The Week in Green Software: Disintegration vs Integration
Environment Variables
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Introduction
The Green Software Foundation is hosting an online event during COP 27 called Decarbonized Software on November the 10th. This week Ismail Velasco looks at the raft of worrying reports released one after another by all the top international climate agencies so recently. He will explain why the news is dire yet find the nevertheless significant milestones of hope buried in the reports. Last episode I focused on the power of individual initiatives, this episode I look at the complex role of big tech and highlight hot of the press green software developments in Microsoft, AWS, Google and Meta.
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👉 State of Green Software Survey - click this link to access! 👈
This Week in Green Software Episode, host Ismael Velasco takes you through the recent key events and happenings in the world of green software. He outlines a range of reports coming out from The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, IPCC, UNEP, UNFCCC, IEA and many other acronyms to boot! He also highlights huge positive (and negative) changes in Big Tech and how you can be part of the crest of the wave of change in green software.
Timings of mentions of links below are listed next to them for your reference!
This Week in Green Software Episode, host Ismael Velasco takes you through the recent key events and happenings in the world of green software. He outlines a range of reports coming out from The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, IPCC, UNEP, UNFCCC, IEA and many other acronyms to boot! He also highlights huge positive (and negative) changes in Big Tech and how you can be part of the crest of the wave of change in green software.
Timings of mentions of links below are listed next to them for your reference!
Learn more about our people:
Episode resources:
- The Green Software Foundation Website
- Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter
- Microsoft’s Green Design Principles [25:52]
- Microsoft’s Carbon Aware Windows (Windows 11) [28:52]
- AWS: Well Architected Updates [31:20]
- Google Cloud: Cloud Aware Computing Dashboard [33:56]
- Meta: AI Powered Audio Compression [38:09]
Talks & Events:
- Event: Decarbonize Software by The Green Software Foundation [39:13]
Reports & Articles:
- Bulletin: The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin [01:55]
- Report: IPCC Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [04:27]
- Report: UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022 [14:02]
- Report: UNFCCC Reports [15:00]
- Report: IEA World Energy Outlook 2022 Report [16:25]
- Article: Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality is Coming into View by David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times [19:24]
- Article: Carbon-aware laptop charging by Andy Stanford-Clark in Hackernoon [23:00]
If you enjoyed this episode then please either:
- Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
- Follow and rate on Spotify
- Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!
- Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
Transcript Below:
Ismael Velasco: Hello, and welcome to The Week in Green Software part of Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we give you the most up-to-date news and events surrounding green software, a bite-sized smorgasbord of resources that will help you discover how to get involved in the world of software focused climate action.
I'm your host, Ismael Velasco.
I'm Ismael Velasco, and this is The Week in Green Software. In this episode, I will look at the raft of worrying reports released one after another by all the top international climate agencies. So recently I will explain why the news is dire, yet find the nevertheless significant milestones of hope buried in their reports.
Whereas last episode, I focused on the power of individual initiatives. This episode, I look at the complex role of big tech and highlight hot off the press green software developments in Microsoft, aws, Google, and Meta. Finally, I take the opportunity to trail the milestone represented by the forthcoming the Carbonized software event on November the 10th.
Check the episode notes for all the. So this week the planet received difficult news from a series of devastating reports, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the I P C C, the World Meteorological Organization, the wmo, the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, the United Nation's Framework, Conventional Climate Change, the U N F C C C, and the International Energy Agency.
The I. All released one after another. A series of scary reports. The World Meteorological Organization released its greenhouse gas bulletin, which found the highest ever CO2 emissions showing that we are back to pre covid levels and beyond. It also saw the biggest year on year jump in methane concentrations in 2021.
Since systematic measurements begun nearly 40 years ago, what does this. We hear a lot of the term CO2 emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, but I think it's become so prevalent that many of us don't really understand what it actually refers to. We talk about carbon. And CO2 emissions as a shorthand for all greenhouse gases, because other gases like methane stay in the atmosphere less so you're able to kind of do more about it.
