Environment Variables

Host Asim Hussain is joined by two of only a handful of people to try and calculate the emissions of software; Navveen Balani of Accenture and Srini Rakhunathan of Microsoft. In this episode of TWiGS Navveen does a deep dive into the processes behind Accenture’s use of the SCI Specification to calculate a measure to track and, ultimately, reduce the carbon emissions of one of its internal reference applications. Asim also quizzes Srini on the upcoming CarbonQL project by the Green Software Foundation which Srini is leading. We also get some links to great resources (particularly for UX folk) and some exciting event news!

Learn more about our people:

• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Navveen Balani: LinkedIn
• Srini Rakhunathan: LinkedIn 

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• How Accenture Implemented the SCI Specification Score to Track Software Emissions / GSF [2:59]
• CarbonQL / GSF [19:49]
• Powershell Module For Watttime Emission Data / Watttime [25:15]

Events:

• GSF London Meetup (Thursday, March 23 at 6-9pm GMT) / GSF [30:12]

Resources:

• Circa by Andy Wood (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF[26:56]
• Sustainable Design Toolkits for UX Designers: / Vitaly Friedman [27:33]
• Sustainable UI (part of the Carbon Hack ‘22) / GSF [28:27]
• Green Jobs Network / greenjobs.net [31:52]
• Branch Magazine / climateaction.tech [34:04]
• lowwwcarbon.com [34:32]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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: Oh my God, that's an interesting way of looking at what we're doing. Like we can't actually, like we're not doing the work ourselves just piling onto the DevOps people to fix all of our coding problems

Navveen Balani: it's a, I call it as a journey from DevOps to GreenOps, so finops and so on. Yeah. So integrate all of these and then get a highly sustainable software

Asim Hussain: as long as it's not my ops, as long as it's somebody else's ops, it's not my problem only joking.

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

Welcome to The Week in Green Software, or TWiGS. Where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development, I'm your host, Asim Hussain. Today we'll be discussing the latest development from a bunch of people, but on the call we've got Navveen from Accenture. We're gonna talk about some of the work that they've been doing calculating carbon emissions are using what's called the SCI specification, which we've been developing, the Green Software Foundation, and we'll also be sharing some valuable resources and some exciting events to do with the world of green software. Before we begin, let me introduce our guest for the episode of TWiGS, with us today, we have Navveen.

Navveen Balani: Hi everyone. I'm Navveen Balani. I'm a chief technologist with the Technology Sustainability Innovation Group at Accenture. Very excited to be here. I look at innovation and creating assets at the intersection of technology and sustainability. I'm also a Google Cloud certified fellow and a published author with several technology books.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. Yeah, I did discover just how many books Navveen has been writing. You just, you go to his Amazon profile, there's quite a few there. I know how hard it's write one book, Navveen, so I'm quite impressed. Oh, it's you.

Srini Rakhunathan: Hi, I'm Srini. I'm with Microsoft and I'm working for the sustainability division of Microsoft. Sustainable Software is something that, that, it was just a spark about three years back in January when the goals around carbon emissions were announced, and I immediately wanted to do something within the consulting space for which I was part of at Microsoft, but I'm happy to be here.

And then Greens Software has started and I've been with them since I think the beginning and as far my interest with green software is going, I like to write a lot of blog articles because they're small and probably can finish it within a couple of weeks. A little lazy that way. But yeah, it's been exciting working with GSF, the different groups and I just look forward to learning a lot from this initiative.

Asim Hussain: Wonderful. It's great. It's great to have you both here and you've both been involved in green software since before the foundation were born. You've both been involved since day one of the foundation, so yeah, really appreciate it. So let's go with the news. Let's start off with the first piece of news.

So this is an a piece on our website, which is called How Accenture implemented the SCI Specification score to track software emission. We were gonna cover this last week, but we figured it made more sense to wait till this week so we could be joined by Navveen because Navveen, you work at Accenture and you are one of the authors of this post.

So yeah. Why don't you tell us people a little bit about w...

