Environmental

James: Well, hi everyone, and welcome back to Crossed Wires. It’s James here, and this week we are going to be focusing on the environment, or rather, the impact our technology and our own use of technology, not just technology itself, but our own habits has on the environment. I have a wonderful guest this week, Chris Adams. Welcome to the show.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me, James. It’s a pleasure to be here.
James: Thank you. And I have to give another shout out to James Smith. So we got Dr. Catherine Flick for our, blockchain discussion and James wonderfully pointed us, to each other and, made that connection. So thank you again, James, genuinely. But Chris, before we get into the show and get into what is I am sure going to be an amazing discussion, we’ve got a Google Doc sort of beside us, which has evolved over the last hour, even as we just jumped on to start a show prep. There’s so much great stuff going in there. But Chris, do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself and why you’re speaking on in the environment?
Chris: My name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. It’s a Dutch foundation that for the last 15 years or so has been tracking the transition of the internet away from fossil fuels towards a more advanced and humane form of power. We now work towards an entirely fossil free Internet by 2030, and we largely work to accelerate that transition using open data, open source and open culture. One of the things that’s probably most you could try immediately if you’ve come across, if you’ve heard of us before, would be our API and our Green Web Check service. So you can check any website in the world. And we will tell you if we can find any information about whether it’s running on green energy or not. We do this because there are more websites in the world than there are data centers. So • if you know which data centers to actually speak to, we basically allow data centers to register with us and share the information they do have about how they’ve sourced their power. When people check a website run on those data centers, you’ll get a smiley face showing a green website. And if we can’t find any information, we’ll show a gray, sad face saying that, no, we cannot find any information for this. We are running on the default, which is like well, most of energy largely comes from fossil fuels right now, so this is what we do. We also do a couple of other things, but, I suspect you might have some questions there, James. So I can go there, then we could talk about some of the other things we do.
James: Absolutely. So, I mean, the first question is, I’ll be completely transparent. We host with DigitalOcean. • How are they doing?
Chris: Yes, Digital Ocean are interesting because they have a number of dedicated employees internally who kind of in many ways, push for this kind of stuff. And DigitalOcean • actually do use some providers who we have evidence of them running on renewable energy. So we have stuff like this. And we even actually our platform that we use to track check this stuff. It’s on GitHub. We have an open issue with DigitalOcean • asking them to do a DigitalOcean • cleanup and actually share information with us so that we can actually mark the green regions, the regions where there is evidence of them accounting for the fossil emissions from the use of data centers. So we can get smiley faces for the people who do have that. So DigitalOcean, • because they’re using Equinix in a number of places, and because Equinix do actually have a pretty good record in this compared to other providers. They are middling at the moment, but they could definitely be moving a lot faster. And if there were users who cared about this, I’m sure they would move even faster.
James: I will absolutely be talking to them. Absolutely something we want as much as possible the stuff that Crossed Wires is using to be on the green web. Now, I know that’s not going to be possible. We use a lot of different services. I would be very curious to see how SquadCast • fares. I, can go and yell at Zack if it’s not doing too well. I know they host a lot of stuff with Google. They host a few other bits and pieces as well. Now, interestingly, one of the reasons I asked this is we did an episode recently with a team at Backblaze • and I don’t know if you’ve heard about the new Nautilus is the company providing it, but one of the new data centers, which is entirely river water cooled.
Chris: This is pretty cool. Just before we go any further on the previous one, I’ve just shared in the show notes the issue specifically. So if there are only people who want to actually contribute to the actual platform we have, and the data that we do have, so that you’re using DigitalOcean • and you can actually get marked as green, that’s where we can add that in the show notes. Awesome. I just want to kind of tidy that one up. So, you mentioned about Nautilus, the data center, from run of the river staff. Yeah. If I understand it, this is actually how I got into this cast, actually. And I’ll briefly speak about, James Smith’s shadow he casts about us being on this podcast in a bit. But let’s go to that part there. You said that the water is the data center is called by the water running through the river, is that correct?
