 Our speaker is Chris Adams and maybe we're talking about reducing carbon in the digital realm How to understand the environmental impact of the digital products you build and take measurable steps to green your stack As far as yours cool Hello, everyone. First of all, can you folks hear me at the back? Yeah, if you can just raise your hands Excellent. Cool. All right. Hello everyone. My name is Chris Adams As you can see a mr. Credit Chris Adams on pretty much ever online really Please don't try to follow this link because it's not going to actually go anywhere yet But it will be up at the end of this talk Uh, I'm just going to introduce myself if you don't already know me My name is Chris Adams. I have a background working in environmental kind of wacky startups from loco 2 Which was all about trying to make trains easier to book than planes Amy which was all about putting kind of carbon calculation as an api So you could work out the carbon footprint of anything and I'll spend a bunch of my time working with the green web foundation Where our mission is to basically make the web green and I also help organize an online community called climate action dot tech Which as you can see is for folk like yourselves who want to work out how to do something about climate in in in their day job and what they do Uh, I'm got about 45 minutes with you and uh, this is a kind of rough outline for the day I'm going to briefly give you a kind of primer on how you measure carbon and why you might measure that Uh, I'll I'll share with you a mental model which I found useful For helping think about what steps I can actually take as a professional working in this field And then I'll give you some pointers of where to go next if you feel compelled to do something about Well, what is essentially an existential challenge and the biggest challenge we are really facing So, uh, first of all, uh measuring carbon So can you just show you raise your hands if you've seen this before? Yeah, the water cycle So you get the idea that we've got like a water kind of evaporates Goes along into the sky then comes down and rains And then generally it's best if it doesn't all go in one place because that's a that's a good thing But generally we have like cycles in nature and one of them we have is cut is for water And uh, we also have uh cycles elsewhere and that's kind of what I want to share with you here Because there are also cycles around carbon So what you're seeing here is actually some freeze frames of a really really cool, but somewhat confusing video And uh, as I was saying kind of carbon works on a kind of slower timescale that might have here So this is an I this is basically a diagram of all the carbon in the world with some idea of proportions All right, so the green stuff up here. This is us like we're made of carbon It turns out so a tree trees are made of carbon and when living things die and decompose some of the carbon Ends in the atmosphere as we decompose The purpley bit stuff here. This is like the ocean Fisher made of carbon too and so are plants and everything like that and when they die they sink down Which is why you've got this massive chunky like a stock of carbon down here Eventually some of that might become sediment then form rock then end up in this kind of black stuff around here Which we kind of consider the earth's crust So and then at the top we've got carbon in the atmosphere So you probably can't see it very well, but there is carbon up here This is kind of atmospheric carbon really and there's like if you watch this video that I've linked to You can see it all moving around as a cycle But this is kind of well carbon really So now in about 1850 we started using a lot more energy And and to meet that demand of all this energy we started burning fossil fuels in earnest As well as burning wood for fuel and you can see the fossil fuels here as kind of stuff that's kind of come out of here and is now represented here and It's we've also taken some carbon that was in the earth and burned some of that and like there's a where does all where does this all go? There's a clue in these arrows on the screen, right? Now if we fast-forward to 2017 Uh, it looks a bit more like this you've seen like there's less of this red stuff down here Because it's got into here and because it's circulated all the way around We've ended up with well carbon We ended up carbon in other parts of earth and in particular You'll see that we have fewer red dots down here But we've got a lot more around here which has kind of pushed some of the carbon higher up here So this is kind of if there's one thing I want you to kind of really take away is that when we talk about climate It's really about carbon and we need as an industry to be able to get good at understanding How to reduce carbon more than anything else if we're going to be thinking about climate Now I'll try and break this down to a kind of simple way which I found so you're really really useful for this There's a lady on twitter. Her name is professor Julia K. Steinberger. She's awesome But she has this really nice way She recently like shared this like thread on twitter where she basically explained How she explains kind of climate change to her children who are four and seven years old And she basically did it this way. She got like a globe Wrapped it in some plastic and then said well, this is basically what happens You understand the idea of being wrapped up and things getting warm and things getting too warm That's it. And like that turned out to be a really effective way for her to do it And it turned out if like if kids can get this stuff then I think we can and I think it's Really really useful for us to kind of be aware that carbon is actually a thing that we do need to be able to count And track and account for in our jobs So we've spoken about this at a kind of planetary scale, which isn't all that actionable But if we were to kind of bring this down to an organizational scale where most of us might kind of work at a more specific Might be easier for us to act upon it might look a little bit like this There are established ways to measure carbon within an organization you work in And in the same way that accountants might talk about legal ownership of a company There are guidelines for talking about who has responsibility for emissions when you're reporting and deciding who should be Who should be making reductions? And I'm sharing this diagram here to basically take some very very dull dry material into something that we can relate to Which is hot beverages and coffee and generally you can think of it think of it like this if I There's three kind of scopes There's this idea of scope one emissions Which is basically if I burn fossil fuels to heat up a say container so I can have coffee Then that's the emissions from me burning those fossil fuels myself for my scope one emissions Scope two might be me using a kettle So if someone is a burning coal to generate electricity for me to kind of boil a kettle Then that's my scope two Now scope three might be me walking to a stall or into a coffee shop and all the emissions and all that supply chain That's my scope three So there's this idea of a kind of like dependency chain of carbon Which because I'm speaking to a bunch of people who have some understanding where technology I think you should be kind of you should you should be relatively comfortable with the concept of dependency chains and things like that And to make this a bit more a bit more concrete. I'll refer it to say a good example. So stripe is in on hood of stripe here Okay, a few of you. Okay. So basically payments company. All right now They are actually pretty good about sharing information about what they do and what their emissions are and you can see this here they uh they've basically got In 2017 they started making noises about becoming carbon neutral and they started reporting information in these kind of scopes here And uh, you'll see this phrase t c 2 o e But basically just think of that as carbon dioxide the stuff that's warming up the world Because there's different