Environment Variables

Host Chris Adams speaks with Didi Hoffmann, CTO of Green Coding Solutions, about building energy awareness into operating systems and making sustainability a first-class concern in software development. They discuss Didi’s journey from Linux kernel programming to climate-focused tech and many more!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Didi Hoffmann: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Green Coding Solutions [02:32]
• BioHof Potsdam [07:12]
• PowerLetrics: An Open-Source Framework for Power and Energy Metrics for Linux | IEEE [12:32]
• GitHub - green-kernel/powerletrics: Powermetrics for Linux 
• Green Metrics Tool | green-coding.io [13:13]
• Green Screen Catalyst Fund [17:15]
• ProcPower | Prototype Fund [22:19]
• Green Kernel Wordpress Plugin | GitHub [27:09]
• GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud: Real Time Energy and Carbon Standards for Cloud Providers [36:48] 
• Blue Angel for Software- Certificate Services | green-coding.io [38:52]
• Paris Conference December 10th and 11th 2025 | Green IO [56:58]
• Green Kernel · GitHub
• Why We’re Exploring SCI Disclosure Certification | GSF  

Events:

• ecoCompute conference [59:41]
• Code: ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLES

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

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

WIN FREE TICKETS TO GREEN IO LONDON:

• CLICK THIS LINK AND COMMENT BELOW TO WIN 

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn | Website
• Gosia Fricze: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Green Software Movement | GSF [04:33] 
• Green Software Practitioner Course | GSF [17:56] 
• Environment Variables Podcast | Ep 84 Backstage: SOFT (Previously TOSS) Project [24:42] 

Events:

• Green IO London Conference September 23 & 24 2025 [20:37] 
• Events - Green Software Movement | GSF

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.

Host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain to explore the latest news from The Week in Green Software. They look at Hugging Face’s AI energy tools, Mistral’s lifecycle analysis, and the push for better data disclosure in the pursuit for AI sustainability. They discuss how prompt design, context windows, and model choice impact emissions, as well as the role of emerging standards like the Software Carbon Intensity for AI, and new research on website energy use. 

Learn more about our people:

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

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• A Gift from Hugging Face on Earth Day: ChatUI-Energy Lets You See Your AI Chat’s Energy Impact Live [04:02]
• Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI | Mistral AI [19:47]
• AI Energy Score Leaderboard - a Hugging Face Space by AIEnergyScore [30:42]
• Challenges Related to Approximating the Energy Consumption of a Website | IEEE [55:14]
• National Drought Group meets to address “nationally significant” water shortfall - GOV.UK 

Resources:

• GitHub - huggingface/chat-ui: Open source codebase powering the HuggingChat app [07:47]
• General policy framework for the ecodesign of digital services version 2024 [29:37]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification Project | GSF [37:35]
• Neural scaling law - Wikipedia [45:26]
• Software Carbon Intensity for Artificial Intelligence | GSF [52:25]

Announcement:

• Green Software Movement | GSF [01:01:45] 

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: ChatGPT, they're all like working towards a space of how do we build a tool where people can literally pour junk into it, and it will figure something out. 

Whereas what we should be doing, is how do you use that context window very carefully. And it is like programming. 

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 this week in Green Software where we look at the latest news in sustainable software development. I am joined once again by my friend and partner in crime or occasionally crimes, Asim Hussain, of the Green Software Foundation. My name is Chris Adams. I am the Director of Policy and Technology at the Green Web Foundation, no longer the executive director there,

and, as we've moved to a co-leadership model. And, Asim, really lovely to see you again, and I believe this is the first time we've been on a video podcast together, right?

Asim Hussain: Yeah. I have to put clothes on now, so, so that's,

Chris Adams: That raises all kinds of questions to how intimate our podcast discussions were before. Maybe they had a different meaning to you than they did to me, actually.

Asim Hussain: Maybe you didn't know I was naked, but anyway.

Chris Adams: No, and that makes it fine. That's what, that's what matters. I also have to say, this is the first time we get to, I like the kind of rocking the Galactus style headphones that you've got on here.

