, as I said previously, coming from a region or a country where sustainability has always been on top of mind. Of our customers, people living here, it's been a, a constant topping, bringing back to our dear friends, sitting on the other side o...

This week host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain and Environment Variables regular Sara Bergman to discuss the hidden costs of generative AI. What’s really at the tip of this iceberg and how far down does it go? They also discuss just how thirsty AI chatbots really are and developments in platform engineering. Finally, we share some opportunities for development from the world of green software.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• AI Chatbots Guzzle Enormous Amounts of Water, Study Finds: / Evening Standard [3:16]
• Two-phase cooling will be hit by EPA rules and 3M's exit from PFAS "forever chemicals" / DCD [9:35]
• The Mounting Human and Environmental Costs of Generative AI: / Ars Technica  [15:02]
• ChatGPT: Mayor starts legal bid over false bribery claim / BBC [20:29]
• Free Dolly: Introducing the World's First Truly Open Instruction-Tuned LLM / DataBricks [25:19]
• How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable: / Devops.com [30:43]

Resources:

• How much water do data centers use? / David Mytton [8:10]
• Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models / Back Market / UC Riverside & UT Arlington [9:28]
• Jevon’s Paradox / Wikipedia [14:24]
• The AI Iceberg / Ars Technica [22:54]
• Simon Willison’s Blog about Dolly [25:37]
• Breaking the code of silence: what we learned from content moderators at the landmark Berlin summit / Foxglove [28:03]
• Holly Cummins from Red Hat’s Speech at QCon London 2023 [32:34]

Events:

• Meetup on How to measure energy consumption of software (April 24, Virtual) / Green Coding Berlin [35:11]
• Microsoft India’s Green Software Development Hackathon (March 21 – April 24, 2023 • Virtual): [36:13]
• GreenTech Southwest Meetup (April 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm • Bristol & Virtual): / Green Web Foundation [37:00]

Transcript Below:
Asim Hussain: I'm talking to people in my family, in fact, who are like thinking, will I have a job in two years time? Will I have a job in three years time? And like as historically, we have ignored in the just transition the other side have created a lot of very unpleasant noises, which has forced us to deal with that.

I think the same thing's gonna happen here. I think there's gonna be a lot of noises, and I would love for people to start really talking about how do we make that transition fairer.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams of the Green Web Foundation. And in this episode we have some interesting news about how thirsty AI chatbots really are, and we uncover the hidden costs of generative AI.

And finally, we share some opportunities for development from the world of green software. Before we dive in though, let me introduce my guests and colleagues for this episode. Today we have Sara.

Sara Bergman: Hi. Glad to be back and in this format as well. So my name is Sara Bergman. I'm a software engineer at Microsoft. I also work with the standards working group here in the Green Software Foundation. I do some conference speaking. I'm actually speaking at conference later this year on this topic in particular. So it's very near and dear to my heart.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Sara, and Asim.

Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. And I also am director of Green Software at Intel. Excited to be here. Am I supposed to say an anecdote?

Chris Adams: This is when you normally talk about mushrooms Asim.

Asim Hussain: This

Chris Adams: Yeah.

Asim Hussain: I actually bought a robot lawnmower yesterday and it's currently mowing my lawn, so that's a weird anecdote. But anyway.

Chris Adams: That is quite a special anecdote. I don't quite know where to go from there, so I'm just gonna park it and then maybe the,

Asim Hussain: let's cut it out

Chris Adams: yeah, the.

Asim Hussain: robot. It's a really shitty robot. The every few minutes I'm going outside and pulling it out of a ditch. But anyway.

Chris Adams: Okay. And if you're new to me, my name is Chris Adams. I am the...

Chris Adams is joined by cloud sustainability advocate and founder of Cloud Sustainably, Aerin Booth in this episode of TWiGS brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. On this episode Aerin provides his insight into the cloud to discuss cloud zombies, the effect that generative AI is having on the environment and exciting developments from Xbox (including a list of some of Aerin’s favourite nostalgic games!). We also touch on GreenOps and the future for green software developers.  

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Aerin Booth: LinkedIn / Podcast

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Generative AI and cloud zombies: Raising the alarm about global climate impact: / Silicon Angle [2:48]
• Report on ChatGPT Model’s Emissions Offers Rare Glimpse of AI’s Climate Impacts: / Truthout.org [2:48]
• Xbox’s New Energy Measurement Tools are World Changing: / Xbox [6:23]
• Wagtail and the summer of code / GitHub [14:32]

Events:

• LF Energy Summit ( June 1 at 2:05 pm - 2:35 pm CET • Paris & Virtual)  [19:35]
• GreenTech Southwest Meetup (April 20, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm • Bristol & Virtual) [20:00]

Resources:

• PS5 Power Consumption / ecoenergygeek [10:58]
• The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill / Linklaters Sustainable Futures [20:16]
• The Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to Amazon Web Services / 451 Research [21:02]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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:
Aerin Booth: When I think about anything we choose to do, not only in terms of carbon and IT, but in our life, if it doesn't have purpose, it's almost a waste. And we forget that we're not really building things for ourselves in technology. We're trying to build services for one, helps people in their day-to-day lives and hopefully save the freaking planet in the next upcoming climate change catastrophe the rest of our lives.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we'll be discussing generative AI worrying impact that I could be having on the environment.