Whereas CO2 stays for a very, very long time and removing it is a huge challenge. People sometimes think also that if we manage to remove all the excess co. Life returns to where it was before industrial times, but that is not the case. Whatever happens, the atmosphere has changed, the weather patterns have changed.
So although we desperately need to reduce and remove that excess co2, no one really knows quite what the world will look like even after we've cleared it all back to preindustrial. All we know is that it will be better, but not necessarily where it would have been at the beginning, and in fact, definitely not where it would have been at the beginning.
Now, why does this matter? Well, As I said, this growing heat in the atmosphere creates extreme weather events, and, and recently in a, in an earlier report, the wmo calculated that under current policies and trajectories by 2050, every single child in the world will be exposed to severe heat event. My son will be in his thirties, possibly about to start a family every single child in the planet, which also means every adult really will be exposed to severe heat events by 2050 at this rate.
What about the other reports? The I P C, UNEP, U N F C C, iea, they all release reports that coincide on certain finding. So back in 2015 there was a massive conference, COP 21. I was there and it was a real battle to arrive at unity of thought and. What we agreed as a trade-off between the economic needs of society, the speed of change, and the demands of survival, was that we would aim to control global warming so that it would not rise above one and a half degrees centi.
And certainly keep below the absolute scary maximum of two degrees. So again, these are figures we hear a lot. What does that mean? Well, Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018, calculated that 37% of all the deaths from heat in that period were directly attributed to human cost warming.
Which means that our global emissions were directly responsible for nearly 10,000 people a year dying in just those cities. Of course, the numbers are dramatically higher because there are a lot more people in the planet than just in those 732 cities. So every day our choices. Responsible, not just our own, but also historic choices are responsible for the deaths of over 10,000 people a year, and that was in 2018.
The number will surely be significantly higher now. Now if you think about that, an extreme heat event, That occurred once per decade in a climate without human influence, would happen four times per decade at 1.5 degrees of warming, but it would happen 5.6 times per decade at two degrees. The difference between a massive deadly heat event happening four times and happening six times.
In terms of the damage, the deaths, the illnesses, the weather events is huge. If global warming spirals to four degrees, then such events could occur nearly 10 times per decade once a year. So again, if you think about that trend, that by 2050, every child will be exposed to a heat. If you think about the fact that 10,000 people have been dying at much lower temperatures from these heat events each year, not in total, but simply proportional to our human pollution, then the idea of this multiplying and multiplying is clearly.
So what do these reports that have just come out? Tell us about where we are in relation to those goals of 1.5 degrees and two degrees, and this broader situation of the consequences of global warming and climate change. Well, what all of these reports agree is that global surface temperature will continue to increase under all emissions scenarios considered.
They consider best case scenarios, worst case scenarios, the status quo, a whole range of scenarios, and under all scenarios, surface temperature will continue to increase. That also means that under all scenario, There will be increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes. So these heat waves will happen not just more often, but they will be more intense.
Likewise, more often and more intense will be the marine heat waves, the heavy rains, precipitation and floods, and in some regions agricultural and ecological drought. And there will be also an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones that are devastating continents and reductions in the Arctic, cis snow cover and permafrost.
All of the reports agree that the updated national pledges since Cop 26 make a negligible difference. To predict the 2030 implementation of the current pledges at the moment, those pledges, if we were to implement implement them, we would have a 66% chance of reducing where we're headed to 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.
So in the best case scenario of implementing our best commitments, That were not currently implemented, just our pledges. If we were to implement everything we've pledged, we would overshoot the maximum that we agreed in COP 21 and hit not just 1.5 degrees, not just two degrees, but 2.4 to 2.6 degrees.
This is if we actually do what we say we. If we do what we are actually doing with our current policies in place and don't change them, we are on track for reaching 2.8 degrees in temperature rise by the end of the century to stay within the 1.5 that we consider vaguely safe, which means still harmful but not extreme by comparison.
We would need to cut four and a half times. 450% are emissions every year more than we are doing now, and three times more emissions per year to just keep to the two degree maximum that we'd agree and reduce global catastrophe. And at the moment there is no clear path to. What they all agree is that if we are going to reduce this growing severity, massive societal transformation is required at speed.
