Green IO

Changing its Cloud provider is never small potatoes, especially when a platform operates up to 40,000 containers and has about 4 million unique visitors a day to its website. Yet Back Market made the move from AWS to Google Cloud Platform motivated primarily by … sustainability concerns! In this episode its CTO, Dawn Backer, chats with Gaël Duez and covers a wide range of GreenOps topics such as:    ☁️ Why they switched from AWs to GCP   📏 The needed granularity in carbon measurement    💸 Why FinOps is a no brainer to boost sustainability   🏦 The importance of carbon P&L in decision making   ⚖️ The Dilemma of running GreenOps between carbon reduction and faster cloud instances   And much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Dawn’s LinkedIn
• Gaël's website 
• Green IO website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Dawn's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Florian Valeye’s python library Tracarbon
• Tead’s dataset  
• Back Market's impact report 
• WHO'S report on ewaste
• EU's publication on ewaste
• Boavizta’s Cloud Scanner
• Cloud Carbon Footprint

Transcript (auto-generated)
Dawn (00:00)It is always important to be controlling costs when you're a CTO and infrastructure is always a significant component of the PNL. And if you can make sure people are focused on the environmental impact, it will have a cost impact. And so you can advocate for GreenOps because it is tied to the bottom line.
Gaël Duez (00:04)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Migrating to a new cloud provider because of the lack of sustainability commitment from the previous one is almost never seen in our IT industry. So I was really impressed with the talk delivered by two Back Market senior engineers at Green IO Paris last year. So impressed that I wanted to learn more about Back Market engineering culture. I discovered teams who have seriously embraced the GreenOps approach and whose feedback could greatly benefit product and tech teams, no matter the industry they work in. This is why I'm so excited to welcome Dawn Becker, Back Market CTO, on the show today. Dawn is a senior engineering leader who has managed infrastructure, operations, and software development teams in organizations ranging from 50 to more than 100,000 employees, from startups to Fortune 500 companies and her functional expertise spans across many layers of the technology stack, including data center, network systems and database operations, software engineering, course, you name it, I guess you understood that she is a very versatile expert. Welcome to the show Dawn and thanks for making room in your busy calendar for this interview.
Dawn (02:06)Thank you for inviting me, Gaël. It's a pleasure to be here.
Gaël Duez (02:09)Pleasure is mine. I'd to start asking you what is the achievement from your teams which you are the proudest in terms of sustainability.
Dawn (02:19)So it is definitely the migration of our infrastructure to a new cloud provider. We did it in under six months. And we have up to 40,000 containers in our infrastructure. So it's a significant achievement. And it's been great results for us so far.
Gaël Duez (02:42)Yeah, what was the result that you were looking such a massive project? just before you answer this question, for the sake of understanding, what size of the tech stack and the human power are we talking about at Back Market? How many engineers?
Dawn (03:00)Yes, so we have about 260 engineers at Back Market. We operate up to 40,000 containers and we have about 4 million unique visitors a day to our site. We work really hard as a company to be conscious about our impact on the environment. And so when we were evaluating our next steps for infrastructure. were at a point where we needed to modernize our infrastructure. We're a 10 year old company and as happens in 10 year old companies, we had a bit of debt that we needed to pay down and it was going to require us to recast our infrastructure. And to do that, it gives you the opportunity, which doesn't come along very often to do a change in cloud providers.
Gaël Duez (04:00)That was also an opportunistic move because it's not like you were scaling up the tech stack and suddenly in the morning you say, okay, enough is enough. I want to change my cloud provider. It was also connected with a reflection on the current state of your tech stack and the level of technical debt you have reached. And okay, enough is enough. We need to refactor a bit and maybe even that's a great timing to ask ourselves on which platforms do we want to be hosted? Am I correct to state it that way?
Dawn (04:31)Exactly.
Gaël Duez (04:32)And what were the results that you wanted to achieve in terms of sustainability by migrating from, I guess we can name them, it was made public in Green IO Paris that you migrated from AWS to Google Cloud Platform.
Dawn (04:48)Yes, so the biggest factor in the decision in the end was the impact and our ability to track it. number one, the visibility we get from Google Cloud on our CO2 emissions and the ability to locations with renewable power was a big factor in our decision we're a B Corp and this becomes a very important aspect of what we do is to be able to report on that. So that became an important component of the decision-making process. And it's also that we can start to break down and start to invest in breaking down not only that information for the infrastructure, but each component of what we run and be able to align teams around the impact that they have. we're still at the early stages of this because we've just finished our migration in April. But we have ambitions to create greater and greater insights with more and more detail so that we can have a clear view of what it costs to serve our users specifically for certain functionality and be able to make decisions about engineering investment on ways to improve that over time.
Gaël Duez (06:11)So it means that the ultimate goal is that each team, feature team, impact teams, I don't know how you name them, are accountable of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they emit.
Dawn (06:27)Yeah, exactly.
Gaël Duez (06:28)And that was the number one reason for you to migrate into Google Cloud because they can provide this level of accuracy.
Dawn (06:38)it was the biggest weight in the decision. There are of course other factors. There's a better visibility and higher impact we have on the roadmap and discussions that we can have with our, our account team, the level of partnership that's provided. were also big factors. We run on Kubernetes. So having the managed GKE offering with definite uplift for us.
Gaël Duez (07:06)You mentioned Kubernetes. There are several projects around incorporating sustainability natively in K8 and also putting them in the CI-CD. Is it the sort of project that you're looking for
Dawn (07:22)Well, first we want to be able to have the level of granularity, which doesn't really exist today, on knowing for what type of instance that we choose, what can be the carbon footprint for that. And we did this. One of the engineers on my team, Florian Valeye he wrote an open source contribution that would, for AWS, using data set provided by Teeds. They did some research in 2021. So he wrote an open source tool called Track Carbon. And that allowed anyone to track the energy consumption and calculate carbon emissions for their use in AWS. That research course was a point in time and it didn't continue to evolve. And so we didn't have the data for the evolving instance types. So it became obsolete. But we would love to be able to do that at this level of detail, not only for ourselves, but make it available to others as well so that we could track with greater accuracy the impact at the instance level.
Gaël Duez (08:22)And on Google Cloud, because maybe I missed some recent updates, but I remember that Google shares some sustainability metrics for the different instances that are running. the feedback I had so far is that it's not that much actionable for engineering teams, mostly because of the lag that it is updated on a monthly basis.
Once again, if I remember that well, that most of the time a software engineering team, want to experiment things and see the next day or within the next few days if the change they made in the architecture, in the code, whatever the design has provided an impact. So maybe could you clarify a how teams are actually using this information from Google Cloud to reduce their carbon footprint?
Dawn (09:29)So today, we're not actually using it to reduce our carbon footprint. We're using it to create visibility. And visibility is the first step for accountability. If people are aware of the impact that they're having, they are more likely to take action on their own. And you're right, the data doesn't come in fast enough, right?
Gaël Duez (09:36)Okay.
Dawn (09:56)Which is part of why we are looking at what different tooling we could have for ourselves to be able to take it a step further than gets provided from Google today. One of the things that we envision doing over time is having costs to serve through infrastructure costs, but also through carbon impact because how well optimized your code is uses more or less CPU and uses more or less energy. And it correlates of course to how much spend you have, but not only. And so being able to have that picture, think is really important. It's also, I think every organization at some point starts to scrutinize the amount that they're spending on infrastructure because you get to a size and scale. If things are going well, that it starts to become a significant part of your, of your P and L and every team then ends up having to put focus on cost cutting optimization. never fun, right? It's never a super motivating task for people. When you think about the other way you can look at this, that is a different cost cutting measure, far more motivating and highly correlated is thinking about how can you reduce your carbon emissions? How can you reduce your impact on the planet? And it's a very different way to think about how to optimize your code, how to optimize your infrastructure to have an impact on, yes, the bottom line from a cost perspective, but it also has a big impact on the cost on the planet.
Gaël Duez (11:53)And so is it something that, I mean, do you have FinOps team today at Back Market?
Dawn (11:58)There's, I would say it's a, we don't have a specific team. have a focus area on FinOps
Gaël Duez (12:04)Okay, which means that each team has at least one person who's in charge of paying attention to the FinOps detail.
Dawn (12:13)Right now this is concentrated in our platform teams looking at this to create the visibility across the feature teams.
Gaël Duez (12:24)And is it the same people within the platform team who will have the same focus on carbon accounting and creating visibility on carbon or will there be different profiles?
Dawn (12:38)It's the same people for us today. Again, we're at the beginning of this journey and there are not a lot of models out there to follow.
Gaël Duez (12:51)I got it. actually going back to what you've said previously about the tooling and the fact that you're still in search of the tooling, what are the tools that you've considered using, whether they're open source or paid tools, or are you actually considering building your own?
Dawn (13:08)Well, one of the reasons we are looking building our own tooling around this is because to do what we want, which is reproduce some of the work that was done by Florian on that open source project is that it doesn't exist today. There's not a tool that will do that for us there are some tools, I think, that show up that can give you some help but they're still very high level and a bit generic and maybe not as actionable as they could be with a little more detail. And so us trying a path forward that would allow us to give real insights to our engineers to be able to make everyday decisions that can have an impact they do their work to optimize for carbon emissions.
Gaël Duez (14:07)Really interesting because there are several tools popping up here and there. There are obvious open source tools such as Cloud Carbon Footprint or Cloud Scanner from Boavizta There are also several paid solutions. and most of the time they take the, financial inputs from cloud provider, they cross it with an emission factor or information from providers such as electricity maps, for instance, to get the carbon intensity of the electricity grid at a certain time in a certain day. And I was wondering what other features do you find missing? Especially you mentioned the granularity that you want to develop your own tool.
Dawn (14:55)All of those things you said are true and there is definitely... We have the ability to look at what type of power in which data center, what percentage is renewable. When are, when can you run your, your intense job so that it's not competing at the time where there's a heavy load on the grid? So all of that is true. And there are things certainly today that we could even do better with the tools that exist, sure we are able to scale to zero at times when everything's idle right, and to do that in an automated way. There's, think, more work to do there. And again, very tied to cost as well in those cases. But when it comes to what can, and I think this is the question that everyone has about their daily lives, is like, what can I do? Like, I'm just one person out of, you know, seven or eight billion on the planet. What does it matter what I do? And when we think about this, there's, I think there's so much that we're not. We don't pay attention to, such as, and I'm going to put this in terms of the everyday human experience, where people don't think about it. And then let's talk about how that translates into engineering. So if you think about how many email addresses do you have and how much storage are you using and how many photos do you have that are uploaded into the cloud? When was the last time you looked at all of them, right? And every bite that is out there, your digital footprint, it also has a carbon cost because it's costing for that. And so when we think about that from an engineering perspective, what are the things that you store and never access? You know, how much logging are you doing? And do you need to do that much logging? How long are you storing it for? And do you need to store it that long? And having some visibility into that, that is your daily dashboard would be hugely, hugely helpful to hold yourself accountable for, are you putting your effort and the cost that you're doing in the right way.
Gaël Duez (17:28)That means that you're incorporating in this green ops dashboarding that you're building at Back Market also management approach. You want to focus on storage, not only the amount of time that you're doing computing or using servers at a certain time of the day and certain location, but also incorporating this data management principles that we store too much, we load too much, et cetera, et cetera. Am I right?
Dawn (17:58)It's a, part of my vision for it. And I would say maybe a little too optimistic to say that we're in the process of building that functionality right now. But when you think about how people as individuals can have the impact. This is, you have to go to that level of detail because that's where it starts. Everything starts from just a small amount of impact that compounds over time and suddenly it's huge.
Gaël Duez (18:30)and that you can scale this impact. And what other features do you envision for this environmental dashboard and tooling that you want your teams to be able to build now that you've migrated to Google. So obviously, we mentioned carbon aware and was also a bit of grid aware. We've just mentioned data management. Is there other aspect where you want to empower your engineering team to make better decision?
Dawn (18:57)That's a big question. I think the perspective of software engineering work that we do for writing and executing code and hosting it in production. Because that is also really important. the run part of software development is where probably the highest carbon costs are because it's going all the time and it is the most obvious place to look. It's not only that, right? Because we're also doing monitoring. We also have a bunch of other tool sets we run to do our job. And all of those things combined. It's just one on top of another, on top of another that is consuming energy I think would be an advanced step here. Because the first most obvious place to look is absolutely on the run, on how what you're doing runs every day and what that impact is. And it's the biggest chunk. At least we think that right now. I don't know if it would turn out, it would, it turned out to be true if you add up all the costs of day-to-day operations that aren't really about what's running. It's probably not, not as insignificant as we think, or we don't think about it. So I don't know, but it's an interesting place. think that we should start to look and validate where do we have impact and where along the way can we optimize it? Because I find that when you start to think about this, start to make different choices.
Gaël Duez (20:42)Could you give us an example of one of these choice that you've made differently thanks to sustainability inputs?
Dawn (20:51)Okay, so we are reconsidering our business continuity disaster recovery planning and there's a non-zero cost to having a solid plan in place, right? And being able to make sure that we have the best possible RPO and RTO for the most reasonable impact, right? Because you can go… can do warm backup and you can do full redundancy. full redundancy obviously has the largest impact. It also costs the most, but it gives you the greatest peace of mind. You end up with so much just sitting and unused completely cold is a bit too long for recovery time at scale, right? So it can be a pretty long time. But especially in a cloud environment, having a warm, small footprint that you're able to manage closely can be a really nice compromise between two and gives you the flexibility with a much lower impact.
Gaël Duez (22:17)Got it and that's interesting to see that the carbon price has become part of the equation as much as the financial price of recovery plans. And that leads me to another question which is how do you make GreenOps efficient and part of the discussion on almost every aspect of your engineering culture? Because we took the example of the cloud migration, of the example you just provided about the recovery plans. But I got it that you don't have yet all the tools that you want to provide the most accurate insights possible. But when I've discussed with your engineer, they were already very, very focused on green ops. I was wondering, how did you achieve this focus on green ops across your teams?
Dawn (23:12)So we're at a slight advantage maybe in this area because we are a mission-driven company with an environmental mission. And one of our corporate values is that it's not green enough. So this is a mantra that shows up everywhere in the culture. And having that kind of mindset, it's not only about your job, it really is about your life and the mission and the values that the back market holds attracts people who are aligned with them and it becomes a part of everybody's thought process.
Gaël Duez (23:52)That raises a very interesting point because do you believe that achieving such a green ops culture in focus would have been possible in, I would say, a regular Fortune 500 company? Or does it require first that the environmental culture is high enough? And, my question is for all the other CTO and CPO and head of engineering listening to you, like, do you have a chance to actually move the needle in the right direction to embrace green ops if you work in a more like, you know, business as usual, I would say company.
Dawn (24:31)Yeah, it's an interesting question. when I first started talking about carbon PNL with my peers,
I met Patrick at an event for Google Cloud. And I was talking with him about Carbon P &L because we at Back Market have started on the journey of a Carbon P &L. And his company does it already. And they're a very big company. And they have a very active focus on this. And so it's possible. And I think that that is very inspiring that that's the case.
Gaël Duez (25:05)It is.
Dawn (25:07)I've also, so I've seen the power of the employee base in this way as well. spent some time at Google. The employees at Google are very environmentally oriented and they do make noise about this. And Google as a company does respond to the things that their employees value in this way. It's harder, I think, in companies that are perhaps not as successful as that to get it to be a focus. There was a lot of discussion during the time I was at Fitbit from the employee base about making the devices more recyclable, having a better sustainability mindset around it which was difficult to make a focus. when the company isn't hugely profitable or hugely growing, you know, when you're facing business headwinds, it is the first thing to fall to the back. is a hard to fight against.
Gaël Duez (26:06)That's interesting because the way I framed the question was the wrong one. I expected that the mission of the company would influence how much a CTO has some leeway to implement GreenOps practices. And actually your answer points toward a slightly different directions, which is it's not really the mission in itself, but it's more the power of employee engagement and the financial situation of the company, which might be even for a B Corp, highly environmentally focused company, facing a lot of turmoil business-wise, we might actually experience a reduction in the to achieve some environmental goals. Very interesting point of view. Thank you.
Dawn (27:02)Yeah. So on the question you were actually asking, I do believe that a CTO in any company can push green ops because today, younger generation of workers is far more aware of environmental impact than anyone was 20 years ago. And as I said earlier, it's always important to be controlling costs when you're a CTO and infrastructure is always a significant component of the PNL. And if you can make sure people are focused on the environmental impact, it will have a cost impact. And so you can advocate for GreenOps because it is tied to the bottom line. And I do believe that the business. We'll buy into it because the correlation is there.
Gaël Duez (28:00)Which is a great enabler. And you were discussing about advocating and that's another question I was wondering how much you managed to have a discussion with your CPO or CMO. I don't know how you're structured regarding product and marketing, but basically people pushing for some features,
when it comes to Green Ops, like, do you manage to say, hey, well, maybe we shall not use video or maybe this feature is not that useful how much they are involved in this Green Ops process? Because we know that design set the tone for most of the music when it comes to Green Ops. So CTO, if they ask to provide more and more features or more and more products, that can completely offset all their efforts to reduce their environmental footprint. So how is the level of the discussion at back market?
Dawn (28:51)Again, because we have the it's not green enough value, it is the topic that comes up. I think we can do better than we're doing and, and the engineering team has a greater responsibility and a bigger role to play in this than any other department, because we have that information. either have access to the information or we can get access to that information in a way that is a bit more difficult perhaps for the CMO and the CPO if engineering teams are very conscientious about it, and if we provide the carbon impact as part of the planning, it can have a different impact and change people's minds. We are also the ones that are best positioned to propose alternatives and say, you are asking for this, for an objective we understand as this, and we can achieve that same objective with a lower impact. One of the superpowers of engineering that we forget that we have. It was just to have this level of influence over the entire corporation because we have the information, we have access to it or we can get it. And with a little bit of effort, we can educate people and really influence the decisions that get made and costs
Gaël Duez (30:25)And maybe just to close the episode, because you've already shared in full transparency and humility, I must say, it's not all shiny and perfect at Back Market, but it's really this focus and these first steps that you've already started and this culture that you managed to But we've briefly mentioned Back Market has being environmentally focused because of its very nature. How the discussion regarding e-waste, and maybe you can explain a bit what Back Market is doing to the audience, how this focus on e-waste, which is at the very core of Back Market mission, influences also the discussion within the engineering teams when it comes to green ops. I was wondering how much weight do you put on creating software that will not… Accelerate hardware obsolescence.
Dawn (31:22)For me, that's a super interesting question. We have a fight against ways of working for the OEMs, which is to make their devices obsolete. They stop updating them. You can no longer get the latest OS update, the security updates, et cetera, beyond a certain model. And thanks to government regulations, these things are being extended more and more. And you see commitments from companies to provide longer term support for the devices that they make than they were 10 years ago. It's a good trend. So from a influence perspective, this is a focus at Back Market is to make sure that we are active in this discussion and advocating for every person out there who wants to keep what they have and they just want it to work longer because they're happy with what they have and through software development, that is what we do and what we advocate for and what we educate people about. Again, something interesting that I think we don't talk about very much is that we are, as engineers, probably almost worse than the general population when it comes to pushing for the latest technology on things. And I don't know how to change this, actually, because when you think about every time new cloud provider or our cloud provider puts out their newest version of instances. They're faster and they're more efficient. And you have a dilemma in that you want to get the speed gains and the efficiency gains you can get from the latest hardware refresh. But the very nature of that hardware refresh can create e-waste. And so we have opposing forces and the best that we can do to serve our business because there's a, have to stay competitive and responsive to fulfill the mission of getting people to buy through the circular economy this is where the carbon PNL comes in as well, to make sure that you're holding yourself accountable for what you put out, what you emit and what you try to save, what you can save. But can we extend, can you choose providers or hardware if you're doing on-prem that is upgradable in place? So maybe you don't have to replace entire chassis every time you're doing an upgrade. Can you choose a cloud provider that has documented and certified recycling practices because we haven't found a way today to get out of this cycle of the constant upgrades for faster, better compute power.
Gaël Duez (34:36)So if I understood you right, that's a very open and transparent way that you put the issue on the table it's a day-to-day dilemma of running green ops based on carbon PNL. I think it could wrap up the entire episode thank you joining and sharing that openly. And it was a pleasure to listening to your team also on Green IO Paris stage. So thanks for all the support.
Dawn (35:05)Thank you, Gaël It was a pleasure talking with you



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“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team.Thank you for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely”. In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived on the spot. To get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of her digital services, Gaël Duez welcomes 3 of the 4 founders of the original sustainability team: Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros. In their much more nuanced exchange that could have been expected due to the current situation, they covered many topics including: 
   👏 The power of applause to kick start a sustainability team   🔧 How changing HTTPS check made WordPress save 471 kWh / month   🌱 The importance of having sustainability tools as close as possible to software practitioners tools   🏛️ The subtle art of creating a foundation while keeping control over it via intellectual property     🎁 How to “enforce” contribution in an open source community   And much more!
❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!
📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 
📣 Green IO next Conferences are in Singapore (April 16th) and New-York (May 15th). Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Csaba Varszeg LinkedIn
• Nahuai Badiola LinkedIn 
• Nora Ferreirós LinkedIn 
• Green IO website 
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   


Our guests's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• WordPress Sustainability Handbook
• The limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress created by Nahuai Badiola
• The Sustainability WordPress plugin
• WordPress Sustainability Team 
• WordPress Foundation 
• The W3C sustainability guidelines presented by Sustainable Web Design
• ClimateAction.Tech
• The grid-aware websites program of the Green Web Foundation

Transcript (auto-generated)
Csaba (00:00)
So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact

Gaël Duez (00:15)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez, and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and, of course, on the website greenio.tech.

Today, I learned that we have a sustainability team. Thank you for your effort in this area. Looking at results of the team so far and the return on investment of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely. In three sentences, almost three years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel was archived on the spot. It reminds me of the Elon Musk style when he arrived at Twitter, except that WordPress CMS still powers almost 40 % of all the websites around the globe, with many being heavy traffic websites. And with heavy traffic comes significant environmental impacts. So to get clarity on what happened at WordPress and to understand what a WordPress practitioner can do to reduce the environmental footprint of digital services now that the sustainability team is gone, I'm glad to welcome today three people who are active members of the WordPress community, especially on sustainability topics. Actually, they were part of the four founders of the original sustainability team.

Csaba is a sustainable web designer based in Antwerp, Belgium. Nahuai is a freelance WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator. And Nora Ferreiros is a freelance UX UI designer.

and both Nahuai and Nora are based in Barcelona. So welcome Csaba, Nahuai and Nora. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Nahuai (02:49)
Hello.

Nora (02:49)
Thank you.

Csaba (02:50)
Hello, hi.

Nora (02:51)
Thank you for

Nahuai (02:51)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Csaba (02:52)
Hi, hello.

Gaël Duez (02:53)
You're

more than welcome. So maybe before we start, could each of you share what is the main fact or figure that leads you to care about sustainability as a WordPress practitioner?

Nora (03:09)
Well, actually, Nahuai is the person who led me to care about sustainability in WordPress and in the details sustainability and life in general,

Nahuai (03:20)
That was super nice to hear, Nora. In my case, the eye-opening moment was a lightning talk by Roberto Vázquez in a work camp that just putting together the energy consumed by data centers and the environmental impact. It's pretty straightforward, but it was the first time that I it was like, okay, this makes sense.

Gaël Duez (03:22)
Now you have to deal with this.

Nora (03:24)
It's true.

Nahuai (03:48)
and I started to go down the rabbit hole. And short after that, I started to talk with Hannah Smith, who has been a key person in my sustainability journey. And yeah, pretty much in that point, I started to research and start giving talks about it. And yeah, probably.

Nora (04:06)
Yeah, have to say that I was in this talk also, but for me it was later. Nahuai was the one that said to me, look at this, sustainability is important, but I also was in this talk and it was important to me to think about internet consumes energy.

Csaba (04:23)
For me, it's a bit similar, just like you mentioned, and as you mentioned in the intro, like WordPress having a large market share. So I was thinking to myself, I can try to do things on my own, but what is the impact of those things? So if we could contribute at a higher level, let's say, at WordPress level, that could have a lot larger impact and maybe a lot more interesting for other people to...

profit from as well.

Gaël Duez (04:50)
you're right, Shaba, that WordPress is just huge in terms of CMS share and I was delighted to hear about the creation of a sustainability team at WordPress. I've heard, but maybe I'm wrong, that it all started at a WordPress convention with Nora speaking up on these aspects, but maybe I'm completely wrong. Could you enlighten me a bit on this?

Nora (05:16)
Yeah, it was kind of this way and honestly it was kind of around the situation, it wasn't something planned because it all started at the WordCamp Europe in 2022. This is the annual big WordPress event in Europe and it was also my first international event and I was super excited and nervous because I was about to spend...

four whole people who I only could communicate in English. I'm in Spanish, so you can imagine it is a little tricky. So I was talking one day, I was talking with Rocio Valdivia. She's a lead of global WordPress community programs. I had to read this because I have not been able to remember it. So she...

Nahuai (05:49)
you

Nora (06:03)
blindly believing my newly acquired language skills. And she encouraged me to ask a question during this Q &A session with Matt Mullenberg and Joseph Heiden-Champonsy, who was the executive director of WordPress at the moment. So basically two of the most important people involved in the project at the time. And for some reason I said, yeah, sure, why not? But the thing is, as time passed,

I started to panic because I had no idea what to ask about. So I turned to Nahuai and I asked him for help and he rightly suggests sustainability as a topic. So with this in mind, I knew, I yeah, I knew if I ask a general question like, what about sustainability? I would just...

Nahuai (06:35)
You

Gaël Duez (06:36)
Ha ha ha ha.

Nora (06:56)
get a polite non-committal answer like, cool that's interesting we will think about it, thank you. So I decided to directly ask them for a team or at least for a Slack channel and for whatever reason they went for the latter. So I did it and when I returned to my seat 18 people had already joined the channel and are rising but the funny thing is I never intended to.

achieve this. My goal was just to, I don't know, get sustainability on the table or maybe use this visibility to draw some attention of some attendees interested in the topic and then maybe connect with them after the event or whatever. But things went unspectral differently and I'm very happy about it.

After that, the four people that finally make the team work as a working group for a year and the next WordCamp Europe, we have the support of some amazing people and we could officially became a team. And this is the story. And I would clarify something. I think it's really important. I voiced the demand, but I'm pretty sure that

was the people who cheer and applaud the thing, my suggestion. That main matter, and Joseph said, okay, let's create the channel because the people want something and we have to do something. So if any of the personnel listening to this, thank you very much for making it possible. And remember that voices lead, but it's the community that moves things forward.

Gaël Duez (08:34)
Power of applause

Nora (08:36)
Yeah.

Csaba (08:36)
Hehehe.

Gaël Duez (08:37)
so you wanted to put sustainability on the table. You actually managed to put sustainability within the Slack workspace of WordPress. Csaba, were you one of these people jumping on this newly created Slack channel?

Csaba (08:55)
I think I was actually one of the first people to join because I remember, I remember Nora asking this question, but the funny thing is that I was like kind of falling asleep during the question and answer, not because it wasn't interesting, but then I just heard the word sustainability. I was, what, what? So I started listening and then I heard that the channel was created. I think I was one of the first and I remember.

Gaël Duez (08:59)
Ha ha ha ha.

Nahuai (09:06)
Thank

Csaba (09:21)
Thijs was there as well and we already arranged something to meet during the conference, the after party, let's say, which we did as well. And the other funny thing is that I ran into Nora and Nahuai as well somewhere during a walk. So we actually really met in Porto and yeah, that's where things probably started up. still we had a long way to go.

Gaël Duez (09:46)
Yeah, the stars were aligned. And maybe for the non-adverted listeners, we talk a lot about the WordPress community at WordPress, but as far as I've understood, WordPress is an open source software, but there is also a company called WordPress. And when we talk about a sustainability team, a lot of people could believe maybe that you're employees at

WordPress or some sort of WordPress company. could you maybe Nahuai you clarify a bit this ecosystem

Nahuai (10:16)
Yeah.

It is kind of tricky to make sense of it because of the naming. So I will try to keep it simple. you said, WordPress, the thing that we've been talking till now is the CMS, it's open source. And it has a vibrant community doing things because they believe on that open source and democratizing the publishing and everything that is behind the motto or the meaning of WordPress. But then after, and this was...

co-founded by Matt Mullenberg and Mike Little. Shortly after this creation, Matt Mullenberg created the company Automatic. And Automatic owns WordPress.com, which is a huge confusion for a lot of people. So WordPress.com is just a hosting company using the CMS WordPress. And that's pretty much all the resemblance between the two of them.

Gaël Duez (10:54)
Mm-hmm.

Nahuai (11:10)
And the tricky part to make it a bit more difficult to understand is to the community, we are all volunteers. This is an open source, but some companies are putting people, sponsoring people to contribute. And Automatic was until one month ago, the one that was putting more people and time on it. It was around 4,000 hours in people, the sponsor, to move forward.

So some of the teams that are in Make WordPress, that is how it's leader by people on automatic. Okay, because since they have a lot of people contributing, it's more than a hundred people. A lot of teams had someone from automatic having 40 hours week to put into there, which is super cool. The sustainability team...

Gaël Duez (11:44)
Hmm.

Nahuai (11:58)
we were a bit different in that sense because we were created in this special way as Nora explained. And the 14 reps were self-sponsored, meaning that we were putting our time because we believe in the CMS and in sustainability and then more people of course joined to the Slack and the meetings. But we were mainly people self-sponsored. There were also some sponsored by companies, but

the sustainability team was quite diverse in that sense. it was not run by, none of the teams are run by automatic, okay, just to be clear, but some teams have a lot of, or had a lot of people from automatic because one month ago, more or less, Matt decided to reduce the time that are putting back into the project. But this is because our legal,

battle that we didn't discuss yet, so I don't want to go down there. I hope I made sense a bit of how it's organized.

Gaël Duez (12:55)
Okay.

actually, thanks a lot because it's crystal clear. I didn't really understand what was automatic. And this is not the first time in the open source community that you have actually a software that is sort of maintained by a company, even if it's an open source software. you think about Red

but usually it's a bit clearer because they share the same name and sometimes the intellectual property is even clarified in that sense. Okay, got it. Thanks a lot. What did you do,

Nora (13:31)
Great question. when we make the team, they ask us to work on sustainability, not just on environmental

Csaba (13:31)
Mm-hmm.

Nora (13:39)
sustainability but also in social and economic part of sustainability. So

We have been working together with other working groups like Fight for the Future, for example, or the V Groups for Diversity. So we can together cover all the things because it was a big thing. And the original founders, we were more into environmental sustainability and it is the part we work more on. For example,

we worked in a handbook for making WordPress events more sustainable. We published it. We were able to translate it to Spanish and to French.

And we were actually working on making guidelines for creating a WordPress website in a more sustainable way. It was, for me, the more exciting project because we were making something similar to what W3C guidelines were making, but applied to WordPress.

And we were also working in a plugin that I think Csaba and Nahuai can explain better about how it works to help on this about creating more sustainable WordPress websites.

Csaba (14:57)
Yes, we

were working on a plugin. Yes, plugins are like kind of extensions of WordPress, functional extensions of WordPress. And the plan was to create a canonical plugin, which means that it's supported by the community or even maybe on the long-term be included in core WordPress. So the WordPress software itself. And the idea was to spread awareness about digital sustainability to give people an idea about their websites in the sense of carbon footprints.

And the two basic ideas were to surface whether the website was hosted on renewable energy and to measure the home page's weight and carbon footprint and to compare it with data from the website's carbon API, like compare it to other websites, other webpages measured and warn people if their homepage has a too large footprint. And of course give them

feedback or assist them how to improve it. And that's where the guidance part would come

Nahuai (15:57)
I wanted to point out as Nora said, we were collaborating with working groups, because this is the naming we are using in WordPress. And one of them was with the performance team, which are also working and job, by the way, reducing

the energy that is needed. And one of the things they did because of somehow the synergy between us was a saving, changing some technical part of how to check the HTTPS. But the number was like 471 kilowatts hour a month was saved because of the large market share of WordPress.

our idea in the sustainability was to raise awareness. So maybe in the performance team, they are already doing great work to reduce the emissions.

But our team, sorry, I have to laugh because our team is no longer alive. it's strange to phrase it this way, but I'm going to continue this way. So our team, the idea was to raise awareness of what the performance team was doing or create guidelines as Nora said. So it was not only reducing the CO2 or whatever, but...

Nora (16:56)
Yeah.

Nahuai (17:15)
is spreading the word of the impact that a website has.