This episode of TWiGS has Chris Adams at the helm again with guests Asim Hussain and Anne Currie. They talk about the impact of Web 3.0 and why the future of immutable blockchains needs to be open source and sustainable and perhaps isn’t the only solution out there. They also talk about recent news from the BBC, AWS and highlight some great resources for you to expand your knowledge in the world of sustainable software.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / 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:

• How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions: / BBC [3:34] 
• Amazon denies claims hiring freeze is slowing AWS sustainability work / Computer Weekly [13:55]
• Nori launches Web3 Marketplace: / Nori [24:38]
• Why the future of Web3 needs open source, sustainable blockchains: / Linux Foundation [33:35]

Events:

• QCon London Software Conference (March 27-29, 2023): / QCon [35:14]

Resources:

• Sustainability at AWS re:Invent 2022 / Adrian Cockcroft 
• FOSDEM 2023 Responsible Clouds and the Green Triangle / Chris Adams [12:42]
• OVH’s 2020 announcement of carbon and energy metrics APIs for customers / OVH [21:46]
• The Cloud Energy Project / Green Coding Berlin [24:02] 
• Asim’s Interview with Nori’s Founder on The Climate Fix [26:35]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

• Follow, rate, and review on Apple 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:

Asim Hussain: In the foundation we talk about carbon efficiency, which is minimizing the amount of carbon per whatever unit per value that you're providing to the end user. And I think there's multiple ways you can think about that cuz you can actually think about fundamentally changing the nature of your application so that you can actually provide the same value without even needing the same functionality.

And I think that's kind of the way we need to really think about this stuff.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Welcome to this week's episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams, and in this episode we have some exciting announcements from the world of energy standards for software, and yes, even Web 3.0, we also bring you some exciting upcoming events. Before we dive in though, let me introduce our participants for this episode of this week in Green software. With us today, we have Anne. Hi Anne!

Anne Currie: Hello, Chris.

Chris Adams: And we have Asim Hussain. Hey, Asim.

Asim Hussain: Hi Chris!

Chris Adams: Okay, so if you don't know Asim and Anne, maybe we should, they should introduce themselves.

I'll hand over to you Anne first, if that's okay. Cuz it's alphabetically ahead of Asim. And then we'll know to you Asim. So Anne, for people who've never met you, how would you introduce yourself?

Anne Currie: So my name is Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly 30 years, and I've been an engineer in various other things. And the past six or seven years I've been doing quite a lot on sustainable software. I work for a company or I work with a company called Container Solutions, and I am one of the co-chairs of the GSF Community Committee.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Anne and, Asim over to you.

Asim Hussain: I really respect the going via alphabetical order. If you go to the Green Software Foundation website, you'll notice that all our companies are listed in alphabetical order. So as, uh, to be fair, So my name's Asim Hussain. I'm the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. One of the ways I used to describe what I do there is I'm in charge of the GSF operating system.

I'm like Linus Torvalds but for the GSF operating system, that's who I am. But I'm here to help all the wonderful people like Anne and Chris and every else involved in the foundation build their amazing solutions and help them to execute what they do.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you Asim. Alright. My name is Chris. As I said before, I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. I work with the Green Software Foundation. As their policy chair for the policy working group. And I also help run a small community online called climateaction.tech, which is passed recently, 8,000 techies working on climate and tech in this particular intersection.

In this the latest episode of The Week in Green Software, Chris Adams is joined by first time Environment Variables guest Tammy McClellan and regulars Anne Currie and Asim Hussain. They discuss the concept of greenwashing; what it is and how companies can avoid it, and why green IT is no longer an option for the tech sector. They cover various statistics about the environmental impact of data centers and cloud computing, the importance of optimizing code and algorithms to reduce emissions, and how developers can’t just rely on hardware to reduce emissions. The hosts also touch on some valuable resources to further your knowledge in the world of Green Software - links below!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn / Website 
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Tammy McLellan: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Greenwashing: The Red Flag of Sustainability / Intel [4:01]
• Green IT Is No Longer An Option For The Tech Sector / Forbes [13:46]
• Everything is moving to the cloud. But how green is it, really? / ZDNET [22:01]
• The Oversight Committee has been launched! / GSF [28:21]