gases, but they all have more or less the same effect So in many cases people will use the term co2 e to describe all of these kind of basket of gases. All right But you'll see here that from uh, the scope one emissions are quite small because they're usually just heating a building Scope two is a little bit higher because they pay to Say, uh, we'll keep a building running and then you'll see down here that uh, there's massive scope three because they tend to Pay for a lot of infrastructure and have a lot of people flying around as the pre evangelists and so on All right, uh, let's look at some other some other examples amazon so amazon repeat um started reporting on co2 emissions for the first time this year and uh long story short Their carbon footprint is about the same as the country of finland Right, which is kind of large and as you can see because uh, obviously they run loads of service Which is why you got four and a half million tons of co2 They also have a lot of warehouses and things like that and have a lot of kind of cars or vehicles for getting things around But because they actually have a large supply chain themselves They have a massive honking great scope set of scope three emissions. So let's look at another company, right? Uh google so google's uh google has a surprisingly low emissions considering its scale About the same as the african country of liberia. All right. Now. There's something interesting here google Have reported their emissions with scope one two like that you can see here and three But they have this interesting thing here where this is the energy they're using But this is the energy they say they're using because they are purchasing What are basically called renewable energy credits? Which is one way of using green energy if you do not have Access to green energy on certain parts of the grid and google are pretty good in this field But it's worth bearing that in mind google are transparent about this stuff Whereas amazon you don't see these numbers. So this number could be sort of somewhat higher for we know. All right So this gives you an idea of what some of these numbers might look like and then let's look at another company Which was also when you I assume you might have heard of if this works. Yes Uh, oh, have I got it uh apple. Yeah, so apple have uh, these are the emissions for just their facility So just their data sensors and just say the offices that they have, right? So this is quite low by comparison, right? So this is carbon emissions of maybe the gambia another small african country. All right, and you'll see once again By sourcing renewable energy They've had a kind of quite big reduction in the emissions that they would otherwise would have had But you'll also see that in scope three because uh, there's lots of flying and because there's lots of commuting That you have a lovely new office uh miles away from anywhere. So you have to drive to get there You end up with like, I don't know 40 of the emissions for just their facilities from people to drive there and back. All right But if you look at the emissions from apple as all the products that people buy You'll see that the emissions are somewhat larger about the same size as mongolia Which is kind of large and you will also see that there is a large This is a breakdown from apple's own report and they basically they're pretty transparent about this stuff And they're good on this and they say this is where the emissions come from and you you can see all The way around here This is the manufacturing the the machines they have and then if we zoom in to like this bit over here Right, you'll see that there's a little bit of information. There's like obviously use phase But the main car the main impact from what they do is actually making the electronics So this is kind of how we tend to think about a Carbon and how one might report on carbon and make and make decisions to reduce carbon. All right Now I'm going to share with you a mental model, which I found helpful in this field. I call it a platform packets and process And it's generally aimed at taking something which is quite abstract to this scope one two and three thing So something that you might act upon inside the teams that you work in and it kind of maps to The the kind of groups that you might be working in if you're say a front-end developer or a back-end developer Or a designer or a product manager So it kind of tries to map to that and as you can see platform might be infrastructure You run packets is infrastructure other folk run like the rest of the internet And process will be decisions that are made inside your organization that cause there to be emissions So if you hey, you're a large company and you have a massive Say corporate campus, which is miles away from anyone else everyone has to drive to Then there's going to be a load of emissions from that decision that you actually make So let's run through this uh on that scoped one two three thing I shared with you This is kind of how it maps and this might look like some of the things and some activities you might have Be involved in that will create emissions So generally on the platform side if it's your if you're running infrastructure yourself, it'll be scope two If it's scope three, you'll see here and well, I'll I'll I'll go into the other ones in more detail later All right, so this is this to the model that I'm showing with you today. All right So let's have a look at platform infrastructure that you run There are kind of three levers, which I'm going to share with you today, which might be of use to you. All right There are so basically provisioning provider and I'm a bit worried about showing this last one because it's kind of new the idea of programming languages And that's partly based on some stuff from yesterday, but also I'm a bit worried about kind of Insighting the pitchforks when I share this, uh, but we'll see where we go with this So provisioning is one lever you might actually have if you build digital products and you run servers. All right So this this chart you see here is a chart from uh, the ce power of wireless cloud report This basically shows how australia uses the internet and uh, it gives you an idea that well we don't use the internet in a uniform fashion all the time because Basically, if you think about us being set a midnight as we tend to fall asleep We tend to use internet less. All right, and then as we wake up We might say kind of have coffee or something like that and then as more of us come to work We start using it more and then later on we work in during the day that we all go home But you will start watching netflix and things and then once again we fall asleep and then we get to there So there is a kind of pattern and if you have any analytics on how your own tools are used or your own services are used You'll see these kind of waves and patterns in how it works And uh, this is worth bearing in mind because traditionally when we've had to provision service Services to support something like a website or a video streaming service The way that we used to do it was basically by a big server that could handle the peak usage And uh, we just accept that because provisioning is quite a difficult kind of a Because it's a real pain to do We just leave this big box idling most of the time in the hope that we could actually hit the Serve things at the peak, right now the downside of that is that um Well, if we can make this conceptual leap at the cloud and computing as someone else's computer Then it shouldn't be that much of a leap again to realize that computers run electricity And uh, we generally burn fossil fuels right now to generate electricity So in the example we had before when we had this big box that wasn't being used We would basically be burning money to pay for capacity we didn't have But we're also burning fossil fuels and causing emissions one way Now we've got better at kind of running infrastructure All right So we've had this kind of trend over the last say 10 to 15 years to abstract machines away to make them easier to manage So this might be vms or