Gaël Duez (17:19)
That's an important point because I was about to ask, but what about other environmental variables or what about using other proxy than just the web page weight? For instance, know, some other tool, they check the DOM size or they check the number of API call, et cetera. But I think if the main idea was really to raise awareness, the simpler you keep it, the better it is.

correct to assume things that way.

Csaba (17:50)
Yes, I think so. funny enough, it's sometimes very hard to keep things simple or just give a quiet, good estimation on what's, what's wrong and what can, what people can do about it. so it wasn't a simple task.

And I also have to note maybe that there is a site help feature of WordPress, which is quite a cool tool, which actually gives you information. does a couple of tests on your environment and gives you a couple of things you can improve for your website. And the idea was to include this.

into that tool, is a native tool of WordPress Core itself,

Gaël Duez (18:27)
And today, the plugin that you developed, is it still available somewhere? even if it's not included in the core WordPress, but can anyone still use it?

Csaba (18:39)
Yes, it's not in the plugin repository, but you can download from GitHub. it probably should undergo a couple of refactoring, but you can try it and use it as it is now.

Gaël Duez (18:50)
and what were the feedback from the community?

Nora (18:54)
The feedback from the community, I was thinking about this thing you said about keep things simple. And it was really hard to keep things simple because people were to use two numbers, like what have you achieved? Numbers. And sustainability is kind of difficult to do that if you don't want to stay in the tunnel carbon.

Gaël Duez (19:08)
Hmm.

Nora (19:18)
so there were many people interested in I want to do something to make WordPress more sustainable but they were feeling really confused because the team didn't have many resources to make practical things so we were in a theoretical place most of the time creating awareness and so and

I think people were interested, motivated, excited maybe, but confused about what they should do to make things more sustainable in a practical way.

Nahuai (19:58)
and having the aim of touching the three pillars of sustainability, the environmental, the social and the economic, made that even more difficult. Not that I didn't like it because I like the holistic point of view, but it was more difficult to communicate sometimes. So yeah, that didn't help to simplify. as Nora was stressing out, we moved

slowly because we were self-sponsored people and that was also something to take into account. And we could just allocate maybe two, four hours a week, but not more because we are mostly freelancers and trying to make our own living. So that was also part of the thing that was not easy to balance, let's say.

Csaba (20:42)
Also, I think it's important to add that you're also spending a lot of time in searching for how to get things done within the community, how the procedures were, which is not always clear, let's say not clear. so you have to, yeah, you have to dig in and then it takes a lot of time to find that out.

Nahuai (20:49)
Yep, the bureaucracy.

Gaël Duez (21:00)
maybe before we move to what happened in the dismantling quite abrupt as I mentioned in the introduction, I'd like and I'm very sorry for this to play a bit the devil advocates here and ask you a naive question. Why do we need WordPress guidelines when we start having W3C guidelines?

Nora (21:24)
Well, from a point of view as a designer, I am always in the side of the user. So for me, the WordPress guidelines were important to specifically explain people who is not into sustainability What they specifically have to do with their WordPress

website in the WordPress world. I suppose all the CMS works this way. There are many users, I think the most of the users making their own websites. So I thought it was important to explain these people are non-developer people, how to specifically set in their WordPress or use their WordPress.

to make things more sustainable.

from the WordPress perspective alone

Nahuai (22:11)
I couldn't agree more. I'm part of the group of the sustainable web of the W3C and it's an amazing work. What we are doing, mainly other colleagues, I have to say I have limited time to put into it, but I love it. And I try to do my best on that regard, but it's a very technical and long document. So even if sustainable web design did a great job filtering, because there is an open API, so you can go and grab the

different criteria and filter it. It's really nicely done, technically. Even if you go to the Sustainable Web Design, It's website in general, which is super cool, but I think that people that is working every day with WordPress, having something more linked with visuals and things that they say, okay, I know where I can do this or this other, I think

Nora (22:53)
you

Nahuai (23:01)
this really helps because it's more familiar. So I think everything we can do to make it easier for people that is interested on doing something, it's a move in a good direction.

Gaël Duez (23:13)
Fair point.

I was expecting that kind of answers

but I wanted to understand how much overlapped was possible there because actually I was wondering if it was one of the reasons why the WordPress SustainB group was dismantled. And maybe now it's time for the three of you to explain what you feel and how you analyzed the, let's be honest, of

brutal dismantling of the sustainability group as I described in the introduction. hypothesis number one, we've got W3C guidelines, no need for anything specific WordPress. I think you already answered this point, but hypothesis number two was like, is it some kind of a Trump-fueled backlash against everything which is sustainable and...

you want to look nice to the new leader of the United States and as some other big tech behemoths just did recently kissing their new ring. So was it like a political move? Was it more maybe some sort of internal feud? What led to such abrupt end of your working group?

Csaba (24:24)
I have been thinking about it and to be honest, I don't think there was really that much of thinking behind the decision. It was a bit of a one-sided decision without any discussion questions asked. So it happened also very quickly after Thijs has resigned, let's say between quotes. Maybe what strikes me the most about this is that we were a group of individuals, contributors, not sponsored.

most of us who were just contributing to WordPress and trying to make it better or at least environmentally, socially and so on better. yeah, it's kind of somewhere surprising, but also not regarding the current situation of WordPress.

Nora (25:06)
I don't have a clear picture of the whole thing because I wasn't into WordPress drama until it affected me and some community fellows I don't know Madd or his circumstances well enough to have a solid opinion about the why I think it is a personal thing it's not something bigger

Nahuai (25:20)
Thank

Nora (25:27)
I mean, I don't have an explanation, but it's pretty obvious to me that we can draw up parallel between his attitude and that of attitude of other big tech founders also at the moment. But I don't know.

Nahuai (25:42)
I have an hypothesis trying to be a bit more specific maybe for the people that is not inside the community and the WP drama and everything. So I think we cannot understand this decision without talking about the legal battle between automatic math because both are and WP engine. And this started in September of the last year and

The main reason to keep it simple was that Matt went into the stage in the keynote and publicly said that WP Engine, which is a WordPress hosting that is making a lot of money from WordPress, was not contributing enough. In that moment, they were contributing like 40 hours a week, something like that. And Automatic was contributing around 4,000. Okay. So he felt that it wasn't fair.

if every company went this route, WordPress would probably die because there wouldn't be enough resources. So fair point till here. At least all I'm going to say is my vision. Okay. So don't take it as a representation of the sustainability team or anything. It's just now I took it. So after Engine started a legal battle against Matt.

basically damaging the brand. Okay, let's say, let's put it that way. And there is more things that Matt say and everything, but I don't want to go down that road. And from this moment to the, probably the sustainability closing, team closing, it has been a different Matt.

for us at least, maybe Matt was always like that. But what happened is that Matt asked to the community to take part on this. So he wanted to know if you were behind him or if you were not behind him and his...

opinions and the things he was doing, you were against, pretty much, just to keep it simple. So the people that were vocal and going against Matt or his opinions, some of them were banned from Slack or from WordPress.org and things like that. again, my hypothesis is that Matt is...

kind of in a battle mode because it's in a legal battle and he needs the community to be behind him. And I think the trigger point in our case, was Thais stepping down as a team rep of the sustainability team because he was not aligned with the new direction that Matt was giving to WordPress okay?

And he made it public and he made it clear to Matt directly. And I think this was the trigger point. as I say, don't think there is much thinking about it. I think it was like, okay, these people were doing something. I don't recall knowing about it. Oh yes. I don't know. He said he didn't. And he was another power move. He made other power moves before. So this is my...

vision. Of course, it's subjective and maybe it's wrong, but I felt like Matt took it as a little attack somehow. And he said, okay, this is not very dear to my heart either. And so we can close it. Well, he can close it. That's probably the more frightening part is that Matt can do a lot of things

without anybody saying nothing and that's the part that is yeah more difficult to swallow.

Gaël Duez (29:11)
you're actually reading my mind because I was about to say that sort of reassuring that very bad decisions are still taken not because of a grand schema to change the world in my humble opinion for the worst and having like this kind of a techno crazy agenda and all this, you know.

movement that we see since the beginning of the year in the US within the tech sector, but just because of good old internal dilemma, feuds and the it should question

any source of open source or community of goodwill trying to achieve something about the governance model? Because how come that so many unilateral decisions were able to be made at WordPress? I mean, maybe the decision to close the sustainability was the right one. don't know. mean, obviously, I believe no, but I was not part of this community. So, you know, from an external perspective, I don't know. But what I do know for sure is that

Nora (29:46)
you

Gaël Duez (30:14)
when as a manager you take such a big decisions, literally firing people, there is a way to do things, even if different cultures, you do things differently. Usually you don't do it the way I've just presented in the introduction. And you must get all people's opinions and you absolutely need to get all the insights, starting with the people who are obviously the most involved in the situation, who are the members of the teams.

and in your case, the sustainability team. that really strikes me. what would you do differently?

from a governance perspective to prevent this to happen if you were to work again in a very engaged and good-willing community as the WordPress one.

Nora (30:56)
Well, for me,

as I have seen the community from external perspective is we trust too much in a voice, in a lead or in the vision one person had.

But as I said before, the voice is not the community. Contributors are the community. I think sometimes we forget this. I think we have to do the effort to step up the inertia in the communities, not just WordPress, but any other.

open source community and reflect on the continuity of the project

And I personally think we should go more into a democratic way of managing the thing, as many other people have said, like a governance with few people, not just one people, not because it is mad. I think a huge community or any other community should not be led by

just one person, but for a group of person choose or representative of the community itself. I don't know, for me it's kind of obvious, but when I get into this community, things were this way. So I was like, okay, if you are happy with this, I'm here just for working. So let's go for it.

Gaël Duez (32:09)
Hmm.

So I got your point that even the most powerful voice is powerful because of

the the community behind But there is something that I still don't understand is what is a governance structure? Actually, what is WordPress? what is the legal even structure of WordPress? Is it a foundation? Is it an association, an NGO? And how come that one person has

all the power

Nahuai (32:39)
It's tricky because there is a foundation, there is a WordPress foundation, okay? And Automatic gave the trademark. So this trademark, which is a huge trademark, was moved to the WordPress foundation, which is good, okay?

Gaël Duez (32:43)
Okay.

Okay.

Nahuai (32:56)
And the WordPress foundation, it has a board of three people, Matt and another two members. But even if there is a foundation, the more important part of the community is probably the WordPress.org, which is the domain and everything make and everything and the plugins and everything is behind.

Gaël Duez (33:10)
Mm-hmm.

Csaba (33:15)
you

Nahuai (33:16)
that domain and Matt is the owner of that. That's why he has quite a lot of power. Indeed, one of the moves he did was blocking the possibility of WP Engine to access to the repository of plugins, which is a kind of a big deal. Okay. And he can do it because he is the owner of the domain. So that part is not in the foundation. That's why it's tricky. And we discovered this lately because of...

Gaël Duez (33:35)
working.

Okay.

Nahuai (33:45)
these things that didn't happen before. Because I have to say, I've been following Matt's path and I was pretty happy with the direction that WordPress was going. Mainly because of the community, but also because Matt was going in the same direction

Gaël Duez (34:00)
that's very interesting what you're saying,

because you can create a foundation, put some intellectual property within it, even the brands.

But if you withhold some strategic assets, such as a domain name or some small pieces of intellectual property, actually, your foundation is still some sort of 100 % under your control. Am I right rephrasing a bit what you say that way?

Nahuai (34:25)
I think so. Sometimes I have doubts if we understand well enough the structure, because it wasn't clear enough before this storm came. Not the team closure, but the legal battle against WP. So I'm pretty sure that this is the way I described minutes ago. And I think if it is like that, it's not optimal, because

Gaël Duez (34:37)
Hmm.

Nahuai (34:50)
As Nora said, I think these big things like the domain of WordPress.org and this kind of decision should be taken by more than one person. And till now there was no problem because Matt was being quite generous with the time he was putting with automaticians into the, in the community and with the trademark and everything. So till not that much time, it was pretty okay, everything.

Gaël Duez (34:59)
Hmm.

Nahuai (35:16)
And this battle kind of put into perspective how much power Matt has.

Csaba (35:21)
I very much agree upon how Nahuai has explained it. And also I think the bottom line we have learned, we learned a lot of things the last couple of months, but the bottom line is that we are very much dependent on WordPress.org for plugin updates, for team updates, everything that is very much hard-coded in WordPress. And that's something that we should, yeah.

Gaël Duez (35:25)
Hmm.

Csaba (35:44)
Think about a bit more if that's the way to go and probably not so.

Nahuai (35:47)
Yeah.

I think Drupal has a pretty interesting structure of how they have the governance structure. And it would be super cool if we moved to something more closer to Drupal or other CMSs or other open source products for that sake. I'm not sure if right now it's going to happen. I still feel like...

we are in a battle somehow, kind of in a battle. So I'm really hoping for the legal battle to finish and maybe the dust settle a bit and maybe some of the proposals can be look more calmly because there are some proposals right now. But I think Matt still sees them as a kind of an attack or power takeover or something like that again.

My opinion, I'm not sure I don't usually talk with Matt about this, but hopefully if this goes, this inflammation, let's call it, goes down, maybe we can talk more calmly about how we want to move forward. That's my hope.

Nora (36:42)
Yeah.

Gaël Duez (36:56)
Nahuai you are a perfect guest because I was about asked what were the repercussions of this battle mode in the WordPress community, quoting you for other CMS providers. And if we could get lessons from other open source projects and you mentioned Drupal. So maybe

Could you elaborate a bit on how Drupal is organized

Nahuai (37:19)
Yeah, probably I'm not the best person to talk about Drupal because I'm not inside it, but

I really recall well is a post from the founder of Drupal, which was explaining how they try to reward the companies that are giving back to the Drupal project. Okay. And there is a system of credits on how if you give more back, you can...

take some advantages, like being, I don't recall exactly, but maybe being highlighted as a plug-in maker or as a company or whatever. So that was one of the ideas that I found interesting because at the end, the main problem that we started this is that WP Engine was making a lot of money without giving anything back or very little back.

But maybe if we put some kind of rewards on people that is giving back, we could solve that part.

Gaël Duez (38:15)
thanks, Nehru, to clarify this Drupal governance Did you get some feedback on how did people react to the closing of the sustainability teams and what do they want to do now to keep on moving on their sustainability journey?

Nora (38:31)
Well, something I'm happy this all brings is many people ask, or at least ask me, the question why technology thing, why WordPress, why any other project like that need a sustainability team or a sustainability group working on this. And many people were asking,

in a bad way, like, we don't need this, but I think this question is important because many people, like Hannah Smith, for example, were answering this question, or even many people were just thinking about it, like, we don't need this, maybe we do. So I'm quite happy taking into account the situation because this situation with the sustainability team, I think, made people reflect on...

If we need in technology groups for working towards sustainability

Gaël Duez (39:28)
Thanks a lot. Nora, about the guidelines, are they still maintained somewhere? Did you migrate the working group on climate action tech or any other thought of a welcoming Slack community where you can keep on working or everything has been paused for the moment?

Nora (39:46)
Everything has been posted for a moment, but some people have asked us like, where are you going to work now on this? I don't have an answer for that because I didn't decide the thing, but we are still open to work on this. So if anybody listen to this says, okay, I'm into this and I want to collaborate, we can create something, but there is nothing at this moment.

Gaël Duez (39:48)
Okay.

Hmm. So it's a hard stop. OK.

Nahuai (40:17)
same for me. My

main idea is to keep contributing to the W3C group as far as I can. We are also in a very, very nice project from the GreenWeb Foundation that maybe later Nora can touch on it. And I will also continue to talk about sustainability in my podcast and in WordPress events. And as a plugin and theme maker, I have it.

embedded in my workflow and I try to also explain it as one of the key features of the plugin or the theme. So I will continue to be interested and talking about it but as Anora said there is since we don't have an official channel and way of working right now we just paused and let's see where it goes but for now it's paused.

Gaël Duez (41:06)
And actually, before talking about this GreenWeb Foundation project, which I believe is very closely related to what you've tried to achieve at WordPress. That's true Nahuai I should have mentioned that we are colleagues because you've also got your own podcast. And can you maybe just pitch us for one minute? Because I reckon that they are very valuable resources for anyone working with WordPress tool to become more sustainable. Am I right?

Nahuai (41:32)
Yeah, yeah, I was lucky enough to be selected by the GreenWeb Foundation the fellowship they have. So as a project, I created a podcast. It's a limited series podcast. So it's just eight episodes and it's about WordPress and sustainability. And I was also lucky enough to have very nice and interesting people like Nora, Csaba Thjis, the team reps, but also Tim Frick, Tom Greenwood.

people from the data sustainability and also for WordPress sphere. So I think if you're interested in the topic, could be a nice resource.

Gaël Duez (42:05)
Got it. And so because the GreenWide Foundation seems to be everywhere with the usual suspects that many of them were and surely will be again in the future, guests or speakers in Green IO or events. Maybe, Nora, to close on a more positive note this podcast, because

Nahuai (42:10)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (42:26)
just as a side note, I was expecting a bit more of a happy ending, that you've already some sort of bounce back and found an agreement that Matt realized that, okay, maybe I shouldn't close or that abruptly, or you've been welcomed by the performance team or you created already some something else. So it's really a bit of a runes at the moment and I feel...

I'm kind of terribly sorry for all the hard work that you put you and hundreds of people, if I just count the numbers on the Slack channel. So yeah, it's a very disturbing thought that so much hard work that aim to go in the right direction with the pro and the con of every project, obviously, is, yeah, cancelled, I would say. But anyway, so to finish on a more optimistic note, Nora, you wanted also to talk about the

project that you are heavily involved within the GreenWeb Foundation. And it's all about carbon aware computing or am I misunderstanding something here?

Nora (43:31)
yeah, I'm super happy being part of this advisory group because we are working on making grid aware websites. We are trying to find a way to help developers to build websites without compromising user experience.

So that's it. We are working on this and I hope this project achieves their objectives.

Gaël Duez (43:56)
So it's a grid aware computing and not a carbon aware computing. I should have known and sorry, but that's interesting to put it from a user rather than a purely technical perspective. I really like it. Okay. That was quite a long episode for you talking about things that are still obviously quite emotional. So I would like to thank you again a lot for joining and taking the time to

Nora (44:00)
Yeah.

Gaël Duez (44:21)
pose and reflect on what happened and also share other projects and other potential resources for WordPress developer and designers. Is there any final positive piece of news that you'd like to share about sustainability at large or digital sustainability more specifically?

Nahuai (44:43)
I would say a general one. Even if the team is closed, I still feel like the people care about the sustainability. for the moment is enough for me to keep going and being somehow rewarded

And they usually are willing to change something. So yeah, let's keep that as a positive note if we can.

Gaël Duez (45:07)
No, but the buzz is-

Nora (45:07)
Yeah, you can

shoot down the team but you cannot make people disappear.

Gaël Duez (45:12)
Yeah.

Csaba (45:13)
hmm, hmm, hmm.

Gaël Duez (45:17)
Excellent. I guess that, there is no bad publicity as the marketers love to say. So I guess this buzz will at least help some of us to reach out new people or to highlight how strategic is sustainably within the digital sector. So thanks a lot for joining. I hope this episode will contribute a bit to this.

noble task. once again, I'm sorry about what happened. And I feel very honored that you've chosen the Green Eye Podcast to share a bit more in details the story of the WordPress sustainability Team version one. And I hope that we will hear soon about version two.

Nahuai (45:59)
Thank you for having us, Gael.

Csaba (46:00)
Thank for having us, yes.

Nora (45:59)
Thank you.

Gaël Duez (46:02)
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us 5 stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find a feature on these apps, but I trust you to succeed.

Sharing the episode on social media or directly with anyone working with WordPress could also be a good idea, don't you think? Yes, I know you've heard this call to action a lot, but please do remember that being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. Now, in your next episode, we will welcome the CTO of BackMarket, Dawn Becker,

To tell us more about some radical choices she made in the green ops field. And yes, it involves her cloud provider.

One last thing, GreenIo is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter. The last one has a great paper from Frédéric Bordage, who founded the greenit.fr community 20 years ago. And check also the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for all five planned conferences this year in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris.

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It’s a 252 pages report with the foreword of António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And, for once, it’s not another report from the UN stating “let’s digitize everything to boost sustainability”. Quite the contrary as it states a “unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitization”. 
To discuss this “scientific report based on an ethical approach” as he described it, we welcome one of its contributors, Pablo José Gamez Cersosimo, based in the Netherlands. Another contributor, Paz Pena Ochoa, based in Chile, joined us to share her unique perspective on Latin America. Together they shared great insights about: 
   🗺️ Colonialism and Digitalization   🪨 Geopolitical Importance of Critical Minerals   💧 Water Footprint of Digitalization   ⚒️ Water Usage and Mining in Chile   🔎 The Digital Divide: A Growing Gap   🇺🇳 The Role of the UN in Digital Sustainability   And much more!
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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Pablo José Gámez Cersosimo
• Paz Peña Ochoa 
• Green IO website 
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Pablo’s and Paz’s sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Latin American Institute of Terraforming
• Paz Pena’s book “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas"
• UNCTAD's report “Shipping an Environmentally Sustainable and Inclusive Digitalization.” Digital Economy Report 2024. 
• The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations
• ClimateAction.Tech
• Branch Magazine

Transcript (auto-generated)
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (00:00)our digital world is literally liquids. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.
Gaël Duez (00:19)Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. This episode is the first of 2025. And being released on January 30th, I can still wish you a happy new year, full of positive impacts. I hope you will find many occasions in 2025 for using technology responsibly, in order to maintain our world livable and our societies just inclusive and at peace. Full disclosure, I am sorry if I couldn't release this first episode of the year sooner, but January was a bit rough both on professional and personal level. Fortunately, everything is getting back on track, including your bi-monthly podcast. And something that is still on track is accessibility and transparent information remaining in the DNA of Green.io, so all the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript are in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website, greenio.tech.
Gaël Duez (01:53)it's a 252 pages report with the foreword of Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, talking about digitalization and sustainability. And for once, it's not another report from the UN stating, let's digitize everything to boost sustainability. Quite the contrary, the report highlights the growing environmental impact of the digital economy and underscores the urgent need for environmentally sustainable and inclusive digitalization strategies. Quite a change. To discuss their insights and their implications, I am delighted to have with me two of its contributors. Pablo Jose Gámez-Certrozimo, based in the Netherlands, and Paz Pena Ochoa based in Chile. So yes, another 3 time zones Paz has dedicated more than 15 years to studying the intersection between technologies, social justice and gender. She has spent the last 5 years researching the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies in Latin America, creating in 2021 the Latin American Institute of Terraforming. And in 2023, she published a summary of that research in the book Technologies for a Burning Planet, which is in Spanish, but I won't try to say it in Spanish, but you will have the link as usual in the show notes. And by the way, this book also made a great contribution to the branch magazine of Climate Action Tech. Pablo is an external researcher for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, as well as a coach and a scientific journalist. His research includes the publication of Depreda... I shouldn't say it in Spanish as well, but I'm going to try. His research includes the publication of Depredadores Digitales 2021, which is a global investigation that sheds light on the complex digital carbon water and waste footprints of digitalizations.
Welcome Paz, welcome Pablo. It's great to have you on the show today.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (04:15)Thank you for having us in your program.
Paz Peña (04:18)Yeah, thank you very much for having us.
Gaël Duez (04:20)My pleasure, both of you.
So Paz, is it the first UN-backed report ever to address the environmental impact of digitalization?
Paz Peña (04:30)Yes, it is.
Gaël Duez (04:32)So that's a kind of a game changer, isn't it?
Paz Peña (04:34)Yes, I will say absolutely. As you said before, is a report that I will say one of the first reports by the UN saying that digitalization is not all good. Even more saying that the social environmental impacts of digitization are huge, but not only huge, are differential depending on where you are in the world.
And this is very important because what it's saying is that the social environmental impacts of digitization, which are growing through the time, is being paid by the poorest of the world. The developing countries, the poorest countries. And again, the benefits of digitization.
are being enjoyed almost only for the developed world, which brings us a very classical and difficult concept, which is the colonial relationships that are again being deployed in digitization, which is something really difficult to address in the UN, but it's so necessary in these times where sustainable or sustainability is being discussed as a justice issue. And that actually brings us to discuss how digitization can be a justice issue in terms of sustainability.
Gaël Duez (06:09)And just to understand like the concept of colonialism or neo colonialism was brought to light in the UN report or is it more like an underlying evolution in the state of mind of UN representatives starting to incorporate this concept also in a main report as this one?
Paz Peña (06:30)Yeah, they will not name colonialism as it is. I don't know, Pablo, if you saw that concept as it is, because it's a very political, difficult concept for a UN fora, However, yeah, exactly. However you can see powerful concepts as, you know, unjusties, you know, different effects between the world, etc. You can see actually what they are saying is about colonialism, but of course they are not named as it is, because probably it's a very difficult concept to address in the UN.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (07:01)It is in between lines, I will say it. And to add what Paz already said, this report is the result of a process of a critical thinking process that took almost 18 months from 2023 to 2024. And it is also the result of the work of several scientific researchers from all over the world that were here for the first time, let's call it the first time at Geneva, to address the externalities regarding the digital ecosystem we are dealing with and not only that, that we are seeing intensifying in a way that we have never seen before. This is really important to address and this is the timely that explains the importance of this critical report. It is a scientific report based on an ethical approach.
If you go deeply in this report, it says developing countries are suffering disproportionately from digitalization's negative environmental externalities of effects, as well as missing out on economic development opportunities to digital divides.
It used the term unequal ecological exchange between developed and developing countries regarding digitalization. And this is also an complementary part of what Bas already said and your question. It is in between colonialism or neocolonialism.
Gaël Duez (09:20)just before we deep dive into the importance of this report and maybe what's in this report, two short questions. The first one you mentioned that it was a scientific work. Was it mostly based on primary data or is it more an aggregation of other scientific studies that were used to build the end results?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (09:44)It took and it used several primary and secondary resources. it is the most comprehensive integral report until now. It looks back from 1996 from the first ever report on digital sustainability until now. It addressed the problematic behind the methodologies that every single report used to say this and to say that. And there is no continuity at all because there is no universal understanding of methodology on how to deal with what we call the digital ecosystem. What is the digital ecosystem? That's your e-bike right now is part of the digital ecosystem or your Tesla car because they are already computers. They are already intelligent. They are already smart. We use also the primary data United Nations has with several agencies all around the world. And what you read, And this is really important to say also is a really comprehensive report. It is right in a common language that you and me can understand.
Gaël Duez (11:22)So if I understand both of you right and if you indulge me to sum up a bit what you've said, this is the first of its kind tackling this issue. It has a broad ambition of tackling quite difficult topics, even if some of them are not named, but at least they are addressed.
And it's also one of the most comprehensive based on several studies, quite a lot of researchers being involved. So I think it's a fair statement to say that pretty much everyone working in the digital economy should have a look at it. Am I right?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (12:04)it is for everyone, for you and me, for the common ones, for all the ones involved in a digital transformation society. It is not only for politicians, it's not only for ICT. No, it is for the common people, for you and me.
Gaël Duez (12:27)So I think we've teased enough about this report. Maybe Paz, if you allow me to ask you these questions. On the impact side, and we will talk a bit later on this very important social justice concept that you've raised, but on the impact size, what are the main findings? Maybe what are the one or two numbers that you believe everyone should be aware when it comes to the environmental impact of digitalization?
Paz Peña (12:56)Sure, so first I will say that one of the greatest thing about this report is that Big Tech is not present there in terms of giving their reports as evidence. It's a very independent report, which is not so common even in the UN. I will say ANTAT is one of the few UN agencies that is still very independent in terms of funding, et cetera. And you can find here that this is a proof that big tech, these big companies are not present there. Actually, we were with Pablo doing the peer review in a couple of meetings with people of, UNCTAD's people, they were all independent researchers, which was very, very rich because the discussion was very, very honest. That is the first thing that is important to say because what you're gonna see in this report, it's scientific evidence, it's not big tech evidence, And the second thing that is really interesting is when you see actually the evidence of environmental impacts of sustainability is not a conversation only focused on CO2 emissions, which is a very important thing because of the use of energy and increase of the use of energy of digitization, but it's very...focus on the necessities of the global north, which is of course very important because the global north doesn't have energy matrix that is clean yet. But that is not actually a very big issue for the global south. For example, Latin America is the continent that has today the most clean energy matrix in the world.
So the use of energy of digitization, it's important, of course, but it's not really the main issue here in the global south in terms of the environmental effects of digitization. 
So one of the things that for me, it's more interesting about the report is that actually has complete evidence there about carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same critical minerals, especially in the global South. So...
Minerals are a geopolitical factor that is actually activating policies around the global south from the global north to actually have access to these minerals. And then here you can actually start the discussion about how these geopolitical necessity of the global north of accessing to these critical minerals is actually affecting developing countries in terms of how this is feeding illegal mining for example or unsustainable practices in mining because that is where the money is today.
Gaël Duez (16:07)I'd like to ask you one last question to get things a bit more concrete here, because you mentioned several times how the report is important, but most of the listeners, will not have read the report. So let me ask you this question to give you the opportunity to provide a bit of numbers or facts that are mind blowing enough for people to remember and to understand what you are highlighting. So, Paz, you've mentioned that actually digitalizations and the transition towards low carbon economy, they tend to compete for the same resources, especially minerals.

Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (16:54)By 2050, we will need more than 150 billion tons of minerals annually. And that will include 50 new lithium mines, 60 new nickel mines, and the production of rare earth metals must be increased at last 12 folds. If you look...into e-waste this year or just published a couple of days ago by 2022 the world generated 62 billion kilograms of e-waste.
It is extremely important to say the complexity we are dealing with when we try to define once again what is a digital device, what is a digital infrastructure, and what is not. Because if you look once again the example of an e-bike or a Tesla car.
then we have to consider them as part of this digital ecosystem, but at the same time as part of the transitional electrification that we are dealing with. The way IoT devices are being created is a moving target that makes really difficult the definition right now of what is a digital device, what is not a digital device. But the main point here is how transitional minerals, that's the word we use in the report to refer to critical minerals, how the amounts of transitional minerals we are going to need. We are talking about open-bit mining. We are talking about the renaissance of the mining industry. We are talking about that we are completely dependent on all elements of the periodic and to obtain them you are not going to find them in Europe. You have to go to Global South to get them.
Gaël Duez (19:19)And my question, Pablo, regarding this is really, what is the share of digital? mean, if I understand you right, what you're saying is pretty much everything is digital now. Am I right?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (19:29)electrify and digital. We are living an electrification era and at the same time we are dealing with an internet intelligent era that is taking for its own almost everything, almost every device we use daily.
Gaël Duez (19:52)Because in the research field, there are several, I would say, debates still going on on how you define what is the ICT sector and what is not the ICT sector. And what is the share of greenhouse gases emitted by the ICT sector? And usually it's believed between 2 and 4%, depending on the studies, et cetera, et cetera. And your point is...
It's slightly irrelevant because the digital economy is fueling the entire economy I mean, you follow Malmöder, for instance, he has a very strong stance on what should be in the digital economy or counted as ICT and what should not like the TV debate, et cetera, et cetera. Your point is
And that's maybe the point in this report as well. That doesn't really matter that strongly to draw a very clear boundary because electrification is everywhere, digitalization is everywhere, and that fueled the trend in this massive increase in mineral resources that you've just described a bit earlier. Am I correct to rephrase you that way?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:06)you are completely correct.
Gaël Duez (21:08)Okay, thanks. I got it.
Pablo, you were mentioning having a holistic view on everything and I guess both of you, you stressed quite a lot the abiotic resources, mostly metals and minerals. But there are also other impacts that are touched upon in this report.
We cannot list all of them, but can I briefly ask you to share maybe one or two figures or one or two facts that you believe are also very important when it comes to environmental impacts? And as far as I know, Pablo, you're quite keen on studying the water usage of the digital sector. Maybe you've got some things to tell us about.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (21:55)Sure. we can understand this better if we say that the more virtual we become, the more fresh and potable water we need for that. And that means that our digital world is literally liquids. We surf the internet, navigating and diving into its waters. And I want to be here clear enough, Kyle. It is the water that makes virtuality possible. That digital light is as blue as the fresh water that make it possible.
Now I'm talking here about data center industry. Here I'm talking now about the semiconductor industry. I'm talking here about the open pit mining industry.
I'm talking here about the production of our gadgets,
Gaël Duez (23:04)I there are quite a lot of examples about this, maybe Paz being based in Chile. I think this is one of the countries where the tension between the mining industries and the population regarding water usage has been one of the fiercest. So do you want to comment on what Pablo just said?
Paz Peña (23:26)Yes, absolutely. in all Latin America, one of the biggest climate effects today is drought. And you can see that in different states. But in the case of Chile, Chile is suffering a historical drought for over 30 years where water is scarce, even for human consumption. And you can see that many of the territorial fights for different communities is actually the access of fresh water. And this is something that is present in mining activities, but also which are related to the digitization, for example, in terms of the lithium mining in the north of Chile, which is one of the biggest worldwide resources of lithium to digitization and green energies. And the fight there from indigenous communities is actually how this mining is affecting the access of fresh water for indigenous community there, which is basically
having a very concrete impact in terms of the environment. Natural, different animals, for example, are being displaced from that place because of this scarcity of water. But also these indigenous communities are being displaced of their territories because of this, which is again something that we must discuss as a society why indigenous communities that haven't actually contributed to the ecological crisis and climate crisis that we are facing as a world, why they are paying the price of having green energies and digitization. This is one thing. But also, Gael...For example, here in Santiago, public policies are being deployed to be some sort of data center hub in Latin America. So there's a lot of data centers being built here in Santiago from like Big Tech, Alphabet, Microsoft, et cetera.And it's very interesting because many of the territorial fights that you can see here in Santiago are regarding the access of fresh water. It's about fighting the building of this huge infrastructure, digital infrastructure for example, in this year, actually at the beginning of this year, in February, I think, a court of law rescinded part of the authorization of the construction of this data center built by Google because there wasn't enough proof of the effects on the access of water for communities, how that will be affected by this huge infrastructure. And actually a couple of weeks ago, Alphabet desisted from insisting on the original design of this data center. And this, it means that they will modify and start all over again. But this is important, Gael, because it shows that people, organized people can actually fight this kind of infrastructure that is designed without seeing actually the environmental effects of its deployment, especially in terms of freshwater in this context of drought, but also in the context of the ecological and climate crisis.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (27:15)Absolutely right.
Gaël Duez (27:16)And Paz, what is the current trend in I've heard about some water quotas also for the mining industry. I've heard also that the mining industry was now building massive water pipeline to bring seawater into the mountains, has obviously a huge environmental and ecological and energy toll, but also to mitigate the water crisis. is it just one piece of news completely out of context that doesn't really describe properly what is at stake in the current train or actually is Chile getting more and more concerned about this water consumption issues and has started to regulate or to mitigate or to slow down the rising water consumption by both the mining industry and now because you've put that under the spotlight as well, the data center industry.
Paz Peña (28:19)That's a very interesting question, Gael, because in Latin America, and especially, for example, in countries as Chile, we call ourselves a mineral country. We basically provide minerals to the world. So copper, for example, is a very important mineral for the Chilean economy. And now lithium, it is being really important because of this, because of green energies and because of digitization. So all our public policies are based on that extraction in terms of get money and pay everything that we need as an estate. So it's a very historical discussion are the environmental costs of mining in Chile because of this. But I will say in the last 15 years, the discussion around the access of fresh water is increasing, especially in the public opinion, because of the ecological and climate crisis that we're facing. we are now understanding that we are not going back to our earlier climate condition. Now we are living with drought for all our life. So this is a discussion that is increasing. It's a very difficult discussion to have because it depends on the economy, know, mineral economy which is why it's so important actually this kind of reports because it shows you actually who is paying the costs of green energies but also digitization in terms actually of access of fresh water.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (30:14)I mean, without the natural resources of global south, it's no possibility to talk about digital transition or green energies. Another really interesting example, not only talking about the mineral countries in Latin America or the ones that are dealing with data centers, it is now the semiconductor industry that is taking over the region. And do not forget that this industry consumes over 264 billions gallons of water per year. And that is more than Hong Kong. And this industry needs a lot of ultra-pure water and you can find it in places as Costa Rica, for example, chosen from the Biden administration to hold Intel expansion in the region. And this is, again, one of the new debates that are taking over in the region.
is this the economical progress we want to go in and with and that will cost this precious element we need to survive. put it in another way, data needs at this moment more water daily than you and me to exist.
Gaël Duez (31:47)So we've covered quite a lot of the environmental impacts. We could also talk about the energy consumption. We could also talk about a bit more in details, greenhouse gasses. We could also talk about the share of electricity consumption used by the digital economy. But actually both of you at the very beginning of the interview, brought under the spotlight some very key and differentiator aspects with this report around social justice and some geopolitical significance of this report. And maybe I'd like to give you the floor now to talk a bit more about what I've understood to be some sort of a digital revolution paradox which is that those contributing the most in terms of resources, including human resources, I mean workers, are not the one benefiting more of it, of this digital revolution. I know that this is one of your specialties. Could you tell us a bit more? how you analyze this discrepancy.
Paz Peña (32:52)Yeah, actually in the report you can see that UNCTAD is addressing that today digitalization is under a very concentrated market. That means that few companies actually are available to actually developed these very digital economies of the 21st century. And many of those companies are based in the US, others are in China, some of them very few are in Europe. And many of them are what we known as big tech companies. They have the power to have the infrastructure, the worldwide infrastructure to actually be able to address this need of digital economy in the world. So when we talk about digitization, for me it's really interesting to say, but who is behind that digitization? There are not many companies behind that. There are not many countries behind that.
you can count the companies that are available to actually address this task. And there are a few of them, probably 20, 25 in the world. So this is the first thing that I think we need to discuss. Who is actually enjoying the benefit, the economic benefits? Yes, they are, you know, developing countries, industrialized countries of digitization, But not all the people actually. The ones that are enjoying the benefits of digitization the most is, these companies, no? Why there's this need to make everything digital is because there's a big push in terms of lobby to do that because these companies know that is where the money come from. So this is the first thing I believe is important to understand and this report will help us to understand that. The UNCTAD is addressing that there's a concentration of market in digital economy and this is a huge problem. This is the first thing. And the second thing I will say is that, as you said, Gaël the biggest question that we need to address here is also who is bearing the costs of digitization.
And you can see this worldwide where there's a gap between developing countries with industrialized countries. And there's a gap there that we have been discussing in this podcast. But also we need to address that even in developed countries, there is also communities that are bearing the cost of digitization. communities that are actually being cut off the access of fresh water in, for example, Europe, etc. And also this is a question of justice, but it's not only a question of justice between developed and developing world, but also in our communities in all the world, which is something that is very important to understand.
Gaël Duez (36:20)when you say, and let me be the devil advocates here. When you say, Big Tech is benefiting the most from digitalization. Does it overlook all the benefits that quite a lot of people get also from digitalization via new jobs, better services, more productivity, you name it. mean, there are countless of reports and you've mentioned at the beginning that quite a lot of them are also sponsored by the digital industry, a lot of them are biased. But I would say for the average North American or European or Japanese or Chinese citizen, believing that digitalization doesn't bring mostly valuable things would be quite hard to sell. question is, sure, Big Tech is reaping quite a lot of the benefit, at least in the global north, does overall the population also benefit from this digital revolution?

Paz Peña (37:28)Yes, but that is something that you can actually discuss. how digitization is actually benefiting our economies because you can say also that you are lowering the work standards that we had before digitization, for example. You can see, and there's many reports on how digitization is influencing this trend of uberization of economy, there's no doubt that developed countries are having more benefits because they have a more digital economy.
But you have to understand that today in the current state of capitalism, for many theorists, digitization is actually lowering the standards of work, for example, without even discussing all the other implications of digitization in terms of
techno-capitalism today in terms of, for example, mental health through being connected all day to social media, cetera. So this is not so clear. It's not so clear that all is benefits. But also, I think it's important to say that in developing countries, many developing countries, even I'm from Chile, so Latin America is a region that I know. In many countries in Latin America, the digital economy is not well developed yet. So when we are going through this global discourse of saying, so to be sustainable enough, we need digitization, digitization of everything. That means concretely today that the gap between these countries that are not having a digital economy well developed, that means that those countries will increase the with industrialized countries, with Europe, with Japan, et cetera. So that gap, that inequality gap is something that is not being discussed very seriously in the world. And I think, again, this and that report help us to understand that kind of new gap that we are creating with this discourse of saying, OK, we need to digitalize everything. Yes, that's maybe something good for the developed countries, but you have to be aware that developing countries are still behind that. And this could actually widening that gap, which is very, very serious matter.
Gaël Duez (40:09)how would you define social injustice actually when it comes to the digital economy and could you provide one or two examples of this imbalance that you've described previously?
Paz Peña (40:22)Sure, so I think we can define that... ...unjustice in the context of digitization is that... ...most of the added value created in the digital economy is captured by developed and digital advanced developing countries. many of the social environmental costs of digitization are paid by developing countries. And this is especially important, for example, in terms of mineral extraction, where the global south is basically the most affected by the extraction of minerals that are needed by the digital economy.
And minerals are being extracted from the Global South, that means a lot of pollution, a lot of illegal mining, which means human rights violations of people, displacement of indigenous communities, scarcity of fresh water, et cetera. Many people, for example, say that there's no way that green mining is possible. All mining have a lot of social environmental costs. And that is something that is as important to examine. So the latest UNTAD report actually what does is to examine those social environmental impacts of digitization in developing countries, which means to not only review evidence, scientific evidence, but also have a call, an international call for countries not only developing countries, but also industrialized countries to understand the need of sustainable digitization
But also, Gael, I just want to add something that I believe is really important to understand. It's that what we're seeing today is a geopolitical discussion where digital economy is really important. today digitalization or the digital economy is being discussed together with the transformation of our energy matrix to a more greener one. These two things, green energies and digitizations, is being discussed as one thing, as something that is needed for a more sustainable world. who is the boss in digital economy and who is available and have the capacity to have most important share of green energies in the world. So this is where the discussion is happening today.
Gaël Duez (43:17)And what about the UN with this geopolitical impact? I this is supposed to be the place where nations are talking to each other. And, know, when I've read the report, I've seen all the recommendations about what should be done. And it sounded a bit like a wishful thinking list. And I was discussing it with a Green IO listener, Benjamin Davy, and he was really questioning whether the UN should or even is able to actually shift a bit from a reporting stance. This is how things are going to a more pedagogical stance and even maybe a bit of name and shame if possible, So my question is, what can actually the United Nations do about it and what actually should we do about it also?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (44:16)United Nations UNCTAD in this case has adopted digital sustainability as a priority under the understanding the principle of common but differentiated responsibility as high relevant.
It is time also to extend the calls for both actions to the entire life cycle of digitalization and to systematically track its social environmental footprint. Be aware of the socio-environmental footprint of the mechanics behind the digital economy and be aware that the problem or part of the problem can be solved with the circular design. But be aware that if we do not follow that way, we are going to deal with really complex problems in the near future. I think this is the main thing, or one of the main things of this UNTACD report.
Gaël Duez (45:31)Paz what do you think about the potential for collaboration at UN level and what the UN should do about it?
Paz Peña (45:39)The UN is going through a huge political crisis because of the war between Israel and Palestine and Lebanon. And also because the lack of concrete action in terms of the climate and ecological crisis we are facing through. But there's also a lot of critics regarding the UN forum and its role in the technological, digital internet governance, because mainly there's a lot of big tech influence in there, et cetera. So I think we need to be realistic and understand the political limits of the UN. There's a lot of fight inside. There's a lot of interest there. I mean, I'm very critical about that, but that doesn't mean that you can actually take these kind of reports and do your own political work as a community, as a territory, as a researcher, et cetera. I do like a lot of many of the conclusion of this report and that reports. really believe that circular as Pablo said, can be something important in terms of the designing of the digital economy. But I do also believe that circular economy is just a mitigation policy. It's not addressing the biggest problem of digital economy, which is basically this logic, this capitalist logic of extraction. This idea, as Pablo said, the idea that we have infinite resources for the economy, which is a completely crazy idea in terms of our reality, in terms of natural resources. And I don't think we can find in any report, including the UNCTAD report, a recommendation that is addressing the problem of capitalism today in digitization, which for me is the biggest problem. But that doesn't mean that these kind of reports that are designed with independent scientific science can help actually communities to understand their reality and actually start to have a more political reaction to it. So I will say, of course, I don't think the UN can do something more relevant in this issue, but I do believe that this kind of report can actually be very useful for communities around the world.
Gaël Duez (48:32)So more awareness than actual actions because of the ongoing political crisis, according to you, Paz. I? Okay, got it. And my last question for both of you would be,
Paz Peña (48:40)I will say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gaël Duez (48:46)As someone working in this digital economy and many listeners of this show are actually workers of the digital economy.
What can we do? How should we react to such a report? And what would be your two cents on tackling the different large issues that are highlighted in this report?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (49:02)We need to go back to our critical thinking.And with the critical thinking, break the magical digital thinking we are dealing with.Understand that cyberspace has a growing footprint, multi-dimensional, that every time we use, we deal with our digital environment has a consequence.
Paz Peña (49:38)I believe that digital workers are essential for change in digitization and in digital economies, are essential. And I actually have two concrete suggestions for workers in the digital industry. First, one of the most important is think about tech differently. try to experiment with new designs of tech that can be actually more sustainable, that cannot necessarily think in growth and growth and growth and maybe think in technology that can be used in territories with the participation of communities, et cetera. Let's try to think out of the box and believe in other tech is possible.the second thing, if you're working in a big tech company and in the industry, it's so, so important for workers to fight for more transparency in terms of the social environmental impacts of that company in different territories. fight for transparency. You are key in this. Today what we are dealing with is that companies tend to be very obscure in how they report their environmental impacts. If we can fight for more transparency, it's something that is so key not only for scientific but also for territories, for people in their territories that can actually start a dialogue with companies. And I think workers are key for that. And for me, this is the second very concrete suggestion. Fight for transparency.
Gaël Duez (51:34)fight for transparency. Quite a tagline for this episode.
What would be a positive piece of news that both of you would like to share regarding the ongoing trend in the digital economy?
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (51:47)I see there is more attention to the importance of the circular design in our digital world. I also see more efforts, for example, at the… European Union level to address critical matters regarding not only the circular design, but also the power of Big Tech Corporates regarding artificial intelligence.
And what I'm also is a more critical thinking approach on the digital ecosystem we have, the nature of it, and the chances we have to correct.
Paz Peña (52:35)I completely agree with Pablo. Five years ago, even three years ago, you didn't see many news in the outlets around the social environmental impacts, for example, of AI, of the digital economy. Today that is completely changed, I think.
There's also a lot of critical thinking or more critical thinking around digitization, but also that means there's a lot of territorial movements saying, know, these digital technologies have a very concrete material impact in our realities. That means that there are people, not necessarily
people that is related to tech, but people in their communities saying, you know, let's discuss about this. And this is something that you can see in the media outlets. And I think that is very, very positive because that means that people is alive actually, know, trying to change and to have a better world, a sustainable world, even in digital technologies.
Gaël Duez (53:49)thanks a lot, both of you for highlighting the rise in awareness, at least in our industry. And let's hope that it will have some impact at some point, but awareness is always the first step. And this is a very reason of this podcast as well.
And yeah, it was really nice to have you both of you on the show, not talking the regular green software or responsible AI topics, but zooming out a bit and discussing massive geopolitical and social issues. So thanks a lot, both of you for this.
Paz Peña (54:12)Thank you, Gael, for the invitation.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:20)thank you very much for make this space possible. And this is also really positive to mention the attention that you are giving also to this issue. Thank you very much.
Paz Peña (54:30)Yeah.
Thank you and so nice to see you, Pablo.
Pablo Gámez Cersosimo (54:39)That's it. Bye!
Gaël Duez (54:44)Thank you for listening to this Green.io episode. Sharing it on social media or directly with, well, pretty much everyone working in the digital sector or using digital services seems a good idea regarding what is at stake here. You know the drill, being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode,
We were supposed to welcome the CTO of Backmarket, Dawn Baker, to tell us more about some radical choices she made in the GreenOps field. However, the brutal dismantling of the sustainability team at WordPress requires some coverage. And I will be honored to welcome in the next episode three of the initiators of this grassroots movement. Nahuai Badiola, Nora Ferreiros and Csaba Varszegi
There will provide us some context and clarification about what happened and more importantly what to do next when you are a responsible technologist using WordPress as your main CMS. course, the episode with Dawn Baker will be released just after. Don't worry. One last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. We opened the call for speakers for our five planned conferences this year. It will be in Singapore, New York, Munich, London and Paris. So if you want to share your experience in green software, sustainable design, green art, responsible AI, you name it, please fill in the form.
I'm looking forward to meeting you there to build with you, fellow responsible technologists, a greener digital world.


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Moore’s law is dead! Long live Eroom’s law!
This provocative statement from Tristan Nitot highlights the pivotal role of software engineers in our journey as an industry toward a sustainable and more frugal digital world. The majority of our old devices, from smartphones to desktop, still work. How come that we waste such a massive gathering of precious resources such as minerals, energy, water and even our human time which we use to manufacture and maintain them? What should we do to break the trend of electronic waste and the ever-increasing footprint of the IT sector on our physical world? Gael Duez sat down with Tristan Nitot to start answering these questions in this Green IO episode where we covered:    ⚖️ Why Wirth’s law matters more than Moore’s law   🗑️ How the Auvergnat cultural aversion for waste accelerated the birth of the Eroom’s law   🔎 How to find (sustainability) weakness in your software,    🐍 Why Python is not (always) guilty of being resource hungry and how to embrace a wise use of alternative libraries such as Polars,   ✨The real ROII of using AI to optimize software.
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• Tristan’s LinkedIn
• Tristan’s website “L’octet Vert”
• Green IO website 
• Gaël's website 
  
  

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Tristan's sources and other references mentioned in this episode

• Niklaus Wirth’s article "A Plea for Lean Software" 
• Moore’s law (wikipedia)
• Greenit.fr 
• Matt Parker's video "Someone improved my code 408 000 000 times better"
• Optimisation de performance bénéfice ou sacrifice ? (FR),
• WeDoLow (software optimization)
• Polars library
• The Digital Collage workshop
• The Biodiversity Collage workshop
• Tom Fishburn’s cartoon about AI and email
• Tristan Nitot’s “La loi de Moore est morte et c'est une bonne nouvelle” (FR)
  
  

Transcript (auto-generated)
Tristan Nitot (00:00)
basically if you manage to double the speed of your software every other year, then you don't need to change your hardware. Because every other year, you have like Moore's Law, you're liberating half of your computing power and resources. And so you have half of it which is available. And half of it means you can invent

new stuff. And I call it Erooms Law.

It's like more in reverse, because it's basically the same.

Gaël Duez (00:32)
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO

I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information

is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.

Gaël Duez (01:19)
It was a late evening in December 2021 in my small Parisian flat. The wind was blowing and a bit of rain was making me feel very comfortable being at home. I was staring at my living room wall, which happened to also be my kitchen wall. I told you this is a Parisian flat. And on this wall were dozens of post-its with voting dotes and names on it, such as Take It Green,

Green Coding, Green Technologists, Eco IO, well, as

I was on the final stage of finding the names of this podcast. The final battle was between Green IO and Green Bytes. And here comes a surprise, the winner was Green Bytes. But Tristan Nitot had been broadcasting for years a successful podcast in French named

L'Octet Vert, the green octet. And I wanted his permission to use a similar title in English. And he told me, I'd rather not. Back in those days, he had plans to expand the podcast internationally. And after he told me this, we talked for an hour. And the amount of tips and support he provided me was mind blowing.

This call was one of the best investments I made while launching the Green IO adventure. So Green IO won and as far as I know from your feedback, that's a pretty cool name as well.

to have him on the show to celebrate this milestone. But we don't have Tristan today with us only for celebrations. We have him to discuss how we will run weather forecasts in 10 years from now on an Amstrad computer from the 80s. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here, but it illustrates well the concept that Tristan has been pushing relentlessly for a year now about his Eeroom's law and the fact that more law is dead.

This focus on sustainability in Tristan's life started 15 years ago in parallel of a successful career in Mozilla Europe,

which he co-founded, then Cozy Cloud as a CPO and Quant as its CEO. He now works at Octo Technology to work on digital sustainability and frugality, but Tristan is also well known for

being one of the strongest voices in Europe for open source software and privacy, a topic he even wrote a book about, surveillance. Welcome back on the show, Tristan. It's always a pleasure to have you here.

Tristan Nitot (04:09)
Bye.

It's a pleasure too and an honor.

Gaël Duez (04:14)
let's get started right now. And I've got a question for you, Tristan. From podcaster to podcaster, just between you and me and a few thousands listeners. Did you kill it? Did you kill Moore's law

Tristan Nitot (04:30)
No, it's not my fault. It happened. Well, I think they say that trees don't grow up to the sky. They have to end sometimes. And has experienced a fantastic run for more than 50 years. But it's pretty close to being

It may be a shock for many people because we've all been living with Moore's Law around us. And to the point it's a fact of life. And to the point we forget about it, it's just like Next year's computers are going to be faster, except that it's slowing And they keep improving stuff, but more Law basically is almost dead.

Gaël Duez (05:22)
and for the listeners not that familiar with the concept of more law, could you just describe it in one sentence?

Tristan Nitot (05:28)
Sure, of course. It was created by Gordon Moore, who was a co-founder of Intel. It pronounced in 1965 in the very early days of semiconductors. Moore realized that basically because they were making so quickly

progress about manufacturing microchips and semiconductors, they were able to double the number of transistors they could put into a semiconductor, basically a computer chip, memory, processor, and stuff. And if they could manage to double the number of transistors per chip every two years, like they've been doing,

And it would be fantastic. And so they decided it's not a physical law, is a programmatic decision of investing in research and development in order to double the number of choices store every other year so that microchip will double in computing power every two years. And they managed to basically pull it off.

for more than 40 years. But now, starting in the mid 2010s, it's really slowing down. they managed to put it off for 40 years, which is amazing.

Gaël Duez (06:51)
which is amazing for a non-physical law. As you stated, it's almost a research and investment program rather than a law, followed by humans at Intel and then everywhere around the world in the semiconductor

Tristan Nitot (06:59)
Yes.

Gaël Duez (07:06)
Now I'd like to ask you a question about whether it's really dead or not. Because someone would argue that with the current trend on GPU chips achieving an etching smaller and smaller, we're talking about two nanometers now, the computing power intensity of our chips is still going up. So dead or not dead, Mauslo, or just being rewritten somehow?

Tristan Nitot (07:32)
Yeah, that's a really good question. Basically, Moslo was interesting because you could make a microprocessor core go faster. And as we write a program, it's executed sequentially with loops on one single core. That was the model from the very start, and it lasted

for a very long time. And if you look at the improvements year over year of the speed of the power of a single core microprocessor, would see it increases very almost in a way. Well, it's a.

It's linear if you have a logarithmic scale. So it really doubles every other year. Actually, sometimes it goes faster than that, and sometimes a little slower, depending on the period of time. And then the curve is making a plateau around 2012 in terms of the speed of one single core. And basically,

If you could put it that way, you could add more transistors into a microprocessor, but at some point, it doesn't make it any faster. It's plateauing, and it's over.

So what they manage to do is they multiply the number of cores. And this is why you have several cores in a microprocessor. But it completely changes the model. And cores is a lot more complex than programming a single core, because you have to synchronize each core altogether. So the complexity is increasing really fast. It's mind blowing.

And so it's a lot harder to manage. So what we see now is with AI and neural networks, we can have a solution to basically split the computing neurons and each core being like a neuron.

But this model is very different from programming like an application or something. It really is about LLMs and AI and stuff like that. Well, you can use thousands of core and being efficient at using them. But the single core thing, it's really over. are slight improvements like Apple did it with the Apple Silicon because they started integrating everything all at once in a single piece of silicon, putting

the processor and the memory and also the GPU and stuff like that, all in the same box, like a tiny box. And so it's faster mostly because the connectioners are shorter and it's more efficient. And as you can see now, even Apple Silicon is plateauing.

Gaël Duez (10:26)
So dead or plateaued, but in any case, significantly slow in down. This is your main takeaway of what is going on at the hardware level of our IT industry, if I understood you right exactly.

Tristan Nitot (10:41)
Yes, yes.

Gaël Duez (10:42)
And in parallel of more law

there is a second law that you love to quote a lot and to put into perspective with more law, which is Weir's law. Can you elaborate a bit on it and why you like to put these two in parallel?

Tristan Nitot (10:57)
so basically there is this famous German Swiss computer scientist which name is Niklaus Wirth.

And so he's a very, he's almost a genius. He's got several prizes for his work. He has invented several innovative languages like Pascal. So he's a really top-notch computer scientist and researcher.

so Niklaus Wirth was actually pretty unhappy about the state of affairs in computing.

because what he saw is that the more someone has a powerful computer, the more lazy the person is when it comes to writing software. So his law is said, software is becoming slower, faster than hardware is accelerating. So the more power you have, more hardware power you have, the more you

misuse it and the lazier you become when writing

Gaël Duez (12:02)
I think it was coined in a different way in the 90s when it was stated like what Intel gives you, Microsoft takes it back.

Tristan Nitot (12:12)
Indeed, yes. It was a popular way to summarize the VEOT slow. And it's exactly that. What Intel gives you Microsoft takes back. And in the time where computing was Intel making the hardware and it was Microsoft delivering the software, you could see that, in fact, you get a new generation. And you see that Windows and Microsoft Office and

They get slower. They get more features, but they get slower. And Intel was super happy about that because it will enable them to sell new computers and new processors and everything. And they loved it. So it was nice.

Gaël Duez (12:54)
So now Gordon Moore is dead. Maybe his law is dead or at least platooning. are still pretty unhappy with the way we run our software. I people are still changing hardware mostly on software reason or on psychological obsolescence, but that's a completely different topic. And a few years ago,

came up with an idea about a new low, E room's low. And that's the reason you're on this show today.

could you tell us a bit more, how did you get this idea of Eroom's law?

Tristan Nitot (13:28)
I wish I could tell you that one day an apple fell on my head and I had this wonderful idea of Irrumsloh. Yeah, but it was a Mac, not an apple. It hurts quite a bit. Just kidding. And so, no, no, it was actually pretty painful. I knew about Morsloh and Wiertzloh.

Gaël Duez (13:33)
I've heard this story already.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Tristan Nitot (13:51)
for a long time and then it came back when I had a conversation with Frédéric Bordage, who is one of the godfather of green IT in France and he mentioned that in a training that I was participating to. And it was nice having my memory refreshed about it.

And so I used this. was trying to do giving talks here and there because I thought that we needed to do something about global warming.

biodiversity collapse and stuff. And I was trying to ways to introduce people to the issue that we should stop wasting competing power. to be honest, I wasn't very successful because basically my idea at the time was that people should give up on

new things all the time. And maybe we should cut down on the amount of computing resources we use. And nobody was ready to hear that. And I understand that. mean, being myself a computer scientist and being myself like in love with the progress and advancement, technical advancement of computing,

It's like everybody in the industry has this feeling that we are going to do more computing in the future and not less,

And so I wanted to explain to the people that computing is not free. Of course, it's getting cheaper and all of that. But it has an impact when it comes to digging mines in many places of the world and pollution and energy consumption and greenhouse gases and stuff.

And they were, I mean, they were not exciting conferences. People would get unhappy And suddenly I realized that there were people that could do optimization of software in amazing ways. And I mean, a friend of mine had written something in Python and realized it was

taking too long for his program to run and decided to optimize it. In just half an hour, he managed to optimize it by a factor of 60. He made his program run 60 times faster.

You could put it in a different way. Until then, he was wasting 60 times too much computing power to achieve the results he wanted to get from his computer. and I am from a region in France, which is a poor region, historically, which is Auvergne. And so people in

they want to save money. wasting resources is just unacceptable.

And it happens, but my friend is also from Auvergne. And he said exactly, he felt exactly the same way. Like, what? I've been wasting 60 times. So he felt ashamed about it. And so I kept researching about optimization.

And there was that one thing that I discussed when I was last here at Green IO Paris 2023 of one guy in the UK named Matt Parker, who made a fantastic video about his code being improved by a factor of 408 million. So he was basically wasting 400 million times

too many power to solve a problem, which actually was not a really interesting problem, by the way.

And he wrote a Python script And this Python script has been running for 32 days to find one solution. And he made a podcast about it.

and people starting making fun of him because really 32 days to solve such a basic problem was way too much. And somebody decided to rewrite another version and made it run in 15 minutes instead of 32 days. so Matt mentioned that in another podcast.

And so other people say, what? 15 minutes is way too slow. I can do better. And so they started first competing and then collaborating altogether to share the best tricks like, no, you don't want to use Python. You want to use Rust. Or no, you can use C. And no, you can use Assembler and all of that in order to go faster.

And one of the latest version, which is not the fastest version, now runs in 6.8 milliseconds instead of 32 days. And so that's more than 400 million times faster.

So basically, overall, what it made me realize is that in most cases, when someone writes software,

We don't really care about quality and the need of resources. And sometimes it's OK. Maybe we could rewrite it. We could redo the work. We could rewrite it and gain maybe 20 % performance. And we don't have to do that. mean, doing the work twice in order to gain 20%, it's not worth the thing. But if you can.

manage to make it 100 times faster, then it makes sense. And basically, the issue is finding where in your code base you behaved like Matt Parker and where you have written a terrible piece of code

So we need to spot that and fix it.

basically if you manage to double the speed of your software every other year, then you don't need to change your hardware. Because every other year, you have like Moore's Law, you're liberating half of your computing power and resources. And so you have half of it which is available. And half of it means you can invent

new stuff. And I call it Erooms Law. It's like more in reverse, because it's basically the same.

Same thing is more law, except that you don't need to change the so does it make a big difference? It does. Why does it? Because actually,

the manufacturing of the hardware

is the thing that has the biggest impact by far because basically it's just not electricity, electricity which can be green electricity by the way. No, this is basically diesel caterpillars being used in some foreign country whether it's South Africa or South America.

Gaël Duez (20:48)
layer.

Tristan Nitot (20:49)
and digging mines pushing earth and soil in huge amounts, and literally tons and tons of these, And then taking all of this and putting on a chip sent to China, which is going to go through, well,

all the oceans for months and stuff like that. And then in China, it's making the chips and the hardware and the steel that goes around it. So basically, when you see your smartphone arrive in front of you, before you switch it on, of the footprint and most of the damage has been done. And so the biggest thing it can do

as a person is make your hardware last longer. And with Eroom's law, we can make it last longer because we will remove the need to change the hardware because we are optimizing software.

Gaël Duez (21:38)
And that's.

that's absolutely true because what you've described is super well described in the digital collage workshop, all this visual with big mine and all of this. you really see that, especially for end user devices, like between 70 and 90 % of the oncological footprint happens before you start using it, as you rightfully said. And

What is very interesting most of the time when people are starting to get aware of it, they get past the psychological obsolescence, like the need to get the latest and shiniest iPhone, laptop, earplugs, whatever. they start willingly to keep their hardware longer and longer. But the problem most of the time they say it's like, comes with a cost that more and more and more softwares will not be available or will not run properly. So it's kind of a

double side push, I would say that crunch any good willing, environmentally aware IT users, which is like, okay, so I've got this big marketing push that, hey, you need the latest stuff, you're not in, you're not cool, you're not whatever, or you're not even a productive enough worker. On one side and on the other side, actually, you've got this

hardware slash software push And I think we're focusing a lot on the marketing push,

But with your E-Rooms low, we open the Pandora box of this other push, is Obsolescence and

the very strong link between software and hardware and how actually is driving most of the hardware obsolescence. So thanks for this clarification. And I Emmanuel talks that was at BraceCamp actually. And that was very interesting because he was using a

Tristan Nitot (23:35)
Hmm

Gaël Duez (23:37)
very largely used software as an example, which was COVID Tracker, if I remember well, and how all the architectural choices that were enabled the applications to be super small and super efficient to run, despite serving millions of calls per hours at the peak of the pandemic. And this leads to my next question, which is,

If I get the concept right, as you described it and why it is important, as a software engineer trying to lower the environmental footprint of my code, starting with the fact that my code should be made in such a way that it could be used on hardware older and older and older, how can I leverage this concept? How can I make it concrete?

Tristan Nitot (24:29)
Well, it's something I'm working on at Octo, but I certainly hope that other companies are going to embrace to with or without Octo.

And they will implement a methodology that I'm trying to write with the community, which is basically

how you find weaknesses in your software. And by weaknesses, I mean the pieces of code that are terribly under-optimized, how you spot them because you have millions of lines of code in your information systems. How do you know where they are? Maybe you already know.

Maybe your Cloud Monthly bill is helping you spot them. Maybe you have a FinOps efforts underway that could help spotting them. then put up a task force with probably senior.

Gaël Duez (25:23)
Spot the culprits.

Tristan Nitot (25:39)
developers that will come and audit the code and spot where the issues are. You will be using tools like profilers that will inspect the code and say, this place is basically taking 98 % of the time and the CPU power and the memory. It's being used right there.

If you use a profiler, you would see flame graphs. You see the heat, if you will, where basically the power is consumed within the code. And so it's there where you want to intervene and send the task force and fix the issue. And so we're working on creating a methodology to spot the places and fix

the issues where they are, in order to basically implement these rooms law at information systems.