Resources:

• The SBTI [11:24]
• ZeroTracker.Net [13:24]
• Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls in assessing the Internet’s energy and carbon impacts / John Koomey [17:21]
• New WC3 Database of References / WC3 Sustainability Group [32:02]
• The Transformation Impact of the Cloud (2016) / 451 Research [23:00]
• There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? / Journal of Science [26:43]
• Green Software Practitioner Course from Linux / GSF [31:13]
• Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification Guide / GSF [31:31]

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!

Asim Hussain: 80% of people don't trust corporate messaging is because I have a belief that members of the public trust nonprofits more than they trust for-profits, and that organizations like the GSF would gain more trust from people than like a for-profit company. And so sometimes I feel the problem is that organizations are trying to market their own thing instead of just aligning to like our commitments or SBTI approved tick!

Okay, everyone trusts you now, rather than, I'm going to try and explain my specific version of my climate target in the way that sells my products the best and shows me the most differentiators.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed 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, and today we're discussing the growing issue of greenwashing in tech and the importance of reporting and communicating corporate sustainability accurately.

Before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guests and colleagues with this episode of The Week in Green Software. Today we have Tammy. Hello, Tammy.

Tammy McClellan: Hi there.

Chris Adams: Asim

Asim Hussain: Hi.

Chris Adams: and Anne.

Anne Currie: Hello.

Chris Adams: And if you're not on first name terms, let's do proper introductions. First of all, I'll hand over to, um, Anne. You'll be the first person to introduce.

Anne Currie: So my name's Anne Currie. I've been in the tech industry for nearly three decades, which is quite depressing and good. And good, depressing, but but also good. And I am part of the Green Software Foundation along with everybody else here. So today I've been working on the introductory chapter of a new book on green software, which we can't yet talk about who the publisher is, but it's a good publisher.

Next time I'll be able to tell you who it is.

Chris Adams: thank you for that, Anne. All right. Next in the alphabetical order would be Asim Go for it.

Asim Hussain: Hi, I'm Asim Hussain. I am the executive director and chairperson of the Green Software Foundation. I'm also the director of Green Software at Intel. I'm excited to be here. I also do, I also, oh, I grow mushrooms, which is an active hobby at this time of the year, so

Tammy McClellan: No way!

Asim Hussain: Growing. Oh yeah. Have we not told you about that, Tammy? Yeah. Spring time's coming. So we're getting, as you are, I imagine, Tammy getting ready for a growing season. But anyway, I'll let you introduce yourself now.

Tammy McClellan: Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Ta...

TWiGS returns this week with host Asim Hussain being joined by (now guest) Chris Adams. They talk about the environmental impact of the cloud and while some of the big cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud, have introduced initiatives designed to increase the sustainability of individual data centres and reduce their overall carbon footprints, will it be enough to help reduce carbon emissions produced by cloud computing? They also cover Microsoft’s Surface Emissions Estimator and a recent paper surveying the factors that influence the emissions of machine learning.

Learn more about our people:

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

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Microsoft launches its Surface Emissions Estimator / Microsoft [2:42]
• GreenOps Carbon Footprint Treads Closer To Cloud Developer Efficiency / Forbes [14:35]
• How green is your cloud? / TechMonitor [22:11]
• Counting Carbon: A Survey of Factors Influencing the Emissions of Machine 

Learning / Alexandra Sasha Luccioni & Alex Hernandez-Garcia [36:21]

Ongoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:

• GSF Meetup Opportunities [46:24]
• GSF Speakers Bureau

Other resources mentioned:

• Ola Fagerström’s announcement about Microsoft Surface Emissions Estimator [13:01]
• Cycloids.io [14:35]
• Net Zero Tracker [27:55]
• Chris Adams & Max Schulze talk Cloud Economics with a spreadsheet [31:02]
• WattTime.org

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:
GSF_Ep17_TWiGS5_Transcript

Chris Adams:  The flip side of this, maybe the thing they're going for is saying if cloud carbon footprint is just ubiquitous like hoovering is, maybe that's the thing you would just say, well, you're just gonna ccf it, or cloud carbon footprint it.