containers or dinos or unicorns or whatever You might prefer to use but in general the pattern is make something more abstract And then make it easier to spin it up and down in response to Demand, all right. This is better because we now have something that looks a bit like this So we are not we're wasting less We're burning less money, but we're still burning money. And as a result, we're still burning fossil fuels Now there's some new changes in the last few years, which are relatively recent And we're seeing kind of changes in how we work now which look a lot looks look and sound are sometimes referred to as like Serverless or functions as a service if you work on the back on the back end with service, right now here This is a interesting because we're rewarded for efficient use of compute because we basically pay on a per request basis So if someone tries to load a page we pay for Specifically that request and then when we're not using it theoretically we're paying for no we're paying for nothing And theoretically things can spin right down So there's a much clearer mapping between the usage and what you would pay for here Now there is a trade-off here That is that the number of providers that if we if you want to use some tools like this and have this much Tighter mapping is that we end up with a small number of people who do provide this So if you were to go to if you want to move to something like this You generally end up using something like either microsoft stacks or googles or aws and this kind of Presents us with a kind of awkward problem right now If we care about climate and we care about like they Like basically being able to solve problems as say professionals We end up having to choose two of these three things so We kind of care about the fossil fuel thing because we're in a climate crisis officially now right well as of uh I think december when the EU parliament declared this If you are used to running any kind of online service You'll be aware that in many cases there is a kind of shift to Basically use a hosted thing because it turns out that running infrastructure is extremely complicated and in many cases If you can buy versus build then you'll often save yourself a lot of hassle Then the final one thing is well Avoiding oligopolies is quite a good thing and because diverse ecosystems are healthy ecosystems and We kind of don't really have so many options right now We if you do care care about this it does feel a little bit like this And as we saw from just yesterday if you were in this stage you saw You you saw julien oliver talking about this and how much infrastructure you end up having to run themselves Uh in many cases because we end up with this consolidation where if you want to use one service You end up having to buy into all these other things associated with that company. All right So that's one of the trade-off you might have to think about when it comes to say platform I'm provisioning provider is also another decision and that might affect it now I did mention in the beginning of this talk that you can basically reduce the emissions From what you do if you use say a cloud provider like aws just by running it in a different region So you can see this map here This is by this person who is basically paid by amazon to build kind of sketch notey things And this is a list of all the data centers and you'll see the ones with the green leaves Which are marked as kind of sustainable regions and you'll see on the right hand side Uh on the east coast of america, which is around north virginia, which has traditionally been cold country That there's you don't have much in the green regions there But on the left hand side Where you'll see a load of kind of leaves and that's because on the west coast of america there's a lot more hydro and uh, and and things like that So you know with like kind of a lower co2 for each kind of unit of compute that you'd be that you're paying for So yes, you can reduce the emissions just by switching from one region to another region And this is because Basically took to expand that point I shared with you before Where you are in the world like the place will affect the carbon intensity Of the emissions that come from running infrastructure anywhere. So let's have a look at europe, right? So france kind of green full of nukes, right? So that's good for some people Maybe less so in germany, right germany, which is but up here. This is the land of solar and coal All right, so we're not all that green england has actually got a little quite a bit better than than it was before but up here you can see poland Oh, not so good. Poland's really really into coal And as you can see up here in the nordic states where there's loads and loads of mountains and winds and water That things are really really green and uh, this gives you an idea that you can kind of see Where the mission the likely emissions might be depending on where you are in the world And you might make decisions based on this but to have to kind of compare against this Is going to be quite a complicated process. So one thing that we do All right At the greenwood foundation, which is where I currently work Is we build like a directory to make it easy if you to make the do the right thing And we present this information as an api and as data sets for you to kind of build into your own tool In which I'll expand on a little bit later But one of the key things is that your provider will actually have an impact on who you Basically where something is will have will have an impact on the emissions from here There's there's also a kind of this at this point here that I want to segue bit into kind of energy markets because When you start working with computers and you if you have to if you're responsible for any servers The more you think about cloud or end up having to work with cloud The more you realize how many how many parallels there are to energy markets Now energy markets are really interesting in lots of strange ways, right? So in europe well actually in lots of places around the world You can have cases where the cost of electricity is actually negative Rather than a positive. So like on a day where there's which is really really sunny or really really windy for it's actually cheaper for the grid to basically pay people to uh, basically take energy off the grid to keep it stable then it is to say Power down a nuclear power station or power down some kind of large coal fired power station And in and result you're not getting in with these scenarios where you have negative And you have negative costs and one of the and one of the reasons here is to basically get people to kind of Take this demand and put it to use in other places And uh, I'm sharing this with you because it's a kind of uh, the idea like shifting load might be Might be something you're aware of as developers or trying to kind of delay jobs for example But you see this manifesting now in how we use energy Well, basically things like with EVs and things. So this is an example Bulb energy in the uk They will basically if you have a car They'll basically have tariffs now where depending on the time of day or if you're prepared to kind of provide be a little bit less Strict about when you need something running then you'll get a cheaper Cheaper cheaper electricity And why am I sharing this with you because I think you're starting to see things like this in uh on like in the in the realm of like Computing now. So this is a paper. Uh, that was shared this year at the ICT for sustainability Basic conference in lap and rata, which I've misspelled sorry finished people And the general idea is these people started building a kubernetes scheduler To basically run docker great run machines running run workloads where energy was cheap and green by basically tracking where But by finding out where it was sunny really and they were able to do this on Where they end up working with microsoft to do this because microsoft is one of one large company that has a number of data centers all around the world But it kind of sucks that there's only one company that you