Gaël Duez (26:37)
And what are the top three takeaways that you've found so far? Is it more in the architecture Is it more on the way we code? Is it more the language we choose for different tasks? What are the main takeaways that you've found while working with your colleagues so far?

Tristan Nitot (26:56)
There are basically several buckets. For some reason, people think, yeah, you're using Python. So the language is the problem. And it is true that Python is not super fast compared to C++ or C or Brust. It's true. But basically, it's how you use it. Python is amazing.

in having a whole ecosystem of libraries that do a lot of things. for example, I've heard

of libraries in Python called Panda that can be replaced by another library which is written in Rust. So basically you spend most of your time running Rust without even knowing it because you're programming it from Python. so if you use Polars, which is written in Rust, it's a lot faster than Pandas, which is written in Python. So these are the kind of things you can change. So it's a matter of language. It's a matter of libraries. It can be also a matter of

storage where you basically have a database it's an old issue that we all know is basically you try it on a small subset of data and it works and that's fine. But if you end up deploying it and two years after you have three million rows in your database, the problem is completely different by nature.

And maybe you need an index that was not noticeable in the first place because the dataset was small. But now you have millions of rows and without the index, you're wasting a lot of time. Maybe just having an index is going to fix your problem. Maybe it's going to be more complicated than that. So storage is also a problem. But it's something you find in

data science where you manipulate very significant volumes of data. A lot of times you import some JSON or CSV and it's slow, but now you have fantastic libraries that enable you to do this kind of thing but a lot faster and things like that. can be also architecture.

You could have very powerful machines that, on the way they have been set together, they keep waiting for each other all the time. So it's basically very inefficient. And then you need to have a systemic approach to find out what the issue is and that kind of thing. it's hard to say, because IT is fantastic in its diversity. But we can spot that they are.

some families or buckets of problems that we find.

Gaël Duez (29:42)
okay Tristan now I would love you to indulge me to play a bit the devil advocate and I have two questions for the first one is about AI and what you've described spotting the inefficiency in the code rewriting the code etc we've seen a lot of production recently

explaining that with AI and being more precise with machine learning techniques, we will be able to rewrite code in a more efficient way, sports, anti-patterns, et cetera, et cetera. the methodology you've mentioned, the buckets,

you've described. Isn't it ultimately a job of a very well and efficient AI to rewrite all the code of the word and to make us save millions of tons of CO2 and also money?

Tristan Nitot (30:35)
It's a really good question. First, I need to say that I've chatted recently with a young lady called Justine Bono, who happens to be French, and has a company named We Do Low, L-O-W, like low energy or low consumption, I don't know. She is co-founder of a startup

that does software optimization, automatic software optimization, especially in the embedded world. So stuff that you find on cars and stuff like that. Not really on general purpose computers, on PCs and stuff. And basically, her approach has nothing to do with AI. And she is already really good at doing stuff, like

automated ways to improve your code by 40 with no AI involved. So yes, there are promises there. Now, I must admit, I am very impressed and for several years about what AI is able to do.

it's amazing. it's amazing. But let's be honest. Resource-wise, it's crazy. It's consuming an amount of resources. It's like,

thousands or million times more complicated than running a normal piece of software. It's amazing, but I think the cost is even more amazing. And it's something we don't see. Like earlier on, you mentioned digital collage, where they talk about the mines and stuff like that.

It's something we don't see and we never talk and you don't see minds in Apple advertising about the new iPhone, right? Because that's not something they want to see. You want to see a pristine white box with an all new shining hardware. That's what they want to see. It's they want to create desire. And so they are not going to show you kids going down in mines. But it does exist still. It's just they don't show it to you.

And exactly the same with AI. It's fantastic what it can do, but it's orders of magnitude more energy consuming than regular computing. And so it's something we need not to forget. I sense, I understand the enthusiasm.

around AI because it's amazing what it can do. But there is a price associated to it and nobody really wants us to know about it. So let's not fall for that.

Gaël Duez (33:12)
So if I follow you here, what you would say is, yes, it's a potential answer to use AI to optimize code, but let's make sure that the cost and especially the environmental cost of using this kind of tool, worse, it's investments

Am I understanding you right here? Yeah.

Tristan Nitot (33:31)
Yes, yes. I think first, I need to see whether AI is going to deliver on its promises of being able to optimize software. Because for now, it's just a promise. And maybe it's not going to be true. We never know. That's one thing. Second thing, we need to sure that we use AI for things that are worth it.

and was the cost and the impact. And third, I'm not sure this is the tendency to use it. Right now, I see AI for helping you

see AI for helping students do their work. if you ask me, because the point is not making them write. It's making them learn. And they learn by writing. But if a machine does the writing for you, you don't learn. It's like bringing a lift to the gym to lift

Gaël Duez (34:24)
You don't know.

Tristan Nitot (34:28)
the weights instead of you. Okay, well, the weights are lifted by the form, but well, you're not making any muscle in the process.

Gaël Duez (34:32)
you

really love this one. I think I'm gonna keep it for my students.

Tristan Nitot (34:41)
So right now, I see this is how AI is used. There is this cartoon that I really like where someone says, you know, I have written this bullet point, and I'm using AI to expand it into a long email. I can't pretend I wrote. But I'm lazy. I don't want to write the whole email. And on the receiving end,

And the person says, there is this long email. I don't have time to read, so I'm going to use AI to sum it up into a bullet point. And that's a well, it's exaggerated, but not so much. think this is really how AI is used these days. And so it's consuming a lot of resources for basically adding no value, other than I pretend I wrote a long email and I pretend I read a long email. If you could only write just a bullet point and set it like that.

it would be a lot more efficient, there would be less noise into the signal anyway, and more efficient in every way. So we should question whether to use AI properly or not.

Gaël Duez (35:40)
That's a fair answer to my first question. But I'm still with my devil's advocate hat on. And that will be actually my last question before closing the podcast. How much of this eRooms law is actually new? just like good old fashioned software optimization with a sustainable angle? Or what is the catch here? Am I misunderstanding something?

Tristan Nitot (36:04)
I think really boils down to a Wirtz law. Basically, the more power we have, the lazier we become as an industry. And if you think about it, even 20 or 30 years ago, which is basically midway from now and the invention of microcomputing,

People knew that they had to optimize. They knew how the computer was working precisely. they knew because they've been hitting the wall of hardware, like the limits of the hardware, you don't have infinite memory. You don't have infinite storage. You don't have infinite computing power. So,

they would be careful and they would learn what to do in order to optimize when they hit a limit of the computer. of course, it took time and energy, but it forced them to become smarter and do smarter things. And it was cool. Now basically, if you don't have enough computing power, basically you fire up another pod. The cloud is going to take care of you. It will scale infinitely.

except that your wallet is not a scale indefinitely. But it's going to cost you a lot, but you don't realize that. And so you don't learn from this. Researching about optimization made me realize one thing is we only optimize under constraint. If there is no constraint, we don't optimize.

And I think we do have two constraints that are with us. The first one is more slow slowing down. It won't keep up forever. That's one thing. And the second thing is basically climate change and biodiversity collapse. We have the moral obligation to do something. I mean, these two things.

climate change and biodiversity collapse are the biggest challenges for mankind.

Basically, Irun's law is saying there are these two new constraints. There is a solution. You can keep building new innovative stuff. But in order to do that, you need to optimize, which is something that we basically have given up because we didn't feel any constraints with computing.

Gaël Duez (38:35)
Okay, so it's not good old fashioned optimization because it comes with a twist about what are the metrics, what are the goals that you're actually chasing and it's not only about financial optimization but also about having an impact and positive impact regarding all this crisis that you've mentioned and also the physical limits that we are about to

got it. Two constraints that are re-incorporated in optimizations to make it much more urgent and top priority. Thanks a lot Tristan for answering all my questions. I've got maybe

Two last ones just to close the podcast. You've mentioned tons of references. All of these references and resources will be put in the show notes as usual and as I mentioned in the introduction. However, is there one final resource or content that you'd like to share with us?

Tristan Nitot (39:30)
listen to Green.io. There are a lot of things. Go to Green.io Paris or the Green.io conference that is taking place near where you live. It's really exciting. And you're going to meet some

new people. So do yourself a favor and listen to more of this information and meet the community. They're very nice people and they're addressing a challenge that deserves to be addressed.

Gaël Duez (40:00)
Well, thanks lot, Tristan. I'm going to hire you as a salesman. But I'm going to mention also that people should keep on listening Octave or Fugazia because it's resources in French, but they're also highly valuable. But thanks a lot for mentioning Green IO in such a positive way. And my last question will be...

Tristan Nitot (40:02)
You

Thank you.

Gaël Duez (40:20)
Actually, you've already started a bit by saying something positive about the momentum and the resources we can find, but is it a positive piece of news that you'd like to share about digital sustainability or maybe sustainability at large to close the podcast?

Tristan Nitot (40:36)
I think every organization is understanding more and more that they need to do something. In Europe, there is the CSRD, Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, that is basically forcing organizations to publish every year a report on how they are improving their corporate social responsibility,

is good because it's not only individuals that need to do something. Of course, individuals need to decide to change, but organizations will change too. So I think everybody will get on board and it will become obvious that we will

be applying the changes that we need to apply.

Gaël Duez (41:24)
Thanks a lot for sharing this positive thoughts and mentioning that sometimes regulation does have an interesting impact, positive impact. actually, we're going to see each other in a matter of days on Green Eye of Paris stage to celebrate the podcast birthday and also to have dozens of amazing speakers and panelists to talk about.

green IT and digital sustainability under different angles, from different perspectives, which is how actually we make the world better and how scientific progress is made. So hope to see a lot of you there and we will see you Tristan. So thanks a lot for joining again and thanks for joining the show. It's always a pleasure to have you there.

Tristan Nitot (42:01)
Yes, with pleasure.

Thank you.



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Have you ever heard “The complaint of the lonely sustainability champion”? Its IT sector version? 
Here it is “I listen to the Green IO podcast and others as well, I read newsletters and articles from CAT, GWF, Boavizta, Greenit.fr, GSF, etc. But I’m isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?”
This episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a SaaS company, Xero, with more than 4M users of its accounting software across a dozen countries. This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at a Xero’s internal technology conference despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.   
In this episode, Annie Freeman shares great insights with host Gaël Duez on:    💪 How two motivated engineers can start a movement in a 4K employees company,
   🔎 Tracking the cultural change signals,
   🔄 Bringing carbon awareness in existing process rather than creating new ones,
   🎓🛠️ Making Community of Practices & tooling working hands in hands, 
   📊 How Data management primes over UI when deciding to build a carbon dashboard,
   🎙️ Why listening to Green IO actually helps (not Gaël saying 😉). 

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Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Annie's LinkedIn
• Annie’s website
• Green IO website 
• Gaël's website
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Annie's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Annie’s article on how to create a green software culture at your company
• Climatiq
• Microsoft building first data centre primarily made out of wood
• Sustainable Business Network Award finalists (link goes to technology finalists)
• Annie's talk at the Grace Hopper Conference
• Green Software Foundation
• Environment variables podcast
• Digital Collage
• Green Web Foundation 
• Boavizta
• GreenIT.fr
• ClimateAction.Tech
• Cloud Carbon Footprint
  
  

Transcript (automatically generated)
Annie Freeman (00:00)one thing is just simply sharing screenshots of the data, the carbon emissions data during a sprint review with stakeholders the first time I shared the data, I noted out some interesting things and everyone was like, yeah, okay, cool. And then the second time I did the same thing, I just put out the data and just left it there and everyone was kind of silent for a minute. But then people are like, well actually that's really interesting that that component has got the highest emissions. Surely there's something we can do there to bring that down just leaving it there without any pressure to do anything with it, I think really sparks that problem solving nature and that curiosity with people.
Gaël Duez (00:40)Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO. I'm Gaël Duez and in this podcast, we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world one bite at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the full transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on our website greenio.tech.
Here is the feedback I hear quite often. Gaël, I listen to your podcast and others. I read newsletters and articles from Climate Action Tech, GreenWeb Foundation, BoaVista, GreenIT.fr, Green Software Foundation, etc. etc. But I'm isolated as a green software champion. I have the feeling that I cannot achieve much by myself. How could we actually do green software in my company?
Well, this episode is all about sharing one concrete use case of someone, Annie Freeman, who achieved to build and deploy an internal tool monitoring carbon emissions in a software as a service company, Xero, with more than 4 million users of its accounting software across a dozen countries. This achievement, among others, has won her to be named a finalist in the New Zealand Sustainable Business Network Awards in 2024. And she started it all by herself when she raised her voice in 2022 at Xero's internal technology conference, despite having joined the company as a software engineer just a few months ago.
Gaël Duez (02:38)Welcome, Annie. Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.
Annie Freeman (02:42)Hi Gail, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited that we're finally chatting.
Gaël Duez (02:47)Finally, with a bit of time difference because as I should have mentioned, Annie is based in New Zealand. And maybe you could start with the beginning. How did this initiative at Xero started and how did you build this tool and manage to leverage that much when it comes to mostly carbon footprint reduction?
Annie Freeman (03:34)Yeah, of course. So it's kind of been a few years in the making. A few years ago, Xero started this internal technology conference and they were getting speakers from around the business. And I was a little young graduate engineer at the time and I thought, this would be a great way to stand out and prove myself. But I didn't, I had nothing to talk about. And it was the night before the submissions were due and I came across this one really random article about sustainability in software. And this was 2021 and it was only a few months after the Green Software Foundation had been founded. So there was really not many resources, not much discourse on this topic at all at the time, but it felt really aligned with me and I was like, this feels like it could be something really interesting. And so I submitted that. and it got accepted unexpectedly. And it was just a 10 minute talk, but it ended up having some of the most engagement of the whole conference, which was so exciting. But as I said, I was literally in my first year of work and I really needed to learn how to be an engineer. So not too much happened after that, but I continued to share this talk at different events and meetups and things until last year I spoke at the Grace Hopper conference, which is the largest women in tech event in the world. And I think I got a lot of confidence from that. And I was like, right, I'm ready. We're going to make change at zero. We're going to start something. So that brings us to this year where
In April, I led a hackathon team to start building out a carbon footprint calculator for our internal resources. And then that led to starting up what we call a community of practice. So building up the group of people who are interested and want to come along and learn and start making changes. And we've started to build things up from there.
Gaël Duez (05:29)So just to unpack a bit what you've said, what is interesting is A, you dared B, it took a bit of time. It wasn't straightforward. Like you had a very positive reactions at first, but nothing that much happened, as you say, because you had to learn the job, but also maybe because things needed to get their way into people's mind. And eventually, it was a grassroot movement that resumed last year. Am I correct here?
Annie Freeman (05:58)Yes, grassroots movement started earlier this year, 2024.
Gaël Duez (06:02)Okay. usually when I discuss with people sponsoring or being ambassador of grassroots movements, they tend to tell me it's okay at the beginning. We get a lot of excitement. People are really willing to join, willing to participate. We start doing a bit of things, but quite often it reaches the plateau and not that much happened. And it seemed that that was not the case for you because you've been able to deliver something and to deploy it. So how did you manage this moment where you've got this excitement, you've got these people willing to work together, starting to regroup? up to the point where you were actually delivering something.
Annie Freeman (06:48)Yeah, I definitely didn't do it by myself. When I started that first hackathon team, one of the people who joined me as another engineer at Xero called Adria Snow, who's been absolutely incredible taking on building out the carbon footprint calculator. And I think Adria's persistence and just impressive dedication to it has been so key to us being able to continue saying, hey, we've got this new exciting tool, here's a new feature, we've added this new visualization, you can now see this breakdown. So there's been lots of exciting updates in that respect. And also I connected with the sustainability team at Xero pretty early on and They loved it. They were like, yes, we want to support this. This is fantastic. And really helped push things forward as well, especially kind of more from like a upper management level as well, considering Adri and I are engineers. being able to get that from both perspectives as well has been really helpful.
Gaël Duez (07:55)So it was basically a team of two plus good connections with the sustainability team that managed to get approval from top management. Is it correct?
Annie Freeman (08:05)Pretty much, we've had a few other people help out, but those have been the key players.
Gaël Duez (08:10)And my question is, how many employees do we have at Xero?
Annie Freeman (08:14)Yeah, I believe it's over 4,000, between 4 5,000 I think.
Gaël Duez (08:20)Okay, so that's a pretty small ratio. And when you started to build this carbon calculator, how was your top management or even your management, your middle management supporting you? Did you have some time? Did you have some resources? Did you have a green light, but hey, you still need to do your job? How did all this happen?
Annie Freeman (08:41)Yeah, definitely. mean, Xero's been really great. We have week-long hackathons every six months, so they're a perfect opportunity to put all your normal work to the side and work on something new. In that first hackathon in April of this year, I got a free trial of a tool called Climatic, which is a carbon footprint
Annie Freeman (09:05)calculation API and they do all sorts of different carbon calculations, including cloud computing. So with a free trial of that, we were able to put together a proof of concept product and get a little bit of data around some of Xero's key products and say, hey, we've made these calculations. We can share this data with you. And from there, with that data, with that proof of concept, we were then able to go to the sustainability team and say, can we get funding for Climatic for this tool? Can we keep promoting this at zero? And yeah, I think as we'll probably come back to the data is always so key in getting things moving, I think. So that was that was how we were able to get started.
Gaël Duez (09:55)And did you have some extra time to work on this topic? Or was it side project, as I see very often, or did you have a share of your bandwidth allocated to it?
Annie Freeman (10:10)No, it was fully a side project for both Adria and I. Adria doing the development on the carbon footprint tool and I've been doing leading all the community practice and outreach and things like that. So yeah, all a side project.
Gaël Duez (10:24)And that's an interesting point because it seems that your initiative kind of forked if I understand you right here, because on one side you have the two of you spear heading the development of an internal tool based on climatic data. but on the other end, you also have launched a community of practice could you tell us a bit more about the outcomes of this community of practice and how it interacted or maybe not at all with your calculator project?
Annie Freeman (10:54)Yeah, definitely. Well, I think… we're trying to change the culture, the engineering culture at Xero. And I continuously am reminded and something you probably are as well, you we're so involved in this green IT space and it's, there's still so many people that just have no idea of the impact that software has in terms of carbon footprint. And so, I knew that it was going to be so important to really push that education, that like getting people excited. And while the having the data is a really key part of that, there needs to be so much more around it to get people excited. we have a few different community of practices at Xero. So it's a standard way of getting people involved. yeah, started up a group. started with an initial learning session basically introducing people to what is green software, what is the impact, what have we done so far and ran a few sessions around the world as well. we've got offices in the UK, US and Singapore and things. So really tried to push it out there as much as possible. And then since then we've had a few sessions talking about the role that data centers have to play in the whole sustainability and software space. We've had brainstorming sessions to figure out what people are interested in. Something we're organizing at the moment is what best practices are there for running Kubernetes workloads to use that most efficiently and things like that. So that's been the crux of that. And then I've shared a lot of like, hey, here's an interesting article. I'd love to know what you guys think. Or here's a really easy way to start using the data that we're collecting. And then on top of that, just sharing documentation around how to use our carbon footprint tool and really try to engage with people as much as possible.
Gaël Duez (12:40)and how many people are we talking about?
Annie Freeman (12:59)So far, believe about 80 people have joined the community of practice.
Gaël Duez (13:04)80 people. You mentioned that… you trained a lot, you raised awareness, then you trained, that you shared information, but you also mentioned that you achieved a few things, Could you give us one or two examples of achievements that you get via this community of practice?
Annie Freeman (13:23)Yes, definitely. And these probably seem kind of small, but I think to me they were quite exciting. So one thing we did was some user testing with some other engineers and I've just showed them the tool and I was like, you know, let's use this. How can you improve it? What would you like to see? And I think that sort of started to get people thinking a bit more because they've like properly sat with it and thought about it themselves and like critically analyzed it. And so was really cool. The other day I had an engineer come over to me and he's like, Annie, I have a feature request for footprint. I have a theory that our team is doing something weird with our test environment, something weird is going on and I really want to prove it. Can you add this feature?
And I thought that was just so cool that people are really getting excited and thinking a bit deeper and really trying to figure out what's going on and how they can improve things, which is so cool. And the other thing, which was really small, a team mate of mine was writing up sort of like a pros and cons list about whether we should deprecate an old service and whether we should put the resources into doing that. And she'd mentioned that we would save X amount of dollars if we remove all these resources and things. And so I added a comment to the report saying, and we would also save X amount of carbon emissions each month. And then the next day, one of the architects was commenting on the report and referenced that comment about the carbon emissions in his opinion of what we should be doing as well. And it was the smallest thing and no one probably thought much of it. But to me, I think that was very indicative of that sort of slow culture change starting to happen slowly, that it's becoming kind of more normal in our working lives.
Gaël Duez (15:20)Yeah, yet another boring data to handle carbon. But that's a good news.
Annie Freeman (15:24)Yes, exactly, yeah, just add that into the mix, it's fine.
Gaël Duez (15:30)Excellent. Annie could you tell us a bit more about the tool? I've got a dozen questions about it, but can you briefly explain the scope, the technological stack that you've chosen to use?
Annie Freeman (15:45)So as I said before, huge shout out to Adria for her amazing, amazing work on this. But so we call this tool Footprint and it's based in Go. So the decision for that was that Go is in itself a really lightweight language. So try to be as efficient as possible for the tool to tell you how efficient you are. So we use, we collect all our AWS billing data. So Xero's resources are mostly hosted on AWS. We have access to all our billing data from the Phenops team and we can collect that workout. For example, we used X number of EC2 instances for X number of hours in this particular region. And we can collect that data and send it off to Climatic, the carbon calculator API. And that'll come back to us with the emissions data, the emissions factors, and we can return that to people. if you are an engineer at Xero, you can go to Footprint, the internal tool, type in your team name and you will get a list of all the components that your team owns. How much carbon each product has been emitting for the past month. You can see a breakdown of each AWS resource within that component. So a pie chart of, was it 30 % lambdas, 20%, S3 bucket, whatever it is which is quite helpful in diagnosing what might be going on. And then just to help visualize it all a bit more, we've also got the equivalent amount in a couple of different statistics. So for example, the equivalent amount of kilometers you would have to drive in a regular gas car to produce the same amount of emissions.
Gaël Duez (17:41)And just to understand right here, when you mentioned the word product, is it product in an AWS meaning? So as you mentioned, EC2, S3 bucket, et cetera, et cetera. Or is it also products in a Xero way, which means that maybe this service or the sub-service that you offer to some of your customers are also track, which means that ultimately you would be able to answer a customer asking, what is my carbon footprint using your product? Or you've got product A, product C, product F, you've used it for six months, 12 months, 12 months. This is the carbon footprint that you've emitted by using our product. So is it one of the two or both?
Annie Freeman (18:32)Well, that letter would be very cool. We're definitely not there yet. So yeah, when I mean product, I basically mean microservices that a team owns. And so that microservice might be made up of a couple of lambdas, some instances, or it runs its workloads on Kubernetes and also connects to a queue or something like that.
Gaël Duez (18:52)how often is the data updated and how easily it is for an engineer to leverage it to fine tune his or her code or choices when it comes to the infrastructure, for instance.
Annie Freeman (19:06)Yeah, sure. So at the moment, we update it monthly. And so you'll be able to see your emissions for the previous month. And then an engineer can click into each component and see the breakdown.
Gaël Duez (19:18)I understand. yet, having a refreshing rate on a monthly basis helped you already get some significant results. mean, you can share some success stories or is it just for awareness or was it already actionable for many teams?
Annie Freeman (19:33)Yeah, definitely. I think the best example we've had so far, Adria, who's been building this out, was looking at one of her team's components. And this was while Footprint was in development, and it was being developed kind of each AWS service at the time. So when we first released it, it only did S3 buckets, EC2 instances, and lambdas. And so Adria was looking at this component that her team owned and was thinking, okay, this component produces a small amount of emissions, but we haven't got everything in the calculation yet because it was still being developed. And so Adria worked through all the different services and when CodeBuild was added in, CodeBuild was being used as one of the resources in this tool. Suddenly the emissions of this product jumped up a huge amount and it ended up being that CodeBuild was responsible for about 80 % of that component's emissions, which was really surprising to the team. And so they were able to, the team were able to use that data and say to their team lead, know, like, we've recognized this, can we get the engineering time to change this to a more efficient way of building and deploying? And so now that component is on Kubernetes and they were able to drop their omissions for that product down quite a lot.
Gaël Duez (21:00)Can you share some numbers to illustrate or is it confidential?
Annie Freeman (21:05)the moment we're keeping these numbers internal to Xero. Of course it's data where it's for engineers, so it's not audited and can't be publicly released. So I can't share that with you unfortunately, but yeah.
Gaël Duez (21:22)That's all good.
It's perfectly understandable. Can you still share in terms of order of magnitude, what is the share of the tech stack and all the IT department, I would say, in regards to the overall greenhouse gas emissions at Xero? Is it something like negligible or is it a few dozen percent?
Annie Freeman (21:44)Yeah, so I think like many technology companies, it is a really small amount, believe around 1 % or less than 1%. I don't have the exact number. And I know you referenced this in your The Green IT Curse article recently. Yeah, so it's a great article. And so I think zero is very similar in that respect.
Gaël Duez (21:58)You read it! Okay, got it. Just wanted to know if Xero was an exception or not.Now, before moving on on how you deploy the tool and so on, Earlier in our discussion, you mentioned data as being absolutely pivotal, which leads me to a few questions regarding the choices you've made. My first one would be, why did you choose Climatic? And the second being, because they might be bit intertwined. Why didn't you go for another open source solution like Boavista, or Cloud Carbon Footprints from ThoughtWorks? What makes you willing to develop this interface tool, collecting data, analyzing it with the emission factors from Climatic, and then pushing it back to the end users being software engineers? 
Annie Freeman (23:05)Yeah. So kind of a funny story, full circle moment. I was listening to this podcast, to Green IO, a while back. And you had Therese Gale on as one of your guests. And I absolutely loved the episode. I thought it was really inspiring what she had been doing at Salesforce, MuleSoft. And I realized that she was based in New Zealand. So I reached out to her and we ended up meeting up and she gave me so much fantastic advice about how to sort of start a grassroots initiative at Xero. And one of her pieces of advice was use Climatic. So I kind of just went with that. I was like, sweet, that sounds good to me. So we went with that and it worked really well for us. We've had fantastic support from the Climatic team as well. So it's worked really well. I believe Climatic does use Cloud Carbon footprint for its calculations as well. So it is, as you say, kind of intertwined.
Gaël Duez (24:03)I got it. I didn't know that the Green IO podcast, who's hosted by a guy living in a super small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is connecting people all around the world, including within their own country. That's quite fun. But thanks for sharing. But Thérèse was in London at Green IO London and she gave an amazing talk as well on
Annie Freeman (24:17)You're pretty amazing. Yes, absolutely.
Gaël Duez (24:28)the job she managed to do at Salesforce. yeah, I really enjoyed my discussion with her. She's a very pragmatic yet stubborn enough person to make things moving forward. that's great. That being said, thanks a lot for sharing this anecdote. And what is interesting here is that you still decided to build things on your own. was the main driver not to use something off the shelf?
Annie Freeman (24:54)Yeah, I think probably like many companies, Xero is quite large and there's a lot of interconnected complex systems and things that are just unique to each company. And for such a sort of niche thing that we really just were starting off, we wanted to do one job and it was easiest to be able to just use the data that we had and make it work exactly for the setup that we have at Xero. And so far that's been working and maybe in the future we'll expand to something else.
Gaël Duez (25:33)That's great. And that's also very interesting because you didn't make that choice on a user interface perspective. You clearly made that choice for data management issues and being able to collect the data, clean the data, store the data and leverage the data, analyze the data in a very consistent way. that's interesting because from time to time I hear, but that's a question of a user experience, actually the user experience here is really around data management. I correct?
Annie Freeman (26:04)Yeah, I think we touched on this before. It comes back down to the data and having the quality data that people are like, yes, this makes sense. I'm going to take action because of this data. And so we did really want to prioritize making sure we were able to do that correctly.
Gaël Duez (26:22)Okay, so. Annie, you managed to deliver with Adria a tool, fully functional tool reporting carbon based on the internal use of zero, you managed to get data from Climatic and AWS. It was mostly a work based on data management. So you've got something, you've got a great output. How did you manage to achieve your outcomes? maybe this is the moment where it's more the human side of the story. How did people accepted the tool and embraced the tool and leverage the tools? Basically, how did you roll it out?
Annie Freeman (27:02)Yeah, I think that's such a great question, because that is so important that the human side of things on top of the data. And one thing I think many of us are probably aware of, especially in in large companies, there's so many competing priorities, there's always so much work, and adding in another thing for people to do to review to improve upon. It's it can be really hard. So I've been taking the approach of first of all, and I will say we're very much in the middle of this, this is not widespread yet at zero. I'm doing this at the moment. But taking the approach of how can we visualize the data, make more people see it, make it just become a normal part of your ways of working. And so I've been sharing ideas with the community of practice, what are like the most low effort things that you can start with. So it doesn't feel like an extra thing that you have to add to to your to-do list. So for example, one thing is just simply sharing screenshots of the data, the carbon emissions data during a sprint review with stakeholders or an operational health update. And I've done this a couple of times with my team now. And the first time I shared the data, I noted out some interesting things and everyone was like, yeah, okay, cool. And then the second time I did the same thing, I just put out the data and just left it there and everyone was kind of silent for a minute. But then people are like, well actually that's really interesting that that component has got the highest emissions. Surely there's something we can do there to bring that down or that's actually really weird because that component is supposed to be archived. So why is that producing any emissions? And so just leaving it there without any pressure to do anything with it, I think really sparks that problem solving nature and that curiosity with people. So a few other things that I've been sharing and getting people to do is potentially discussing how you're going to review carbon emissions metrics during retrospective meetings or adding a regular task to your sprint planning to just review the metrics. And so it's those easy things like that that will help embed and footprint tracking and taking action into the normal ways of working.
Gaël Duez (29:22)If I follow you there, think your magical recipe is blend data visualizations, so make things explicit, plus… adjust to existing process. Just do not build something new. It's just you've got a retrospective. Let's just have five minutes to talk about this data, but no extra organizational burden on top of the teams. Am I right?
Annie Freeman (29:33)Yes. Yes, just slot it in, make it as easy as possible. And then suddenly it's just a normal part of your day.
Gaël Duez (29:51)yeah, the boring sustainability stuff to do. And how would you measure the success of the deployment today?
Annie Freeman (29:59)Yeah, great question. think, you know, as I said, we're still very much in the middle of it. But it's more those those smaller things of people taking notice and coming up with their own ideas that I think are showing that that culture is starting to take root and changes are happening. We always whenever we share an update or a new feature, we always see the usage go way up and everyone gets really excited and things. But of course it's an ongoing challenge to just keep pushing it and keep making it a part of people's work lives.
Gaël Duez (30:34)Excellent. I love the idea of checking the usage just after an update. That's interesting. Like, what's new? What's new? Let's check or something. Annie, you already shared a lot, and I thank you a lot for this. Is there any specific resources that you would like to advise people willing to kickstart things as you did or ramp up things if there is already a good momentum in their own company?
Annie Freeman (31:01)Ooh, yes. What can I share? Obviously, the Green Software Foundation has so many amazing resources. And we've used Climatics, which I would recommend, but also Cloud Carbon Footprint is really great. I've written up some of the things that I've talked about today on my website as well. So I can share that article with sort of those low effort actions and things and some ways you can start taking action. I feel like most of the things that I use have probably already been talked about. Your newsletter, this podcast, the environment variables podcast. There's just so many fantastic people in the space who are really, really knowledgeable and they've got really great ideas.
Gaël Duez (31:41)Thanks a lot. And hi to Chris, Asim, and Anne, who very often are the host of the environment podcast, Viable. I really enjoy this show as well. As usual, we will put all the references that you mentioned during the episode and that you've just mentioned right now in the show notes, because it's all about sharing information and getting people into action mode, would say. And for this, having these kind of resources is very useful. My last question, and you're familiar with the show, so you already know it, is would you share a piece of positive news about sustainability and maybe even digital sustainability with the audience?
Annie Freeman (32:05)Yes, absolutely. Yeah, well, I feel like this might be really niche, but this definitely caught my eye the other day learning about the fact that Microsoft is now building its first data center partially made out of wood. So trying to reduce emissions from steel and concrete, which are really high meters. And I thought that was really cool. There's definitely so many things like that that we just don't even think that we could innovate on. And I that was really interesting.
Gaël Duez (32:48)That's pretty crazy because I didn't know about it. So I'm going to really enjoy reading the link to the source. Plus, that's cool that you mentioned something positive about Microsoft because the two last episodes, they were a bit under pressure. you know, it's a subtle world and things are a bit complex and it's not all white or all dark. So it's good to know that they're still innovating when it comes to sustainability despite some challenges they've got elsewhere. So excellent. Thanks a lot, Annie. And thanks for joining the show. It was really great to have you there. Who knows, maybe if we decide to launch a Green IO Melbourne, so moving a bit down under, we will have the pleasure to meet and to have you on stage as well, obviously.
Annie Freeman (33:20)You're very welcome. Yes. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure and I would love if you came down under. It would be awesome to meet you down there and everyone else who is interested in green software.
Gaël Duez (33:51)Let's try to make this happen and let's try to find also the participants that will commit to reduce drastically their carbon to offset the fact that I will have to jump on the plane emitting a lot of CO2. So that's always something I'm very, very concerned about. Like, do we have a community which has a big enough size to accelerate things and to make an impact? Because when you invest, I would say, in carbon, you definitely want a
Annie Freeman (34:03)Yes.
Gaël Duez (34:17)return on investment and impact. So obviously the impact word is more important for me than the investment one. But anyway, we'll see.
Annie Freeman (34:21)Mmm, nice. Yes.
Gaël Duez (34:28)Maybe Green Eye or Melbourne, at least for the moment, a lot of people in the Southern Hemisphere and in Oceania, they will benefit from this episode and your great advices. So thanks a lot, Annie, and talk to you later.
Annie Freeman (34:40)very welcome. Talk to you later.
Gaël Duez (34:43)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, please take 30 seconds to give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know it's not easy to find the feature on these apps, but it gives your vote a much bigger weight and I trust you to succeed. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with relatives working as software practitioners seems also a good idea to provide them with inspiration. You got the point. Being an independent media, we rely mostly on you to get more responsible technologists on board. In our next episode, which will be the 50th episode, yes, five zero, we will welcome Tristan Nito, a respected French veteran in open source and digital sustainability to go to a funeral. Yes, according to Tristan, Moore's law is dead and we should welcome the e-room law instead to boost sustainability in the tech industry. One last word. We already mentioned the Greenio conferences during this episode. The last one of this year will be in Paris on December 3rd, 4th and 5th. As usual, you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the remaining 15 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

RoxaneOne byte at a time


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3 billion gamers worldwide, billions of devices, terabytes of data streamed, the gaming industry comes with pretty big numbers starting with its $455 billion sales in 2023. 