Asim Hussain: Yeah.

Hello and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discussed 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. 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 am your host, Asim Hussain. In this episode, we have some exciting announcements from various organizations, and we're going to cover some interesting articles about the environmental impact of cloud and machine learning.

And finally, we're gonna share some opportunities for development for the world of Green software. But before we dive in, let me introduce my esteemed guest and colleague for this episode of Twigs. With us today, we have Chris Adams.

Chris Adams: Hi Asim. My name is Chris. For folks who've never heard of me before, I work as the one of the chairs of the policy working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I also work as the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a small, non but fierce non-profit focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet by 2030.

And I also work with the online community climateaction.tech, which is where I met Asim.

Asim Hussain: Oh, the climateaction.tech days.

Chris Adams: Yeah, that and OMG Climate as well actually.

Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. OMG Climate. I remember the OMG climate. You should start those again. Oh, have you started those again? Actually, I have interest. For the listeners, OMG Climate was a A A A conference, an on a conference that Chris was running.

Chris Adams: Yes, I can talk about this. We can segue into that gracefully in the podcast if you'd like. After we've covered some of the news. But this is something that we would like to do a bit more of, and I’ve got a fun story about why it's called OMG Climate and where some of that came from. So it's also open source.

So if you like the idea of onConferences around climate, then maybe we should leave a bit of time for that actually seen, because there are some kind of green software and digital sustainability related events in the coming months that are probably worth pointing people to. So that was me introduced

Asim Hussain:  And before we dive in, just a reminder that everything we talk about will be linked in the show notes below this episode. So I think Chris to kick off uh, news from the world of Green Software, Microsoft Company I used to work for. Microsoft has launched a new tool called the Surface Emissions Estimator that helps customers understand the carbon footprint of the devices purchased.

It is the surface device range of the purchases that are purchased. It uses a lifecycle assessment model to provide accurate estimates of carbon emissions, it also, I believe, helps you adjust those emissions based upon where you are, what you bought, where it's been delivered, and things like that.

Chris Adams: I thought this was pretty cool actually. See, have you had ...

The Week in Green Software (or TWiGS) is back with a new format! This time host Chris Adams is joined by Anne Currie and Asim Hussain to talk about news about AI and the environment (with a particular focus on Chat GPT and Bing), the environmental impact of the cloud, the Corporate Sustainable Software Market report, and some exciting opportunities to explore, learn, and contribute to green software. 

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

Events:

• LF seeking speakers for upcoming Energy Summit / Linux Foundation June 2023 ⋅ Seeking Speakers until Feb 17

News:

• AI can help address climate change—as long as it doesn’t exacerbate it / Fast Company 
• Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” / Simon Willison
• The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret / Wired
• Why we can no longer afford to overlook the environmental impact of the cloud / Computer Weekly
• Corporate Sustainable Software Market report explores industry size, share, growth & forecast 2028 / WhaTech
• Sustainability for Development and Operations with DevSusOps / InfoQ
• How a Hackathon Is Slowly Saving The World / Will Buchanan
• CO2.js: An Open Library for Digital Carbon Reporting / ClimateAction.tech

Books:

• Bulls*** Jobs by David Graeber

Previous Episodes Mentioned:

• How does AI and ML Impact Climate Change? / Environment Variables

Ongoing Opportunities to Scale Green Software:

• Submit Call for Papers / GSF Speakers Bureau 
• Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification

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!

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

For our first episode of 2023, we have an episode of The Week in Green Software where Ismael Velasco looks at the dense legislative landscape around green software and technology and energy regulations. Everything from France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation to the UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy; Ismael will help you make sense of it all! 

Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Legislation & Reports:

• State of Green Software Report from The Green Software Foundation [3:16]
• France’s Digital Environmental Footprint Reduction Legislation [9:22]
• The US' Executive Order 14067 Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets [11:33]
• AWS Environmental Sustainability Impact Report [23:13]
• ITU Activities & Sustainable Development Goals [30:14]
• Gartner Survey 2022 [34:14]
• 2021 World Bank Study on Green Public Procurement [36:36]
• The UK’s Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy [38:31]

Projects, Protocols & Tools:

• Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Tool [24:44]
• ISO 25010 [29:08]
• Green Software Foundation Software Carbon Intensity Specification [32:46]

Talks & Events:

• 2022 World Telecommunications Development Conference [5:04]

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!

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

We’ve moved from a more decentralised internet running on centralised power, to a more centralised internet running on more decentralised power. Is this the only computing model of the future? What would a decentralised internet running on decentralised power look like? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also the edge of the grid, and this is an area our two guests Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of the University of Edinburgh have spent quite a lot of time researching. They join host Chris Adams in this episode of Environment Variables as they explore community clouds, datacentres, energy regulation, projects on Islands of Orkney and the book that they’re working on together!

Learn more about our guests:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn / GitHub / Website
• Dawn Nafus: Website / LinkedIn
• Laura Watts: Website / LinkedIn

Episode resources:

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

People:

• Rachel Coldicutt
• Noman Bashir - Ecovisors
• Philipp Wiesner
• Lorenzo Kristov

Papers:

• Paper: Carbon-Responsive Computing: Changing the Nexus between Energy and Computing by Dawn Nafus, Eve M. Schooler and Karly Ann Burch.

Projects:

• Microsoft Underwater Data Centers in Orkney
• Solar Protocol

Podcasts:

• Environment Variables Episode on Carbon Aware Computing
• Script Notes Podcast by John August

Books:

• The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Laura’s Book: Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga
• Dawn’s Book: Ethnography for a data-saturated world with Hannah Knox

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:
Dawn Nafus: The implication of green software is not just that it's efficient in the immediate savings, but that you're opening the door to this much bigger infrastructure change that is enormously important.

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams.

Hello and welcome to Environment Variables. On this episode, I am joined by Dawn Nafus of Intel and Laura Watts of University of Edinburgh, and we'll be discussing community clouds and energy islands. We're shifting from an internet powered predominantly by burning fossil fuels 24 7 in large, centralized generation plants to one powered by a wider mix of decentralized forms of energy, generation.

And yet over the last 10 years, we've seen a shift from a more distributed internet to one where computing is concentrated correspondingly into large centralized Hyperscale data centers running 24 7, much like the centralized power plants of before. So we've moved from a decentralized internet running on centralized power to a more centralized internet running on more decentralized power.

Is this the only computing model of the future though? What would a decentralized internet running on decentralized power look like, though? We see hints of what this looks like at the edge of the internet, but also at the edge of the grid. And this is an area two of our guests have spent quite a lot of time researching to share their insights, and that's what we're gonna dive into today.

But before we dive in, let's do a quick round of intros in alphabetical order. My name's Chris Adams. I am the host of Environment Variables. I am the chair of the policy working group and the executive director of the Green Web foundation. I also help manage the community called climateaction.tech, and I'll hand over to the next person particularly, which I think is you Dawn, Nafus.

Dawn Nafus: Yes, I am Dawn Nafus. I am an anthropologist over at Intel where I focus on AI governance and responsible ai, specifically with an emphasis on AI's role climate change. I'm also an editor with Hannah Knox of for a Data Saturated World, which looks at the surprising ways that ethnography and data science intersection.

So I'll hand it over to Laura.

Laura Watts: Chris, thanks so much for inviting us to be here. This is fantastic. I'm Laura Watts. I'm a consultant and an ethnographer of futures, which basically means that I collaborate with organizations, companies, and communities to explore there innovations and how they, and together we might make the future otherwise.