can actually get this stuff from Or that if you wanted to do something kind of cool with say a more decentralized use of the web That we you have to kind of go through one large company And uh, if we were to look at say what maybe a more kind of open green And decentralized web or internet might look like there's actually some lessons We could learn from the energy sector over the last say 10 to 20 years So germany one thing that we saw was the energy vendor over the last 15 years And uh, the result of that was that we had like cheap green distributed energy So that we germany is interesting in the sense that it has quite a heterogeneous grid So there's lots and lots of smaller providers of energy rather than number of Lots of small providers rather than just a handful of huge providers And uh, there's lots of reasons why having a diverse ecosystem is helpful in this rate And I kind of wonder like this is when I share with you as an idea What if we have something like a digger telelendo, right? What if we could do something like this to Kind of abstract computing away to the point that you can run these in the same way There are companies that are now doing stuff like this right now And uh, there's one company called helio exchange that does exactly this But the paper I showed you before shows you this stuff around there So this may provide a way away from having to rely on just basically an oligopoly and concentrating more power If we were to kind of be prepared to think a bit more about how we run computing around So the final thing is uh, this is about as a little bit way about sharing was Programming language. So we're appropriate. You can actually have an impact here as well Because different languages have different goals And uh, that can result in reduced emissions from just just much more efficient use of resources So this is uh, hanes, uh, men at yesterday. He was presenting some work He's been doing on mirage iris unicornals. All right. And uh, whether you probably can't see it He was basically making a making a point that this is how he was running this stuff before Then when he switched to using unicornals, he saw uh memory usage and CPU drop massively By just having a kind of better use of the existing resources So this was like a 25 fold decrease uh in compute use and a 10 times decrease in like RAM usage And uh, you see the same things with other computing other languages And uh, the nice thing is this is recorded now. So you can see it too tomorrow. All right But there's also papers that talk all about this stuff. So, um If depending on what your goals might be, there may be certain languages which are really better kind of, uh, Optimized for the task that you might actually have Now does this mean that I'm saying that we we should all go out and code everything in o camel c and rust No, that's a really really We choose languages for a wide range of reasons from ecosystem to hiring to like developer happiness And uh, when you look at a project or a product level, you'll see that these kind of micro-optimizations as well They're fun might not be the most effective way to achieve some emission emissions reductions But it's still out there and it's worth being aware of And also it's both thinking about if you are able to kind of think about the entire stack of tools you might be using then You're kind of doing something like this in many cases if you say use like redis or engine x or something to serve things So that's the idea for like platform now. Let's talk about packets. So this is uh, I've spoke about infrastructure you control This is infrastructure. You do not control. All right Now you cannot really control the other parts of the internet and that's generally considered a good thing But what you can do is control how much data you send over the wire instead. All right, and uh If we were to kind of look at say the amount of energy we send over the white data We send over the wire and we figured out that both sending data uses infrastructure Which uses energy which uses fossil fuels then we've got some bad news Like we've seen pages growing in size to the point that the average the I think the mean web page size is now larger than the original download of doom. All right But we're also seeing it because we have mobile phones. So we use this more All right And then because cellular networks tend to use more energy to shift the same amount of data as say wired or wi-fi networks We have making a loss here. So from a kind of energy and climate point of view This is like the worst scenario we can imagine right now Thankfully there are this if we think about web paid budgets as basically carbon budgets We realize that we have lots of tools that we can repurpose for carbon reductions So one example is google's lighthouse. It basically runs checks against your page Then it grades you on how well your page is optimized So what we've been doing at the green web foundation has taken lighthouse. We forked it And we made green house, which was basically the same idea But it kind of looks at how many resources you run And then says, well, yeah climate emergency folks Maybe you don't want to get all your stuff on fossil fuels And there's some other things from here We also work and make it kind of work at the carbon footprint from this because these numbers exist But That's further down the line But you can also see that i'm referring to the ethical web Principles here if you care about this as a professional This is something the the the creators of the web are now saying and giving you license to be doing If you'd say look, I don't want to do this There was a moral argument for doing this and if I want to build the web as As as as tim intended then you can refer back to these ethical principles now for this But I will need to share with you that That doesn't mean that we should just like reader optimize every single web page and that'll be fine All right, it's worth getting a sense of perspective around this. All right video like of the video just warped web traffic When we think about designs we might make like to give you some context This chart is just showing you an idea of where of like usage of like data flows, right now 60% of this is this basically just telling us that All the video used and streamed is about 300 kind of megatons of co2 That was that's what it was in 2018, which is roughly the carbon footprint of spain. All right, so all the video spain That's the kind of numbers sometimes you might want to look at now video and demand like say netflix and stuff That's like the country of chile porn That's like austria. All right. So these are some kind of like reference points for you to kind of refer to now. All right And uh, I speak a bit about process now and like this is why it's worth thinking about some other things This is why I also care about kind of making the web a green because I think it's going to be easier To make the entire internet green then it is to stop people watching porn basically Which is a statement, I suppose So, uh, I spoke a bit about process and how there are other things you can do outside of computers. All right, so They are oh, there's there's two ways. I'm going to share this So there's kind of inward looking at process like the greening of how we build digital products All right, this isn't visible to the end users, but it's still a useful thing to do now An example of this is the company called uh, whole grain digital I really admire them. They're a really really cool company doing some good stuff on the web And uh, they are one of the original kind of wordpress agencies and they basically say, yeah We do everything with wordpress and green energy and they started working at their own missions I'm blogging about this and what they said was that They They know the they they looked at these figures and they switched to running on green infra Because that was the kind of right thing for them to do But when they started doing that they started looking at where else are the emissions in what they do and they Basically looked at it and some realized that oh wow a large part