Is its environmental footprint as big? (Not) fun fact, not a single executive in this sector could answer the question. 

A new non-profit initiative, the Sustainable Gaming Alliance, is trying to get these numbers right and to equip the industry with the right framework. Its Managing Director, Maria Wagner, and its Research and Standard lead, Dr Benjamin Abraham joined this Green IO episode where great insights were shared on:

• 👿 The periodic table of torture for gaming device,
• 🖼️ The Gaming industry dependency on graphics to boost its sales
• 🕹️ Why “this game is beautiful” should be replaced as a praise by “this game is so enjoyable”
• 📋 Why GHG protocol is not adapted to the gaming industry
• 🌋 How to shake up a multi-billions industry in 10 weeks ?
• 🔄 Why the project mode in the game industry - and elsewhere? - doesn’t help a GreenOps culture to flourish
• 😴 Energy consumption at idle state

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📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 3rd, 4th and 5th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) 

Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Ben's LinkedIn
• Maria’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Gael Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Ben and Maria's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• The Sustainable Gaming Alliance Website 
• The SGA youtube channel (with recorded workshops and interviews) 
• The SGA discord channel 
• SGA - How it all started: 10 weeks to save the games industry 
• Greening the Game Industry, Ben’s newsletter
• Benjamin’s book “Digital Game after Climate Change”
• Wattwise the game jam dedicated on the energy consumption of video games
• Godot game engine
• Unreal game engine
• Digital Collage workshop
• Nature article on climate protests 
• Giovanni’s Celeste game
• Thomas Beaufils’ newsletter “Tales from the Tech”
• Signatories against gaming in Metaverse

Transcript (automatically generated)
Ben (00:00)the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.
was just on no one's kind of radar. My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum.
Gaël Duez (00:24)Hello everyone, welcome to Green.io. I'm Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month, on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green.io,
All the references mentioned in this episode as well as the full transcript will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform and of course on the website greenayo.tech.
I'm all in mushrooms at the moment. This is how a few months ago Giovanni Celeste started to describe his new game. He kept on. They're incredible and you can tell great stories with them. Of course, to be more mainstream, the first part of my new game is about bees. But I'll do scenes with mushrooms. Giovanni is a pillar of the small but vibrant gaming sector in Réunion Island where I live.
He crafts games focusing on the ecological transition. He works either with a small team or by himself. He's what is called an indie developer. Before our discussions, I hadn't realized how diverse and complex the gaming industry was. For me, it was mostly massive studios delivering entertainment to more than three billions of gamers worldwide.
or discussions, reactivated a question I had in the back of my mind for some time. How is the gaming industry doing with its environmental footprint? With massive data transfers, billions of devices sold, and all of the computing power used to develop and run the games, it cannot be negligible. Thomas Bouffis, from the Tales from the Tech newsletter, pointed out to me several signs showing a modest interest in the sector.
Starting with very few C-level offices exclusively in charge of sustainability in the main studios. Sure, here and there some initiatives are emerging such as a petition against developing games in the metaverse, the ongoing work of the French agency ADEME on a referential for sustainable gaming, or what was the active game jam on the energy consumption of video games.
Still, most of the buzz is about the gaming industry helping to raise awareness on climate change and ecological transition, almost nothing about its own
This is where Giovanni told me about the Sustainable Gaming Alliance. And voila, I eventually found experts to discuss the gaming industry environmental footprint.
Maria Wagner and Dr Benjamin Abram respectively the SGA Managing Director and SGA Research and Standard Lead kindly agreed to answer my questions about the footprint and more importantly what a tech worker in the game industry sector should do about it. Ben has written an entire book on the topic digital games after climate change based on his PhD work. Maria's personal story could be the scenario for a video game.
Before becoming a seasoned actor in the gaming industry, she worked in diplomacy, intercultural conflict management, as a political observer in Syria, or ran a refugee camp. Wow,
the perfect fit to run a global multi-stackholders initiative to green a 455 billion dollar market.
Gaël Duez (04:00)So welcome Ben, welcome Maria. It's great to have you on the show today.
Ben (04:06)Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here.
Maria Wagner (04:06)Thanks for having us.
Gaël Duez (04:09)You're welcome. Just to understand a bit the context before deep diving into the environmental footprint of the gaming industry and the many, many, different topics that I'd like to cover with you. What make
Gaël Duez (04:24)The gaming industry is so specific within the tech industry. And how come that we usually don't incorporate in the big green software, green IT, sustainable IT, you name it, momentum, which is happening around the world, what is related to the gaming industry itself. And as I said in my introduction, the gaming industry is pretty big, both in terms of a number of gamers, employees and workers.
So I guess in terms of footprint as well. Maria, you're a very knowledgeable person of this industry. Could you maybe try to give us an answer?
Maria Wagner (05:00)Yeah, I think the games industry is very special when it comes to the connection to the people and of course also the reach, right? As you have said, we are reaching basically half of the globe and this is something which a lot of people forget that we are the medium of
the times. So compared to movies and films or the TV, there is no other medium which reaches so many people and I think this makes us really special.
Gaël Duez (05:33)It's a question of reach according to you more than the technical setup behind it.
Maria Wagner (05:38)The technical setup behind it, of course, as well, I would say it's way more complicated because it connects so many different parts when it comes to games. There are so many parts which need to come together to make a game happen and this is maybe something also Ben can cover perfectly because he looks into the value chain.
Ben (05:55)The thing that separates the game industry from just general software and tech to my mind is that it is a software industry, but it's also an art form. It's an art industry. it's both artistic practitioners who work with digital tools. So there's like 3D artists, there's also coders, there's also community managers. There's a really strong emphasis on engagement with the end users.
Games companies are very aware of what their users are interested in and care about. And so it is just a software company. Games are just a software development exercise, but they are also an artistic exercise as well. There's a creative dimension to it.
Gaël Duez (06:47)Which makes them pretty specific, I would say, because I've never heard about a piece of SAP reporting being branded as arty.
What about its environmental footprint? We're talking about billions of users. We're talking about hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. So I guess it's pretty big. I couldn't really see any global report on
the environment and footprint of the gaming industry. So maybe that's an issue that we should discuss a bit later in the episode. But what are the numbers or the order of magnitude that you could share with us to grasp how much is the gaming industry impacting the planet?
Ben (07:29)So in terms of orders of magnitude, I think that's the right question to ask because we really only have a rough sense. It is in the tens of millions, almost certainly. Is it less than a hundred million? Possibly. When I started the research work that became the book that I wrote, Digital Games After Climate Change, there was
hardly any kind of research out there. I couldn't find anyone who was even really thinking about what the impact globally of the games industry was in terms of emissions at any rate. There was a bit of awareness of things like e-waste, resource consumption, that, know, vaguely there's this thing called the cloud that's probably not great for the environment. But the idea that the gaming industry globally has a footprint probably the size of a country like Sweden.
was, was just on no one's kind of radar. and so My best guess is that it's somewhere in the tens of millions of tons. The disclosures that I've added up over the last couple of years from the biggest game companies in the world point to a figure somewhere around about 20 to 50 million tons per annum. And that's just, just playing games. That's players that's.
infrastructure, making the games themselves, offices, it's everything. the complexity of it really does sprawl.
Gaël Duez (08:54)And Ben, you're mentioning to greenhouse gas emissions when you mentioned talking about millions. That was the main focus of your study in terms of environmental impact. Am I right here?
Ben (09:05)It was, yeah. So I, I tried to break down the production process into different phases and looked at what is involved in each phase. So developing games, it's a lot of power in offices, it's IT purchases, new equipment. distributing games involves data centers, the digital distribution networks of steam, the Apple store, the Google play store, you know, all these devices that are getting games downloaded to them.
And then the end users themselves and the devices that they play games on, whether that's a games console or a PC or a smartphone. And each one of them has vastly different levers of decarbonization potential and vastly different levels of transparency even in terms of what we know about each phase.
Gaël Duez (09:56)And did you manage to calculate also the embedded carbon or was it only carbon emitted by the energy consumption or also
the carbon emitted during the manufacturing and extraction phase, so through the entire life cycle of all the devices.
Ben (10:14)So I did also look at embodied carbon and I also actually looked at a little bit of the other non-climate environmental impacts, so things from like mining rare earth materials and things like that. So actually in my book, there's a really interesting table, like I call it the periodic table of torture, where I go through a list of elements that were detected via this advanced ICPMS method.
of analyzing what are the atomic elements inside a PS4 chip. And I go, okay, well, what are they probably doing in there? Where do they come from? What are they used for? Are they part of the transistors? Are they part of some other part of the lithography process? Yeah. And so when it comes to games consoles, at least, companies like Microsoft and Sony have gotten a bit better over the years at disclosing what the embodied carbon is in those.
consoles. So we know a little bit about them, but PCs, because there's so many device manufacturers, there's so many different hardware components. Yeah, again, that's just this big question mark unknown area.
Gaël Duez (11:18)That's interesting because you mentioned embedded carbon, so everything related to greenhouse gas emissions, but you also touched upon the material footprint, which is how much we need to extract to get one piece of console or chip to be manufactured.
When I facilitate digital collage workshop, that's a figure we use a lot, which is basically for two, 300 grams smartphones, we need to extract around 70 kilos of resources. this ecological backpack is pretty big. Do you know if this is this same order of magnitude for a console or
Can it be a bit smaller?
Ben (12:00)It's a really hard question to answer. My suspicions are that they're about the same.
I don't have any hard numbers exactly, so my study was done on the smell of an oily rag. I had no money to do it and my research lab couldn't actually tell me the exact quantities that are in them. it's a good guess that most games consoles are probably equivalent to like a smartphone.
Okay, well, that's pretty big. It's a ratio in terms of hundreds times more than the actual weight of the device. pretty good. Maria, are there other environmental impacts that the gaming industry is starting to get aware of?
Maria Wagner (12:37)At the moment we are in the phase of raising awareness in general when it comes to the footprint of the value chain and really producing games because I think there is a big focus when it comes to the reach and what people can communicate through their games. when it comes to
getting their own house in order and looking at the value chain and decarbonizing the value chain itself. There we still have a long way to go.
Gaël Duez (13:09)I think I'm going to hire you to explain to everyone why this podcast is about cleaning our hand house rather than doing green tech or tech saving the world, etc. That's exactly the approach I've got. Okay, so before deep diving into the industry and more specifically a tech worker in the gaming industry can do, I've got one question
So as a gamer in my personal life, are there some things that I should specifically focus on to reduce my environmental footprint? Maybe Maria, do you have some idea?
Maria Wagner (13:46)you can look at your electricity grid. So where do you get your electricity from is a huge factor. And of course, you also have to ask yourself if you always have to have the newest hardware, which is out there, or if it's possible to play your favorite game, maybe on like an older device.
Yeah, so I think this is something what players can do for sure. And of course, being more vocal about it. Ask your favorite game studios about their footprint and responsibility and the same goes, of course, also for the hardware.
Gaël Duez (14:24)Regarding the devices, what is the churn rate? Smartphones used to be crazy. the average use span of a smartphone used to be a year and a half. So people were literally dropping perfectly functionable devices to get the newest one. It gets a bit better since a few years. I think it's a bit above two years, which is completely insane.
And you think about all the energy and materials and resources put into this incredibly sophisticated device. anyway, I've heard that the gaming industry, the console, people tend to use them a bit longer. So how much the device is something that we as gamers should also focus on? Or how much is it more about energy consumption, as you mentioned a bit before?
Ben (14:48)It's still so short, yeah.
Maria Wagner (15:16)I mean, this is a question or this is a topic we actually discussed, I think, just like last week. So, of course, it takes up a lot of resources to produce new hardware. So I think we should in general question our culture of...
having software which always needs new devices, know, so basically adapting the software in a way that we can still use the old devices and it still would run perfectly. So it's hard to say because of course if we would use hardware way longer then it would be more an energy question and optimizing
the software to use less energy. But as long as we keep pushing the boundaries and need always new hardware, this is still a big question.
Ben (16:15)Maybe I'll just add a little bit extra context or a little bit extra color there then. The games industry has been basically since the 1980s, it's relied on selling games or marketing games via a kind of approach that
that sells based on graphics, right? Like this, it's slowed down a little bit in the last five to 10 years, but for the longest time it was like, you know, it went from eight bit graphics to 16 bit to 32, and then you get polygon counts, resolutions, frame rates. And so that's been kind of embedded in the games industry for a really, really long time now. The expectation is we're going to sell games by saying, ooh, this year's model is better.
There's more polygons or it's, you know, it goes up to 200 frames per second or it's more responsive or it's got this new engine or that new feature. And that drives the hardware upgrade cycle. So even though console generations, so if we're just talking about console gaming last for somewhere between six, seven, maybe eight years at the very most in terms of like, you know, a new one comes along and it's upgraded and better.
Usually what ends up happening is we get these mid cycle refreshes where you know get the ps4 pro or the ps5 pro or you know these upgraded ones Yeah, so basically the games industry has been locked into the hardware upgrade cycle for a really really long time And we're really really reaching the limit of that in in the last year or so The games industry has been through a real shake-up. It's been through a real crisis
It's because production costs of making games has been so high because of this churn of graphics and visual fidelity that just means you need to throw more and more artists at the problem, more and more 3D modelers, more and more texture and all of this sort of stuff. And that's to sell more consoles, to sell more games. And that's part of this unsustainable trajectory that we really need to rein in.
Gaël Duez (18:21)And you know, Ben, it super interesting because I remember that when I used to magazine, yes, paper magazine on games, the best way to praise a game was, is beautiful. It is an interesting choice of word. Like, it is a beautiful game. And it was,
As you say, a lot based on graphic and not necessarily how enjoyable it was to play with this game. we could have expected a journalist wanting to praise a game saying, it's incredibly gameable or enjoyable to play with, or it got many twists or you get completely hooked by the story.
That's true that most of the time it's all about how beautiful, how well crafted, how pixel perfect the game is. I think it has started to change a bit in the industry. it was really something that struck my mind when you mentioned it, this vicious cycle of always more hardware. to wrap up what you both said for a gamer, it's really about...
questioning the need for the latest shiny stuff and considering keeping the hardware longer and make sure that the electricity grid is as decarbonized as possible, especially, I guess, if the person plays a lot via streaming solutions. Am I right to summarize it that way?
Maria Wagner (19:47)I maybe would also just add there are so many beautiful games out there which don't have like the craziest newest like graphic and the craziest needs when it comes to hardware and this is something which we need to cherish and I think it's just like as you said before a marketing question that
especially like the big corporations is on the shiniest versions and like the games which need a lot of resources but there are also games out there which are completely the opposite and are beautiful as well.
Ben (20:25)Just to add on to that as well, I think one of the things that I want to emphasize too is that this is what we know at the moment, right? So the ability for consumers to actually affect their end emissions when they're playing games is actually quite limited, right? A lot of the power is in the choices that have already been made by people upstream, by big corporations, by big companies.
will be things that consumers can do. And that's sort of what I think needs to kind of happen. And what we're hoping to do with the SGA actually is to get the whole of the industry, consumers, producers, fans, know, even people who hate the games industry, all to be on the same page about, where do the biggest interventions need to happen? Where do we get the most bang for our buck?
Gaël Duez (21:19)Ben, what a wonderful transition. Let's talk about the gaming industry itself.
So maybe it's time to talk a bit of, first of all, as a worker in the IT industry, sorry, in the gaming industry.
How much am I exposed to the fact that I'm also part of the problem and I emit greenhouse gases and I consume a lot of non-renewable resources, et cetera, et cetera? What is the level of awareness in the gaming industry at the moment?
Maria Wagner (21:49)Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the question which, like one of the other co-founders, Jiri Kupjainen and I was asking ourselves when we did our 10 weeks to save the games industry tour, where we really wanted to interview the leaders of the industry and just find out what is their knowledge level on this topic. so...
Maria Wagner (22:14)like we interviewed around like 40 industry leaders within 25 cities and found out that they don't know anything about it. most of the people,
Maria Wagner (22:30)A lot of people think that because games are digital that they are automatically green or that they say, okay, compared to other industries, we don't have such a huge footprint. So we don't need to focus on that, which is of course crazy because we don't have any data.
Gaël Duez (22:51)The level of awareness seems to be very, very low, even compared to other subparts of the IT industry. mean, usually, the, it's in the cloud, so it doesn't pollute anymore.
It's something a bit of the past now in the IT industry. That was something that you could hear maybe five years ago, but not that much today.
Gaël Duez (23:10)So you mentioned the Sustainable Gaming Alliance and I guess you created the SGA as a reaction when you realized with Yuri and other people that the level of awareness was super low. Could you tell us a bit more about this organization? Why you created it and how is it helping to contribute today to a greener, if I may use the word, gaming industry?
Maria Wagner (23:33)Yeah, basically, before founding the Sustainable Games Alliance, I for my part was leading the Games Forest Club, another NGO, was helping games companies to donate to forest protection. And there I realized very fast that a lot of companies use
the forest protection or planting trees as a way to, you know, think of themselves that they're done their part and being green. But the problem is, of course, that they never looked at themselves and at the value chain. So they did not understand that they need to decarbonize and need to, yeah, really basically change the way they're doing business.
to be sustainable. So in the conversations which we were having together with Jiri, found out that we need numbers. We basically need numbers to be able to address this topic. there are no comparable numbers at the moment. At the moment, every company can just like...
publish and say whatever they basically want, what their current footprint is. And this is something we want to address because like only with comparable numbers, we will be able to talk about best practices and how to optimize and yeah, more efficiently reduce the footprint and decarbonize the industry.
Gaël Duez (25:02)Maria, there is something that I don't understand. Most of these companies, they are pretty big. they already, they should already report carbon audit. mean, especially if they're European based or even in some states in the US, you've got now compulsory carbon reporting following GSG protocol or other protocol in France. So how come that the numbers are not comparable?
Maria Wagner (25:08)Yeah. It's because these reports are based on the greenhouse gas protocol so far. mean, there is the corporate sustainability reporting directive in Europe, which is based on the ESRS. But the problem is it's not game specific. So basically, when you do your reporting, the framework and methodology is so vague, it leaves so much room for you to make decisions and
adapt your numbers, that in the end you get non-comparable results. for example, up until now, companies could leave out category 11, the use of the product. And it's like in gaming, a huge part of the mission.
Maria Wagner (26:15)If companies leave this out, the numbers are not comparable.
Ben (26:18)Yeah. The reason I think that a lot of that happens is that again, because games like they like the games industry relies on these larger tech platforms. Like there's not a lot of direct to consumer sales of games, right? It all goes through the steam or the app store or that's about it. Really. There's no buying a game directly from the producer. Usually there's like a platform between you.
And so what that's meant is that most of the companies have been like, well, I didn't design the Xbox. I didn't design the PlayStation. So that energy profile is like outside of my control. So I guess they just decide, and this is like open to them based on the interpretation of the greenhouse gas protocol that yeah, use for sold products. That's not my responsibility. It's actually the console owners responsibility. like Microsoft's or Sony's responsibility.
It ends up with this situation where there are large parts of the games industry that are number one, just not being added up, they're not being calculated properly. And then number two, we have no plan for how to reduce them. No real actionable strategy for how to get to net zero in the games industry.
Gaël Duez (27:26)There is no in the SBTi framework any specific guidelines for the gaming industry. Not at all.
Ben (27:37)I don't believe so, no.
Gaël Duez (27:38)And could you share another example? Is there any discrepancies or way of calculating that creates so incomparable reports?
Ben (27:52)well, I think a lot of it just comes down to it not being a practice for lots of games companies, right? yes, it is quite surprising that a lot of the big companies aren't disclosing, that is changing over time, but, quite a lot of the biggest game companies, if you think about like Nintendo, based in Japan, Japan doesn't yet have a mandatory,
reporting standards. Nintendo actually does disclose quite a bit, but there are lots of other Japanese games companies, South Korean games companies, North American games companies as well that it's just not, hasn't been on their radar. No one, guess, has really asked them to do this reporting yet.
Maria Wagner (28:32)Maybe one more thing is, so the problem is there are so many different components within the value chain. I think this is something which is really special that the greenhouse gas protocol does not provide the boundaries between the different service providers. So we have, for example, ads, right? Like if you have a mobile game and it's free to play and you have all the ads.
which are played during the gameplay. There is no clear definition of who is responsible for the emissions of this ad which are played during your game. And this is just like one example of how many different companies are involved within the value chain. And because the boundaries are so unclear, you have completely incomparable numbers
Ben (29:25)And the same goes too for game engine makers. most modern games are made on a software platform. They're made in Unity or they're made in Unreal. And so there you go. You're like, OK, well, I don't have control over Unity. I don't have control over Unreal. Is it really my responsibility to do something about the efficiency of my software? Or what are the levers that I even have? It's not visible within any of them yet.
you know, what you're actually asking of your end user and their energy consumption, you know, and this could be millions of people that you're potentially selling and playing your game.
Gaël Duez (30:02)That's a beautiful example, Ben, because I've done a bit of research and actually there is a third solution named Godot. And that's a bit insane without any piece of data, I think it's something 60 gigabytes of data just to install Unreal.
And then you've got this other game engine called Godot, and it's 160 megabytes. So it's just insane the difference.
So it seems that for a developer working in the game industry or a small studio, there are some leeway
Or am I completely misunderstanding the issue here, Ben?
Ben (30:45)No, I think that's right.
It's hard to know exactly because it's just never been part of the culture to really think about the performance. I mean, it has been for specific platforms. Like you need to hit your target. You know, maybe the new call of duty will have a frames per second target of 60 frames per second on, you know, this specific kind of hardware thing. And so they will always like push the limit right up to their, you know, squeezing as many pixels and stuff as you can.
But yeah, there are absolutely alternatives that use less space, less power, less like resource intensive, less taxing on the player's device. And, you know, if you just take a different artistic approach, you take a game development methodology, basically, you you develop something smaller, you're not making a big blockbuster here. If you're an indie developer and you're working in a small team,
You don't need all the features of Unreal. You're not going to need them all.
Maria Wagner (31:44)I I think this is also like the exciting part of our work that because it's so new to the industry, there are so many low hanging fruits and potential because like people just have not looked into this topic much. And yeah, that's the exciting part about it.
Gaël Duez (32:02)How easy do you believe the change in mindset will be?
Ben (32:05)I mean, it's partly mindset, but it's also partly the business model that the games industry has used and relied on to sell games. that approach to marketing the game as being the newest, biggest, brashest, most advanced game and
you know, selling a new game every couple of years, right? And you're, moving on to the next project, you know, as soon as your game is out, at least until fairly recently when with the advent of games as a service, a lot of the games, you know, they would just get shipped and then you start the next project immediately. So there's nothing really to optimize or there's no chance even to, to optimize in the development cycle for saving money in the servers, unless you are running a game like Fortnite or something with big servers. And then, yeah, that's, think where it's probably starting to happen.
Gaël Duez (32:59)And where things are starting to move, because you mentioned several times the business models, but we talk more and more about streaming game. We can also see that some, maybe a fraction, I don't know how big it is, but of the gaming industry is focusing or refocusing on the narrative, the beauty of the story and the beauty of the gameplay rather than the beauty of the game itself. So.
Are these trends potent or are they still marginal? And what is changing in the industry that could positively impact the reduction of its environmental footprint?
Maria Wagner (33:36)I think actually that the industry is getting more mature at the moment because of the problems it has been through or is still in. I think before the eyes were also not on the industry that much. So there has been this discussion within the industry, are games political?
or not, you know, do we have a responsibility as game developers to be political? And I think it also goes into do we have a responsibility to decarbonize or is this up for our service providers and the politicians to deal with that topic? And I think at the moment there is a change that the industry is getting more more mature and is ready to take on more responsibility.
Just because we have on the one hand the regulation and also politics are getting more and more interested in games and what is going on on the platforms. yeah, I think also the society is now a little bit more aware that that the games industry is a huge industry. And before...
they were able to just be something on the side and be not heard of.
Gaël Duez (34:55)It's the number one media today, maybe with video streaming, but I'm not even sure. think video gaming is bigger than video streaming. And just to bounce back on what you've said, I've never heard about a single cultural product which is not political per se. By not willing to be political, it is political, it means that it's just conservative. And I guess if you look at the story of Call of Duty,

Gaël Duez (35:22)It's just a living recruitment ad for the US Army and it has been copycat by almost all the armies around the world for recruiting purpose. So it is very political what you put in the game.
So let's play a game, pun intended. Let's say that we are a team of a small indie studio, because big, big cooperation, it's a different story. And we are, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 people in the room. And we are brainstorming And we're saying, OK, what are the top three things
that we should consider changing or we should consider start doing to truly make our games sustainable.
According to you, would be the three things that a small indie studio should consider?
Ben (36:16)certainly I think the top one is to support older hardware because that's the big challenge, right? A lot of the games industry, we have the solutions, we just need to kind of implement them so we can buy renewable electricity and we can run our servers on renewable electricity.
do digital downloads renewably as well, but when it comes to hardware, that's just always going to have a huge emissions and huge other environmental footprint attached. doing things to opt out of the hardware upgrade cycle to make devices last longer, I think is the number one thing for a small team to do.
Maria Wagner (36:57)I actually would agree when it comes to that and my number two would be get in touch with other studios who are already working on the topic because like I still think that at the moment the industry is barely connected when it comes to sustainability and games and there are a lot of great examples out there.
And of course, yeah, like talk to us because we can provide you with the tools to measure your impact.
Gaël Duez (37:32)you mentioned several times the framework or actually the tools that the SDA can provide to anyone in the gaming industry to help get better measurement or calculation. you want to say something about it.
Ben (37:49)Thanks Gael. at the SGA our main mission is to produce a methodological standard for how we measure, how we collect the data and how we calculate the end greenhouse gas burden of making games, of playing games, of selling, distributing games, the whole value chain.
we're working on this standard and it's going to be an open source standard. It's going to be open to anyone to use and apply. And we want as much input as possible. Like we're already consulting with lots of games companies. The goal of it really is to just save everyone a whole bunch of time, right?
Gaël Duez (38:28)And is it more a tool or a or a framework? Is it like plug and play? That's my first question. You know, you've just dropped numbers from, I don't know, your accounting system or wherever you need those numbers from. Or is it more something that you get your own people trained to understand how to apply this methodology into your company?