And I have a background both in tech cuz a long time ago I used to work in the telecoms industry, particularly mobile telecoms. And I'm also a professor of Energy and Society at the University of Edinburgh. And as part of all that work, I've written a book called Energy at the End of the World an Orkney Island Saga, which is published by MIT press.

And that's based on the work that I've been doing for, oh, over a decade in the islands of Orkney, which is islands off the far northeast coast of Scotland. And that's actually also where I live. And I've been talking a bit and working with them on their energy futures, which we'll be hearing mor...

Welcome to Fact Check on the Environment Variables podcast! Fact Check is a new segment where we take a deeper dive into the bigger questions in a one-to-one discussion with a special guest. Host Ismael Velasco, is joined by EV regular Sara Bergman, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, and an individual contributor to the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity project. They discuss Sara’s green software journey, the Software Carbon Intensity ISO standard, why it excludes carbon offsets, and fact checking what that tells us about offset-based green software claims, from Google to Blockchain.

Learn more about our people:

• Sara Bergman: LinkedIn / Twitter
• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter
• The GSF’s Software Carbon Intensity Specification 
• Microsoft’s Green Design Principles
• Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11)
• Microsoft’s Sleeping Tabs for Edge
• Browser Plugin: Tab Suspender
• Tim Frick’s MightyBytes

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:

Sara Bergman: It gives us the software practitioner a way of evaluating if a future change will be good or bad. If an older implemented change was good or bad, it allows us to find the biggest culprit. Sets us up for success in terms of being able to change our software. And I think that's what makes it important because it, it gives us leverage.

It gives us opportunity for room to move, I guess, to do something, to not just stand there and be like, okay, now what?

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.

Ismael Velasco: Hello and welcome to the first episode of Fact, check a new segment in Environment Variables. I am your host Ismael Velasco, and I am thrilled and inspired to be welcoming Sara Bergman to our home.

Sara Bergman: Thank you so much. I am thrilled to be here and I'm very honored to be on this this first episode. So thank you so much for having me.

Ismael Velasco: It's great. And for our listeners, the format that we've had in the past for Environment Variables is where you have a host and several panelists, and you've been a regular. But this will be the first time that you're interviewed one on one as part of fact check. The goal of fact check is to do that, to dive more deeply into a subject with a wonderful expert and just have a good conversation and see where it takes us.

So I am excited to, to start, and before starting, I just wanted to ask a bit. About yourself. I understand that you sort of got into green software in university and just kind of never let it go, but I wanted to know why that happened. You must have chosen to study it. So how did you end up in, in software engineering and how didn't you end up in green software engineering?

Sara Bergman: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm really impressed by, by the, by the homework you've made here , so thanks for that. Yeah. So I. Usually say I slipped into software on like a banana peel in the school system in Sweden is such that after 10 years of school you get to select program for your upper, upper secondary diploma.

So you have three years where you can. Go a bit deeper into something. So you have the university preparational programs where you have the more geared towards profession such as carpent tea or hairdressing or, or things like that. And I wanted to do something that was preparatory for university, that was close to science and technology, and that was a special program that they had.

Like a third was computer science. And at the time I knew how to start a computer and I could play the. . That was about the extent of my knowledge. But I thought, and to this day, I can't explain this reasoning, but I was like, yeah, computers would probably be important. At some point I better learn. So that was my sole reason for choosing that program.

And then in the first class, I had to sort of raise my hand and ask, sorry, but what's a CPU? Because I've never heard a term and. Of course were a lot of men in this class, they all turned around like, who is this chick? What she like, does she know what she's done? I did not know what, what I had done at all.

But then this was a great program. The teachers was really great, and after that it was sort of love at first sight once I got into programming and started taking more of those courses and I, I really loved the mindset of how you think about building software and. It's so creative. People don't think it's creative.

It's like the best kept secret of our industry is the creativity. So then after that I chose a, an engineering programming in university, which was geared towards engineering. And yeah, that's where, where, where it led to green software engineering, because we actually. In order to be allowed to graduate with this specific title, you had to take at least one course, which involved sustainable practices.