James: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s in California and there’s a whole paper that Backblaze put out explaining the partnership. And so I think the idea is that it draws the cold river water in and then it loops up through the cooling system. And I will be honest, I am not a data center expert by any definition. The closest I’ve come is punching a Cisco switch at one point because it wasn’t working properly. but then that water is then put back out once it’s done its job, put back out into the river. And from what I understand, they’ve done it in a way that it’s not going to impact the aquatic life in the area. They’ve done the studies to make sure that I think it’s only maybe a couple of degrees warmer, it’s not a huge jump. And yeah, it’s fascinating.
Chris: Yeah. I need to be kind of clear that I’m not a data center expert either. But there is a lot of talk about free cooling as mechanisms for being able to use water like this. And as long as it’s not actually having an impact or like you said, affecting the outside environment, this is actually a good thing. And in many cases, this is in many ways better than other forms of, cooling people might use, like evaporative cooling, where it just goes into the sky. For example, you’ll see some places where you have like a water table or aquifer, that people draw water from. And you can have cases where data centers use as much as the rest of the entire community • for this. And that’s like one source of power, that one source of water usage. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that when you’re generating energy, most of the time, if you’re not using something like kind of renewable or geothermal sources, then you’re basically doing something to like you’re taking heat. You’re making heat somehow, either nuclear or setting fire to things that turns water into steam, which is then used to turn a turbine. And then you need to figure out what to do with that waste heat in that water. One of the significant uses of water is actually and this is by far the largest usage of fresh water both in America and probably the UK. Still, is actually power, generation, thermal power generation is one of the biggest, if not the biggest source of water usage. And it’s really important to have this in mind when we talk about water, usage related to data centers. Because a lot of the time, the data center part you can solve with clever usages, like the Backblaze example. But for the other part, which is in many cases, much, much larger, if you want to get rid of that, you’re going to probably need to get away from thermal generation, where you heat up water to turn a turbine, basically. • for this. exactly. And that’s like one source of power, that one source of water usage. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that when you’re generating energy, most of the time, if you’re not using something like kind of renewable or geothermal sources, then you’re basically doing something to like you’re taking heat. You’re making heat somehow, either nuclear or setting fire to things that turns water into steam, which is then used to turn a turbine. And then you need to figure out what to do with that waste heat in that water. One of the significant uses of water is actually and this is by far the largest usage of fresh water both in America and probably the UK. Still, is actually power, generation, thermal power generation is one of the biggest, if not the biggest source of water usage. And it’s really important to have this in mind when we talk about water, usage related to data centers. Because a lot of the time, the data center part you can solve with clever usages, like the Backblaze example. But for the other part, which is in many cases, much, much larger, if you want to get rid of that, you’re going to probably need to get away from thermal generation, where you heat up water to turn a turbine, basically.
James: And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that little explanation of power. My mind went straight to the Chernobyl miniseries and the experiment they were trying to run there. All I’m going to say is you didn’t see graphite on the roof, there is no graphite. But it’s an interesting one. it’s fully public where I live. I live in the south coast of England. I live in Bournemouth. So we do get a lot, quite a reasonable amount of sun and a lot of properties here are south facing. So I’m seeing more and more solar panels. Now, solar has, because it’s correct me if I’m wrong, because solar is not a guaranteed form of power, it’s wonderful. But obviously it’s a varying amount of power generation. Would it be considered stable enough for data center use? I mean, I guess if you run it through your typical huge Ups systems that those data centers have, can solar play a part here as well?
Chris: Absolutely. In fact, solar power, because it is roughly ten times cheaper than it was ten years ago and it’s getting cheaper, more or less around 20% year on year. Going forward, it’s likely to become more and more popular. so you are going to see this and as long as you have a way to store that power, it’s viable to run data centers with this as part of it. Now, unless you’re somewhere where it’s only ever sunny, then you obviously are going to have an issue when the sun goes down. And that’s when you’d often resorts to other forms of energy generation or some way of actually making sure that you can use power. So a common thing, for example, if you’re not connected to the grid is actually having things like storage itself, like either form of batteries or other forms of storage, possibly like a backup fuel cell or something like that. So Ebay, for example, they have fuel cells in some of their data centers as an alternative to using the grid. And what we’ve seen over the last two years in particular, is that as the cost of energy from the grid has just skyrocketed because of the cost of fossil gas, you’ve seen a real drive for people to find other forms of onsite generation as a way to reduce the cost that they do actually have. so yes, you can have solar as a key part. And solar is only going to become a greater and greater part of our energy mix, according to all of the analysis, simply because it’s getting cheaper, faster than any other power source that we are really deploying right now or have access to at present.