of their emissions just comes from travel And you as you can see office and home energy and of the travel Around 94 of their emissions came from commuting So this is why I'm saying that it's more than just playing around with computers and optimizing stuff. All right Uh, so this was kind of useful and this kind of inspired some of the work at the green web foundation for us to start sharing this and What we've been doing recently is basically take this model and build some like I guess mvcc Which is I'm referring to as minimum minimum viable carbon calculator not the postgres Uh other kind of acronym there and uh, we basically Built like a simple spreadsheet that was very very fast to fill out So people to people to kind of get an idea of okay. These are the things i'm paying to run Uh, this is the like if I build a web project. This is how much data i'm shifting over time And then because it turns out that it uses energy to keep people warm and dry inside buildings And people tend to use energy commuting then we track it. We track that as well And uh, we do this to give people some figures and get some idea of where they might want to act upon this Because the current ways that you report on say emissions or think about this is like an annual report every year That's a really really slow debugging cycle. That means we have like Eight what nine kind of hits of the f5 key before like it's a climate apocalypse That feels like we should probably do better than that But this is um entirely open you can link to the template yourself and uh, we we learned some interesting things when we did this We realized uh, when we were working on this because uh, the team were pretty good on commuting because a lot of them cycled to work They were missions are quite low there, but we also realized that uh, there was actually an argument for changing how we designed say a Web uh, and it's just this thing website. We found that one chunky background video You know those things that we all hate right that had the same carbon footprint as Basically the entire team commuting for the entire project, right? So it's quite easy to make an argument to get rid of that and make a meaning make a kind of meaningful measurable reduction there So these is um, some of the stuff that we do now in this The other thing is um outward process. So these might be decisions you make that affect Uh, the kind of emissions through use or or for your end users and these are going to be much more visible to end users The example I like to refer to because I'm a fan of the company is fairphone. You folks have heard of fairphone here, right? Yeah, like they're basically the canonical fair trade smart smart phone really. All right That's the best way to describe them and they also they there's lots of good things about where they do But they also share lots of information About their own carbon emissions and what steps they're trying to take to reduce them in a relatively honest way Which is also really good and because they publish it you we can read it now We've seen trends in electronics over the last say five or six years where where we had modular things And we saw a few failed attempts at having like modular smartphones We've been a shift towards like systems on a chip and stuff like that So if you are going to do that that means in some way that modular that having a modular design is a challenge But it means that if most of the energy Or impact on building electronics is coming from basically turning sand Into a chip with lots lots of energy Then we'll need to think about where we might have a way to decouple this from the rest of it All right to make us the electronics we do have last longer All right, and this is what fairphone did in their own LCA life cycle analysis report where they look at the Emissions over the entire process. They basically were first in this firstly the actual use is pretty small for this But well, you can see here The emissions were from the production and the thing they they they they decided to do was Make the phone as easy as possible to repair for end users Or replace parts of it to make it go from say a five-year product to a Sort from a three-year product to a five-year product And this had the impact of reducing emissions by a measurable figure and it's a pattern that we might follow ourselves All right Now actually fairphone make a make a real feature of this now and they've talked about this To their kind of to their to the audience So they basically say if you can just upgrade just the camera rather than the rest of the phone That is still kind of working then you can reduce the carbon footprint over the lifetime by these kind of figures And I think this is actually worth sharing because it It hints that there are options for us to actually be doing something until we can run everything on green power Which would affect these numbers And I think I've shared with you like a mental model and see how it can be activated I've spoken a bit about kind of carbon. I'm not just going to give you some steps of where to go next So, okay It's 2020 right and I kind of feel this feels like the Stables takes and I'm really glad that at least one person's taking photos of this I'd really like it if more of you to take some photos of this and share with your peers Because I think the single most effective thing we can do as communities is stuff like this. All right We would expect we need to kind of make this just we need to change your aesthetic about how we build things So in the same way that we would expect to build it to know about asbestos And we expect automotive engineers to know about lead poisoning my particulates I think as professionals we need to know about the impact of carbon in what we do And that we don't need it to build digital services And I think if we can build electric cars in the automotive center, then we can build green stacks in technology And I think we need this to become the norm. So this is what I need I need you to help me to share this with your boss with your co-workers set something like this We've had people talk about just how bad The situation is and like this is really like one of the minimum things we can do Which doesn't actually have a massive cost for us to actually do so If we do we need something like a cloud like a cloud moonshot to get our fossil fuels And this is one thing I really would ask you to really consider So asking for this is a bit easier if you will have friends So I'm in a group called climateaction.tech where it's basically just a slack group with a few other things that we now run from here and run meetups And the idea is that we do this to kind of share what the strategies are to actually kind of Push for this kind of stuff because not everyone can join the extinction rebellion And I'm not sure that everyone should join extinction rebellion They use the they We have different We have different aspects of ourselves that we bring in in in our work compared to where where else what might work Now if you are interested in acting upon any of this Uh, I work at the green moon foundation and we provide we have like an open source platform Where you can check your stack and then use tools you have to to do this and um If you are interested about any of this stuff We are trying to find a way to make it easier or to make some of this much more transparent because I shared with you before about how large companies can basically fudge some of the numbers To make them to make them look greener than they otherwise might be so uh tomorrow We're running a kind of on lecture room two We're running something like of a workshop to figure out what some of this might look like in the same way that we Set up robots.txt so carbon.txt a way to verify this there's a website That that's been hastily put together to give you some idea for this And uh, finally, I'm just going to wrap up now Thank you for letting me talk to you about this stuff here. Um, if you're interested in getting in touch and talk to me Please do uh at the green moon foundation. Uh, I'm mr. Chris Adams on twitter and github We are starting