So I was forced to do something at least. And then I wanted, I took a course called Green itm.

Ismael Velasco: And did you have a previous connection to nature? I heard in one of your talks when you were giving examples and you were making a really great point, you were saying how we make all these efforts to green our domestic lives? And then we get to work and kind of lose ou...

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This Week in Green Software Episode, host Ismael Velasco takes you through the recent key events and happenings in the world of green software. He outlines a range of reports coming out from The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, IPCC, UNEP, UNFCCC, IEA and many other acronyms to boot! He also highlights huge positive (and negative) changes in Big Tech and how you can be part of the crest of the wave of change in green software.

Timings of mentions of links below are listed next to them for your reference!

Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Microsoft’s Green Design Principles [25:52]
• Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11) [28:52]
• AWS: Well Architected Updates [31:20]
• Google Cloud: Cloud Aware Computing Dashboard [33:56]
• Meta: AI Powered Audio Compression [38:09]

Talks & Events:

• Event: Decarbonize Software by The Green Software Foundation [39:13]

Reports & Articles:

• Bulletin: The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin [01:55]
• Report: IPCC Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [04:27]
• Report: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [14:02]
• Report: UNFCCC Reports [15:00]
• Report: IEA World Energy Outlook 2022 Report [16:25]
• Article: Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality is Coming into View by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times [19:24]
• Article: Carbon-aware laptop charging by Andy Stanford-Clark in Hackernoon [23:00]

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:

Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most up-to-date news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focused climate action.

I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.

I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. In this episode, I will look at the raft of worrying reports released one after another by all the top international climate agencies. So recently I will explain why the news is dire, yet find the nevertheless significant milestones of hope buried in their reports.

Whereas last episode, I focused on the power of individual initiatives. This episode, I look at the complex role of big tech and highlight hot off the press green software developments in Microsoft, aws, Google, and Meta. Finally, I take the opportunity to trail the milestone represented by the forthcoming the Carbonized software event on November the 10th.

Check the episode notes for all the. So this week the planet received difficult news from a series of devastating reports, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the I P C C, the World Meteorological Organization, the wmo, the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, the United Nation's Framework, Conventional Climate Change, the U N F C C C, and the International Energy Agency.

The I. All released one after another. A series of scary reports. The World Meteorological Organization released its greenhouse gas bulletin, which found the highest ever CO2 emissions showing that we are back to pre covid levels and beyond. It also saw the biggest year on year jump in methane concentrations in 2021.

Since systematic measurements begun nearly 40 years ago, what does this. We hear a lot of the term CO2 emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, but I think it's become so prevalent that many of us don't really understand what it actually refers to. We talk about carbon. And CO2 emissions as a shorthand for all greenhouse gases, because other gases like methane stay in the atmosphere less so you're able to kind of do more about it.

Whereas CO2 stays for a very, very long time and removing it is a huge challenge. People sometimes think also that if we manage to remove all the excess co. Life returns to where it was before industrial times, but that is not the case. Whatever happens, the atmosphere has changed, the weather patterns have changed.

So although we desperately need to reduce and remove that excess co2, no one really knows quite what the world will look like even after we've cleared it all back to preindustrial. All we know is that it will be better, but not necessarily where it would have been at the beginning, and in fact, definitely not where it would have been at the beginning.

Now, why does this matter? Well, As I said, this growing heat in the atmosphere creates extreme weather events, and, and recently in a, in an earlier report, the wmo calculated that under current policies and trajectories by 2050, every single child in the world will be exposed to severe heat event. My son will be in his thirties, possibly about to start a family every single child in the planet, which also means every adult really will be exposed to severe heat events by 2050 at this rate.

What about the other reports? The I P C, UNEP, ...

Welcome to our first episode of The Week in Green Software hosted by Ismael Velasco. This new segment on The Environment Variables Podcast will be a bite size smorgasbord of news, events, resources and tools that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software-focused climate action.  Check out the links below for all the resources mentioned in this podcast! 