Gaël Duez (38:53)That will be my question number one and my question number two, because it might be a bit related, is how connected is this work that you're doing with the GHG protocol or other, I would say, meta protocol or meta way of measuring the footprint?
Ben (39:09)So it is a little hard to describe because it is a work in progress. We obviously have massive big vision for it. We want it to be like the kind of plug and play thing. You can just like connect it up to all your existing systems. But at the moment, it's just a set of methodologies and some spreadsheets that I've made to kind of test the methodologies and.
and work as a tool for people who maybe don't have anything to use at the moment.
Maria Wagner (39:36)I mean, basically, our goal is to help the games companies to comply with CSRD. So the methodology sits on the baseline of the greenhouse gas protocol and the ESRS. So it is basically helping the games companies to understand all this blurry lines.
which the greenhouse gas protocol leaves open at the moment. So what we are doing with this at the moment spreadsheets and supportive numbers is that we reduce the time and efforts of the companies to doing the research themselves and also to be alone making this decision, decisions which are going into the reporting.
For example, what is material for my studio? This is something which you cannot put into a spreadsheet or a calculation. This is something which you need to decide case by case. And what we are doing is we helping the industry to have this conversations and decide basically what is material and what is not. So they're not alone.
At the moment, this legislation is still a moving target. So it would be stupid to now develop like a tool, right? Because it would be outdated in two months. So it's kind of a moving target. And we are offering a community with experts discussing all these topics. like this poor...
reporting sustainability managers are not alone having to make these decisions, but that they can basically connect with each other, exchange knowledge, and in that sense, save themselves time and share best practices.
Gaël Duez (41:30)So I've got a better understanding of what is currently offered by the sustainable gaming aliens and the big vision I would say. So thanks a lot both of you. I think we have some sort of an action plan now with the brainstorming exercise plus the explanations you provided with the SGA methodology.
Maria Wagner (41:53)And when it comes to the story, I...wanted to add on that a little bit. Of course, it always depends on what kind of game you're developing. But sometimes the stories within games are very focused on extraction of goods. I think game developers should just like, but I think most of the game developers do, just be more aware of what kind of story
do you convey to your players? Does it always have to be gather everything and throw it away afterwards? Does it need to be this extraction? Because there are already more and more games which are keeping that in mind, that there is always a cost to extraction. But this is something which is quite new, I would say.
Gaël Duez (42:47)Yeah, we should create an extension to Age of Empire, where actually when you ran out of mine, you know, and especially gold or whatever, it's not like stable because it happens, you know, I was always very shocked when I used to play with this game that, okay, it's over. You know, we collected everything on the map and it's over and you stay at the same level of civilization and it should be like an immediate drop back to...
prehistorical age, like you don't have the gold to pay whatever the resources are. Boom, end of game, end of civilization. But I got your point that the philosophy of being a bit more aware of how our biosphere works and that it's not just extract, extract and strike and then the game is over because actually in the real world, we don't want the game to be over.
Gaël Duez (43:39)Ben, you want to add another action?
Ben (43:42)It's probably a little bit less relevant for small indie studios, but it's still something they can do. it's actually something that the Microsoft Xbox sustainability team pioneered. So what they realized is that there is a lot of waste in games, a lot of wasted energy. When players are sitting on a menu screen because they're in between rounds or they've gone off to make a
cup of tea or get some food or whatever. You don't need to be pushing all those pixels on a idle state, right? So, and they worked with a couple of different studios, big studios, small studios. And they realized that, yeah, if you just shave a few frames per second off the menu screen and you lower the resolution,
you can save a substantial amount of power from that device while it's in that state. And I think the result for Epic Games who make Fortnite was in the order of megawatt hours of power a day, just from this one change. So if you've got a really big audience, you can make a big impact.
And that's pretty amazing because it's user aware electricity consumption. Like if no one is actually using the game, no need to consume crazy amount of energy if I follow you right here. But could we envision a word when we move a step forward with carbon aware? Like if I know that my electricity grid is highly carbonized at the moment because of the time of the day or because where I am, I will...
offer my user to maybe play with a lower quality or resolution being a bit degraded Or is it something that at least at the R &D stage, like not being rolled out already, is something considered on it's a bit of a taboo, like all the time best services ever should be delivered to our user?
Ben (45:38)I think it's possible. It's definitely achievable. I think the barriers there are actually just cultural. is like, we've always got to have the most powerful, most beautiful image. And we are starting to see attitudes in gamers change. A bit of research done in 2021, think, asked gamers, a thousand gamers in the US, like
Ben (46:04)a whole bunch of climate and sustainability related questions. And even then, a majority of them said, yeah, the games industry has a responsibility to reduce its emissions. So I think players are starting to be aware of this. it's up, it's at the point where we just need to connect those desires with the solutions that developers already have.
Maria Wagner (46:26)I'm just thinking, it wasn't the eco mode version, like the Fortnite event, what they did. I mean, it was playing with reduced frame rate, as far as I know, but there was no study done how the players received it, right?
Yeah, I'm not aware of, I can't remember what was in the white paper. They have a published white paper that you can go look at and see. But I think the goal mainly there was to be as unobtrusive as possible. It's really not a thing yet in the games industry to connect with those gamers that do have those green impulses and make use of them.
Maria Wagner (47:12)Also, sorry to add on that, I definitely think that there is the potential and for like an indie game studio, in that sense, I would say the number one thing would be to get together with others and put pressure on the big service providers, the platforms, or not pressure, but like working with them together to decarbonize the whole industry.
Because I think if we see the big picture and we have comparable numbers, it will be way easier to decarbonize as a whole industry than one studio doing little tweaks.
Gaël Duez (47:51)Before closing the podcast, know that you've already shared some resources, but is there any other resources on top of the SGA and your book, Ben, that you'd like to share that could be very, very useful for a tech worker in the gaming industry?
Maria Wagner (48:07)I think at the moment we are also shooting a bunch of different interviews with industry experts. And I think it's actually interesting to hear what is happening there. So this is definitely something I encourage people to look into because we are interviewing the different sustainability managers with their challenges and solutions within the industry.
we are really coming from the industry and the solutions we design are for the game developers, like really for people working at the games and which will be applicable. like Yirik Kupyainen, who is one of the founders and had won the ideas, is an engineer himself. He had a bunch of like
Maria Wagner (48:55)companies within the industry. also, Petri Jerviletto is one of the co-founders of Remedy, who is backing us. And of course, also David Helgeson, the founder of Unity. So we are backed by industry experts.
Gaël Duez (49:15)So thanks a lot for these extra resources and extra explanations on what you're trying to achieve with the SGA. Now, traditionally, and this time I will make no exception, I love to close the podcast with a positive note. So I would like to ask both of you, what is the positive piece of news that you would like to share regarding sustainability and maybe even sustainability in the gaming industry?
Ben (49:41)well, yeah, so I was really encouraged by the recent publication in, think it was a nature journal, looking at the effect of what, I guess what we might consider the more extreme climate protesters was on public sentiment. I think they ran a study on the public public opinion after like before and after the just up oil intervention that I think threw some soup on the, on one of those artistic works.
And the result was actually that rather than like harming the cause or anything actually it the support for more moderate climate sustainability action rose after those sort of extreme interventions. So I thought that was really encouraging. It just made me want to like go out and do the Andreas Malm thing and blow up a pipeline.
Maria Wagner (50:31)Yeah, I think it's very encouraging to see that more more companies are reporting on their scope three emissions because of course on the one hand they have to anyway because of the European regulations but it's encouraging to see that also a lot of companies doing that like out of free will.
and that we get more and more data within the market. And because of that, it is also more and more clear that we need to have more refined methodologies and that we are basically all connected because I think many times we think we can sweep over the responsibility to someone else. But when it comes to solving climate change or decarbonizing the industry,
It's really about working together. yeah, think, yeah, seeing more and more companies disclosing their scope three emissions is something which will help to recognize that.
Gaël Duez (51:34)So transparency in working together. I think that could be the tagline of this episode.
Maria Wagner (51:39)Yeah, yeah, yeah, actually, yeah.
Gaël Duez (51:42)So thanks a lot both of you for joining the show. I think I will very carefully consider which kind of device I will buy to put under the Christmas tree.
As I said in the introduction, that's a sector I absolutely have no clue on how it works. So I learnt a lot thanks to both of you. once again, it was great to have you on the show and I hope that we will keep on having a very interesting discussion.
Ben (52:07)Thanks, Gael. It's great.
Maria Wagner (52:08)Thank you, thank you,
Gaël Duez (52:11)Thank you for listening to this Green.io episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative working in the tech industry is also highly efficient to switch more responsible technologists in action mode. In our next episode,
We will welcome Annie Freeman, who's based in New Zealand. Full disclosure, I'm completely biased with this country. And we will deep dive into a concrete use case, the building of an internal product in our company to calculate carbon emissions of each software component of each team using data from Climatic. Stay tuned. By the way, Greenire is a podcast in much more.
So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Paris is in less than three weeks from now, on December 3rd, 4th, and 5th. You can still get a free ticket using the Vulture Greenio VIP.
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Roxane (53:42)one byte at a time.



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They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division. With a romance on top of it…Yet several years later, they decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on “enabled emissions” issues. Holly and Will Alpine are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and give us insider perspectives, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” about sustainability claims in all big tech companies.
In the final part of this 2-part episode, great insights were shared on :   🤯 What is enabled carbon and why it offsets by far all Microsoft achievements    😈 Devil is in the details from tailored solutions to “carbon-neutral” oil company not following standard definitions of “net-zero”   ✨ Can responsible AI principles really not mention anything about the environment?    ⚖️ Why regulation will ultimately be needed   ♀️✊ And … the Pussy Riot!
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• Holly Alpine’s LinkedIn 
• William Alpine’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

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Holly and Will's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Quarterly Revenues from Microsoft and its cloud division 
• Microsoft latest Sustainability Report
• The carbon aware SDK from the Green Web Foundation
• “Carbon-aware computing: Measuring and reducing the carbon footprint associated with software in execution” 
• “How a Hackathon Is Slowly Changing The World” 
• Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
• Data center jobs scam by Gerry Mc Govern
• Frac to the Future; Oil’s Digital Rebirth (Barclays)
• Heeding the digital call to action in oil and gas
• “Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI” (The Atlantic) 
• “I loved my job at Microsoft, but I had to resign on principle. Here’s why” (Fortune)

Transcript (auto-generated)
Gaël Duez (00:00)
Got it. So if I understand, if I can wrap up the first part of this podcast episode, you joined Microsoft because you believed in the brands. Both of you, you were part of a super strong grassroots movement who achieved significant results when it comes to sustainability across all countries

where Microsoft is operating. You listed some significant achievement, whether it's your local community program, Holly, deploying SCI, not necessarily at scale, but at least testing it in a very serious production environment for you will. So it was pretty good time. Am I correct to say so?

Holly Alpine (00:40)
Yeah.

Will (00:40)
I'd say it's been one of the best times of my career thus far, and especially seeing the impact that we've both made at such a scale has been truly rewarding. I'm grateful for the experience.

Gaël Duez (00:50)
Okay, so thanks a lot for sharing it.
But now I think it's time to ask the $1 million question, At some point, both of you, you decided to leave and you didn't do it that quietly. So could you tell us a bit the story here? And I recall the basis for your decision of Microsoft on cloud and AI. Could you explain us a bit well what you wanted to say with this very strong word.

Will (01:24)
Let's start with the science. The world needs to reduce emissions by 50 % by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement targets. And the IEA, a industry friendly group, has stated in its net zero by 2050 report that no new oil and gas natural fields are required beyond those that are already approved for development. So when the science is telling us that we don't need more oil and gas,

We at the same time have technology companies providing advanced technology such as AI, IoT and high-performance computing to oil and gas companies to help them dramatically increase and expand their fossil fuel production. It raises the question, is AI truly a climate tool or is a weapon? Now AI is often hailed as an essential tool to address climate change, but the reality is that it's actually being weaponized by the fossil fuel industry.

And this advanced digital technology is seen as a quote, game changer in optimizing oil and gas exploration, drilling and production, which drives untold emissions and hinders an equitable energy transition. so Microsoft really exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that we're facing here. is promoting AI's potential to expedite decarbonization while simultaneously aggressively marketing its AI solutions and custom technology.

to these fossil fuel giants. And in essence, it's fueling the single biggest industry to the climate crisis. And so the issue that we're actually talking about here is we define as enabled emissions. These enabled emissions are defined as emissions that would have not been possible without the use of advanced technology. And specifically, these enabled emissions are facilitating new oil and gas production and enabling continued fossil fuel expansion.

despite the fact that the science is saying that we don't need to do so.

Gaël Duez (03:20)
enabled emissions is a core concept here to understand what push you away from Microsoft. this enabled emission concept was something framed internally at Microsoft or was it something more brought by the scientific community?

Will (03:38)
I don't think we are the first to have coined the term enabled emissions. I believe it's actually an industry term, but it's something that we within Microsoft formalized. Sometimes it's called serviced emissions and there's actually a broad movement around that. And that's specifically in the professional services provider industry. But enabled emissions could better be called technology enabled emissions, which is the specific flavor that we are most familiar with and we're advocating for change around.

Gaël Duez (04:07)
enabled emissions. Holly, how was it tackled from this huge sustainability community that has been gathered as you described previously as a grassroots movement? Was it something that was discussed?

Holly Alpine (04:22)
This topic was discussed within the employee community at Microsoft. I would say most employees though were unaware of the extent that Microsoft was supporting increased fossil fuel production. A lot of employees like us work and love Microsoft because of its sustainability commitments and it was really quite

disappointing and devastating to a lot of employees to see so just how deeply Microsoft was embedded with these fossil fuel companies and reading the explicit goals around expanding production with Exxon or generating new exploration opportunities with Chevron or accelerating extracted and refined hydrocarbons with BP. We use the word hypocrisy because

those statements and those very explicit goals are so starkly at odds with Microsoft's extremely outspoken stance on the ethics of technology and sustainability and other quotes from senior leadership around Microsoft's role in climate change and committing to helping the societal conditions to cultivate a net zero economy.

enabling a just transition, mean, extremely strong quotes and stance around pursuing Microsoft's mission and the enormous responsibility to ensure the technology that they build benefits everyone on the planet, including the planet itself. So we did speak internally about this topic and employees were

pretty distraught and I mean a lot of what we heard from employees it was around how the work is hypocritical that Microsoft needs their relationship with customers to focus on renewables and tech innovation and delivering safe and reliable and clean energy. And they hated the idea that as hard as they work as a company to drive sustainability goals, one big Azure contract with an oil and gas company could put

any progress in jeopardy by actually increasing global emissions. And I'm paraphrasing here from the quotes from a survey that we sent out to the employee community to ask about their opinions on enabled emissions.

Gaël Duez (07:00)
And that's a very important point that you've raised and thanks for the clarification. And I really want to make sure I understood it right. Because when I read the stories first reported in newspapers about you quitting and being some sort of whistleblowers on it, my question was, is it an ethical dilemma or a scientific dilemma? by that, mean, was it a question of Microsoft supporting companies

that it shouldn't support and claiming kind of the opposite like we're here to bring technology to save the world, blah, blah. So it's bad from an ethical perspective. Or is it also a scientific issue, meaning that the numbers are really worrisome? And by that, mean that by helping fossil fuels expand their production,

Holly Alpine (07:36)
Mm-hmm.

Gaël Duez (07:52)
It is actually offsetting in the wrong sense any other progress that Microsoft are doing. So how much thousands of millions of tons are we talking from one side and from the other?

Holly Alpine (08:01)
Yeah, yeah, so it's both. But we can tell you that back in 2019, Microsoft published a press release around a deal with Exxon to expand production by 50,000 barrels per day by 2025. And we did the carbon math and had it checked by carbon experts.

and the annual metric tons of CO2 increase from this one deal was about six and a half million metric tons per year. That is 640 % of Microsoft's annual carbon removal pledge of 2020 from one deal. There was another contract that we've seen with Chevron and that works stream increased production. So this is what we're saying enabled emissions.

emissions that would otherwise not occur if not for Microsoft technology was increasing their production

barrels per day. That gives you about 51 million metric tons of CO2 per year. That is 2000 % of Microsoft's 2021 carbon removal, about 300%.

of Microsoft's entire carbon footprint for FY23.

Gaël Duez (09:26)
Okay, got it. it's a serious ethical

massive climate science issue that has been raised. We're talking about numbers completely offsetting any pledges, any offsetting programs, any progress made by Microsoft worldwide.

Am I getting this right? Because that's a very important piece of your case against Microsoft, if I got it right.

Holly Alpine (09:52)
That's correct. And one of the things that we would like to do going forward is come up with some estimates for what that total is worldwide. We would like to put the numbers into context on a global scale. And that's one of the things that we need to do, because we know that it's a lot from just these two deals. And so we want to show what it could be.

globally with all of the deals and have some sort of estimates for that.

Will (10:23)
specifically the impacts that it could have on net zero pathways. I do want to add that from what we've seen today based on case studies, oil and gas companies are using advanced digital technologies to increase their yield by up to 15%. And so imagine increasing the world's fossil fuel production by 15 % using this advanced technology provided by big tech.

Imagine what impact that really has on the net zero projections. From what we've seen, it has not been factored into any of the discussion, let alone the modeling. And that is terrifying. I think this will break our chances of a habitable.

Gaël Duez (11:04)
So that's truly terrifying. And yet I'd like, if you indulge me to do so, to play a bit the devil's advocate here, because I've met countless of people still working at Microsoft, working at Amazon, working at Google, and they're facing all the time this kind of dilemma. my first question would be, yes, but what about the use of technology and especially machine learning AI, if you indulge me there?

broad word, to reduce the emissions from the fossil fuel industry. And I'm especially thinking about methane. Was it included this potential savings or even complete disappearance of methane emissions, thanks to AI in the estimate, the mass, you say, the Holy, that were done by a scientist when you estimated

carbon emissions, mean the greenhouse gases emissions to be a bit more precise from this increase in production from Chevron and BP.

Will (12:03)
To be clear, we'd never completed the math. That's something that we were advocating is done. And one that includes the net impacts of both. I will say that the Atlantic published an article which compared the emissions reductions from using advanced technology on, I think it was Shell's operations and compared it to Shell's overall carbon footprint. And it was, I think I quote, paltry in comparison. It's a fraction of a percent.

Gaël Duez (12:29)
Okay.

got it. My second question is, okay, but what should Microsoft do regarding the current economic environment, way of doing business, et cetera?

should be according to your past experience, the right attitude from Microsoft toward the fossil fuel industry. Because I guess many C-level might say, hey, if we don't get these deals, others will do it, maybe even less cleaner than we are. And we cannot really afford losing these clients. I could list a lot of pushback stances, I would say. According to you,

what is true, what is false, what is debatable here.

Will (13:13)
You know, you actually you raise a great point and I want to mention to start. This is not just Microsoft. This is an industry wide issue. The initial reasoning was we you know Microsoft needs a seat at the table to have these discussions, but change doesn't happen at scale. If you just go by one technology provider at the time, this has to be regulated mandated. The campaign only focuses on Microsoft because Microsoft has up to 65 % share of the market, but.

corporations like Google have publicly committed to not provide custom technology to the upstream oil and gas industry. That is a gold standard and it's something that Microsoft seems to be unwilling to do. But there are things that Microsoft could do. For example, align its responsible AI principles to include environmental harms. It's not a big leap to make the jump between harms to the planet and harms to people.

things like impact assessments could be done. This could really readily be operationalized in a way that is good for business and good for the planet.

Holly Alpine (14:15)
I can add on to that too. So just to elaborate on that a bit. So Microsoft has responsibly AI standards that evaluate their impacts of their technology and avoid human harms. They just currently do not include environment. And so just rolling that up into that just to add a little bit to what Will was saying. But another thing that Microsoft can do is Microsoft has published

energy principles for how they'll work with the oil and gas industry. One of the main principles that they have to make change is that they'll only work with oil and gas companies that have a net zero target. At first, that sounds great. Net zero, that's where the world needs to go. But when you really drill down, pun intended, into that principle, you find that

Will (15:05)
you

Holly Alpine (15:08)
this net zero target that those companies, the oil and gas companies need to set only includes their operational emissions. Basically how they power their office buildings. It's only scope one and two. It does not include the fuels themselves. And so that is, we believe, just a glaring omission. And we have asked Microsoft when we were there,

to follow standards for net zero. There are some fantastic standards that exist like the IIGCC's net zero standard for oil and gas or the UN high level expert groups net zero standard. And if they could follow those standards then that would actually have a credible net zero rather than right now we believe is extremely misleading.

Will (15:59)
And so what you're saying is really great. In essence, what we're advocating for is to align business activities with climate science. So you can't have a net zero commitment without basing it in science.

Holly Alpine (16:11)
and aligning to the climate science that Microsoft very strongly supports. mean, have published, mean, their Accelerating Sustainability with AI playbook that Will was a part of crafting talks about how society needs to push harder on the AI accelerator while establishing guardrails.

to steer the world safely, securely and equitably towards net zero emissions and a nature positive future. And we just see that as starkly at odds with their actual business practices. And yes, if Microsoft stopped, maybe these companies would move to So yes, it needs to be a tech-wide issue, but we can't just capitulate to the system because of those reasons.

This is the future of the planet we're talking about. And some of the most profitable company in the world with extremely intelligent people that can absolutely come up with solutions going forward.

Gaël Duez (17:13)
So here, yeah.

Will (17:13)
the most profitable company in the planet cannot do this, then what I is that...

Gaël Duez (17:19)
Yeah, that's my point is how much are we talking about? guess even if it's big, the revenues coming from contracts with the oil and gas industry doesn't make more than 1 % or 2 % of the overall revenue streams from Microsoft. Am I right or am I completely missing the point here?

Will (17:40)
not so sure. I'd love to see transparency, but I think that's unlikely that that information will be shared. But according to the recent Atlantic report, the digital technology oil and gas market is somewhere between 30 and $70 billion for that total addressable market. And that is a sizable share of Microsoft's cloud and AI revenue.

Gaël Duez (18:00)
So it will make a significantly more important effort from a business perspective, which is completely insane regarding the basic survival of a specie, but that's another point. So that will be a significant effort. Like Microsoft could issue a profit warning saying, okay, we decided to stop our work with the oil and gas industry,

Holly Alpine (18:22)
but I will have to interject there because we have never and we will never ask for Microsoft to completely cut ties with the oil and gas industry. That is, we know, not something that is possible and we think unrealistic. But we don't think that what Microsoft should and the industry at large should be doing with these companies is increasing production that is completely at odds.

with the climate science and with what the top climate researchers say needs to happen. when we know that new oil and gas reserves

necessary, as Will mentioned at the beginning of this episode,

Gaël Duez (19:06)
Do you really have this kind of overview on how Microsoft products are used by their customers? Because let's say that, okay, we don't want to cut ties with the entire oil and gas industry. So we keep the contract with Chevron going on. We provide services here and there, et cetera. How can you make a difference?

whether they use this for increasing the effectiveness and the cleanliness of their day-to-day operation or exploring new fields and increasing their production. can you say how using your products and...

differentiate and say, okay, we allow you to use that kind of algorithm because I know we use it for purposeful, positively impactful way, or we don't want you to use this machine learning algorithm because it will be to explore some new rig fields.

Will (19:59)
So I want to circle back to the point I made about Google earlier. Google has publicly committed to not providing customized technology to the upstream oil and gas industry. And I want to emphasize customized technology here because that's a lot of what's happening. It's not just, hey, here's a generic model. Let it lose on the world. This is custom technology with millions of dollars in revenue associated or staff.

Gaël Duez (20:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Will (20:26)
several staff behind it that are customizing this advanced technology for specifically upstream oil and gas scenarios. So finding and extracting more

Gaël Duez (20:35)
Yeah, I think that that

Will (20:35)
So if Microsoft followed something like Google's guidance, then it could possibly reach parity with its competitors.

Gaël Duez (20:42)
Okay, got it. This is the point I wanted to reach to make sure that we are on the same page and we're really talking about customized services. So people will use all the regular Azure solutions off the shelf, but they will not have access potentially to data scientists, experts, product manager, helping them to fine tune models, et cetera, to increase oil production. I'm at right here.

Will (21:09)
That is part of it, but I do also really want to emphasize regulation is necessary here. It's an unregulated industry, but having transparency, mandated transparency as to what use cases are being supported with what technology. Full accounting, that would be required by law to put guardrails on what this technology is used for or not used for.

Gaël Duez (21:15)
Hmm.

And actually, I would love to follow a bit on you here, Will, because I was struck when you say that Microsoft AI responsible policy doesn't include any environmental aspects, which seems a bit insane for me. So how would you see a more responsible use of AI, including but not only the environmental impact, being enforced? In the European Union, we...

have the AI Act, which has been enforced, with massive pushback from the industry, massive lobbying of big American and European tech companies saying that it will kill innovations, that Europe is already a lagga behind China and the US, and that will get even worse, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you see the possibility of a regulation that doesn't kill innovation in the AI industry?

And once again, sorry for using the buzzword AI, but I think we all understand that it covers mostly algorithm, machine learning stuff, and not necessarily chat GPT here.

Will (22:36)
not convinced that regulation kills innovation. I believe that you could still be mandated to provide an inventory of the use cases of the technology to inform future decision making. I think you could mandate that certain environmentally sensitive applications such as upstream oil and gas go through what could be called a sensitive uses review process and establish governance there and then report that out to stakeholders.

That would not kill innovation in my eyes. That would possibly only help the planet, help the employees, and help people.

Holly Alpine (23:12)
Yeah, I agree with Will and we had an environmentally responsible AI memo that kind of wrote up what Will was just saying and provided it to Microsoft leadership who agreed with our stance. It just was not implemented.

Gaël Duez (23:30)
So I'd like to move on now that I think we've got a very clear understanding, at least from my point of view, what is at stake here and why this word has been used and all this climate science issue that you raised that goes even beyond the ethical issue and how devils is in the details, whether it's

regarding working with oil companies that are committed to go net zero, but net zero on scope one and two, which is complete nonsense regarding what is at stake with the scope

Holly Alpine (24:07)
Mm-hmm.

Gaël Duez (24:09)
of the oil industry and also the customized aspect. think you covered quite a lot and explained quite a lot in details. And eventually, both of you decided to leave. And I'd like to talk a bit more now from a personal

I've spotted at least two, if not three articles where you explained why and you used some very strong words against a company, not the people, the people were never attacked, but the company and its strategy.

My first question would be, what was the news What was the momentum around this debate?

Holly Alpine (24:49)
Those have been the three main articles so far. We've also recorded a few podcasts so far and will not be the last. The uptake has been really fantastic from these stories and it's been slightly uncomfortable to have the story be about our journey and.

what we did and how we decided to leave because what we really want is coverage of the content. We want the public and employees and shareholders to be more aware of how this technology is being used. That is the main purpose of everything that we're doing right now. But we do know that having a narrative helps folks follow along the story, it gets more readership.

That's been part of our journey. yeah, we've had a lot of really great feedback so far, a lot of people being very surprised by this information, but really seeing the importance of it. So we hope to continue that momentum. Of course, we've seen also some folks who disagree with our position, which of course is gonna happen, but I think...

Overall, we've seen a lot more support than we have detractors.

Gaël Duez (26:10)
Okay, so people working in the tech industry at large, I would say, have sent you more positive feedback than negative feedback regarding your current stance.

Holly Alpine (26:21)
Yes.

Gaël Duez (26:22)
Okay, and what about Microsoft?

Holly Alpine (26:24)
We haven't heard anything from Microsoft directly. When we were at Microsoft, we worked for years internally to try to make change in this space. It was very collaborative with some of the top senior leadership of the company. We co-wrote a memo back in 2019, I believe that really framed the issue and met with senior leadership and they...

really completely agreed with us on almost every single one of our recommendations. We came up with a very detailed and comprehensive list of recommendations for going forward, what they could actually implement. We didn't just say, you know, this is bad, stop everything. It was very well thought out recommendations. We got a lot of promises that ultimately went unfulfilled.

And including one of the reactions from the senior leadership from the president of Microsoft was being surprised that environment was not part of the responsible AI principles, which was surprising to us given that he was executive sponsor of those principles. But ultimately over the couple years that we saw these promises go unfulfilled, we really realized that internal pressure alone,

was not going to make the change required. We are not saying that internal pressure does not work and that we should give up. We did not quit because we were giving up. We were quitting because we realized we needed both, the internal to continue as well as now pressure from external position.

Will (28:05)
And I'd actually like to add on to what Holly was saying. From an external position, we're still really actively working on this. And there are three parts that we're doing. One is around raising awareness and educating the public as to the scope of the issue that we're facing here. The next is around mobilizing a coalition and engaging different stakeholders, be it regulators, be it shareholders,

building a support network here to really amplify. And the third is that we're advocating for and advancing research and policy reform. So those are three aspects of what we're doing about it and things that need to happen.

Gaël Duez (28:45)
But it's a bit strange not to have an official answer from Microsoft because that looks like a public relation nightmare that they're dealing at the moment. So they decided to go for the silent treatment.

Holly Alpine (28:59)
Well, they were interviewed for the Atlantic article. Daryl Willis, the CVP of Energy and Industry, who was our main contact, we worked with closely at Microsoft, was interviewed for Atlantic. It was pretty generic and he said that it's complicated many, many times. I think it was what, Will, like 11 or 14 times in their interview, which we just don't think is a sufficient response.

Will (29:19)
11 times, yeah.

Holly Alpine (29:27)
We will point out that he came from a background of BP. He was an executive at BP for many, years and was a spokesperson during Deepwater Horizon. So he knows a thing or two about public relations.

Gaël Duez (29:41)
Okay. And what about other hyperscalers or massive solution vendors? Did they leverage the opportunity to have this debate or to witness this debate focusing a bit on Microsoft also to clarify their own positions? Will you mention Google or was it complete silence from all top executives regarding this enabled

emissions question.

Will (30:06)
I'm not aware of any reactions from the rest of Big Tech.

Holly Alpine (30:10)
Yeah, not yet.

Gaël Duez (30:11)
Okay.

Will (30:12)
But again, it's important to mobilize stakeholders and employees across the entire tech sector. This is not just a Microsoft issue, this is a global issue.

Holly Alpine (30:21)
Right, yeah, and sorry, that's kind of what I mean by not yet, that we're just not there yet because we just left not that long ago, but as we continue to push, do expect, I mean, that is a big part of our campaign is having that cross-industry collaboration. I would not be surprised, I I hope that we get a response before long.

Gaël Duez (30:44)
That will be excellent. OK, I've questioned you because I don't think I grilled you. I questioned you for almost an hour and a half. It's getting super late for you, Well, you've got dolphins and whales and and fishes to take care of. So maybe it's time to not necessarily wrap up, but actually open to a bit more personal angle. This is really a question I wanted to ask you.

Holly Alpine (30:58)
Hehehehe

Will (31:01)
Yeah.

Gaël Duez (31:12)
knowing that I would say thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people working in big corporations, working in big tech companies and having strong environmental values are facing like should I stay or should I go? You decided to go, it went with some media exposure. So from a personal angle,

How do you deal with all the pressure?

Holly Alpine (31:38)
guess it's been really important to get support from folks who have also left their companies or are struggling within their own companies that they're still working at, but having this, just feeling this dissonance and just kind of feeling like there's a community out there who all feels this way and we're...

very, very far from alone. And we've gotten such nice messages from people who say that they're inspired, you know, that's such an amazing thing to hear that people will now speak up more inside their companies or at least speak more with their colleagues and think about what more they could do internally. So that's a way to kind of...

deal with the pressure and also luckily we have each other. I I'm so grateful to have Will as my partner in all of this. It's a challenge to do this kind of really high pressure work with your significant other, but it also has massive benefits.

Will (32:52)
And I'd actually like to add on to what Holly was saying, actually with the quote from the founder of Pussy Riot, the punk band that was persecuted by Putin because they were seen as a threat for their activism. Courage is contagious. Any act of speaking the truth can cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness. We all have this power. It's a moral act to use this power. You may or may not achieve the results you wanted, but there's eternal beauty.

Gaël Duez (32:52)
Is it?

Will (33:19)
and trying to find truth, risking what you have, you've got for what's right.

I think that summarizes my personal stance.

Gaël Duez (33:26)
Well, we'll usually ask people to close on a positive piece of news. But I think this is the perfect quote to end the podcast. I just wanted to add on a more personal note, congratulations for your wedding. Because I know that we were actually preparing the episode while you were getting engaged and then married. So all my best to both of you.

Holly Alpine (33:45)
He

Thank you, yeah, it's been good.

Will (33:51)
Our first wedding anniversary came up not too long ago.

Gaël Duez (33:55)
Excellent. And I really wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart to take the time to join the podcast, to take so much time to elaborate the context, what drive your decisions, go a bit into the details of what is at stake here. I think you brought a lot of valuable content to the audience of this podcast and beyond. Thanks a lot, both of you. And I wish you the very, very best for the rest of your fight.

Holly Alpine (34:22)
Thank you, yeah, it's past 1 a.m. for me, so time to sleep. Thank you so much.

Will (34:23)
Thank you so much for having us. Pleasure chatting.

Gaël Duez (34:29)
I can't imagine. Thanks a lot both of you and talk to you soon.

Okay.



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They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division and with a romance on top of it… 💕
Yet several years later, Holly and Will Alpine decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on the “enabled emissions” issues. 🕵️
Holly and Will are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and they provide us with an insider perspective, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” in all big tech companies: are their sustainability claims offset by the so-called enabled emissions? 🐘

In this first part of this 2-part episode, Holly and Will shared great insights with Gaël Duez on: 
   🌱 Microsoft’s employee grassroot sustainability initiative which gathers now more than ten thousands people 
   ⚖️ The opportunity cost for most middle management to support sustainability initiatives
   🛠️ The difference between attributional and consequential methodologies and why it impacts the adoption of SCI enabled tools
   💰 Can investing millions in local community support justify the increasing data center expansion?