Asim Hussain: These are my, yeah, no, these are old ones that I posted recently. I actually repaired them. I got my soldering iron and I repaired the jack at the end there. So, I'm very proud of myself for having repaired. I had the right to repair. Chris. I had the right to repair it.

Chris Adams: Yeah. This is why policy matters.

Asim Hussain: I also have the capability.

Chris Adams: Good. So you can get, so, good on you for saving a bunch of embodied carbon and, how that's calculated is something we might touch on. So, yes. So if you are new to this podcast, my friends, we're just gonna be reviewing some of the news and stories that are kinda showed up on our respective radars as we work in our kind of corresponding roles in both the Green Software Foundation and the Green Web Foundation.

And hopefully this will be somewhat interesting or at least diverting to people as they wash their dishes whilst listening to us. So that's the plan. Asim, should I give you a chance to just briefly introduce what you do at the Green Software Foundation before I go into this?

'Cause I realized, I've just assumed that everyone knows who you are. And I know who you are, but maybe there's people who are listening for the first time, for example.

Asim Hussain: Oh yeah. So, yeah. So my name's Asim Hussain. I am a technologist by trade. I've been building software for several decades now. I formed the green software, yeah, Green Software Foundation, you know, four years ago. And, now I'm the executive director and I'm basically in charge of, yeah, just running the foundation and making sure we deliver against our vision of a futur...

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams welcomes Scott Chamberlin, co-founder of Neuralwatt and ex-Microsoft Software Engineer, to discuss energy transparency in large language models (LLMs). They explore the challenges of measuring AI emissions, the importance of data center transparency, and projects that work to enable flexible, carbon-aware use of AI. Scott shares insights into the current state of LLM energy reporting, the complexities of benchmarking across vendors, and how collaborative efforts can help create shared metrics to guide responsible AI development.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Scott Chamberlin: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

News:

• Set a carbon fee in Sustainability Manager | Microsoft [26:45]
• Making an Impact with Microsoft's Carbon Fee | Microsoft Report [28:40] 
• AI Training Load Fluctuations at Gigawatt-scale – Risk of Power Grid Blackout? – SemiAnalysis [49:12]

Resources:

• Chris’s question on LinkedIn about understanding the energy usage from personal use of Generative AI tools [01:56]
• Neuralwatt Demo on YouTube [02:04]
• Charting the path towards sustainable AI with Azure Machine Learning resource metrics | Will Alpine [24:53] 
• NVApi - Nvidia GPU Monitoring API | smcleod.net [29:44]
• Azure Machine Learning monitoring data reference | Microsoft 
• Environment Variables Episode 63 - Greening Serverless with Kate Goldenring [31:18]
• NVIDIA to Acquire GPU Orchestration Software Provider Run:ai [33:20]
• Run.AI
• NVIDIA Run:ai Documentation  
• GitHub - huggingface/AIEnergyScore: AI Energy Score: Initiative to establish comparable energy efficiency ratings for AI models. [56:20]
• Carbon accounting in the Cloud: a methodology for allocating emissions across data center users 

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:

Scott Chamberlin: Every AI factory is going to be power constrained in the future. And so what does compute look like if power is the number one limiting factor that you have to deal with? 

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, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. We talk a lot about transparency on this podcast when talking about green software, because if you want to manage the environmental impact of software, it really helps if you can actually measure it.

And as we've covered on this podcast before, measurement can very quickly become quite the rabbit hole to go down, particularly in new domains such as generative AI. So I'm glad to have our guest, Scott Chamberlain today here to help us navigate as we plum these depths. Why am I glad in particular?

Well, in previous lives, Scott not only built the Microsoft Windows operating system power and carbon tracking tooling, getting deep into the weeds of measuring how devices consume electricity, but he was also key in helping Microsoft Azure work out their own internal carbon accounting standards. He then moved on to working at Intel to work on a few related projects, including work to expose these kinds of numbers in usable form to developers when people when making the chips that go in these servers. His new project Neuralwatt is bringing more transparency and control to AI language models.

And a few weeks back when I was asking on LinkedIn for pointers on how to understand the energy usage from LLMs I use, he shared a link to a very cool demo showing basically the thing I was asking for: real-time energy usage figures from Nvidia cards directly in the interface of a chat tool. The video's in the show notes if you're curious.