James: So very exciting. So do go and check your favorite websites. Maybe if you’re hosting a site for your business, go and check it and see if it does meet that green web check. And then maybe consider, let’s just be really honest, maybe consider moving to a hosting provider that will give you that yellow, that smiley face because that’s helping you be more of a positive impact on, the environment. And look, it’s one of the things, isn’t it? Companies want to get all that certification. Well, having a control, I think it’s something you talk about later in our show us, is the importance of not just your own production, but the supply chain behind it all.
Chris: This is actually maybe a nice elegant segue to one other thing we do, which is running a fellowship. So last year, because when people first come to when lots of techies and people who are tech adjacent start thinking about the link between technology and environment, they often are extremely overwhelmed. And we actually applied for some funding with the Internet Society Foundation. And they funded us to basically run a series of fellowships where we would basically pay for someone’s time, pay for five fellows to basically share their learning in the open about how they figured out how to incorporate ideas like climate justice into their work. So, for example, one of the projects was a kind of cool interactive map from one woman, Melissa Hsuing. She was doing a sustainability course. A master’s in sustainability at Columbia University. But, alongside this, she was reading the entire set of literature about climate justice and about what some of these conversations are about and how, in many ways, climate change is very much a story about some of the things we see back in kind of colonialism, kind of, moved all the way forward and projected into the future. So she ended up doing a bunch of research around that. And one thing she did was she built this cool map Google Earth to show where all the various parts of hardware would actually come from. So you could use like a really slick activity like that, but the map would take you to parts of Africa, and it would take you to parts of say, the Congo or parts of Peru, where certain minerals came from. So you could actually kind of visually see all these different mines and places like that. But we had other people doing other research like this and one thing that came out of that is a second year. We’re now doing some work with the Ford Foundation for a second and third year of this fellowship program. But we also created a library on using an open source tool called Zotero where we’ve been collecting all of these reports and papers and websites and things so that if someone doesn’t want to come to this field and basically start making sense of it, we’ve kind of dropped some breadcrumbs for other people who might have may be interested. And later on in February, we’ll be announcing the next set of fellows who will be sharing their learning as they come along.
James: Brilliant. That’s fantastic. So the next thing we talk about, obviously we talk about data centers, we talk about infrastructure, what about the software that runs a lot of the tools that we use? Now, this is a big one. Again, how that’s all run, and how we can have how that can be more green rather than just a color code in the CSS. No bad jokes.
Chris: So there’s a few things that you might want to look at or if you are interested in this field specifically, I think most engineers would, if they’re given all things being equal, they would prefer to have be responsible for an application which is not causing avoidable harm if they can help it. And because pretty much electricity or any of the usage is coming from places where fossil fuels are being burned, there is avoidable harm while we have that. So there is like a kind of reflex that you do want to kind of make the tools you do have tread lightly on the world, or at least avoid that avoidable harm, right? And if you’re looking at software, there’s a few organizations that we do some work with and some libraries, some software libraries that we’ve created to make it easier for this. So most recently, and I’m going to share something now, because by the time this goes live, I think it should be visible for people. we worked on a library called Co2.js • which as you’d imagine, is a JavaScript library, which embeds a number of various models so that you can say, well, I’m doing this much, this kind of activity, it’s using this much power. This is what the environmental impact of that is likely to be. We basically got that merged into the Firefox browser itself. So when you’re using the browser itself, you can basically visit a web page, you can use all of Firefox’s profiling tools and you can get a rough idea of what the likely environmental impact of that website and that particular session is likely to be. And this is shared. We did this to create some tooling so that people who build the web are able to set more kind of humane and considerate defaults, which don’t unnecessarily burn through people’s batteries, but also don’t have a kind of wider impact, as well. So that’s like one thing we did. And yeah, we’re pretty proud of that because, that literally came out of a discussion in the second half of 2022. And, we’ve ended up using Co2.js • in a number of different places now. And it’s an open source project, open to pull requests, as with other ones.