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📣 Green IO next Conference is in Paris on December 4th and 5th (use the voucher GREENIOVIP to get a free ticket) 
Learn more about our guest and connect: 

• Holly Alpine’s LinkedIn 
• William Alpine’s LinkedIn
• Green IO website 
• Gaël Duez's website 
  
  

📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Holly and Will's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Quarterly Revenues from Microsoft and its cloud division 
• Microsoft latest Sustainability Report
• The carbon aware SDK from the Green Web Foundation
• “Carbon-aware computing: Measuring and reducing the carbon footprint associated with software in execution” 
• “How a Hackathon Is Slowly Changing The World” 
• Measuring the Carbon Intensity of AI in Cloud Instances
• Data center jobs scam by Gerry Mc Govern
• Frac to the Future; Oil’s Digital Rebirth (Barclays)
• Heeding the digital call to action in oil and gas
• “Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI” (The Atlantic) 
• “I loved my job at Microsoft, but I had to resign on principle. Here’s why” (Fortune)

Transcript (auto-generated)
Gaël Duez (01:53.354)Today, I'm joined by the Bonnie and Clyde of Microsoft Azure, two experts in their respective fields who had a dream job in a company which they were proud of working for with significant achievements in their missions as well as their internal volunteering activities in the sustainability field and a romance on top of it. Yet, they decided to quit because of what they called Microsoft hypocrisy on AI. And here we are talking about millions of tons of greenhouse gases that should not be emitted and are enabled by tech solutions based on machine learning. The exchange I had with Holly Alpine and Will Alpine was so rich that I decided to split it into two episodes. They brought very complimentary perspectives. Holly being the former head of Microsoft Data Center Community Environmental Sustainability and Employee Engagement. And being now on the board of directors of both American Forest and Zero Waste Washington, and by the way, being listed in the green biz 30 under 30, la valeur n'attend pas le nombre des années, as we say in French. And Will, being a seasoned AI product manager, also in charge of driving sustainability within Azure across the operational machine learning lifecycle. So bringing a more technical aspect to our discussion. Shall I also add, he's a serious contributor to the software carbon intensity specification as I discovered in the episode. One last word before we start. I know I used a catchy statement to introduce the episode and the word hypocrisy is a very strong one. But I was impressed in our discussion how nuanced and balanced were their positions and their claims. Everyone in the tech industry should take a time to pose and reflect on the dilemma they raised because it's not at all a Microsoft only debate. 
Hello Will, Hello Holly, very nice to have you on the show. Great to finally have a recording on three different time zones. So we made it. Thanks to you and welcome to the show. 
Will (07:49.437)Thanks for having us. 
Holly Alpine (07:51.366)Thank you, glad to be here. 
Gaël Duez (07:54.07)Yeah, I'm especially happy regarding Will because Will at the moment, if I'm not wrong, you're at sea. Am I right? 
Will (08:04.495)I am currently on a Sea Shepherd ship in Tasmania. We're doing a refit to prepare the ship for an Arctic voyage. So we're not on the open ocean, but I am on a boat that is floating on the water. 
Gaël Duez (08:17.344)Okay, pretty cool. What are you doing there? 
Will (08:21.459)This is part of a campaign to refit a boat from an old fishing vessel into one that's used to fight illegal fishing. So I'm fighting poetic justice in the work that we're doing. 
Gaël Duez (08:31.842)Well, that's pretty cool. how an engineer, a software engineer or data scientist, I don't know which hat do you want to wear these days, how can you contribute to this kind of campaign? 
Will (08:46.459)So my past life, I was actually a blacksmith and I picked up skills of welding and fabrication. And then I worked as a mechanical engineer. So I'm actually getting to contribute those to the mission here. It's really nice to reconnect with old selves. 
Gaël Duez (09:02.294)I can imagine how cool is this. Okay, but let's go back to your old days. I've got thousands of questions to unpack with you. We will try to make it in one, maybe two episodes exceptionally, we'll see. Maybe just before to deep dive in all the different issues you've raised regarding Azure solutions at Microsoft, maybe could you explain us both of you a bit? What is to work at Microsoft and especially in the data center division? It's huge, maybe Oli, can you share some numbers to grasp the magnitude of its operations? 
Holly Alpine (09:45.382)Sure, Microsoft employees, last time I checked about 150,000 people and that's all over the world. We have countless different divisions and different programs and it's particularly with sustainability. They have a corporate sustainability team, but what we were really trying to do is embed sustainability into everything that we did all across the company. a couple years ago, Microsoft was the most profitable company on the planet Earth. 
Gaël Duez (10:20.0)That's pretty huge. And regarding the size, maybe, Will you can comment on this, the size of the data center operation and the flagship solution, which is Azure. How big is it? I think it's a solid number two behind AWS. Correct me if I'm wrong. 
Will (10:37.075)believe you're correct. Azure has about 20 % of the global cloud market. so Azure's revenue was about 32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and it covers the entire globe. So the operations and the scale is quite staggering. 
Gaël Duez (11:03.667)Will you meant 32 billions for the entire Microsoft revenue with Azure accounting? For roughly 40 % of it. Am I correct? 
Will (11:24.722)That's my understanding, yes. 
Gaël Duez (11:38.807)Well, that's pretty impressive. And regarding the tech stack, I how many data centers, how many, I mean, don't share any confidential information. It could be by order of magnitude, but are we talking about 550, 500, 5,000 hyperscaler facilities worldwide? 
Will (11:56.594)You know, that's a great question. Actually, according to an article by the Washington Post, it's more than 2,700 data centers nationwide. And a lot of them are from shops that are actually renting out their compute to the hyperscalers. So I can't give you any specifics of the scale of Microsoft specific operations, but the number is in the thousands for data centers. 
Gaël Duez (12:15.829)in the thousands just for the US. Wow, that's pretty impressive. 
Holly Alpine (12:21.497)And a number that I saw the other day was that Microsoft is opening a new data center every three days. 
Gaël Duez (12:29.651)every three days. it's not necessarily building it up from scratch, but it's like opening by using data center providers solutions, but opening a new location. Is it right? Or is it also stuff that they are building up from the ground? 
Holly Alpine (12:48.783)I think that includes both, it is a combination of different classes, call it class A, B, or C, where it's either Microsoft completely owning the land, they purchase the land, build the data center from scratch, they're buying a building that already exists, but they're putting their servers inside of it, or they're leasing space in co-owned facilities, or some combination. 
Gaël Duez (13:17.483)Well, that's pretty huge. And just before to jump on this question of the energy consumption, which is very related to all these data centers, popping up like Mushroom, I was just visiting two weeks ago for a client that I will not disclose the name, a very significant, like one of the main data centers north of Paris. And it reminds me how huge these facilities are. It's a huge client. mean, they've got a lot of their own servers. They're doing like millions of compute per seconds. So it's pretty impressive. And that was just a tiny part of a, not even the smaller part of the big data centers. And just thinking that we're talking about thousands of them, it's pretty impressive. And fun One of the ideas they got after a workshop that we did two weeks ago is we should have every employee visiting the data center again, just to remind people what is at stake here and how big it is, is almost invisible to most employees. I was pretty 
Will (14:29.244)You know, that's my one regret from my time at Microsoft. I never managed to make a data center visit. 
Gaël Duez (14:35.063)Really? 
Holly Alpine (14:36.827)they're pretty hard to go to. now it's pretty impossible to go visit. I used to, based on the work that I was doing, I got to see them in various stages of construction and yeah, they are massive. mean, they're football fields long. You have to drive a car around just the campus. They're so big. And you know, they're in communities my main role at Microsoft was looking at the impact to the communities where Microsoft data centers were located and how we could give back and try to be a good neighbor. 
Gaël Duez (15:21.271)I think we will go on this field, a soccer field or a football field, no jealous. need to pay attention to whoever is listening. So my dear American based friend, let's talk about football, but for the rest of the world, let's talk about soccer. Anyway, I've got maybe two last questions to understand the context Do you have any figures regarding the energy consumption? And I know it's just tip of the iceberg, the energy, but the energy consumption of all these data centers providing the Azure solution worldwide. 
Will (16:09.832)You know, it's a great question and one that's really important and is getting quite a lot of media coverage as of now. I actually spent four years at Microsoft really advocating strongly to reduce the carbon and energy footprint of technology at Microsoft. And so I did want to define the terminology. I will call this the operational emissions. That's from the building and the hosting of the data center. And so by 2030 data centers are expected to use around three to 13 % of global electricity. As compared to 1 % in 2010. And I do want to emphasize the wide range there is because analysts are quietly revising their projections here because simply put, no one knows what the impact really is. 
Gaël Duez (16:54.807)which is an issue in itself. deep dive maybe on your time at Microsoft and what you did. And let's start maybe with a simple question, Why did you join Microsoft, which seemed to be a dream job? I recall Holly, you were featured in a Fortune article quote recently and the quote was, “I love my job at Microsoft, but I had to resign on principles. Here's why.” You loved your job. Why did you join this job, please? 
Holly Alpine (17:54.137)Microsoft is a fantastic place to work in so many ways. I really joined Microsoft because of its great reputation. Back then, it wasn't really a sustainability focus. I actually, when I first joined Microsoft, didn't really think of Microsoft in a sustainability capacity at all. I was passionate about sustainability, but just thought that I would need to volunteer outside of my day job. But as I continued at Microsoft over the next 10 years, I met some truly incredible people who were working on sustainability day in, day out, and I was able to create my own roles in sustainability at Microsoft. I started on Microsoft's energy team and our cloud operations and innovation team, basically the data center team. And then I was able to found a new program called Community Environmental Sustainability that was in that same organization. I developed it back in 2017 and was able to invest in nature-based solutions in the global communities where those data centers were operating. And it was fantastic. And I met hundreds, if of people across the company who were very passionate, intelligent, and were really embedding sustainability into everything we did as a company. I can speak more to the employee engagement program that I was leading as well, but in my time there, there's so much good to say about Microsoft. I think Will had a pretty good experience there too, yeah Will? 
Will (19:40.196)I actually joined by way of a happy accident. I was attending and graduating from the University of Washington's Global Exchange program and I was at that moment simply practicing for interviews and I decided to sign up for Microsoft interview and then when I went in it was actually a great experience and I was when I received the offer I became really excited because it was an offer to join the Azure AI platform group which was a really really exciting and innovative place to be and I saw this as a huge lever to make positive change and really impact society at scale and really work with novel technology. So really chasing the promise of impact and innovation. 
Holly Alpine (20:27.695)You know, that's funny. I don't think I actually knew that well, because I don't know if you know this either, but my interview with Microsoft, I was seeing it as just practice as well. I was in college and even though I had great grades, I just thought, you know, it's Microsoft. There's no way I'm going to be able to get a job there. And so I just went into it thinking it was just practice, but lo and behold, I got the job. And I'm so glad that I didn't skip that interview. 
Will (20:54.706)Same here. 
Gaël Duez (20:56.225)That's pretty cool. I think that's a first tip for students and job seekers. Go for your dream interview. Maybe it's practice, but you might eventually land on your dream job. That's a very cool story. And that's quite funny that it happened to both of so these years at Microsoft were very fruitful in terms of sustainability achievements. You mentioned the employee engagement. It seems to be a pretty big success. I think the numbers were in 10 of thousands. Could you explain us what it was about and why it was so important, how you managed to achieve such a huge number of people gathered in a community, a sustainability community? 
Holly Alpine (21:50.747)Yeah, so it was kind of born out of a sense of almost loneliness and wanting to find community. I knew that there were other people at Microsoft who cared about sustainability. There had to be. We just hadn't been able to find each other. And it turned out there were. We just needed a platform to connect. And so a colleague and I, back in about 2017, founded Microsoft's employee engagement group for sustainability. It was a platform for employees to come together and really be able to engage in the ways that made sense for them. I think what made it so successful was that it was so grassroots grassroots. It was really born out of the programs that we wanted to see as employees and how we wanted to connect and how we wanted to contribute. And so we had many different programs that helped employees to learn more about sustainability. You know, it's a really big topic and there's a lot to learn. So we had various speaker series and different meetings to bring in various experts in their fields. We also had various platforms for employees to really contribute, to start their own projects and to find others who wanted to join their projects. And this could be employees from all across the world and all across the company who otherwise wouldn't have ever maybe been able to meet. it really caught on. And we, as you said, grew the program to over 10,000 employees and across 37 global chapters. And it was really enabling positive environmental change at every level of the company. 
Gaël Duez (23:37.492)Could you share some some success stories because I understand the idea of gathering a lot of people like minded people in training them or raising their awareness raising their skills in sustainability topics but how did it concretely contributes to changing things at Microsoft? 
Holly Alpine (23:59.865)Yeah, I guess two main things that I'll bring up are we had every year hackathons where we would bring organizations from outside of Microsoft or just form teams within Microsoft and really pick a topic and actually take a week and really make change and have an impact. And actually, I'll pass this on to Will. Will, do you wanna talk about the hackathon that you did that you won? Last year, right? Can you, you want to talk about that? 
Will (24:32.754)Sure, actually my last day at Microsoft was presenting the winning hackathon to the chief sustainability officer along with the team. And this was a really special moment for me because it was the culmination of everything I had been working on for the past four years. And so I'll step back a second. When I first joined, I also plugged into the sustainability connected community and I was seeking like-minded folks. And so we ended up doing a hackathon. And actually on that hackathon were several people who were profoundly influential to my career, including Asim Hussain, who's the chair of the Green Software Foundation. And so as you might imagine, that lit a fire within me and built the community that was so instrumental to our successes later. And so to make a long story short, several of the things that we did, we more or less graduated this set of hackathons into what is now the Carbonware SDK at the Green Software Foundation. And I see this as a massive win, specifically on behalf of the employees that have contributed to this, and because it has reached megaton scale carbon avoidance potential and is seeing production applications with several Fortune 500 companies, including Vestas and UBS. So check out the Green Software Foundation's Carbonware SDK if you're curious. 
Gaël Duez (25:52.257)I didn't know you were involved that much in the GSF. Fun fact is that I was with Assim last week in Green IO London. I should have told him that, hey, I'm going to have Will Alpine on the show pretty soon. 
Will (25:59.653)Awesome 
Holly Alpine (26:19.481)I would say another major success that we had as a sustainability community was that in no small part, Microsoft's employee community played a role in Microsoft's sustainability commitments. The carbon, water, waste, and ecosystems commitments that Microsoft is so famous for in sustainability what really propelled them to be seen as a leader across the globe. And sustainability was in no small part because of employee pressure and employees asking their employer and largely through this community, how can we be better? How can we really show up, put our money where our mouth is and really show up as a company that is leading in sustainability? 
Gaël Duez (27:14.517)Hmm. And that was you. 
Will (27:15.59)And I'll just add something really quickly unto what Holly was saying. I think so much of the fantastic sustainability work that's happening at Microsoft is on behalf of volunteers who are really doing this work out of dedication and passion. And there are thousands at the company and all of this really accrues to the brand reputation of Microsoft and is featured prominently in the annual sustainability report, which is seen as the gold standard for sustainability reports. 
Gaël Duez (27:42.555)So many roads I'd love to follow from that point, but I would like to ask two questions. So first question is, you mentioned that the community groups had a significant influence on how the sustainability goals from Microsoft were designed and published. My question would be, how does this Sustainability community or these different Sustainability groups interact with the official, I would say, Sustainability team or teams maybe at Microsoft, like the Chief Sustainability Officer. Does she or he has regular contact with the different groups? Are the volunteers included in work group? And how is the workflow going? And is it based more on tension, collaboration, sometimes a bit of both? How does it work? 
Holly Alpine (29:40.559)Yeah, so the chief sustainability officer of Microsoft, so was formerly Lucas Joppa and now it's Melanie Nakagawa. We met with them quarterly, at least with Lucas, we met quarterly and really discussed employees' top priorities. We would send out surveys to employees to try to understand what their main priorities were, what they wanted to see, how they thought Microsoft could be better, and then we would meet with directly with the CSO and discuss and decide what was possible and they would take some stuff forward and at the next meeting we would talk about where the progress was and what they thought was not possible. It really felt collaborative. I do think at times it maybe felt more collaborative than it actually was. I think we can get into that when we really get into the beans of this podcast today around our Enabled Admissions Initiative is that a lot of the promises that were made did ultimately go unfulfilled. But when we were meeting with them, it did feel very collaborative and open. Would you agree with that, Will? 
Will (31:03.208)I would say that's fair to say. 
Gaël Duez (31:08.808)Okay, so I got it now. It's very important because I see a lot of this grassroots movement in many companies. And at the beginning, they're kind of welcomed by top management. But when you have to start interacting in a bit more structured way, this is where the momentum get lost most of the time and people are moving from an advocate position to an opponent position. And I know that is something that we will talk about a bit later in this episode. My second question and sorry to put it that blankly because being US based and I guess Microsoft is such a, it's a household name all over the world, but especially in the US. But from a bit of an external perspective, what did you make so sure that Microsoft was a leading force in the sustainability area? 
Holly Alpine (33:04.123)Well, I joined before Microsoft was really a leader in sustainability and really before sustainability was even part of really their top considerations as a company. And so I saw the evolution over time. And I do think that Microsoft has made some really laudable commitments around carbon, water, waste and ecosystems. I mean, they were potentially the first major company anyway to commit to going carbon negative, meaning that they'll sequester more carbon than they produce, that including Scope 1, 2, and 3. I I do think that that is a very impressive commitment. We think that they need to go farther, but that is very impressive goal. Same with water, trying to be water positive, being zero waste and protecting more land than they use by 2030. Those are all goals that, of course, they could always do more, but if every company on the planet did at least those, we would be in a lot better position than we are now. 
Will (34:24.284)And I'd like to add a bit of context from someone who's really driving the grassroots sustainability initiatives at Microsoft. When I joined, was really, it wasn't in my formal job description in any sense, but it was definitely part of the decision is the image that Microsoft had been projecting in some of the bold commitments that had made. And so I was really, really eager to join. I will caveat this with saying, when you join a company with very, very ambitious top-down commitments, it's really important to ensure that company also connects it down to the boots on the ground, so to speak. So one of the challenges that I faced and many currently face today is that there are no sustainability OKRs. That's objectives and key results for certain business groups. So let's say if you join Azure AI, unless an employee can trace the work that they're doing to a specific objective of that business group, then it's going to be really nearly impossible to get traction. So there's a top down that needs to meet a bottoms up approach. 
Gaël Duez (35:27.079)That's a very important point, not having OKR, if I understood you right, you had on one side very strong overall goals like we want to be carbon negative, want to be water negative, etc. Obviously, what you described as super strong grassroots movements of good willing people dedicating quite a lot of time to move the sustainability efforts in the right directions. And in the middle, the operational, like meeting this overall strategy aspiration and with this bottom-up energy gathering, in the middle, you have to have some operational setup, whether it's OKR, whether it's dashboards, whether it's some bandwidth allocated to sustainable topics in roadmaps or backlog or whatever. And this is maybe where that was not that easy, that convenient to set up. Am I right to rephrase this like this? 
Will (36:29.832)That's exactly right. The middle layer is the operational layer and that's so crucial to actually get sustainability right. And I don't think many companies frankly are doing it today. I believe Alcoa might be one of the only examples I know of sustainability OKRs for certain groups. 
Holly Alpine (36:45.202)I will say as a volunteer myself, and then leading a massive team of volunteers, of program leads and chapter leads around the world, if that's not part of their actual job description or their leadership doesn't value it, it's going to be the first thing to go when there's time pressure on these employees. So we had super passionate volunteers who really wanted to help But when things got busy, we just wouldn't hear from them anymore for a time because they just couldn't. their leadership would, it's an opportunity cost for them. Their leadership, they would pass them up for review if they spent their time on sustainability and because they saw it as detracting from their time that could be spent on the objectives for their business group. 
Gaël Duez (37:43.093)Now that's super valuable. 
Will (37:43.206)I second that opportunity cost. If you could really bypass that and make it so that employees making these contributions did not accrue an opportunity cost, I think we'd see real transformation in sustainability. And also I just fact checked myself. I mentioned Alcoa. Actually, that's a different type of accountability. That is actually executive compensation as an incentive. So 20 % of executive compensation is based on progress towards specific sustainability goals. So that is actually simply a tops down method. So I'm not aware of any company that has rolled out sustainability OKRs across their entire line of operations. 
Gaël Duez (38:54.799)Okay, just before we start talking about the elephant in the room and all the papers and the news coverage you got recently, I've got two final questions regarding you in the Azure division before you left. And my first one might be for Will. You were running, you were driving the sustainability effort within Azure Machine Learning across all the operational machine learning life cycle. And could you maybe give us a bit more details and concrete examples on what is it to do such a job or such volunteering missions, because maybe that was not part of your job description. 
Will (39:47.624)Correct, my official job title was product manager in the Azure AI group and it had nothing to do with sustainability until the very end in which a mentor was very kind and brought me in to his team on the Responsible AI team with a 50 % sustainability focus. But what I was really doing was trying to apply the basic principles of green software engineering. We call it green AI into the Azure AI, Azure machine learning operational life cycle. The tenets here are you can reduce energy, the energy consumption of your software, you can shift your software to consume cleaner energy. And the third is you can consume fewer physical resources with that software. for me, the baseline effort and it was significant challenge that we faced was how do you provide transparency on even a single piece of the equation there? So one of the wins we actually did as we released energy consumption for Azure Machine Learning. That's in the product today and that shows developers what is the cost of training or inference. You can see that in the studio. That took quite a lot of work just to get out the We actually use that to apply the software carbon intensity specification from the Green Software Foundation to apply it to machine learning models. And so we published that paper in partnership with Allen Institute for AI and Carnegie Mellon and Hebrew University of New Jerusalem. And just one finding there is that training a large language model has the carbon equivalent of a rail car of coal being burned. I'll share the link for that paper if anyone's curious. 
Gaël Duez (41:32.343)Yeah, that will be awesome because as I often mentioned, all the papers, links, references that are mentioned in the episode will be put in the show notes Just to clarify, these SCI specifications, were they made available to every data scientist at Microsoft or is it also every users of Azure solution can have access to a module where they're based on the SCI. They can get the carbon emission of training their model. 
Will (42:11.378)Good point. Thanks for letting me clarify. So the only thing that is in the product today that any user of Azure Machine Learning could use is the transparency on the energy consumption. The application of the software carbon intensity spec, that was manual. And so we did that and then we published our findings in a paper called On Measuring the Carbon of Machine Learning in Cloud Instances. 
Gaël Duez (42:36.469)Were there any clients asking to get this information? 
Will (42:49.724)There were several clients that were asking, but it was always a ruthless prioritization exercise. 
Gaël Duez (42:56.404)Okay. 
Will (42:57.318)But from a technical perspective, it's very possible. There's no reason you could not apply the SEI and roll it out across the entire stack or show it in your operational or business reporting for a given product line in Azure. 
Gaël Duez (43:13.527)Okay, that's a very strong statement because it means that technically it's feasible. It's really a question, as you said, of a prioritization and why you allocate your time and effort, whether it's to bring more visibility and awareness on the carbon issues or is it on other features that are asked by the clients? 
Will (43:35.831)Of prioritization, but I also want to add it's a point of methodology. And there's a difference between attributional and consequential methodologies that I won't go into on this episode, but methodology has become a political act. 
Gaël Duez (43:52.447)Actually, I would love you to go down that rabbit hole because we hear more and more this debate between attributional and consequential allocation. And when you state that is becoming political, that's definitely something that I want you to elaborate a bit more on. 
Will (44:35.368)Okay, so the software carbon intensity specification is a consequential methodology. So it measures the change as a result of an action or an intervention that say a user could take. But most carbon reporting today is actually attributional. You come up with a top-down figure of perhaps your carbon footprint using your energy consumption of your data center, and then you divide that and you attribute that to a specific line of business. And so it becomes very challenging to come up with the right attributional proxy. I've heard sometimes of cost being used as a proxy to allocate carbon and that has several drawbacks. Sometimes you could use energy, but fundamentally you need to make the investments in the data collection and the telemetry to be able to even get there. And so without a massive investment, which is a prioritization exercise into the sufficient telemetry, then you don't prioritize the methodology development and the tools needed to really provide the transparency to unlock, say, the SCI. 
Gaël Duez (45:51.607)just making sure that I understood it correctly, what you're telling us is that it requires significant investments from the methodology perspective to get the SCI right, because we try to make it consequential, not attributional. Am I right, or is it the other way around? 
Will (46:17.605)Correct. So at a very simplistic level, if you were to look at, let's say, Microsoft Submissions Impact Dashboard, you really couldn't see anything below the surface level there of what the top line emissions are. You could not drill down anymore. And that's because you would need the granular enough data to really understand it, as well as the specific types of consequential accounting and the methodology behind it to back it up. So you need the data, you need the methodology, and you need the funding. 
Gaël Duez (46:48.87)Okay, got it. Thanks lot for the clarification. What did you state it was becoming political? It's just a question of resource allocation or there are other topics there. 
Will (47:01.669)I see funding as an inherently political act. 
Gaël Duez (47:07.49)Okay, got it. 
Will (47:07.726)You have a certain amount of resources that you have to distribute and that becomes more or less a question of politics at corporate or bureaucratic level. 
Gaël Duez (47:18.462)Got it. Thanks a lot. I've got one last question for you, Holly. And I know it's me jumping from one topic to another, but it's such a rich material that you're both bringing on the table that I want to cover all angles. You mentioned several times, and I couldn't help telling me we need to discuss this a bit. The community, the impact on communities from locating data centers here and there. And we've seen several papers highlighting across the globe. I think they've been one in the UK, one in the Netherlands, quite a lot in South America as well, local pushback against data centers. And also that Jerry McGovern made a rally battle cry, I would say, fact that economic benefits that are often stated by hyperscalers when they set up a new facility somewhere are vastly overestimated. So I think it's kind of a boiling at the moment, the topic of what do we get when we are in local community and we've got such big buildings consuming so much energy and so much water in our neighborhood with the noises, et cetera. But hey, lot of mayors and politicians, will say jobs, jobs, jobs. 
Holly Alpine (48:56.438)Yeah, yeah, yeah, lots to say here. Yeah, not too many jobs, not that many jobs in a data center. And there is definitely environmental impacts from building a new data center in a community. And what I was trying to do, I was on the data center community development team. So when I was on the energy team at Microsoft, this data center community development team had these economic and social programs where it would try to give back to those local communities in various ways having to do with social and economic benefits. The program that I started was around environmental sustainability. So this was not related to the sustainability impact of the data center itself. There is a team at Microsoft that is trying to reduce the environmental impact of those data centers, whether that's reducing water usage or increasing energy efficiency of the servers that are being used. There's a whole team actually on biomimicry. Well, it's a small team, but they're looking at how they can actually look at ecosystems nearby the data center and try to have the data center have an actually positive impact on the environment. This is in the nascent stages and could use a lot more investment to actually become really relevant to their global portfolio. But there is that team doing some great things to decrease the footprint. What my role was, was understanding the priorities of those data center communities and how we could give back in a positive way to the environments of where those communities were located. I directed investments of over $8 million in the time that I was there across 45 different global mostly investing in urban forestry and ecological restoration projects to provide human well-being and social equity and positive environmental benefits. I’m proud of what I did and my team did. think it's absolutely something that companies should do. If they have a physical presence in a community, they should absolutely have programs to give back. What I wrestle with and what I worry about is the net impact of the work that I was doing. If the work that I did to be a good neighbor was then used to justify increasing data center expansion, there was no net impact analysis on the positive from the work that I was doing and the harms from those data center expansions. So, you know, the jury's out there on the net impact of the work, but that's the work that I was doing for about seven years. 
Gaël Duez (53:19.358)I would say it's interesting that the direct benefits are not that high that actually Microsoft or other companies needed to empower a team with a significant budget. We can discuss 8 millions regarding to the billions made in revenue from Microsoft. Sure, it sounds like very big numbers but proportionally to what we've said earlier in the discussion doesn't seem that high. But hey, I guess with 8 millions, you can achieve a lot of things. But what is interesting is you needed these kinds of programs to offset the environmental cost. And if I rephrase you properly, eventually you didn't have a clear cut understanding on whether you had net positive impact or not when you were implementing a data center in any community. Am I correct stating that? 
Holly Alpine (54:13.016)Yeah, that's right. I mean, absolutely, that team should have way more funding. We are trying to advocate for the funding to be tied to, say, electricity usage and have some percentage of the electricity bill or the construction budget have the amount that goes back to the communities be tied to that and not just be an arbitrary number that we got allocated each year. And that's correct. We did not do an analysis of the cost benefit for the environment through these programs. 
Gaël Duez (54:51.86)Okay, thanks a lot. Still a huge achievement. I could feel it when you say that. We were proud of what we were doing. 
Holly Alpine (55:07.865)absolutely. it wasn't just about the environmental impact too. I a lot of the programs we did, we tried to incorporate really strong principles into these projects that ensured that we had those social equity components and human wellbeing. mean, we were trying to employ local folks who were underemployed. We were trying to ensure that we had different equity components incorporated into where we were doing these projects and ensure that we were putting them in the areas that needed them most. mean, we had really solid principles in the program overall. 
Gaël Duez (55:47.06)Got it. So if I understand, if I can wrap up the first part of this podcast episode, you joined Microsoft because you believed in the brands. Both of you, you were part of a super strong grassroots movement who achieved significant results when it comes to sustainability across all countries where Microsoft is operating. You listed some significant achievements, whether it's your local community program, Holi, deploying SCI, not necessarily at scale, but at least testing it in a very serious production environment for you will. So it was pretty good time. Am I correct to say so? 
Will (56:44.653)I'd say it's been one of the best times of my career thus far, and especially seeing the impact that we've both made at such a scale has been truly rewarding. I'm grateful for the experience. 
Gaël Duez (56:56.54)Okay, so thanks a lot for sharing it. But now I think it's time to ask the $1 million question, At some point, both of you, you decided to leave and you didn't do it that quietly. So could you tell us a bit the story here? …
Gaël Duez (58:31.486)This is the end of the first part of this episode with Holly and Will. The second part where we will discuss why the left and the crisis around enabled emissions will be live next Tuesday, that is October the 19th. Make sure to follow the podcast or subscribe to the email notification not to miss it. 
Gaël Duez (59:09.32)Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing it on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative working in the tech industry seems also good idea regarding what is at stake here. As I always say, we are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners. By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech, subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. London was a blast last month and the next one is in Paris on December the 4th and the 5th. You can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all  I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world, 
Roxane (01:00:48.242)One byte at a time. 




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Today, we don’t have 1 or 2 guests but 12! In partnership with the YouTube channel Architect Tomorrow, we are glad to share with you snippets and interviews of the speakers who made the latest Green IO Conference in London a huge success last month. 
I have no idea if you have some appetite for this kind of content so feel free to come back to me at [email protected] or just comment on our posts on social media. 
One last thing, the audio quality is ok but not great because of the noise at the venue. If this episode gets some success, we will try to find a quieter place and better gear for the next editions of Green IO starting with Green IO Paris on December 4th and 5th. 
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❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.

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🔎 Green SEO? Not the most widespread concept in the sustainability field. Still, seasoned web designers and developers know it well: folks in charge of SEO often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry. 
🎙️ In this episode, Gaël DUEZ invites two seasoned SEO practitioners and pillars of BrightonSEO - one of the world’s top conferences on the topic - Stuart Davies, founder of the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom, and Natalie Arney, an SEO Consultant with a knack for sustainability to explore Green SEO.
Some Takeaways:↔️ the transversality of SEO functions,💻 the alignment of the core web vitals with sustainability goals,🌐 The importance of choosing sustainable hosting providers,♻️ Practical sustainable SEO practices, and much more.
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📧 You can also send us an email at [email protected] to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Natalie and Stuart's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

• Search Engine Land’s interesting study among SEO folks
• GreenSEO
• Jean-Christophe Chouinard’s blog 
• Core web vitals
• Green Web Foundation
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update – Version 20.0 
• GreenSEO Meet-Up Green SEO

Transcript Gael Duez 00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO! I’m Gael Duez and in this podcast we empower responsible technologists to build a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Twice a month on a Tuesday, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the Tech sector and beyond, to boost Digital Sustainability.
And because accessible and transparent information is in the DNA of Green IO, all the references mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript, will be in the show notes. You can find these notes on your favorite podcast platform, and, of course, on our website greenio.tech. 
Green SEO, I had never heard the word before last year when I started discussing the topic with Jean-Christophe Chouinard who happened to be one of the thought leaders on this concept. He reminded me something that I actually experienced many many times in my past years as a CTO: folks in charge of S E O often have the final say when it comes to content, design and even sometimes technical choices. 
And on top of this influence, SEO practices also carry their own environmental footprint being very data hungry. 
Hence to investigate more this angle, I invited 2 pillars of BrightonSEO, one of the top conferences worldwide on the topic, who are also actively launching a fringe event called the GreenSEO Meet-Up on October 2nd Stuart Davies and Natalie Arney. Both are seasoned practitioners in the SEO industry with a more technical angle for Stuart, who Stu founded the Ethical Agency Creative Bloom in 2014 and is also a passionate surfer. And with a focus more on content for Natalie who has been freelancing for 5 years and is also a singer in the Brighton-based community choir. And I must admit this hit a soft spot for me having spent a wonderful year in Brighton when studying at the University of Sussex in … well shall I say this … in 1998. That's quite a long time ago. Hello, Natalie. Hello Stuart. It's great to have you on the show today.

Stuart Davies 02:26
Good morning.

Natalie Arney 02:27
Thanks for having us. Morning.

Gael Duez 02:30
So, as I said, I think I've never realized the pivotal role that SEO could have in enhancing green IT practices. I just wanted maybe to kickstart our discussion with a very simple question, why should we care about Green SEO at all? And maybe, Stuart, if you could share some ideas on it.

Stuart Davies 02:54
Okay, thanks. Thanks, Gael. It's great to be here. So, Green SEO, it's two funny words to put together. In 2012, I commissioned some of my team to do some research on to the impact of websites and digital content on the Internet, and I had an itch back then, the vocabulary sustainable net digital sustainability started to permeate a little bit towards me, but it hadn't quite resonated. Obviously, I run an ethical agency. I've always worked with the green and the good and the good local businesses. So it felt that by helping them with their mission, we were helping to do something positive, but we didn't really have a good handle on the impact that we were making. And I think that research to me was a real eye opener. It was a game changer, it was a significant impact. I think there was one stats which really blew my mind. I think at the time there was a study done by a gentleman and he calculated the carbon impact of the Internet to work out that currently he thinks it's a 7th. If it was a country, the Internet was a country, it would be the 7th largest emitter of carbon emissions on the planet and it's on track to be the second of the United States. So it's quite significant what we're doing. So it felt important that SEOs, because we often, I think, as you said, SEOs sit across the divide of digital often. So we sit against digital strategy, we sit against content, we sit against technical, there are many other facets and rings that we actually kind of sit against and we can help influence a much, many factors as well as SEO itself. So it felt like there was a space for a conversation and a space for learnings to be given and a space for open resource tool sets, and here's how to do your jobs. And that's the place that Green SEO is doing. So we're at the beginning of the discovery curve in terms of SEOs and digital sustainability. But that was the point of Green SEO. It started with three of us, initially in Brighton, and those three have grown to 30, of which Natalie Arney is one of our brilliant speakers in our April BrightonSEO meetup. And we're planning to make that 100 next time. That's our plan.

Gael Duez 05:24
That's a good, healthy, sustainable growth, the one we want. And what about you, Natalie? What brought you to this concept of Green SEO?