If China is excluded, the amount being invested in clean energy in emerging and developing economies has remained flat since the Paris Agreement 2015, The cost of capital for a solar plant in 2021 in key emerging economies was between two and three times higher. Advanced economies and China. So the countries that most suffer and the countries that have the most solar energy available have to pay two to three times more to create a solar plant.
That's crazy. And a prime example of climate injustice. And if clean energy investment does not accelerate, then there would. A need for higher investment in oil and gas to avoid further fuel price volatility. Clearly, when you take stock of these findings, we are in the midst of a disintegrating world.
Our decision making systems, our leadership, our lifestyle choices are leading us toward a break. At so many levels. However, this narrative of this integration, which is how the UK Guardian, for example, in an article that gained a lot of traction, chose to cover these reports is justified, but. There is another narrative that is also true.
There is also a process of integration going on in the planet. There is an integration of people thinking together, visioning together, agreeing on the reading of reality. We have agreed that climate change is real. We are putting in place policies, we are changing our lifestyles, we are changing our consumer choices, and we are building new institutions, new models, new technologies.
So actually inside these reports that were so terrifying, there were also some incredibly positive milestones. So in the unit report, we find that compared to our policy trajectory in 2010, we have cut our gap in emissions toward two degrees by a third. This doesn't mean that if we improve as much in the next two decades as we have done in the last decade, we catch up, we would need to change by 300% to do so.
Our change is dismally behind the. But it's not nothing and it counts. Whereas the worst apocalyptic scenarios looked likely even at the start of the Paris CO 21 Summit in 2015. If we look at the data in the UN report, we are currently in the intermediate scenario, and this is outta five or six I think it is.
So again, it is harmful. But it is dramatic progress. Another milestone, the UNF CCCs report identified that last year's analysis showed projected emissions would continue to increase beyond 2030. This year's analysis shows that emissions are, for the first time ever, no longer increasing after 2030. Again, the decrease is not fast enough to keep us on target.
But it is hugely significant. Think about this current long-term strategies representing 62 parties to the Paris Agreement account for 83% of the world's gdp, 47% of global population in 2019, and around 70% of total energy consumption in 2019. This is to say that most of the world is trying. Half of the population, but 83% of the economic engine and 69% of the energy vacuum is moving in a progressive direction.
This is a strong signal that the world is starting to aim for net zero emissions. Way too slow, but it ain't. Finally, the most exciting news in these reports comes from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report. For the first time, a scenario based on the status quo on current prevailing policy settings has global demand for each of the fossil fuel.
Exhibiting a peak or plateau, cold use falls back within the next few years. Natural gas demand reaches a plateau by the end of the decade. And rising sales of electric vehicles mean that oil demand levels off in the mid 2030s before ebbing slightly to mid-century. Total demand for fossil fuels declines steadily from the mid 2020s by around two exes per year on average to 2050, an annual reduction, roughly equivalent to the lifetime output of a large oil field.
Again, this is massive. Our demand for fossil fuels is the single biggest driver of climate change, and for the first time in. We can see it peak or plateau, starting this very decade. Similarly, they predict that annual clean energy investment rises to more than 2 trillion US dollars by 2030, more than 50% from today, clean energy becomes a huge opportunity for growth and jobs and a major arena for international economic competition by 2030, thanks in large part of the US inflation reduction.
And so learned when capacity additions in the United States grow two and a half times over today's levels, while electric car sales are seven times greater. New targets continue to spur the massive build out of clean energy in China, meaning that its coal and oil consumption both peak before the end of this decade.
That would have been unthinkable at CO 20. Faster deployment of renewables and efficiency improvements in the European Union, bring down EU natural gas and all demand by 20% this decade and coal demand by 50%. Japan's green transformation program provides a major funding boost for technologies including nuclear low emissions, hydrogen, and am.
And India makes further progress toward its domestic renewable capacity target of 500 kts in 2030, and renewables meet nearly two thirds of the country's rapidly rising demand for electricity. When you really take stock of this, you realize that these two processes of this integration and integration are equally powerful and they are recipro.