James: That’s fantastic. And look, I’m a big Firefox fan. I did a video, on our YouTube channel a while ago about their multi-account • containers. They may not have the biggest browser share anymore, but there’s so much of that legacy of Mozilla and Netscape. Some really clever innovation, I would say. I have all three browsers, sorry. I run Chrome for SquadCast, • just because WebRTC, • that’s where the best support is. But Firefox. I use so much. That’s incredible. And of course, that is you’re building your website. So, say, for example, when me and Jay were building the Crossed Wires WordPress site, we could have used those profile and tools to say, okay, how much impact does our new site have? And, where can we be looking at things?
Chris: Yeah, that was the idea. We wanted to create something like that because there is a lot of public discourse in our kind of little digital sustainability circles about what makes an environmentally friendly website? How do you measure this kind of stuff? And there are some models which we include in the library. One is called the Sustainable Web Design Model, which largely goes on the amount of transfer that’s sent over the wire. Because that’s one thing which is easy to measure. And in many ways, a lot of the academic literature basically says if you’re going to look at the environmental footprint of things, then working out a CO2 • per gb figure is one way to do it. Now, there’s good things about that, it’s easy to do, but there’s also bad things about it because in many ways, as we learn more about this, about like this field, the actual relationship, it’s not necessarily kind of proportional. So a lot of us think, and this is what we spoke about before, James, the idea that if you have a kind of car model where, well, let’s say that you drive twice as far in a car, it’s going to have twice as many emissions, it’s not necessarily the same when you have websites and things. And in fact, the mental model that’s more useful to kind of have at hand is maybe rather than cars, think of maybe like putting cycle lanes down and then having people cycle along those. So there’s obviously an environmental impact to building cycle lanes, right? But once you’ve got that set up, the marginal emissions from every single person cycling on that, yeah, it’s not zero, because people breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2. But it’s not the same as you would have with cars. For example. And I think it’s a lot of time, we don’t really have the mental models yet to do this. And this is partly what we did some work with on CO2.js • to do to a provide a kind of vessel for different models, but also to provide easy access to some of the kind of conversion factors. So that if you’ve got direct information from a browser, you can use that. But if you only have the information, that you might measure indirectly, like say, transfer, you’ve got an option there. We try to basically serialize some of these ideas in code. So it’s possible to use different models to see what’s the most effective and relevant for your particular use case.
James: Yeah, and it’s great to get those models established so people can think about this. And, that leads me nicely to at least at this point in the show, the big question I want to ask and put to you and put into the minds of our, audience, of our listeners. Before we go any further, I do want to say this is absolutely an episode where we want to invite discussion. So there are the comments on the episode itself. Of course, you can tweet or toot, whatever have you calling it. Post. I’m hoping we’ve changed it away from Toot.
Chris: I’m using post instead of Toot because I feel a bit silly saying Toot.
James: Yes, it doesn’t sound quite right, does it? So you can either toot or why not come over to our discord, CrossedWires.net/Discord • • We will have a forum post for this episode, come and discuss with us. Just follow our community rules and everyone will be welcome. That’s our rule. So on the back of that, the question I did pose in our document, is why should we, as people, as me and you, right now, sat here recording this with lights on. With computers on or when we go elsewhere and maybe charge our phones or watch Netflix, watch YouTube or watch PeerTube, • whatever we want to watch. Why should we care? Why should we care about what the environmental impact of sending my email is or playing the latest game?