to do some training around this because we've realized that although most of us do care We don't have much in the way of actual way to act upon this kind of stuff Then finally if you find this interesting there's a newsletter which uh, I've started with a friend of mine martin Where we're basically sharing what we learn as we go through it, which bits are hard, which bits aren't so hard And uh, yeah, thank you everyone Thank you very much um, we do have plenty of time from q&a Nonetheless, I would like the q&a to be high quality So if many ask a question, it should be a question Thinking the speaker is lovely and nice, but don't waste our Collective benefit from that and do that afterwards on your own Uh, and I don't really care what your name is and what your affiliation is Just ask a question and make it short and so on and the first two questions go to the internet You mentioned um the preview for the workshop a carbon txt just now Can you already share some strategies how for example the green web foundation and other such directories? Can protect themselves against Being abused by companies for example through greenwashing So I think um, okay I think you need to read read some reports about this kind of stuff and Uh get familiar with this now. I really apologize a large punch of this was incredibly dry There is lots and lots of dry material around this to actually figure this stuff out Um, I think it's mainly a case of working at what numbers you or what questions you might actually have to ask And I can share a link specifically for the questions that you need to ask But generally I think the four things I would look for is if an organization Hasn't made a public statement about when they're going to hit zero emissions If they're not sharing their progress on an annual basis If they're not sharing how much of their business they get from Basically the uh from from from fossil fuels right now Then or how much of the business is still involved in like extracting fossil fuels from the ground I think these are the key things and if they're not using this kind of scope to missions process Which is a clear thing or finding numbers those are the biggest ones There is a page there is a page on that I've got which lists these questions to ask and I'll share I'll share a link to it once I get on the interwebs to link to this And a second question from irc The numbers that you mentioned that the companies themselves Publish can you verify them and if yes, how so the thing that you can't oh that was the other thing It's independent verification is the thing you need to ask for as the final one Sorry, I've just finally seen where the voice is coming from. It's like the voice of god speaking The yeah independent verification is very important. Uh, all the examples I've pointed to had independent verification usually from Uh, a set of companies that do auditing of this kind of stuff now There is a again There's a firewall of tedium around this stuff like that thing where I showed you with the google with google's numbers being High than low This is because you need to kind of go into the minutiae of understanding market based reporting because location based Reporting and there's reporting around this stuff. There's like loads of academic literature, but There's just not very accessible to lots of people right now. There need to be more of us who do do this stuff This is partly one of the reasons we want to have something like carbon dot text was to basically A give people a chance to see this but also link to the specific documentation They're referring to so you can ask okay, so it's nice that you've done this But where's this where's a third party verification of this or why is the same guy called trevor being Uh, uh, basically audited all of these companies and like literally it's the same dude who's reported amazon zan apples and i'm not sure about google right, but Uh, trevor's probably a good guy, but the fact that there is only one person doing this is kind of come on We know we know that there are Things that you probably don't want to do in this field also in europe at least If you want to sell renewable energy you do need to register this with uh, the government registry and uh, there is There is something in the in the i didn't really talk about in this in the session That i'm going to talk about more in carbon dot text is how to find this and how to look this up Basically everything we know about ssl and dns You can basically apply that to solve this kind of problem without needing a freaking blockchain All right, and you can actually find something useful here right like this data is out there It's just that we need to be able to know the right question to ask and uh, make sure that Well, we are running stuff on a green stack rather than a brown stack Okay Microphone number six Is that your question? Hello, and thanks for your good. Thanks for your great. It's had something about thanking the speaker before I know That's why I said it. Um, I understand you could try to convince people to reduce their carbon emissions Um, now the managers I have been working under are generally good in reducing cost Do you think it would help to translate carbon emissions into cost and have this problem solved by the invisible hand So this is actually the approach that amazon use and for some of the Spreadsheets I was showing you before where we do not have numbers for car for emission for reported emissions The best thing you can go on is going to be sector level averages for the carbon intensity of spending a thousand pounds Or a thousand euros in a particular area So you might look at it like that I I kind of feel that there are certain people who really respond To this kind of like cost based measures messaging But I think it's more attractive for us to kind of change the aesthetic Around what we do so rather than us continually striving I mean if we had their narrative for people for our generation was to basically save the planet That feels a much more attractive thing than than using cost But I do I'm aware that if you are in an organization Where the primary driver is cost then you need to be able to use that language And that's why we've been speaking about some of that But there are lots and lots of there's actually stuff in this field to show this there's There are organizations that will basically help you quantify the risks From doing nothing versus the cost of action because in many cases when we talk about this we think but we we often use You hear the phrase well What's it going to cost to shift to kind of a green energy for example? But it's like we we like thought we pretend there is no cost to inaction when it really really is and we've seen Just the five years massive massive changes in the destruction of companies and industries and well and and and hundreds and hundreds of lives as well So I think that you can use cost for this But I don't I think it's a bit reductive to only use cost In your research, did you encounter a trade-off between Privacy and security and carbon neutrality and if yes in which cases? Yes In fact, I used to work at a company. Amy One of the key ideas behind the company was that if you can Understand the company's co2 emissions you can understand the supply chain and if you understand the supply chain then In some ways you can use that as a kind of cost to kind of beat Beating organization to reduce their prices because you can see that they're much more wasteful compared to other ones But at the same time this is a so that works at an organizational level there's also a personal aspect to this and I think that this is I actually feel that in many cases focusing on individual action and Kind of shaming people for a bit has been proven not to be very very effective But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do anything There isn't there isn't a cause for individual action because I think that provides The cover for for politicians to make the decisions which will result in kind of real meaningful changes So there is a trade-off because in order for you to understand the