And it is really, cool. So Scott, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything else that I missed that you'd like to add for the intro before we dive into any of this stuff?

Scott Chamberlin: No, that sounds good.

Chris Adams: Cool. Well, Scott, thank you very much once again for joining us. If you are new to this podcast, just a reminder, we'll try and share a link to every single project in the show notes.

So if there are things that are particularly interest, go to podcast.greensoftware.foundation and we'll do our best to make sure that we have links to any papers, projects, or demos like we said. Alright, Scott, I've done a bit of an intro about your background and everything like that, and you're calling me from a kind of pleasingly green room today.

So maybe I should ask you, can I ask where you're calling from today and a little bit about like the place?

Scott Chamberlin: So I live in the ...

Anne Currie is joined by Sean Varley, Chief Evangelist and VP of Business Development at Ampere Computing, a leader in building energy-efficient, cloud-native processors. They unpack the energy demands of AI, why power caps and utilization matter more than raw compute, and how to rethink metrics like performance-per-rack for a greener digital future. Sean also discusses Ampere’s role in the AI Platform Alliance, the company’s partnership with Rakuten, and how infrastructure choices impact the climate trajectory of AI.

Learn more about our people:

• Anne Currie: LinkedIn | Website
• Sean Varley: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Ampere Cloud Native Processors – Ultra-efficient ARM-based chips powering cloud and edge workloads [02:30]
• AI Platform Alliance – Coalition promoting energy-efficient AI hardware [04:55]
• Ampere + Rakuten Case Study – Real-world deployment with 36% less energy per rack [05:50]
• Green Software Foundation Real Time Cloud Project – Standardizing real-time carbon data from cloud providers [15:10]
• Software Carbon Intensity Specification – Measuring the carbon intensity of software [17:45]
• FinOps Foundation – Financial accountability in cloud usage, with sustainability guidance [24:20]
• Kepler Project – Kubernetes power usage monitoring [26:30]
• LLaMA Models by Meta [29:10]
• Anthropic’s Claude AI [31:25]
• Anne Currie, Sara Bergman & Sarah Hsu: Building Green Software [34:00]

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:

Sean Varley: Because at the end of the day, if you want to be more sustainable, then just use less electricity. That's the whole point, right. 

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

I'm your host, Chris Adams. 

Anne Currie: Hello and welcome to the World of Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software. So I'm your guest host today. It's not, you're not hearing the usual dulcet tones of Chris Adams. My name is Anne Currie. And today we'll be diving into a pressing and timely topic, how to scale AI infrastructure sustainably in a world where energy constraints are becoming a hard limit. And that means that we are gonna be, have to be a little bit more clever and a little bit more careful when we choose the chips we run on. So it's tempting to believe that innovation alone will lead us towards greener compute, but in reality, real sustainability gains happen when efficiency becomes a business imperative when performance per watt, cost and carbon footprint are all measured and all have weight. So, that's where companies like Ampere come in, with cloud native energy efficient approaches to chip design. They're rethinking how we power the AI boom, not just faster but smarter. It's a strategy that aligns directly with Green Software Foundation's mission to reduce carbon emissions from the software lifecycle, particularly in the cloud. So in this episode, we'll explore what this looks like at scale and what we can learn from Ampere's approach to real world efficiency. So what did it take? What does it take to make an AI ready infrastructure that's both powerful, effective, and sustainable? Let's find out. And today we have with us Sean Varley from Ampere.

So Sean, welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sean Varley: Yeah, absolutely Anne, and thanks first for having me on the podcast. I'm a big fan, so, I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I'm the chief evangelist of Ampere Computing. And, I, now what that means is that we run a lot of the ecosystem building and all of the partnership kind of, works that go on to support our silicon products in the marketplace.

And also, build a lot of awareness right around some of these concepts you introduced. You know, all of the, you know, kind of building out that awareness around sustainability and power efficiency and how that also really kinda works, within different workload contexts and workload context change over time.

So all of those sorts of things are kind of in scope, for the evangelism role.

Anne Currie: That's, that is fantastic. So I'll just introduce myself a little bit as well. My name is Anne Currie. If you haven't heard the podcast before, I am one of the authors of O'Reilly's new book, Building Green Software, which I, as I always say, everybody who's listening to this podcast should read Building Green Software.