Chris: I think there’s two reasons. So first of all, if you’re in a position where you can play the latest game or watch Netflix or something like that, you’re already in front of a pretty exclusive club of people who enjoy really good access to things that lots of other people don’t have, like shelter, energy access, cool gadgets, or stuff like that. And in many cases, if you’re in that kind of group of people, you’re probably proportionately like to have a greater environmental impact than maybe the other, say 80% plus of the planet, right? So there’s a degree of responsibility that you might actually have just because you’re in a position of power compared to other people. This is not to say that there are people who are more powerful you that should not be also need to be doing things. Because when you look at the environmental impact, when you look at, say, if you look at like, the higher you go up the kind of food chain, the greater the environmental impact tends to be from various people. So you and me, we might have a carbon footprint of between 5 and 15 tons per person. When you go up to the kind of millionaire or billionaire status, you’re looking at thousands of tons for people, which there’s a kind of unfairness aspect that you might want to have. So there’s basically a kind of in my view, there is a kind of somewhat moral related aspect of that. Like, if I’m able to make changes to avoid harm, then I probably should do some of that stuff. Especially if it’s not going to be creating significant amounts of sacrifice at my end, for example. And a lot of the time, I think the things that you might want to do are actually or the things people might be advocating do actually represent a win on an environmental scale, but they also represent a win in terms of quality of life scale yourself, for example. So I think going back to your original reason why you should care, I think there is a kind of justice and moral argument, but there’s also a kind of isn’t it cool? Argument, right? There’s a whole thing about if you want to build something you want to, you do in a really efficient fashion. Because a lot of us, you know, we’re nerds we’re quite, we kind of have this kind of aversion to waste, if possible, right? It seems like we’re taught to avoid some of that stuff. So I think there’s different reasons that you might actually have. I think that it’s useful to bear in mind that when, you do have this, it’s worth realizing that there are some things you can do that might feel good and there are some things which are systemically effective. They’re not necessarily the same thing. So a lot of the time you’ll see people basically say, well, if you feel bad about, the environmental impact of technology, then you should turn off the video on a Zoom call, for example, or something like that. You can do something like that. Or you might feel terrible about watching Netflix, for example, or having a Zoom call with someone when you’re in middle of a pandemic. You’re not going to have that much of an impact there. I feel that it might help you feel like you’re more in control of and feel like you’re able to do something. But systemically, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as effective as being able to engage at a political level or speak to like, say, local government, for example. So I think there is an argument, which is basically just it’s probably aligning with how you feel. And in many cases, it can help you feel a little bit better about some of the kind of general ennui and dredge people tend to have around climate, basically, because some kind of action does often help you move to a larger or more impactful thing elsewhere.
James: I can completely echo that sort of food chain, because something has just come back to, if I’m going out for a walk in the evening, there’s a certain route I take, and it goes past quite a, shall we say, well off street. I won’t name it, but there’s a new build there. And every time I walk past it, every single light is on in that build. There’s no one in there, but all the lights are on, everything. I’m thinking, okay, there might be LEDs, but that’s still why do they need to be on? Okay, for me, there’s a difference we’re talking external lights. There was a difference between safety, so security lighting, and then why does your house need to be lit up like Blackpool Tower and Blackpool Illuminations? If there’s A, there’s no one there, and B, why okay, sure, security spotlights that are motion based or whatever, that makes perfect sense. But I don’t need to see the outside of your house. I don’t need to see how wealthy you are. And I think the problem for me is that class of person that can afford to pay the energy bill on that. But what they’re not considering is their contribution to the environmental impact. I’ve seen a lot of discussion around football stadiums, leaving their spotlights on for longer after there was a big argument about, Bournemouth recently, where they’d left their spotlights on, and it was causing, like, this huge orange glow in the sky. It’s a very interesting again, and businesses who’s, a real estate, agent office, who they’ve closed that office down, but we’ve left all the lights inside on and all the, like, display panels, all the signage permanently on. Why?
Chris: I think a lot of the time, okay, this stuff like this can happen because there is either no one responsible for it, or it’s not costing enough for people to actually feel the kind of negative impacts of that a lot of the time. And in many cases, for example, your example of light pollution into the sky. Right? It’s probably not the people who own the stadium who are harmed by that kind of light pollution. So the harms can be very diffuse, but the upsides are much, much more concentrated. And this is the thing that this is all the kind of wider governance problem, but it might be worth referring to like this. You spoke about one or two things, about the idea of saying, well, there’s a degree of comfort I might want to have, and then there’s maybe a cost to providing slightly more comfort for this. And this might be a nice segue to one of the stories you hear about the Xbox story about the shutdown thing, because this is one thing we looked at before.