Integration drives disintegration. Disintegration drives integration, but there is motion in both directions. Perhaps the most balanced treatment I have come across this week of our current moment is this recent article by the New York Times. In it, there is a quote from Kate Marvel, and as a scientist and lead chapter author of an I P C C assessment.
She said, We live in a terrible world and we live in a wonderful world. It is a terrible world that's more than a degree Celsius warmer, but also a wonderful world in which we have so many ways to generate electricity that are cheaper and more cost effective and easier to deploy. And I would've ever imagined.
People are writing incredible papers in scientific journals. Making the case at switching rapidly to renewable energy isn't a net cost. It will be a net financial benefit, she says, with a head shake of near disbelief. If you had told me five years ago that that would be the case, I would've thought, Wow, that's a miracle.
So back to. We can be part of the integrative or the disintegrative process. Our industry is part of both trends. A really great example is aws. In their recent report and sustainability, they disclosed that they had achieved extraordinary. Advances in energy efficiency, that means that every process that they do consumes dramatically, exponentially less energy than it did some years ago.
At the same time, their net emissions keep growing because their business keeps growing. So even though they are generating less emissions, In every activity, they are having to generate a lot more activity every year because they keep growing. And this is really not particular to aws. We are all part of this.
Every technologist is helping technology grow. It's helping products grow and. Data consumption and our electricity consumption are going up even as other sectors are going down, so we can be part of that disintegration process. We can just keep adding to the electricity drain, to the carbon emissions, to the greenhouse gas effects, by the way, we build our software or we can be part of.
Integrative process and focus on patterns, methods, values, choices and designs that make us green,
and as we speak of greening our software and following where energy leads, then clearly carbon aware computing is a core part of our future as a. We discussed the CarbonHack 22 last week and the fantastic individual initiatives that it sparked around carbon aware computing. And one of the really exciting developments this week for me was that the Green Software Foundation published an article in Hacker None, and that article is called Our Code is Harming the Planet.
We Need Carbon Aware Design Patent. And the article trended number one in Hacker, which is an incredible thing. 50,000 people, nearly 50,000 people read that article and counting. It was such a privilege to be part of writing that article in a collaborative manner with a team because the resulting article, I think is the best introduction I've seen to carbon over computing.
Whether you are. More or less experienced in this field or completely new to it. So highly recommended as a guide. And along those lines, the CarbonHack has now resulted in. Over 70 teams and over 50 completed project submissions, and the ideas are incredible. They cover the full span from hardware to software to vr, to domestic appliances, to infrastructure as code.
I encourage you to visit simply to get a sense of what's possible and what's out there, because I think this is truly the beginning of something exciting, but really all of these individual initiatives that I discussed last week and that I'm mentioning now, are a very critical part of the roadmap to change.
But that roadmap cannot avoid big tech. And we discuss this massive companies, Microsoft, Googles, Apple Meta as if they were monoliths, just this one body thinking together. But the reality is that they are a microcosm of all of our society and just. Society has constructive and destructive forces integrity and disintegrity process.
So do these behemoths with tens and tens of thousands of people exist within each of these companies. And so we find that each of these companies has areas where it is contributing fantastic, groundbreaking, good things to the planet. And also has things that are massive blockages in the road to positive transformation, and both of these things are happening at once.
So I'd like to begin by highlighting Microsoft's recently released green design principles document. Now this is coming from their sustainable design. And this is an example of the part of Microsoft that is working to harness the power of this massive global corporation for the good of the planet.
Their initial principles, or manifest to, as it were for their getting started backpack on digital sustainability, is that. Climate crisis doesn't happen in a vacuum, that it is not just about carbon, but it is about ethics and relationships and inclusion and social justice, and all of these things come together.
That big change starts small. I'll come back to that in a second. That talking about climate can be hard and that digital is physical. These are the organizing principles of their green design principles manifesto, and they. Work on the idea that you should think bigger before you start, which means to challenge the status quo and to put care first, and that you should build better by default, meaning optimized, transparent, and adaptable.