That was, that is entirely why we wrote the book. I'm also the CEO of the training and Green Consulting Company as Strategically Green. So, hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to talk a little bit about training consultancy, but back to the, back to the podcast. Oh, and I need to remember that everything we'll be talking about today, there will be links about it in the show notes.

So you don't need to worry about writing down URLs or anything. Just look at the show notes before. So, now, I'm actually gonna start off the question by harking, start off the podcast by harking back to somebody that we had on the podcast a couple of months ago. A chap called, Charles Humble. And his, the assertion that he was making was that we all need to wake up to the fact that there isn't just one chip anymore, there isn't a default chip anymore that everybody uses and is kind of good enough for the best in all circumstances to use. when you are, setting up infrastructure, or in the cloud for example, and you have ...

Chris Adams is joined by Adrian Cockcroft, former VP of Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, a pioneer of microservices at Netflix, and contributor to the Green Software Foundation’s Real Time Cloud project. They explore the evolution of cloud sustainability—from monoliths to microservices to serverless—and what it really takes to track carbon emissions in real time. Adrian explains why GPUs offer rare transparency in energy data, how the Real Time Cloud dataset works, and what’s holding cloud providers back from full carbon disclosure. Plus, he shares his latest obsession: building a generative AI-powered house automation system using agent swarms.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Adrian Cockcroft: LinkedIn | GitHub | Medium

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Serverless vs. Microservices vs. Monolith – Adrian's influential blog post [08:08]
• Monitorama 2022: Monitoring Carbon – Adrian’s talk at Monitorama Portland [25:08]
• Real Time Cloud Project – Green Software Foundation [30:23]
• Google Cloud Sustainability Report (2024) – Includes regional carbon data [33:39]
• Microsoft Sustainability Report [36:49]
• AWS Sustainability Practices & AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool [39:59]
• Kepler – Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter [48:01]
• Focus – FinOps Sustainability Working Group [50:10]
• Agent Swarm by Reuven Cohen – AI agent-based coding framework [01:05:01]
• Claude AI by Anthropic [01:05:32]
• GitHub Codespaces [01:11:47]
• Soopra AI – Chat with an AI trained on Adrian’s blog [01:17:01]

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:

Adrian Cockcroft: We figured out it wasn't really possible to get real time energy statistics out of cloud providers because the numbers just didn't exist.

It turns out the only place you can get real time numbers is on things that are not virtualized.

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 Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. If you have worked in cloud computing for any length of time, then even if you do not know the name yet yourself, it's very likely that the way you design systems will have been influenced by my guest today, Adrian Cockcroft.

When at Netflix, Adrian led the move to the cloud there helping, popularize many of the patterns we use when deploying applications ourselves to the cloud. And his name then became synonymous with serverless throughout the 2010s when he joined AWS first leading on open source engagement, and then as a VP focused on what we might refer to now as cloud sustainability.

After leaving AWS, Adrian's kept his fingers in many pies, one of which is the Green Software Foundation's real time cloud project, an initiative to bring transparency and consistency to cloud emissions reporting. With the first dataset release from that project out the door, it seemed a good idea to invite him onto the show to see what's up.

Adrian, thank you so much for joining us today. Can I give you a bit of time to tell us about yourself and what you are, what's what you're keeping? What's keeping you busy these days? I.

Adrian Cockcroft: Yeah, it's great to see you and thanks also for your contributions to the project. We've had a lot of discussions over the last few years as we've worked on that together. well, I'm sort of semi-retired. I stopped my big corporate job at Amazon in 2022. and yeah, I spend my time worrying about my family.

I've got old parents that live in the uk, so I spend a lot of time with them. And, fixing stuff around the house and generally goofing around and doing things I feel like doing rather than stuff that's driven by some corporate agenda. So I'm enjoying that freedom. And, let's see the, yeah, I spend time on the, Green Software Foundation project.

I go to a few conferences and give a few talks and I try to keep up with, you know, what's happening in technology by playing around with whatever the latest tools are and things like that. And that's been my career over the years. I've generally been an early adopter through my entire career. as you mentioned, we were early adopters in cloud.