James: Most modern consoles will have a couple of different modes. They’ll have what they call energy savings standby. So the console will go to sleep. This is true across a lot of devices. The concept of sleep versus suspend versus shutdown. And on the Mac in particular, I remember being a big fan of Hibernation, because Hibernation would effectively write the contents of your RAM to disk and then it would completely power off a machine. And the idea would be that yet when you turn your machine back on, there’s a little bit longer to time to come back up, but you don’t have that same environmental impact. But Microsoft, if I remember, they’re basically doing something to effectively nudge people towards more of a shutdown, mode, the power saving shutdown, rather than just having a system on standby, what are they actually doing? And is this something that’s common across the games? Because I’ve got two systems in front of me games wise. I’ve got the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck, both of which are probably in standby.
Chris: So the story that I think we’re referring to is ArsTechnica • • about Microsoft switching a default to shutdown rather than sleep mode, right? The impact of this is that when you’re not using an Xbox being in the kind of shutdown mode versus the sleep mode means that it uses 20 times less power or around about that. So it’s like rather you’re using like 0.5 watts compared to like 10 to 15 watts. Now, that doesn’t sound very much when we talk about it right now, but if something is like sleeping all day long, over a year, that works out, I mean, 15 watts over, I think, all the hours in a year, it’s comparable to a very efficient fridge in the UK, right? And a lot of the time we don’t have a kind of reference point for this, right? so it’s maybe like £15 or so, or some figure like that in terms of costs for this. But it’s just avoidable for this, because, for example, the difference in experience you might have is that it takes 15 seconds to come on, rather than 2 seconds to come on, for example. And a lot of the time I’m not sure waiting 15 seconds is worth that 20 fold increase in energy usage or resource impact. And you see this in lots and lots of other places. So one example, there’s an organization called the Greening of Streaming group, and they’re trying to do something like this for streaming because a lot of the time we’ve gone from maybe 720p • 1080p, up to there’s discussion about having like 8K • displays and stuff like that. And you have a default to sending as much data as you can down the pipe to people all the time. And there’s a question about how much quality can we perceive, but also there’s a question about, are we even paying attention to this kind of stuff in the first place? And stuff like this means there are ways where if you can’t perceive the actual usage, or if you’re not going to benefit from it, then it’s not really worth the extra resource usage. I mean, the example that I guess we all experience every day is browser tabs, right? Once you tap out the browser, your browser will usually try to throw it back a bit, right? And most of the time, this is a good thing. It means you have a longer life on your battery, for example. But it’s the same concept, and it’s about where you actually choose to use it. So there’s a whole thing around efficiency and where you choose to use this kind of stuff and where the marginal increase is worthwhile. And the Xbox One is a really nice example. The Greening of Streaming stuff is also, in my view, quite an interesting one. And the thing that comes into here is it starts asking questions about, okay, how much power do you actually need in your typical gaming rig? When you compare different things, like, I’m not sure if I want to go into the field of saying is, I don’t know, The Last of Us on PS4, • really the 20 or 30 times better than the energy usage than the value I get from playing. I know. Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild on a Switch. There’s going to be a difference in power usage there. And I don’t think that’s the thing you should probably go to that level. But for cases where there is no loss, it feels like this is a really low hanging fruit and there’s loads of avoidable, basically waste that we could probably do without, in the short term, the very least.
James: And that’s a really good point. So yeah, if I finish my gaming session for the evening, I don’t mind actually shutting down the system because I’m not going to come in back to that evening. And look, I can go and do if it takes an extra 10-15 seconds, we’re talking consoles that use solid state storage. We’re not talking 90s gaming PCs with drives that will take 20 minutes to boot. We’re talking incredibly fast SSDs. And I think it’s worth considering that, and something that of course I realize is, well, what devices need to be permanently on? We’ve talked about WiFi routers. I guess you could potentially shut down your WiFi overnight. Now there is a potential problem there in that that means your phone then goes on to cellular data. Does that then use more power?
James: There’s a balancing act. One thing that I did want to touch on a little bit. You talked about quality and gaming rig. It’s something, you’ve put the power of these GPUs and the CPUs. Now, I’m a huge fan of what Apple are doing with their Apple Silicon. Such a low powered system that can perform just mind blowing performance. But then you look at Nvidia’s 40 series cards, which are like 350 watts, 400 watts per card, if not more.
Chris: You can end up with figures like this. Mind blowing power.