Natalie Arney 05:35
I think I've always been into making the world at a better place in lots of different ways. And obviously, as I've kind of changed my lifestyle to better suit the way that I do things in every part of my life, obviously, work is one of those things that I haven't always been able to control. But now, as a freelancer, I'm able to do that a lot more, from client choices to things like helping them improve the impact of their websites and their marketing activity on the rest of the web, so that we're able to be good examples for other people.

Gael Duez 06:23
Your clients, Natalie, are they aware of these topics? How do you bring the topic of, hey, I'm an SEO expert and I'd also like to discuss the sustainability angle. How do you kickstart the conversation with them?

Natalie Arney 06:39
So some of them have already got it on their KPI's and things. So a lot of the brands that I do work with will have targets. So, for example, at the moment, one of my clients actually is being audited to see by a graduate. They're being audited to check every element of their business because what they don't want to do is obviously promote and preach themselves as being a sustainable business and driving all of their activity without doing it in the best way that they can. Some of them, it's part of their brand, as in, we are an e-commerce site that sells things like sells products… It's an interesting one. For example, one of my clients is an e-commerce site, and they dissuade people from buying things.

Gael Duez 07:40
Wow.

Natalie Arney 07:43
So, yeah, so obviously it's being able to be a kind of, if you need something, if you really need something, buy it from them and buy the best option. But if you don't, just don't buy it. And it's funny, you know, having worked for agencies in the past where everything's like, “We've got to sell as much as possible and we've got to hit all of these targets.” And it's actually like, well, and I've had a couple of clients that have got this Simmons, like, the same attitude now. It's like, well, actually, we only really want people who really need the product. And rather than driving this kind of high consumption, we all know of Shein and Temu and those kinds of sites, but it's not just them heavy consumers that's obviously then driving waste, driving, overconsumption, driving unsustainable working practices, child labor, so many different things that the impact is beyond the world or beyond the environment is the world rather than just the environment. And, yeah, being able to kind of work with businesses like that is great, but we don't always have the choice to do so. So it's working with people like that when I can, and then when I'm not, it's looking to see, “Okay, what can I do with my brands to help them become better in terms of, you know, accessibility, security, site speed, anything.” And then a lot of the SEO best practices do then feed into, you know, best practices on the sustainability side. But, yeah, it's kind of slowly and surely with some brands and then with others, it's from day one, as soon as you have your kind of call with them, you know exactly what you're going to be doing with them. So it is quite varied. And not everyone has the benefit of being able to say yes or no, whether they're, you know, agency leaders like Stu or freelancers like myself, we both have a lot more control over who we can work with. Whereas if you're an exec and you're just starting out in your career or you're a couple of years in, you don't always have that ability to do that. So obviously taking, getting involved in maybe company projects and things like that, or seeing what you can do internally and attending meetups like GreenSEO can really help as well because you're skilling the team up on understanding and being able to communicate it. Because if you're working with B-Corps, if you're working with businesses that's got all these big goals, you're going to have to be able to work with them anyway and understand and feed it in and it can help get things signed off as well. It's always nice to get an extra thing, an extra ticket signed off just because it's got a green impact, as well as improving keyword rankings, for example.

Gael Duez 10:41
If we go a little more concrete now, I'd like both of you to explain what are, according to you, the techniques, the SEO techniques that help reduce the environmental footprint of a website, digital services, etcetera. And maybe a bit later we will talk about what is specifically related to SEO. But I mean, we've heard about the size of a website, image management, etcetera, but I'd like you to cover the different angles, not necessarily all of them, but with this extra question, is this aligned or not aligned with what Google expects from us… because eventually they are the big moneymaker here with their ranking.

Stuart Davies 11:34
As Natalie has touched on, I think that some of the core principles or the big ticket items that you could do for sustainability to make your site cleaner do align with the principles of, say, core web vitals and site speed and performance and up to date relevant content rather than content for content's sake. And these kind of big factors which can impact the website. How much of it is Google? I mean, it's quite interesting. During the last GreenSEO, we did post a post, a tweet, no, an x, as it is now, to all of the search engines asking would they consider applying sustainable digital factors in their ranking algorithms? We're yet to have a response, but we will be reminding them of that question again in October. 
So if, you know, one of probably the biggest things you could do is find an accredited renewable energy data host. Okay, so somewhere where your, your website is going to be, it's because that's the problem. It's energy use. And if you can, at least the minimum requirement I think, is if you can find, and you can find accredited green energy hosts on the greenfoundation.org website, there's some really good resources on there. You can find yourself a green energy host and you're moving, you know, from potentially a fossil fuel held data center to a potentially green energy accredited data center. I think that's one of the biggest things like the number one impact. Number one things that a lot of organizations can do. Whether or not that doesn't impact, that's not going to impact the front end of the website, the design or kind of the strategy. And this is just where the website is held. Obviously you need to be able to have the same requirements you need for your hosting and the developers will need to get around that. But that feels for me like a good win. If one thing that people would maybe take away from this, that they're not sure where to hit first, that's one of the big ticket items for me.

Gael Duez 13:45
First things first, make sure you are sustainably hosted. Now once we've got this basic layout, you mentioned that most of the best practices are aligned with the core web vitals. And by core web vitals I guess you refer to the set of best practices that has been pushed by Google as the best way to get good ranking because the information will be easily accessible and as transparent as possible.

Stuart Davies 14:16
It's also how the website loads, how the website renders, how it responds to people who are coming back, how the images are served, how the layout of the pages moves around with the user or doesn't, how certain features react on desktop and mobile. So all of this is starting to go into the world of design and user experience. The core web vitals does hit into that as well. How fast your website loads, obviously, and what's behind it and how that content actually loads to the users as well. So that's some of the core principles of core web vitals and SEO 101.

Gael Duez 14:56
And SEO experts will be fully aligned with sustainably or green IT experts on most of these vitals. Could you maybe name the top three top five that are the no-brainer that as an SEO expert, as someone taking care of the SEO ranking of the website because you don't necessarily hire experts all the time in every company. What will be the top three top five things to keep in mind to make sure that you've got both a good ranking and the lowest possible environmental footprint.

Stuart Davies 15:35
So with core web vitals again, I didn't come up with this word. We use a lot of jargon in our industry and I'm not a techie jargon. Some of the people who work for me and work with me, I call this “make the website quick”. So there, as I know there are three major, three major areas. One is called LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, and that's how quickly the most important content on the page loads. Okay, so you know the banner of the image, however, so you know developers can do things to make that quick. That should occur within 2.5 seconds. That's Google's recommendation for SEO ranking factors. And then that also creates a quickly loaded, presentable website. You then have something called First Input Delay, and that measures how long it takes for a site to respond to a user's first click. Again, these should be very quick metrics and these are some of the things that designers and developers can, can focus on. And then you've got something called CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift. So that measures the page's visual stability as well. So it's about reserving space for images, videos, iframes and optimizing fonts. LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, is all about how to look, how, how you prioritize loading resources, making files smaller, the host resources on the same server and feed. First Input Delay is about reducing the amount of JavaScript and where you can use web workers.

Gael Duez 17:21
And Natalie maybe more on the content side and the philosophy of searching data, are there any things that you'd like to add on these three biggest topics that Stu just covered?

Natalie Arney 17:37
So on the content side, I think a lot of it's to do with graphics when we talk about core web vitals, but also JavaScript. So a lot of people will use JavaScript to load menus and add little fun things to navigate content. And alongside that, some people might even just use JavaScript across their whole site. Now that can be really great in some ways. However, the web is still built on HTML and CSS and that's what search engines usually crawl. They have got better at crawling and rendering JavaScript. However, it's not always as efficient as it should be. So usually they go to the HTML first. So making sure that there's fallbacks is really, really important, not just from, from a search engine point of view and a search perspective and having an impact on the core web vitals, but again, like adding in additional layers to that is good for accessibility as well. So it allows people to navigate content, whether they're, no matter what device they're using, wherever they are, they're able to access that content. So rather than having JavaScript disabled on certain browsers, or just not wanting to have things load as fast, and some people will use stripped out browsers, for example, being able to actually access that content is so, so important. And yet not using as much JavaScript or at least having a fallback is super important because yeah, as Stu's mentioned before, not only is that load time having an impact on things like core web vitals, but it frustrates the user as well and then it increases bounce rate and decreases the value of the content and then there's, there's lots of other impact from there onwards.

Gael Duez 19:33
And so if I kind of gather your point of view, there is one aspect which is basically the size, size, size, size, which is very much aligned with the sustainability angle because the bigger, the more resources, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a complex story. It's not linear, obviously. Absolutely not linear. But eventually, when we multiply by dozens more times the size of websites since a decade, as brilliantly proven in the Web Almanac Sustainably Chapter, I really encourage anyone to read this chapter because it's kind of mind blowing to see the average size of a web page just exponentially growing over just a decade. So it's really about reducing the size. But Natalie, what you'll see advocating, it's also a technical choice, like not using that much JavaScript. It's not just the question of size, but also some choices that could make this website more difficult to load or reduce user experience. And before I ask the elephant in the room question, I've got a final one which is regarding when everything is well aligned. Did you already see some website size decreasing? Like did you manage to reduce the size of web pages and websites? Or is it still very, very hard to reverse the trend that we are seeing in our industry at the moment?

Natalie Arney 21:07
Oh, from my point of view. So it's an interesting one because obviously from the content side of things, my talk when I spoke at BrightonSEO in April was all to do with how content audits can really play a massive part, not just on the SEO side, but environmentally as well because obviously there are so many sites and so many brands that are continuing to believe that the more content you have on your site, the better you're going to rank. And we see on a daily basis in the SEO world, people saying how they're going to scale the content on their website. And oh, we've seen these great exponential growth in all of these places and we've driven traffic so, so high now. Like, you know, we've ten x'ed it, we've hundred x'ed it, we've done all of this. And then it's like, well, is that, has that content got any use to the user? What is the environmental impact of that content? How much time and effort has that content made? If you've not got a team creating that content, how are you creating it? Are you using an LLM? And obviously then there's the impact of the use of LLMs from the environmental footprint side of things, but also from the ethical standpoint as well. And then we've also got the fact that you can have loads and loads of pieces of content that are just not getting any traffic or not getting any decent traffic. So although you might be driving a lot of traffic to your website, the pages might have high bounce rates, they might have, you know, really irrelevant keyword rankings, but obviously being able to use and target more detailed keywords, driving prospective customers rather than general browsers, that really is key for a lot of SEOs now. I guess it's a growing trend that people are like, well, we can make charts go up, we know how to do that, but it's going from driving traffic to driving valuable traffic from the commercial side, but also from the environmental side. And there was, I remember reading a case study a while back of a food waste company, and they basically created a new website. And by creating their new website design and kind of narrowing down the user journey and stripping back their content and ignoring those vanity metrics of increasing traffic, they were then able to save over 500 kilos of carbon emissions a year. So I think it was over two and a half thousand miles of air travel a year. Just by just giving their website a little bit of a sort out, running a content audit, really trimming down their design and making sure that it was just really fast, really simple, really impactful. And yeah, the content actually helped people rather than just driving lots of irrelevant traffic.

Gael Duez 24:07
I'd like to pause here and to share a personal anecdote. When I started my position as a CTO at Solojet, obviously I kind of self audited briefly the website just to understand what was on it. And I ended up discussing with the teams roughly, we've got between five and twelve main pages. Like the pages, like the homepage, the one describing an ad, et cetera, et cetera. But eventually I asked them the question, but how many pages do we have on the website for real? And the answer was more than 1 million and a half. Because for SEO purpose only that amount of pages was and maybe still is created because you basically have one page for every single address in France. Because it is a website based in France. But the same happened in Germany, Israel, Belgium, UK, wherever I worked with a property portal, the same drill and I was shocked like, wow, we are maintaining more than 1 million and a half page. What is the traffic on it? What is the use? I mean, we could get rid of it. Are you really sure? And the answer was always yes. But think about the long tail. It doesn't cost that much. And whenever someone will hit, you know, mostly what is the price for a property in this specific street, in this specific town, etcetera. We want our websites to be ranked super high if possible, number one. So we need to think about the long tail and we need to maintain then 1 million and a half in a highly automated way. And we were not even using LLM back in those days. So this is my personal feedback from a very wasteful behavior. But still, business wise, it makes sense. What would be both of you, your point of view on this? Do you really believe, or is it really the case that the long tail works that well and requires that amount of resources? Or is it a misconception or is it a way between, I would say.

Stuart Davies 26:16
I mean, with long tail content, I have an agreement with most of my clients, but my clients are the green and the good. These are people who are early adopters. The challenge is bringing some of these principles to the mass market. But we've got an agreement where we've got a one in, one out on the website. So it's okay, we'll put in, we'll put in a piece of content, but we're going to take some of it off. And that's how we manage our long tail content strategies. So yes, there is a place for it, because often you are answering useful information, a question that someone wants to ask about your product or service, that it is useful to have or to provide that on your website, but it can go so crazy. And what we found was it kept the size of the website lean and lo and behold, it also kept their content strategy lean and really did their rankings quite well. So that's how we've approached that particular thorny subject.

Natalie Arney 27:13
So I keep going back to it, but my bright and SEO talk, so basically the name of my talk was “Reduce, reuse, recycle your way to content success.” And basically what that involves is obviously content audits. And I really believe in having really impactful, useful content audits on a regular basis, I would say at least every year. And from that side of things, you always need to keep a grasp on which pieces of content are driving traffic and which are getting good engagements. Like I said, with a case study, having that impactful content that drives conversions, that drives kind of meaningful traffic, rather than just making the graph go up, is so, so important. I think looking at what you can consolidate and what you can improve in terms of content is so important. You might have some really useful content from years ago that just needs a refresh. That could drive a lot more traffic through better keyword rankings. It could be that you have got some outdated information, for example, on an article, and you can just go in and tweak it rather than creating a whole new article. Or it might be that you go back and you've been working on a client for a couple of years and you find some content from about five to ten years ago that could be relevant to you now. And instead of creating a whole brand new article in your content calendar, you could consolidate all of that content together and get rid of additional pages and put everything in one new piece of content. And it's making sure that your content strategy isn't just creating more content and targeting the long tail, it's being able to do it in an effective way. And that's not just from an environmental point of view, but also from an SEO point of view. Years ago, people would create pages upon pages to answer every single query. And obviously, because Google's semantic, it groups content together. Well, in theory, it groups content together by theme and by topic anyway, so you might have pieces of content that might not mention a keyword or a theme, but are related to that keyword or a theme, then ranking for those related terms. And it's like, well, they might be ranking low, but Google and Bing can see that you're trying to kind of target that. It's almost giving you hints when you look at it and go, oh, well, actually, I could work that into that article. And it's looking at that content and saying, well, actually, what have we got now? What do we need? And can we fulfill what we need with what we've already got? And then moving on to creating that new content. So you might have articles, you might have landing pages, and see what you can consolidate, what you can improve before then going on and making brand new content. If it's more kind of on an evergreen side, if it's more trend led, then obviously it's creating that content there and then being able to do that. But where you specifically got really kind of evergreen content, it is so, so important to have your regular content audits, content refreshes and it can work. I had a client last year and it's one piece of content. It was getting less than 300 visits a month and we basically went through, gave some recommendations. It was a couple of paragraphs worth of text that needed to be added and a few headings that needed to be moved around. Within six months, that content was getting over 3000 visits a month. Just for that one piece of content. It was the top piece of content on the site. So it's really, really important to refresh that content because you never know what you might be missing out on and obviously who you're missing out on as well, without then having to create lots and lots of new content, which then has the impact on the hosting, this page, speed and everything else.

Gael Duez 31:06
And if I'm following you there, what I hear is two main messages, which are first of all, chase the right metrics, get rid of vanity metrics. After all, even if you're an e-commerce website, you don't want people to spend 1 hour on your website, you want them to spend 10 seconds and then, you know, live their life after having buy your items, obviously. And the second one is the issue is more about stewardship, about caring about your content, recycling your content than just adding new one.

Stuart Davies 31:40
There's another issue here as well, Gael, and this might segue us nicely into SEO specific green SEO strategies and tactics. This applies certainly for bigger websites, those with thousands, tens of thousands, some have hundreds of thousands, some have millions of pages and it's managing the bots or managing the crawlers. So out there you've got lots of web crawlers, you've got Google, you've got Bing, you've got so many different kinds of SEO tools. You've got ChatGPT coming into websites now and all of the various permutations of AI tools coming in, there's a lot of malicious stuff coming in the spam. There's a huge amount of now that creates resources as well, that creates resource drain and energy use as well every time a crawler comes into your website. And what SEOs can do specifically is they can use the robots txt file. So it's a file where we can instruct website crawlers what to do and what part of the website to look at. So, you know, if we think at scale, we've got a huge, huge, massive website with lots of archive material. I know Will Barnes from Reed Pop. He works for a gaming company. So they have lots and lots and lots and lots of archive website material which they want to keep but not rank. So they will use their robots txt file to say, this is just our archive. We might pull out some of them. But I don't want you to come in and crawl this anymore because you're, you know, I want you to focus on the bit of the site I want you to do. Or you could have lots of FAQs sections on your site which are just for readers. It's not useful for search because you might just have one FAQ page. You can also block the search engine from using that. So on a one page basis it might not feel like much. But when you start adding this stuff at scale, it does become important and it creates less load on the servers. We can also block AI, ChatGPT. It's yet to be quantified. What the impact of that is on website loads, but I imagine it is quite significant. But what we're doing at GreenSEO is we are going to produce a file SEOs and digital marketers can use to put on their robots txt files. That's the file that controls the search engine which blocks all of the bad bots. So it's saying these are definitely ones which will come into your website that you do not want anywhere near it. And then again, sir, that's going to be open source on the greenseo.org website. And that's really going to help with the server load and the resource use on websites as well.

Gael Duez 34:30
Yeah, because obviously it drains resources. It creates data which has to be stored and analyzed sometimes, et cetera, et cetera. But it also drains resources from the owner of the website because they need to enter these bots. Okay, got it.

Stuart Davies 34:45
So it's like we're all littering and someone's coming up to your property and leaving their litter and you didn't ask them to.

Gael Duez 34:53
I think it's a great example and I love the idea of creating some sort of open source community where everyone will share. Okay, bad bots file, like the Dark Web Foundation repository, like you've got the Green Web Foundation, like not dark web, maybe gray Web, whatever. Yeah, that's definitely a great idea. And something that I didn't consider because I was more considering the robot text.

Stuart Davies 35:22
The robots that text.

Gael Duez 35:23
Yeah. As you know, something that you don't want data to be produced when it's not needed. But actually, yes, obviously it can drain a lot of resources from your own hosting solutions.

Stuart Davies 35:37
It's a good place to start, especially for big websites, websites at scale, e-commerce websites, anyone with a huge footprint, again, that can really help.

Gael Duez 35:46
And as an SEO expert, or not expert necessarily, but an SEO practitioner, do I have things to change specifically in the way I work or new tools to embrace to help me with having a more sustainable way of working?

Stuart Davies 36:02
So the GreenSEO website, greenseo.org, is a repository and a toolset and it has the playbooks of here are the things that can help you do your job, here are the tools that you can use to address speed, page weight design, here are the other people who are talking about it, such as sustainable design resources, such as pointing to whole grain, digital, Green Web Foundation and a sustainable web, all of those resources as well. And we've also put on there from our learnings some of the playbooks in terms of how you can go about introducing a sustainable web into a large organization that doesn't necessarily have it at the core of its values. And we expect that to grow. It's going to be open source and it's for anyone who's got a story, anyone who's done something to contribute to this. The whole thing about it is just getting it out and saying, “Here you go, here are tools to do your job and here are some of the learnings and here's what we've done and here's what's worked.” So that's a good place to start.

Natalie Arney 37:05
So one of the things that most SEOs have got in our toolkits is a crawler. And the two main crawlers that I use are Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. And one of the things that Stu's managed to and the GreenSEO team have managed to arrange with Screaming Frog is that in the Screaming Frog crawlers now you can get the carbon impact of certain pages and elements in the auditing tool, which is fantastic. So when you are auditing a site and if you want to add in as part of your website auditing process or a separate process altogether, it might be, say, feeding into a consultant like one of my clients has got at the moment where they're auditing everything on the site and not everything to do with the business is, yeah, you can use that and that's fantastic. And thank you to Screaming Frog for doing that because it's going to help a lot of us do our job a little bit more effectively. And then obviously when you're using your crawlers, you can switch them into dark mode as well, which is always handy too. So yeah, always switch your crawlers into dark mode.

Gael Duez 38:13
I reckoned integrated the CO2 GS library to calculate the website carbon. Am I right or is it something to check?

Stuart Davies 38:23
Yes, I believe that is correct. Yes.

Gael Duez 38:27
And actually, Natalie, you touched upon something interesting as well, which is the amount of data that is produced by each SEO practitioner. That sounds to be quite significant. When you crawl and crawl and crawl over, is there anything also that you, or Stu, you want to tell us in terms of best practices and how to reduce our own environmental footprint?

Natalie Arney 38:54
Go on, Stu, I think you're fair.

Stuart Davies 38:57
Okay. Right. So I'll go first. So yes, SEOs and digital marketers use a lot of analytics tools and we use a lot of software for SEO for conversion rate optimization, for UX, for example. Heat mapping is a very good example. So they'll get used on 1% of the website, on a project that might run over one month and they'll put scripts and recordings onto the website. And then generally tools like that are then left to run. Also all of the various kinds of plugins that are active on browsers. And so things like this, again, it's our own kind of personal imprint as well. So what digital marketers and SEOs can do is make sure that if they're using any analytics tools and crawlers as well, like setting regular crawls and all of those things is take the scripts off of the website once they've been used or make sure that you're not littering. Make sure you're only using things and switching things on when you need to use them. I think there's like so many software tools that go into people's websites and crawling because someone set off a project on a website crawler at some point and it's just sitting there doing it, it's not being used and it's just taking data and things like that. So we personally can do that. So I'd say that someone would want to check what's running on their website and also personally, what have you got running in the background on your own machine that's on all the time or not on all the time, and think very carefully about, you know, what tools you use and also maybe check out the credentials of the tools that you're using. You know, you could run their website through a carbon metric and see how that stacks up. Or you could even better write to them and ask them and introduce the conversation to them. So there's definitely things that we can do individually.

Gael Duez 40:51
Yeah, I think Holly Cummins that coined the word cloud zombie, you know, in the DevOps words that you kick start an instance or a server, et cetera, and you don't pay attention because it costs not that much money because the load is so low, et cetera. So maybe in the SEO world there is something like crawl zombies or optimizing tool zombies that we should pay attention to. But that's so true. I mean, I've audited websites and some pages where I had countless ads on that were not used anymore. And a bit of JavaScript here and a bit of JavaScript there and oh, it used to be for this media campaign that we ran like one year ago. I was like, what the hell? We don't need that anymore. But we tend to forget. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So we covered a lot of techniques and how to make SEO practices greener. Maybe one of you could share a practical example. I mean, do you have a client, even if you cannot name it, who actively embraced a GreenSEO approach and where you could share what worked well, what didn't work that well, what are the main pain points? Like if someone wants to kickstart a conversation in his or her company or clients, what should be the best first steps based on these use cases that one of you could share?

Stuart Davies 42:28
I'm happy to share one. I can't name the company. What I can do is say that one of the Co-Founders of GreenSEO is involved with this company and it is an extremely large international global tech firm with an extremely large footprint and extremely complex change management IT barriers, getting things done. So this was very example, so this is an example of a super huge company, super huge corporation, and then somebody trying to introduce some of the principles of GreenSEO digital web and what we call this is planting seeds, I think, and this is the right lot, people can take this away is this is a big subject, but what you can do is plant a seed and watch it grow. And so what the person did is he decided to go after dark mode. Okay, so wanted to do something. Dark mode reduces the energy use of the person, browsing the screen on the load, et cetera, et cetera. And so you wanted to introduce dark mode on the sustainability section of the website. Okay, got there. So what he had to do initially was get buy-in. So he went and tapped on the shoulder of the sustainability person and he also got user polls. He did user polls internal and external to get some stats behind the change as well. So he was starting to push out. But what is really important is you've got to contextualize the argument. So what this person did was measure the carbon weight of the pages and then say, measure it what it would be like in dark mode and say, well, this could be the impact. And wouldn't this be great as part of our CSR reporting that we've actually done something to actually clean our own pages? Okay. So the sustainability team got really interested. Okay. He then actually, then spoke to some of the developers, got buy-in from his management. He had to do a presentation, internal presentation. He had to get find some friends and they all went for it. And so he had the development team in there, he had the change team, the branding team. Everybody loved it. That was kind of the key learning here. Everybody loved it and nobody put in a barrier of obstacles. The only thing they asked for is that the dark mode would be a toggle that users could switch on and off just to satisfy any kind of jittery stuff. And then the DevOps team just put it through. They just went, oh yeah, we've just put it, we've just done it. So they didn't have to go through the big change stack as well. So this was like immediately there was one page and then suddenly a week or so later, the sustainability team from one of the other countries got in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we get that as well? And then suddenly other sections from the website, because it's quite siloed, start getting in touch saying, what have you done there? Can we do this? And then as a result of that, one of the sub-sites of this massive technology firm, which has a footprint of say, 100,000 pages, it's going to do the entire subdomain on dark mode toggle. So that's, that's how and that's extremely impactful. So that's going to save a huge amount of carbon. I haven't quantified it, but that just shows you how you plant one seed and you can start small, can suddenly grow off and take mode and, you know, it's what we call marginal gains. You know, there is a marginal gains strategy to SEO and there is a lot of… can't talk about it, but also marginal gains to sustainability because it is such a big subject and it can be quite scary for large organizations to do something which is going to impact their strategies. But these kinds of small seeds that can be planted seem to sprout. So I think that was a really good, really good case.

Gael Duez 46:12
At least on my island, you can see quite often that a plant will break a rock after just a few years. So at the pore of seed, definitely. Maybe, Natalie, from your perspective, going the absolute opposite direction with a very small company, if you had to advertise like a small or medium sized company running a basic website, maybe a small e-commerce activity, or, I don't know, a small media activity like greenio.tech, which is not optimized for SEO as well. I know I need to pay attention to it, but I didn't have time. So anyway, what will be the main steps? Knowing that it's less a question of seeds that I guess budget and having the time to start something?

Natalie Arney 47:04
Yeah, I think as you mentioned earlier, I think it's really important to think about your hosting, first of all, because it has so much of an impact. Obviously, my talk at GreenSEO is about greenwashing and there are hosts that do greenwash. So it's really, really important not just for the environment, but also for your brand reputation, is to work with partners that don't greenwash and that actually, you know, that work really well. And there are some really great companies out there that do some great, great things on top of having a greener hosting and legitimately greener hosting. So I would say start there. Always think about from an SEO point of view, but also from a sustainability point of view, think about the value and the use of the content that you're creating. Really, really important. And do you always need that extra bit of JavaScript or is it just to make the user or the client and not even impress the user? Is it there to impress your boss or the client, or is it there to be actually helpful for the user? Because obviously at the end of the day, everything that we're doing is for the user, whether that's to make their web experience better or to make sure that their children and grandchildren have got a nice place to live in a few years time. So it's kind of encompassing all of that together, I would say, yeah, if you've got a small website, think about the hosting, double check kind of sense check what you're doing to the site. And yeah, see if you can get, if you're say, on WordPress, it's pretty easy to get your core web vitals scores as close to 100% as possible. Obviously using different technologies is a little more difficult, especially out of the box. And obviously a lot of SMEs use things out of the box like Wix and Squarespace and things like that. But yeah, and then I think, yeah, I think about hosting, think about platform, think about content, think about load speed, and they're there. The fundamentals, not just from the environmental point of view, but it's SEO best practices as well.

Gael Duez 49:20
And maybe before we close the session, is there a situation where what Google expects from us is not aligned with a more sustainable approach?

Natalie Arney 49:36
I guess it depends on what your position is about SEO tactics, because there's a lot of different types of people in the SEO world. There are people who will flood the Internet with garbage and obviously that floods the environment with garbage and they don't care about that. And then there are people who care about good quality content that actually serves the user's needs. And without going into too much detail and discussion about Google and the changes that have happened in the last few years in particular, at the end of the day, Google wants to be able to serve the best results for the user and to keep people on their platform as much as possible. So it's thinking about what is going to be useful for you and your users, because depending on what happens with all kinds of monopoly, breakups and business related corporation things to do with the search engines and to do with potential competition on the horizon from other companies that may or may not be just doing it to inflate their stock prices and investments, it's really, really important to think that obviously we don't just get traffic from search or we don't just get traffic from Google. People are moving away slightly, maybe using alternatives for lots of different reasons. But yeah, I think it depends on what… I hate being as SEO and saying it depends, but it does depend on what kind of SEO you are, whether you're one that kind of cares and does kind of as best practice as possible, whether that's against Google's conditions or not. It's what impacts you and your site and your users, or whether you just don't care and you're just going to continue to flood the Internet. We've got absolute, and I mean garbage. There are other terms that I did use in my brain, SEO talk about that. And you know, Ed Zitron and Co will talk about that a lot more in their kind of publications and podcasts about the changes that have been made, particularly at Google. But I think, yes, it's important to kind of consider what kind of SEOs people are first and then go from there.

Gael Duez 52:07
Got it about the garbage. I think we've all experienced this kind of website or content.

Stuart Davies 52:13
I mean, I thoroughly believe that the principles of GreenSEO are aligned to good SEO. So there's nothing in there at all that I would see that is going to impact your rankings. It might upset some brand designers when it's kind of, you're starting to sort of move into the design things when you talk about fonts and images and videos and sort of things like this. But there's nothing I have seen so far in terms of tactics for GreenSEO or green web that I think would significantly impact rankings. In fact, I think it really complements it in most cases.

Gael Duez 52:53
Okay, so not such a hard sell to do with clients or executives.

Stuart Davies 53:00
The hard sell is around behavior. It's ingrained behavior. It's ingrained behavior that this is how our website needs to look. It's ingrained behavior that this is how the marketing team creates content and churns it out. It's those ingrained behaviors like, oh, this is how we know this weird digital environment works. You know, we have our big glossy websites with lots of resources on and we know that works. And we know if we produce lots of content, we know that worked. And what we're saying is we're starting to see case studies where that's not the case, but it's those behaviors and that's the cell and because the data is still coming out, which is why it's very important to contextualize the debate and maybe to start small. So we go actually, well, we're going to tackle one section of the website. Let me try this one section of the website and we'll see what happens with it. So that's how I think people can start to make inroads into that ingrained behavior.

Gael Duez 53:58
Okay, thanks a lot, both of you. Before we close the podcast, you mentioned it several times, but do you want to pitch one last time the GreenSEO Meetup in Brighton? Why should people attend and what kind of people should attend?

Stuart Davies 54:20
Well, you should attend because it's hosted by us and we're really lovely people. And it's a community starting to come together of digital marketers and SEOs who care about the environment and have either a story to tell or have done something or have found some way to help clean up the environment or help them do their job. And it's part of BrightonSEO, which is one of the world's biggest search marketing conferences, I think. And they're really, really great and they've given us the platform as part of their conference to be able to have this fringe side event really focused on sustainability. We've got Screaming Frog as our sponsor. They are demonstrable impact in helping SEOs do their job to be able to do carbon audits. And we've got three great speakers lined up as well, which Nat was one of ours in the last time. It's free. There's going to be drinks, soft and other types of drinks as well. Just 2 hours. So if anyone is in Brighton and you're there as part of the BrightonSEO conference, just pop in the GreenSEO BrightonSEO event and you can just sign up for a ticket and come straight along. It's just a couple of hours and we will most probably go to a pub afterwards. There we go. Sold it.

Stuart Davies 55:46
We like a good pub called Gael.

Stuart Davies 55:57
Now we're going to the pub.

Stuart Davies 56:03
I know, I know, I know.

Gael Duez 56:14
Okay, great. It was really great to have both of you on the podcast. Best wishes for GreenSEO Brighton and hope to see you maybe in Green IO London as well. Thanks again for joining. Have a nice day.

Natalie Arney 56:27
Thank you.

Stuart Davies 56:28
Thank you very much.

Gael Duez 56:30
Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode! If you enjoyed it, share it, and give us 5 stars on Apple or Spotify. It will make a lot of difference to help us find new responsible technologists.
In our next episode, we will welcome the Bonnie and Clyde of Azure to talk about Microsoft Cloud Solution, its carbon footprint and the dilemma cloud providers face when it comes to sustainability choices. Holy and William Alpine will tell us more about their past experiences as Azure employees and the quite harsh articles they recently wrote about it. 
Stay tuned.  
Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. The next one is in Paris on December 4th and 5th. And you can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP, just make sure to have one before they’re all gone. I’m looking forward to meeting you there, to help you - fellow responsible technologists - build a greener digital world. 

Roxane 
One byte at a time 


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