Back when people said This isn't gonna work and you'll be back in the data center soon. People forgot that was the initial reaction to what we said. it's a little bit like that now with people saying, all this AI stuff doesn't work and we're gonna be giving up and whatever. And it's like, well, I'm making bits of it work well enough to be interesting.

We can talk a bit about that later. and then I know you probably see behind me various musical instruments and things like that, so that's kind of, I, collect musical instruments that I don't have time to really learn how to play and mess around and make bad noises that make me happy. But luckily no one else has to listen to them particularly.

In this Backstage episode of Environment Variables, podcast producer Chris Skipper highlights the Green Software Foundation’s Software Standards Working Group—chaired by Henry Richardson (WattTime) and Navveen Balani (Accenture). This group is central to shaping global benchmarks for sustainable software. Key initiatives discussed include the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification, its extensions for AI and the web, the Real-Time Energy and Carbon Standard for cloud providers, the SCI Guide, and the TOSS framework. Together, these tools aim to drive emissions reduction through interoperable, transparent, and globally applicable standards. 

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn | Website
• Navveen Balani: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Software Standards Working Group [00:18]
• GSF Directory | Projects [01:06]
• https://wiki.greensoftware.foundation/proj-mycelium [03:57]
• Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification | GSF [04:18] 
• Impact Framework [08:09]
• Carbon Aware SDK [09:11]
• Green Software Patterns [09:32]
• Awesome Green Software | GitHub [10:11]
• Software Carbon Intensity for AI [10:58]
• Software Carbon Intensity for Web [12:24]

Events:

• Developer Week 2025 (July 3 · Mannheim) [13:20]
• Green IO Munich (July 3-4) [13:35]
• EVOLVE [25]: Shaping Tomorrow (July 4 · Brighton) [13:51]
• Grid-Aware Websites (July 6 at 7:00 pm CEST · Amsterdam) [14:03]
• Master JobRunr v8: A Live-Coding Webinar (July 6 · Virtual) [14:20]
• Blue Angle for Software / Carbon Aware Computing (July 9 at 6:30 pm CEST · Berlin) [14:30]
• Shaping Progress Responsibly—AI and Sustainability (July 10 at 6:00 pm CEST · Frankfurt am Main) [14:41]
• Green Data Center for Green Software (July 15 at 6:30 pm CEST · Hybrid · Karlsruhe) [14:52]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Chris Skipper: Welcome to Backstage, the behind the scenes series from Environment Variables, where we take a look at the Green Software Foundation's key initiatives and working groups. I'm the producer and host, Chris Skipper. Today we are shining a spotlight on the Green Software Foundation's Software Standards working group. This group plays a critical role in shaping the specifications and benchmarks that guide the development of green software.

Chaired by Henry Richardson, a senior analyst at what time, and Navveen Balani, managing Director and Chief Technologist for Technology Sustainable Innovation at Accenture, the group's mission is to build baseline specifications that can be used across the world, whether you're running systems in a cloud environment in Europe or on the ground in a developing country.

In other words, the Software Standards Working Group is all about creating interoperable, reliable standards, tools that allow us to measure, compare, and improve the sustainability of software in a meaningful way.

Some of the major projects they lead at the Green Software Foundation include the Software Carbon Intensity Specification, or SCI, which defines how to calculate the carbon emissions of software; the SCI for Artificial Intelligence, which extends this framework to cover the unique challenges of measuring emissions from AI workloads; the SCI for Web, which focuses on emissions from websites and front end systems;

the Realtime Energy and Carbon Standard for Cloud Providers, which aims to establish benchmarks for emissions data and cloud platforms;

the SCI Guide, which helps organizations navigate energy carbon intensity and embodied emissions methodologies,

and the Transforming Organizations for Sustainable Software, or TOSS framework, which offers a broader blueprint for integrating sustainability across business and development processes.

Together these initiatives support the foundation's broader mission to reduce the total change in global carbon emissions associated with software by prioritizing abatement over offsetting, and building trust through open, transparent, and inclusive standards. Now for some recent updates from the working group.