Without going into detail into all these things, I do want to highlight that their principle of big change starts small, says. Start seeing yourself as a change maker. It takes only 3.5% of the population actively participating in nonviolent protests to ensure serious political change. Similarly, in companies and the tech industry, forming groups that can push change, can have lasting.
When they say, talking about climate can be hard, they say develop a willingness to meet coworkers, clients, stakeholders, or customers where they're at. Grow your ability to frame a conversation in a way that focuses on benefits, incentives, other than sustainability, just being something that is the right thing to.
It can be helpful to learn about climate commitments your workplace already has. You can use this to highlight how your sustainability work fits into these goals. So again, I find it very interesting that their design manifesto begins with designing for organizational change and effective communication.
And one of the recent examples of this in m. Is that they recently announced their latest version of Windows 11, and if you go to the announcement, you will see all kinds of features and they are all functional features, wonderful, good functional features, and then towards the end, without any sustainability heading whatsoever, but as part of the main core announcement, they also announce.
They have now made. Uh, change to their windows update experience. Windows update they say is now carbon aware, making it easier for your devices to reduce carbon emissions. When devices are plugged in, turned on, connected to the internet and regional carbon intensity data is available. Windows update will schedule installations at specific times of the day.
When doing so may result in lower carbon emissions because the higher proportion of electricity is coming from lower carbon sources on the electricity grid. And this is under the heading, Delivering Continuous Windows innovation and value. We've also made some changes they say to the default power setting for sleep and screen off to help reduce carbon emissions when PCs are idle.
And it's a wonderful example of those conversations. But it is also an example of the power of individual initiative outside of Big Tech because the director of sustainability for Microsoft made a post on LinkedIn about this and mentioned how they had built on the work of electricity maps. Electricity maps is not remotely big tech rather, it is one of a few innovations.
What time being the other big one of. Teams of individuals who came together to create an API that tells you what the carbon emissions are or other, what is the carbon intensity for the grid in any given time and place where that information is easily available, and their initiative, this API that they created has been used now to change the entire PC l.
Another development recently in Big Tech is that AWS announced updates to the AWS well-architected framework. And it's very interesting when you see, again, the trend, the movement, the I integrative process. The well-architected framework was born in 2012, and it had four pillars in 2015 when it was fully published for the first time released out.
But sustainability, again, has made it into the mainstream of their standards for good cloud computing. So what's new? The updates have done a couple of things. They have updated the prescriptive guidance of on best practices. To reliability, performance efficiency, and operational excellence pillars.
Performance efficiency in particular is close to sustainable design and greening emissions, but in addition, they have consolidated, including for the sixth pillar, for sustainability, they have consolidated. White papers and their best practice descriptions, which means that this is now the best tool you could look for if you wanted to understand how to build on the cloud in a sustainable way.
And to give you a sense of what this looks like, the sustainability pillar has six design principles. Understand your. Establish sustainability goals, maximize utilization, anticipate and adopt new, more efficient hardware and software offerings. Use managed services and reduce the downstream impact of your cloud workloads.
And there are six best practice areas. For sustainability in the cloud, namely region selection, how you select a region is clearly very significant to your sustainability practices, user patterns, software and architecture patterns, data patterns, hardware patterns, and development and deployment process.
So this is a collection of patterns, very practical. Guides that apply to all clouds, not just to aws, and then that drill down into AWS tooling as well. What about Google? Well, they're the smallest of the players in the cloud space and very early on they seem to have chosen to differentiate themselves.
By really committing to green software to sustainable computing. And so I think it is fair to say that out of the big three, Google is the one that has advanced the most in terms of its own footprint and also in terms of its transparency and tooling, and it's moving forward with it at pace. Quite recently, they rolled out a ui, a dashboard that allows users of Google Cloud to see which zones or which regions are currently running on clean electricity at any one time.
So, They tell you, for example, right now Europe, North Europe, Southwest and Europe West are on low CO2 with a nice little logo and a highlight that is clickable and takes you to the actual region cardboard footprint. In detail, it tells you that Europe West 1, 2, 3, 4 are not running on low co2, but West Six is and so on for the entire.