Learn more about our people:

• Ismael Velasco: LinkedIn / Twitter

Episode resources:

• The Green Software Foundation Website 
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter 
• Course: Green Software Practitioner Training Course by the Green Software Foundation 
• Company: Greenspector
• Website: climateaction.tech 

Talks & Events:

• Event: CarbonHack22 by The Green Software Foundation

Papers, Books, Articles & Blogs:

• Paper: The Sustainability Chapter of the Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
• Book: World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern
• Book: Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick
• Article: Greta Thunberg on the Climate Delusion in The Guardian

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:

Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green. Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most UpToDate news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focus, climate action.

I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.

Hello. I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. Each episode I will visit the cutting edge of software focused climate action and give you a whistlestop tool of the latest research and solutions standards and tools. A Bitesize smorgasbord of News and Resources. If you're just starting your journey as a responsible technologist, The Week in Green Software will give you the signpost you need to navigate this fast changing landscape.

And the first signpost I'll give you is the Green Software Practitioner Training course created by the Green Software Foundation. If you have found your way to this podcast, you probably already know that. Digital creations of our hands as we type on keyboards and build software have very real material impacts on the environment that aggregate into a massive driver of climate change.

And you want to do something about it, and this is why you're here, but perhaps a lot of the vocabulary terminology techniques. Are still fuzzy to you. We speak about CO2 emissions of software. What does that mean? We speak about carbon efficiency versus energy efficiency, and we also speak of carbon awareness and we talk about hardware efficiency and how that interacts with software.

When we talk about all kinds of metrics around all this, and finally we discuss all of these things. Very frequently in the context of climate commitments, whether it be the planetary commitment toward net zero or specific targets in particular companies or nations, and just like a junior developer, junior green software developer.

Can also feel somewhat lost in the massive vocabulary and of new concepts that are not part of the day to day of our practice to this day. So this course creates a very. Easy to consume, clear and evidence-based structure that breaks down the concepts of carbon efficiency, of energy, efficiency, of carbon awareness, hardware efficiency measurement, and of climate commitments, including each core component, each core terminology, and in very brief units.

Allows you to understand the landscape and gives you healthfully some good multiple choice questions at the end to consolidate your learning. By the time you finish this very brief course, you will be equipped to. Dive into the nitty gritty of making your software green, not just at the level of technique, but at the level of understanding why those techniques are having an impact and how they fit as a whole with the various other elements of creating green software.

In short, the Green Software Foundation training course will prepare you to consume. This podcast and others from a position of awareness. But the weaken green software is not only aimed at those starting their journey, if you are a pioneer already greening the material impact of our digital lives, this podcast will keep you updated on the latest advances and how they might enhance your own efforts.

And speaking of pioneers, Second resource I'd like to bring to your attention is the sustainability chapter of a hot of the Press Web Almanac Report by HTTP Archive. HTTP Archive are the creators of the Wayback Machine, and they. Are the foremost collection of copies of snapshots of the worldwide Web in the world, and that results in a massive data set that is indicative of the practices of Web developers.

This chapter was authored by real pioneers, Lauren De Verne Gerry McGovern and Tim Frick, who have helped define and continue to shape discourse and practice in green software on a global scale. Many of the green software practitioners that I know. Began their journey and trace it back to the incredible book, Indispensable book, Worldwide Waste by Gerry McGovern, and many of the people who started trying to respond to the moral imperative and call to action of that powerful occur, that powerful voice from the heart turned to Tim freak's groundbreaking textbook.

Sustainable Web design and he was one of the first people really together. A lot of the practices that today we are working on across the field. And Lo de Verne works with a company called Greenspector who have been really. Forefront of new techniques and new approaches to understanding in a very rigorous and actionable way, the environmental impact not just of websites, but of Web applications and of software in general.

And this chapter that they have written as a dream team together, I would say is probably the single best resource on green website development practices available rig...