Earlier this year, the group made a big move by bringing the SCI for AI project directly into its core focus. As the world turns more and more to artificial intelligence, figuring out how to measure AI's energy use and emissions footprint is becoming a priority. That's why they've committed to developing a baseline SCI specification for AI over the next few months, drawing on insights from a recent Green AI committee workshop and collaborating closely with experts across the space.

There's also growing interest in extending the SCI framework beyond carbon. In a recent meeting, the group discussed the potential for creating a software water intensity metric, a way to track water usage associated with digital infrastructure, especially data centers. While that comes with some chal...

It’s been three years of Environment Variables! What a landmark year for the Green Software Foundation. From launching behind-the-scenes Backstage episodes, to covering the explosive impact of AI on software emissions, to broadening our audience through beginner-friendly conversations; this retrospective showcases our mission to create a trusted ecosystem for sustainable software. Here’s to many more years of EV!

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Anne Currie: LinkedIn
• Chris Skipper: LinkedIn
• Pindy Bhullar: LinkedIn
• Liya Mathew: LinkedIn
• Asim Hussain: LinkedIn
• Holly Cummins: LinkedIn
• Charles Tripp: LinkedIn
• Dawn Nafus: LinkedIn
• Max Schulze: LinkedIn
• Killian Daly: LinkedIn
• James Martin: LinkedIn

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Backstage: TOSS Project (02:26)
• Backstage: Green Software Patterns (04:51)
• The Week in Green Software: Obscuring AI’s Real Carbon Output (07:41)
• The Week in Green Software: Sustainable AI Progress (09:51)
• AI Energy Measurement for Beginners (12:57)
• The Economics of AI (15:22)
• How to Tell When Energy Is Green with Killian Daly (17:47)
• How to Explain Software to Normal People with James Martin (20:29)
  
  

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Chris Skipper: Welcome to Environment Variables from the Green Software Foundation. The podcast that brings you the latest in sustainable software development has now been running for three years.

So that's three years of the latest news in green software, talking about everything from AI energy through to the cloud, and its effect on our environment and how we as a software community can make things better for everybody else.

This past year Environment Variables has truly embodied the mission of the Green Software Foundation, and that's to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools, and best practices for creating and building green software. Now this episode's gonna feature some of the more key episodes that we did over the last year.

We're gonna be looking at a wide variety of topics and it's going to be hopefully a nice journey back through both the timeline of the podcast, but also the landscape of green software over the last year and how it has dramatically changed, not only due to the dramatic rise in use of AI amongst other things, but also just to the fantastic ideas that people have brought to the table in order to try and solve the problem of trying to decarbonize software. So without further ado, let's dive in to the first topic.

​

Chris Skipper: First, we brought about a new change in the way the podcast was structured. A new type of episode called Backstage.

Backstage is basically a behind the scenes look at the Green Software Foundation, internal projects and working groups. It's a space for our community to hear directly from project leaders to share the wins and their lessons learned and reinforce trust and transparency, which is one of the core tenets of the Green Software Foundation Manifesto.

Now, there were a bunch of great projects that were featured over the last year. We're gonna look at two specifically.

In our first backstage episode, we introduced the TOSS project. TOSS stands for Transforming Organizations for Sustainable Software, and it's led by the fantastic Pindy Bhullar. This project aims to embed sustainability into business strategy and operations through a four pillar framework.

. It's a perfect example of how the foundation operationalizes its mission to minimize emissions by supporting organizations on their sustainability journey.

Let's hear the snippet from Pendi explaining these four pillars.

Pindy Bhullar: Transforming organizations for sustainable software is the acronym for toss. Businesses will be able to utilize the toss framework as a guide to lay the groundwork for managing change and also improving software operations in the future, software practices within organizations can be integrated with sustainability in a cohesive and agile manner, rather than addressing green software practices in an isolated approach.

For a company to fully benefit from sustainable transformation of their software development processes, we need to review all aspects of technology. The Toss framework is designed to be embedded across multiple aspects of its business operations. Dividing the task framework along four pillars has allowed for simultaneous, top down and bottom up reinforcement of sustainable practices, as well as the integration of new tools, processes, and regulations that I merge over time.