We'll also cover some exciting news from Xbox and some events for you to take part in as part of the world of green software. Before we dive in though, let me introduce my guest with us today. We have Aerin Booth the former head of Cloud at the UK Home Office now turned cloud sustainably advocate joining us.

Hi Aerin.

Aerin Booth: Hello. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having me on. So my name is Aerin Booth. I, like Chris said, former, I say in name in, in some ways product manager for Public Cloud at the UK Home Office. But while I was there, I signed 130 million pound contract, was part of negotiating the memorandum, understanding between the UK government and the cloud providers, hyperscalers, AWS, Azure and Google.

Um, and did a lot of other stuff for the cloud community across the UK. And then moved into my own consulting. So I've been running a consulting company for the last few years. Not to go too salesy or anything, but it's called Cloud Sustainably. Just helping people rethink how we consider carbon emissions in it, because it's on the rise.

And obviously we all know and care about this. We wouldn't be listening to this podcast otherwise. And yeah, I think more people talking about it does the world a little bit of good. And yeah, I've been on an interesting journey to say the least.

Chris Adams: Okay, thanks Aerin. So if you're new to this podcast, I am Chris Adams. I am the policy chair, sorry, I'm the chair of the policy working group in the Green Software Foundation and the executive director of the Green. Web Foundation. Every week we do this, we will basically share any of the links that we discuss and do a roundup of the news.

So that's generally of the plan. Today, it's gonna be a bit of a short one cuz it's Easter, so we're gonna keep it short and sweet. And I suppose Aerin, should we look at what stories have come up on our radars today? What's the first one here? There's one about generative ai and in particular, the environmental impact from generative AI and cloud zombies.

Aerin. I think given your background, with cloud, the Cloud zombies one might be an interesting one for you to start with actually.

Aerin Booth: It is really interesting. Yeah, cloud zombies, I mean it's, we could probably use any term we want really. I did a talk on being ethical in tech at Reve last year in November, and just before that I did a talk, I think it was titled DALL-E oh God, what was it called? Now? Is DALL-E Ethical? Something around like the use of ai?

What's the purpose?

Chris Adams: This is DALL-E, the AI m...

On this episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams and Asim Hussain discuss the latest research on streaming emissions from Netflix and DIMPACT, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, The European Commission's Right to Repair Law and their proposal for an Anti Greenwashing Law which is being echoed across the channel with the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill. Asim also discovers an alternative to central heating with his hot TV! The usual exciting resources and events in the show notes from TWiGS, Environment Variables and the Green Software Foundation.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / 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:

• What the Latest Research on Streaming Emissions Tells Us / Netflix [2:39]
• The environmental impact of refurbished tech / Back Market [13:21]
• The European Commission's Right to Repair Law / European Commission  [17:58]
• Microsoft wants to export 'grid-interactive' Dublin datacenter setup / Microsoft [23:31]
• The European Commission's Anti Greenwashing Law Proposal / European Commission [36:20]
• The UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill / Linklaters Sustainable Futures [38:06]

Resources:

• Table that Chris refers to from ADEME [14:19]
• ADEME Study on the Impact of Refurbished Electronics / ADEME [14:19]
• The Restart Project Podcast [20:27]
• US Right to Repair Law from 2022 / Reuters [21:21]
• Balancing Power Systems With Datacenters Using a Virtual Interconnector Balancing / Conor Kelly [24:31]
• Ecovisor / Ecovisor [26:21]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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 Adams: Turning bauxite into aluminum is incredibly energy intensive. It's in terms of density of load versus the area used. The only thing that is greater than it is data centers.

Asim Hussain: Oh, alright.

Chris Adams: Yeah. Or maybe Bitcoin mining, but you can, they probably count as a data center as well. But basically, yeah, incredibly dense load, which is why you see this, and this really spelled out to me just how big a player some of these large companies are now.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams. Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and I'm joined here with Asim today. Hey, Asim.

Asim Hussain: Hiya

Chris Adams: Oh, see, before we go further, we should probably introduce ourselves, shouldn't we?

Asim Hussain: yeah. Sounds good.

Chris Adams: Okay, so my name's Chris. I am the policy working group co-chair in the Green Software Foundation, and I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I'm also an organizer at climateaction.tech, and I think that's enough things for me to explain what I do. Asim, I'll hand over to you next.

Asim Hussain: Yep. Hi name's Asim Hussain I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also a director of Green software at Intel and uh, ex-organizer at climaaction.tech, which is where me and Chris, we didn't meet then, but we first started working closely together.

Chris Adams: Where we started working together. We met at OMG Climate, another conference based in London and Berlin, which was a successor to OMGDPR, which is a conference all about GDPR, which was considered quite an earth shattering thing to be thinking about back in 2018.

Asim Hussain: I definitely shattered the earth a little bit, didn't it?

Chris Adams: Yeah, a little bit. It definitely had an impact.

So today, if you're familiar, if you're not familiar with the format for this show, we generally run through some of the stories that have come up and share some of the commentary and sometimes we invite guests on to talk about some of these. I think we've got a few stories here from link, stuff from Netflix, the environmental impact of refurbished tech from Back Market, and some interesting news from the policy point of view with both the European Commission and stuff going down in the UK as well.

Should we start Asim?

Asim Hussain: Let's start with Netflix, should we?

Chris Adams: Yes, what the latest research on streaming emissions tells us. So this is a piece published by Netflix and in collaboration with the folks at D...