emissions Because basically emissions are essentially a proxy for activity and you will usually see This and there are plenty of stories around this and hopefully there might even be a topic About this specific subject at republica in may because yeah, there is lots of interesting literature around this trade-off That we do actually have to make microphone microphone number one Hi, can you make an educated guess on how much emission could be spared of like the big Providers would follow your advice So I guess it's tied to the You know, I showed you the numbers with google like the different kind of charts, right? You could make these kind of like koi argue this I know just cheat arguments to say well, that'd be all of it, right? But I don't think that's Really accurate generally if we are looking at just the co2 emissions from just like running the internet, right? I reckon you could probably wipe out Two-thirds to 80 percent of By what actually depends on it. It kind of depends on where you might be looking at this actually So more than half comfortably. All right, because if you look at say data centers, the main Right that the main that the main the main source of Emissions is from them being on 24 7 continually use like three quarters of the emissions Assuming that data centers are full of servers which are used for three to five years, which is common I'm not sure this is the case Please talk to me if it's not the case because I hear rumors that that might not be the case at large companies But no one will write this down So until you know that I can't give you a really educated a really kind of better guess than that But it'd be lovely to find out if that data exists and there are a load of hackers here who might be able to know about this kind of stuff microphone number four When you talk about moving computation around the globe basically called the weather I wonder if there isn't a lot of overhead associated with that like additional communication Maybe if you know you're far away from your database and you don't rooting hops or whatever Do you know anything about that? Yes, uh, the I spoke to the guy, um, I led James who was actually working on that and I said hey What you said and he said yeah, we take that into account because we can work out the emissions from moving Um a container of this of this size to over there and In many cases we might move the state that we want you want a query there as well So his approach was to Basically apply various kinds of metadata tags to the kind of jobs you might want to run Uh to provide this kind of flexibility and this is not a new idea Like uh mastodon c uh is a kind of data science company that started doing something like this 10 years ago They're kind of the og green cloud People doing this kind of stuff and even before then there's this phrase called chasing the moon Where was this idea that yeah, you can do this if you run stuff on the dark side of earth which sounds super metal Right, but is uh shows that this is not a new concept really, but it is cool Microphone number five, please Uh, hey, do you see any chance of getting like governmental support with this? For example, like with tax cuts for electronic cars. I mean, maybe that would be possible in here too Yes, I was actually at the eu commission Green public procurement workshops. They've been doing for the last like few months and I was There were a tiny number of people from two more companies There were lots of large large companies who were they're saying yes The thing you should do is move to the our cloud. That's the clear solution to the climate crisis Uh, but they actually it does look like there's guidance and uh, there is going to be Support in this field. All right, so I do know there's going to be Um, well, we've already seen this like we've seen the european parlant declare climate emergency saying We need to halve emissions by 2030. That's a that's around eight percent year on year Uh for the next 10 years now Most of us don't know what that looks like because the last time you saw Eight percent drop in a single year was the collapse of the soviet union Which is partly why i'm kind of sharing stuff like this because I think the idea of having a more managed reduction Of emissions feels more kind of conducive to I'd I guess kind of continuity of of of how we live Then the collapse of the soviet union. So I think there there is stuff out there But in many cases we don't have the knowledge right now as people in the sector to know what is effective And this is something that we need to as professionals learn To learn where the levers are if we want to consider ourselves as professionals facing The scale of the challenge that is ahead of us Microphone number two, please Hello, uh, so my question is about uh, you talked a lot about how much a carbon emission Happens because of running a server and in the server side But if the traffic goes really really high in a really large scale You might have lots of emission just because of the transmitting the packet through the data center from And uh through IX fees and backbones plus Like the And carbon emission from rendering the page in the like phones and everything around that Is there I was looking for it for a while where they couldn't find the number like saying, okay One terabyte of traffic in the data center from united states going to cost like this much of carbon Ah, yeah Is that what your question like what's the carbon footprint of a gigabyte of data or something? Yeah Yeah, yeah, I want to have some numbers saying like which one is uh, like translate traffic to a number Okay, so there are two organizations who are doing something some work in this field. Uh, in fact, there's a whole kind of Kind of community around greener web performance where they are tracking this kind of stuff now the There's a group called the shift project who I referenced before who talk about the carbon for the Video being the carbon footprint of spain. They've actually got some browser extensions Which you can install into firefox. It will give you numbers as you browse as you browse to see this Um, I've also put together just like some interactive notebooks So you can get some ballpark figures of this kind of stuff yourself. So very quickly you can decide well Do I do this or do I just do something different? So, uh, Yes, look at the green web foundation There's a link specifically to a notebook with the sort with the sites with the numbers for this Next question goes to the internet. Hi IRC states that in their experience kubernetes has a quite a high cpu idle Usage about 40% is mentioned This mechanism that you show to adapt the um server usage to the demand does this mitigate against this I don't really know enough about kubernetes to give a useful opinion on kubernetes So my thing was like this is an interesting idea because it's it's treating cloud and compute like a utility As a result we see patterns that we've seen have success in other sectors, but that could be applied to us I don't know beyond that, but I can tell you that there's a lot of uh Well, there's basically funding going into this kind of stuff now But i'm sorry. I don't know much more than that But uh, if you do work with kubernetes, please do talk to me because I would be really nice to have a better answer than I don't know in the future And microphone number three How many talks do I have to attend here so that it will have been worth it traveling here from unique instead of watching this online uh, so It depends what okay first of all, I think coming to a conference just because there's talks That's not the reason to come to a conference You come to a conference to have high quality high context conversations with other people and get something useful from that Because like you said you don't need to do that That said the idea of like having kind of physical community is actually very very useful. Uh, I think that There isn't a number. I can't see like seven because that's going to be meaningless, but the uh, the there is a whole issue around Basically the carbon footprint of traveling two