World and they tell you what their methodology is for calculating that, et cetera. So they moved from what was an internal benefit to an external benefit. And then again, this year they. Identified another tool. So they did a really interesting research project. They analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across across Google Cloud and found over 600 tons of CO2 emissions in seemingly idle projects that could be cleaned up or reclaimed.
These are your proof of concepts, your experiments, your tutorials. Moth bolt projects, the projects that were created by somebody 10 years ago or five years ago, and that have just, nobody's touching them either way, because nobody knows what they do. If those could be cleaned up, it would have a similar impact to planting almost 10,000 trees.
So Google's response was to create an active assist recommender that alerts. To your seemingly idle projects and tells you how many emissions they are consuming, how much you are producing waste in the world. This is exciting because the amount of dead data in the planet is huge. And finally this week they announced that they were launching their carbon footprint.
Product. A product that provides customers with across carbon emissions, associated with a Google platform usage. There are a number of dimensions here. They collaborated with atos, Etsy, hsbc, L'Oreal, Salesforce, ThoughtWorks, and Twitter. And if you know what's been going on behind the scenes, you recognize that ThoughtWorks have been the pioneers in the cloud carbon footprint.org tool, which pioneered the measurement.
Emissions across all the clouds. Instead of competing with them, they've learned from them. Likewise, you will know that Etsy was one of the pioneers in measuring CO2 emissions. Google have also announced that very soon they will be displaying for users of Google Workspace. We will be getting the carbon emissions of our usage.
So this is all extremely powerful and, and hugely scalable. As a very quick parenthesis, I think I want to make an honorable mention of an innovation that matter. AI has come up with recently that they announced the 25th of October and. It's not yet out. Out as in available to consumers. But using ai, they have managed to achieve a dramatic improvement in audio compression.
They have managed to make the equivalent of a CD quality mp3. Be stored in a 10th of the data. So where an MP3 compresses at 64 kilobytes per second. Their new process compresses at six kilobytes per second, and they are now hoping to take this approach and the techniques they developed with their AI algorithms and see if they can achieve similar gains for video compress.
Lastly, I want to finish by previewing the upcoming Green Software Foundation Cop 27 Showcase the event, the carbonized software in November the 10th. And this really brings together all the threads that I have been discussing because it involves many of the big tech actors. And it involves constituencies within those big tech companies that are moving to drive the progressive integrity process within the massive companies.
But it also includes some of the thought leaders, some of the key innovators that have already nudged and shaped and made possible. Some of the changes in big tech that I've. And finally, it also brings together and celebrates and highlights the individual innovators who are drawing the new frontiers of green software action.
And it brings those three constituencies right at the top, showcasing a raft of initiatives that will be crucial for all of us interested in this. At this showcase, there will be a number of high level panels discussing the state of the art in thinking about green software. In addition, there will be a launch of a new ISO standard, the software carbon intensity specification, a standardized way accepted by ISO to measure.
The carbon footprint of all software, and this is a standard that integrates both direct emissions and embodied emissions to take account of the manufacturing and disposal of the devices that consume the software. It will also be. Launching the training program I highlighted last week. Fantastic training program, which is now going to be owned by the Linux Foundation, so it will be a Linux Foundation course in green software practice.
It will also be launching a Patterns catalog. I mentioned the Well-Architected framework as a collection of patterns. The Green Software Foundation Patterns Catalog is an ambitious. Project to bring together. The green software patterns in Web, in cloud, and in ai, and this is not just a collection, but a vetting and curation.
Every pattern goes through a rigorous vetting process before. Being published and mainstream. So this will become a fantastic reference point and entry point to good practices. And we will have a preview of the State of green software report that I am working on for the Green, Software Foundation, and it will share.
The state of progress. What we will be doing with the survey, with the high level interviews and with the desk research and how we will be covering the, the level of awareness and adoption, the enablers and the points of friction in the expansion of the green software ecosystem. It will further highlight the launch of a green software speaker bureau where.