James: Yeah, when we look at our gaming rigs and our streaming rigs, do we want to be conscious of making sure we’ve got the performance we need for things to be comfortably playable? Is there an excess, do you think, in those really silly GPUs and CPUs?
Chris: Here’s the thing, I don’t really play the games that need such high resolutions at like 120 FPS. And as far as if you’re choosing to do something like that in my book, I feel like that’s probably better than taking a flight every weekend, for example, or something like that. And I feel that if you are doing that and you really enjoy that, I don’t think it’s really my place to tell you not to do that. But it might be my place to say, well, if you’re going to do that, and you know, there’s an environmental impact from the power you’re using, that heightens the importance of you probably doing something to decarbonize the electricity you are actually using. Because in many ways the story of progress is us having greater access to energy, which allows us to do more things or benefit from all kinds of services. And I feel that because these are not cheap cards, right, to do that, but not then spend a little bit extra spend to actually have like, say, a green energy plan, for example. That seems like a misplacement of priorities in my book here, I suspect. I think that’s what you could actually do. I mean, you can also make the argument that if you’re going to go down this route, you could do something really, really wacky like say, well, I’m only going to run this GPU on the power that I can store from the solar on my roof. So I’ve got a certain amount of time to play, right but there’s things you could actually have there to have my entirely guilt free gaming session. But I’m not sure that and to be honest, the people who buy gaming rigs and stuff like that, I’m not sure that telling people you shouldn’t be using this is going to make that much of a difference to their behavior. But being able to be a bit mindful about where the power comes from and how and trying to take steps there, I think are useful. And this actually speaks to a model that we use internally where we work. We talk about the CID model. So consumption, intensity, and direction, we largely talk about it in terms of consumption. It’s like, can I reduce the amount of resources I need to do something? And now intensity is about, can I reduce the harm done when I use those resources? Because in some cases, you will have to use resources, but you want to reduce the harm there. And then direction is basically okay, what kind of world am I heading towards to build? For example, we use this as a model for helping organizations figure out what kind of intervention they might actually want to make to do something about the climate crisis. And the reason we have these three is that you might talk about, say, consumption and intensity, for example. But there’s a whole piece about what world you choose to create. Right now, let’s talk about, say, something like AI, for example, using machine learning to do something. You can have super efficient machine learning, like the most effective model, rather than a wasteful one. And you can use it running on green energy. But if you’re using machine learning or AI to do something like help people extract oil, for example, or you help it or you’re helping use it to radicalise people on social media, I feel that’s, like, that’s probably not. That’s just as important as how green the energy is that you might be using for any of these tools. So I think there’s very much a kind of direction aspect for this kind of stuff, too.
James: Absolutely. And look, one, of my biggest reasons for we talked with, Catherine Flick a couple of weeks ago about the environmental impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Insane GPU farming with massive power draw, I just don’t see a benefit in that at all.
Chris: Yeah, to be honest, I think I sympathize with that. I really, really struggle with finding, whenever I speak to people whose opinions I respect when they’re trying to solve a technical problem. I can’t think of many scenarios where a blockchain improves things, or performs better than existing non blockchain related environments. There may be some cases which are really, really, really nation specific. I don’t know about them. And I’ve never come across anything like that in my 25 years of working as a professional in this field. So I suspect maybe they do exist in the same way that maybe unicorns do exist or stuff like that. But for the most of the time, I’m not going to base my career around this case. And I feel like, yeah, from a technical point of view, that’s kind of problematic, but also just from an, idea of who is benefiting for the amount of usage. There’s another problem there. Like, if you look at the numbers from the International Energy Agency, I find this stuff really fascinating, because they’ve released some reports recently, basically showing that data centers might be using I think when they looked at all the figures, there was something in the region of 200ish • terawatt hours is the figure cited by the IEA. Right. That’s quite large. Right? And when they looked at blockchain by comparison, or like kind of cryptocurrency mining or something like that, it was around at least 40% of that. So you got 200 terawatt hours to benefit half of the globe, right? Because I’m not sure if this included China, then you got almost 40% to benefit, not half of the globe. So there’s a whole equity issue at play there, actually. And I suspect we might not knock this one on the head, because this could be a rabbit hole that we’re not going down. Because blockchain discussions tend to take up a lot of oxygen, basically.