events and in many cases So for some context we uh, I was organizing a conference in london called helping organize a conference called map camp and we were trying to internalize the carbon costs of people traveling and we found that some Basically a minority of people coming across the atlantic ocean Wiped out I think about half the carbon footprint The kind of carbon budget for a 600 person conference. So there is some numbers around that we've actually hired a group to give to actually publish some of this information out there and there's some There's there's a couple of widgets to for you to figure this stuff out But if you're here for the talks that's one thing But really you're you should be here to make speak to the other people and get some kind of a meaningful Meaningful connection you can have from there Okay, microphone number one Is this possible to create like an automated way a platform or service that tech companies can connect to and estimate like have a rough estimate about the carbon footprint based on the stack they use based on the bandwings based on the you know different process information It depends this this relies on the organization Having access to the metrics that will go in as an input. So garbage in garbage out, right? So the spreadsheet I pointed to gives you a very very low quality version of doing that There's also a tool called aws caustics. Sorry green cost explorer. We basically forked ad bros cost aws cost explorer worked out which ones which regions are running on fossil fuels And then we present that information back to you so you can get some idea for this So you can work out these numbers, but I don't see them right now Largely because a lot of organizations see this information as commercially sensitive So they don't like to share this so we have to go on Basically kind of some rough numbers here And this is one of the problems that we do have and that came up with the green public procurement thing was that We don't have the transparency right now to make the particularly informed decisions about this But theoretically yes Mike from number five Hi, um, I have a Like a question about this double The double things that you are doing on one side you have the getting things done like building sustainable infrastructure And in the last days yesterday there was a couple of examples of that And on the other side is generate momentum like convincing people to join The movement and be more aware of that. So I I want I'm wondering how does for example the green by foundation Apply to that in the sense then how radical can you be like can you kick out people from your directory because you Think they are not doing green enough or how does this work? So I should be clear about the green river foundation just being a handful of guys It's not a big thing at all, right? So it's been running for about 10 years And this is a thing that we've been doing over the last six months. I mean I joined in march and we started looking through this and We are basically now we've been contacting our providers and say look We need you to provide some more useful and some more rigorous Data evidence to back up your green claims for this reason Because it's very very because you can't well basically it's as the stakes have got higher It's become more and more important to actually do this and if you're going to base decisions about how you Kind of choose infrastructure from now on it makes a lot of sense to do that So we are heading in that direction to basically say look if you can't share this information We're going to stop listing you and but we have given because We are we we're not so sure ourselves and this is this is this is a we've given people a deadline To get this information So you probably see some of the stats change over the coming weeks As the way that we do our reporting changes But because we release open data sets around this on a regular basis you can actually see this Okay microphone number two Hi, have you heard about the science based targets initiative and if yes, what do you think of them? So science based targets is interesting because they are One of the drivers to basic so If you if you're not familiar what science based targets are Science based targets are basically a way to say well if you're an organization and you want to hit net zero The science dictates that you need to take these steps here. I actually think they're better than Uh, nothing in a lot of cases and I think they're probably one of the more effective things to use And they also insist that you do need to understand the emissions in your supply chain So I imagine organizations are signed up to science based targets will come bump up against the problems that I've Just explained about trying to get numbers from the larger Uh companies who tend to be coy about sharing this stuff I think it makes total sense at a corporate level If you're if you're not a state body, but I feel that the Legally binding targets that are now in place in the uk And we're likely to see in europe in the next six months to a year would be greater Leavers because they provide a degree of certainty for people to then justify decisions because it's the law now Rather than being a thing that you might get kind of applauded for Okay question from the internet You mentioned that um video on the internet is a large majority of the energy usage Can you say something about how this breaks down to encoding storage transmission and decoding? Yes, um those numbers I understand are all about just a transfer So I don't think there is much about the encoding parts on that. That's just sending it and quick follow up Can you approximately say how much people can save by for example staying on single definition or sd instead of hd? I was it was it four times? I don't know what they what the the change in resolution would be and it's not something I Feel comfortable sharing numbers on because I basically be making up on the spot Um, I actually feel that the solution is telling people to not do something like this I think it's a really really hard ask and seriously speeding Getting off fossil fuels is a much better way to solve this problem than telling people they're not allowed to watch netflix ever again Or only in low resolution for example Like we like technology because we're like 15 000 people here because we like technology telling everyone you don't get to use technology anymore Is going to be it's much much harder to sell than just use green power and stop running fossil fuels Okay, last question goes to microphone number one Hello, I work for a company that I said something about affiliations and introductions State your question. We're pretty much out of time. Um if a company owns a lot of servers and the only solution to reduce the carbon footprint was uh to switch to green energy, um, this would increase the costs for the energy and um, I'm afraid that um, I don't have good arguments to Um Yeah To ask them to switch to green energy because of the costs Green energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy now Like it's uh, it's we've we've seen this massive reduction in costs Like uh, like storage has come down by 85 percent in the last say 10 years We've seen a massive drop in renewables like this argument is kind of being solved at that level there It's uh, it's choice of provider is something separate is separate But uh, I think in many cases it's going to be a case of choosing who you want to Do that and if you're trying to make this argument here, you can make the argument that generally People tend to want to work in companies that are not destroying the planet And if you want to retain people or attract new people saying, hi We're part of the solution Not the problem is a good way to present this and that's why lots of organizations Talk about kind of green credentials because it's a recruiting tool in the same way that you talk about open source Or working from home or everything like that Especially as we get older and have more kids and then realize that wow, there'll be a live when this stuff happens Okay, thank you so much