Anyone organizing a tech conference will be able to source an authoritative voice in green software. And finally, and very dear to my heart, it will be showcasing the most impressive carbon aware proof of concepts. It will be announcing the winners of the Carbon 22 Hackathon out of the Fantastic 50 something.
Solutions that have been completed and submitted and that you can go and visit and see and watch their videos and see their code and potentially work with them. We will be highlighting the absolute best of the best. So these are the initiatives that might be quoted. In one, two years time by big tech, by government, by regulators when they are scaling up new paradigms of green computing.
To finish today, I want to reflect on the nature of change. I believe that the movement toward a green energy sustainable just society. Is not only possible, but inevitable because the alternative is self destruction and human history is chaotic. It's violent, it is destructive, but ultimately it tells us two things.
The two things that human beings have. No matter what, and through all the pain and all the disruption and all the chaos, one is survive. Whenever we've been confronted with a choice of changing or surviving, we have changed. Not easily, not smoothly, not pretty, but we have survived by adapting. And the second thing that human history tells us is that we have.
Grown in our capacity for complex cohesion where we were able to collaborate only at the level of families or clans. After lots of bloodshed, we learned to collaborate at the levels of cities after even more. Trauma and destruction. We learn to collaborate at the level of nations, and right now, in the midst of all the chaos and Confucian, we are learning to collaborate at the level of the entire planet.
And we're not being driven there by Kumbaya songs. We are driven there by pain, and so I. Whether we are going to reach a sustainable, peaceful, just society by an act of collective will and consultation, or only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by our stubborn, clinging to old patterns of behavior that is the choice before all on earth.
That is our choice. And at the moment, let's face it, we are going for the slightly more painful option. And by slightly I mean. But significantly, as I said, the data suggests we are no longer going for the worst case option. We are in the middle in the really painful option as opposed to the catastrophic touch and go survival option.
We are adapting because we are wanting to survive, and I think this process of change is non-linear. It's like the waves of the sea and the rising of the tide in the. The tide does not rise in one go. The water doesn't just keep going up. It goes forward and it retreats. It goes forward and it retreat.
And when it retreats, it leaves dry land and foam and dirt, and then it comes back up in waves. And I think this is what this process is like. We have these retreats and we have these advances, but overall, the nature of survival means that we will have to advance and I believe we will. So we are part of these waves of change.
And I think as individual technologists, we can be in the back of the sea, completely unaware of the waves themselves right at the front, and be working as though the world was not burning. more likely. More and more and more of us, and very soon, perhaps already, most of us are somewhere in the wave of change.
We are at the base, we are at the middle. We are at the top of that wave and at the base. All that may mean is that we're hosted in the cloud and the cloud is already doing something to become greener. And so we're part of that change simply by being in the cloud, But we're not consciously making any decision.
Or we can be in the middle of the cloud. We are aware that this matters. We want to make a difference, and as far as we can fit it into our schedule, we do. But mostly our lives, our schedules are driven by motivations of a very different nature. Or we can be at the crest of the wave. And the crest of the wave is the thinnest part of the.
We are not with the majority of people, and it's the most turbulent part of the wave. It is full of foam and dirt and lack of clarity in that spot. It's the first bit that meets the sand and the resistance and the wind, but it also has a unique privilege. It has advantage point. It's the only point on the wave from which you can.
The other side where you can see the shore and what lies beyond it. And so I'd like to invite you, and I'm sure if you are listening, you are already near that crest. If you are, keep swimming, swim up, get to the cutting edge. Of that wave and it won't be comfortable and it won't be easy, and it might affect your career choices and might lead to awkward conversations with your colleagues and your friends and your family.
But it will give you the incredible gift of seeing past the despair and past the complacence and putting you in a position to be. The first to touch the New Shores. Thank you for joining me on another episode. And good luck with your adventures. Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, visit Green Software Foundation, and please, if you liked what you heard, do leave a rating and review. It helps other people discover the show and join in the conversation. The more of us are exploring these issues at home, at work, in our free time and in our projects, the greater chances of taking effective action and making a difference in our own corner of the world.
Good luck in your green software journeys and see you in the next episode.
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