The four pillars aim to foster a dynamic foundation for companies to understand where to act now, to adjust later and expand within organizational's sustainable software transformation. The four pillars are strategy, implementation. Operational compliance and regulations and within each of the pillars, we have designed a decision tree that will be construc...

Chris Adams is joined by Thibaud Colas; product lead at Torchbox, president of the Django Software Foundation, and lead on Wagtail CMS. They explore the role of open source projects in tackling digital carbon emissions and discuss Wagtail's pioneering carbon footprint reporting, sustainable default settings, and grid-aware website features, all enabled through initiatives like Google Summer of Code. Thibaud shares how transparency, contributor motivation, and clear governance can drive impactful sustainability efforts in web development, and why measuring and reducing emissions in the Python ecosystem matters now more than ever.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Thibaud Colas: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

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

Resources:

• Wagtail CMS [01:46]
• Web Almanac | HTTP Archive [08:03]
• Google Summer of Code [11:07] 
• Wagtail RFCs [19:51] 
• A Gift from Hugging Face on Earth Day: ChatUI-Energy [27:55]
• PyCon US [36:07]
• Grid-aware websites - Green Web Foundation [39:22] 
• Climate Action Tech [41:07] 
• Agent Bedlam: A Future of Endless AI Energy Consumption? - My Framer Site 
• Here's how re/insurers can curb GenAI emissions | Reinsurance Business 

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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

Thibaud Colas: If you get your contributors to work on high value and high impact things, that's the best way to motivate them. So that's kind of the idea here is, formalize that we have a goal to reduce our footprint. And by virtue of this, we, you know, make it a more impactful thing for people to work on by having those numbers, by communicating this specific change to images, here is the potential for it to reduce emissions.

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, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. If you want the way we build software to be more sustainable and more inclusive, one way to improve the chances of this happening is to make it easier to build it that way,

so building greener software goes with the grain of the software framework you're using. And one way to do that is update the defaults that prioritize accessibility and sustainability in the framework itself. One of the people I've seen who really exemplifies this idea and this approach is my guest today, Thibaud Colas,

a lead developer at the software agency, Torchbox, the current president of the Django Software Foundation and the product lead at the popular Wagtail Content Management System, which is also built on top of Django. The Wagtail CMS powers sites like the NASA Jet Propulsion Labs website, the University of Pennsylvania's website, the Tate Gallery, and even the main NHS website in the UK.

So while it might not have the same coverage as WordPress, which covers more than a third of the internet, still powers a large number of, a number of large sites, and changes made in this framework can have a decent reach. So changes made here are worth discussing because the Wagtail CMS docs, in my view, are probably the most advanced talking about sustainability for any open source CMS right now.

And there's a clear link between sustainability and embodied admissions of the hardware that you actually, that people need to use to access your websites too. And with that in mind, you can see it's got some of the most developed accessibility features as well. But we're getting ahead of ourselves though, and Thibaud is in a much better place to talk about this than me.

So Thibaud, thank you so much for joining us. Can I give you the floor to introduce yourself for our listeners?

Thibaud Colas: Hi. It's my pleasure, Chris. Thank you for having me. I'm Thibaud, my pronouns are he/him. And, yeah, I'm the product lead, for the Wagtail CMS at Torchbox. Wagtail is an open source project and products, and Torchbox, we are the original creators of the project and main contributors. And, yeah, as product lead I helped shape the work of Torchbox on Wagtail and of other contributors as well. And, as president of the Jingo Software Foundation, I have similar responsibilities for the Django Project. Django being a big Web framework, one of the biggest on Python. Just to give you a sense of scale, Wagtail, that's on the order of 10 to 20,000 sites out there. And Django, we're talking half a million to a million projects.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thank you, Thibaud. And, Thibaud, where are you calling me from today? Because, I,

Thibaud Colas: I'm in Cambridge, UK. got started on Wagtail way back in New Zealand,

but travels took me back to Europe and UK. I'm from France originally.

Chris Adams: Oh, cool. Alright, thank you for that. So I'm Chris Adams. I am the co-chair of the Green Software Foundation Policy Working Group. I'm also one of the, we're also, we also have show notes for this.

So all the projects and links that we discuss will be available. So in your quest to basically develop better sustain sustainable software engineering skills, that will all be available for...