James: Yes, they do. And we’ve already had one with Catherine. So folks, go back, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that episode, because it’s worth going and listening to, but just something to mention. Now, one of the things, obviously I’m looking at the shownotes, so this story, putting it on, working with RIPE NCC.
Chris: Yeah. So the link I shared there is actually there was a workshop called The E-Impact • Workshop by the Internet Architecture Board, where actually some of the discussion I said about, say, the relationship between energy usage and network usage and stuff like that. They, there’s a series of one or two hour workshops where by a number of experts, like people with lots of letters after their name and published papers and things, they all got together and shared their stuff. And they shared some of their findings and had some discussions about, OK, what are the levers for change? They were all put online. and what that link is, is basically me collating those YouTube videos, which were recorded, for the workshops, but it also records some of the work we did with RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC are, one of the groups who issue IP addresses to people. So like, they control IP address space. And we did some work with them to basically annotate every single public IP address on Earth with information about how clean the energy was at that point, that public point of presence on the internet as well, you might say, with the idea being that could support new ways of routing. So we actually submitted our own paper called Extending IPv6 • for carbon aware networking. With the idea being that you could kind of build an awareness so that when you want to route a packet of data from say, one computer to another computer, you could take into account the carbon intensity to go through maybe the greenest possible grid. So if the grid itself knows that it’s really, really sunny or windy in one part of Earth, you would have the packets take that kind of greener route. And as long as it stays inside a kind of latency budget, it should be fine. And you end up with like low carbon trick shots of packets zipping around all across the world. So that was one of the ideas that we proposes for a paper ourselves. And it turns out that you can extend IPv6 • to do this. We didn’t realize that. And yeah, so this is one thing we’d like to do in 2023. So we wrote a paper to propose this as an idea. And this is builds on the project we did with RIPE NCC to provide that initial layer of annotation with open data from a climate nonprofit called Ember Climate, who are based in the UK. And basically publish data about the carbon intensity of electricity all around the world.
James: Fascinating. It would be one even more important when we start really adopting IPv6 • because it’s not really going as well as it was meant to go. We are still very heavily reliant on IPv4. • I don’t, for example, get an IPv6 • address from my ISP. We talk about obviously the wider infrastructure of the Internet. But one thing we would talk about preshow is actually a lot of that usage. Maybe you’re streaming Netflix actually comes down to your own internal network infrastructure, your own router, because it’s obviously having to work harder, particularly if you’re on WiFi, I guess, having to put out more transmission power. How much do our internal networks have an impact?
Chris: So yeah, this was actually one thing which was counterintuitive, and I think it’s the second of the videos on the link I just mentioned, where people explore this. essentially it’s not so much a case of routers having to work harder, it’s more the case of do you remember when we were like 20 years ago with a website, when someone could deploy website, they would provision it for all the traffic. So you would buy a chunking great web server, even though you’re going to get maybe single digit utilization, right? just in case you get that spike. Now with things like cloud, the idea would be that you might be slightly higher level of utilization, so it’s not quite so wasteful so there is like a degree of power, proportionality. And then if you go all the way to things like serverless, then when things are supposed to kind of switch themselves off after use, you’ve got a much, much greater relationship between the provisioning of resources and the usage of resources. It turns out that with networking, we’re still ten years ago, or 20, it’s like we’re at that point 20 years ago where you provision for maximum usage all the time. So for WiFi and they, you’ll see a fairly static usage. There is a bit of a fluctuation, but not massively. And one of the things that surprised me when, all these findings were being shared on the workshops was that I think Carbon Trust and the digital impact, the DIMPACT, project, they were looking at the energy usage from, say, video streaming, for example. And it turns out that a significant part of it, like around between 30% to 40% of domestic usage is actually at the router level. And that’s, over a given year. And that’s because we never turn routers off. So, over a given year, right. A router can have the same environmental impact as the fridge, for example. Just because it’s on one thing is on all the time, and a fridge, which obviously is going to have spikes of power usage, but most of the time is not on. Yeah, you end up with on average, the same usage, for the two of these things. And when you start adding repeaters all around the house again, you’ve added another, say, ten watts, 24/