Okay, shall I start folks? I'm afraid I have quite a few slides to go through folks, so
if you, I guess I'll start now then. Hello folks, welcome to my talk, Getting to a Fossil
Free Internet by 2030, before I start. Can you folks hear me all right? Excellent. Okay,
all right. As you can see there's the title, a talk of the tech and policy changes to get
us there. Hello, if you can't see my face here, because you're not in this room, that's
what I look like, I suppose. My name is Chris, I work at an organisation called the Green
Web Foundation. I've spent the last 10 to 15 years working in a series of wacky climate
and data themed start-ups, as you can see here. Loco 2 is about locomotion, like trains, but
also a low CO2, and going loco, going holiday, stuff like that, and it's just puns are a
thing that I have been working with. But these days I do most of my time working with the
Green Web Foundation, so we track the transition of the internet away from fossil fuels. I
also run a podcast where I talk all about green software with other people, and I also
work with a larger organisation called the Green Software Foundation, where we do work
on policy specifically. During the time I have with you today, we're going to cover these
three things here. I'm going to tell you about why I care about a fossil free internet by
2030. I'm going to share a framework for helping you think about sustainability in the digital
realm, and then I'm going to use this framework to look ahead at some policy and tech changes.
So let's start. Why a fossil free internet by 2030? So the main one is, let's be clear
about this. We're in a climate crisis because we keep burning fossil fuels, and every single
time over the last 30 years we've had a chance to get off them, we haven't. If you want to
actually speak to your friends or your boss about why a fossil free internet is important,
these are the ways I think you might explain it to someone. So first of all, it's achievable.
There are big firms already doing this, but we'll see that small firms can do this, like
climate emergency, carbon savings, that's another one. It saves lives because all the
kind of stuff that gets put into the sky that it doesn't heat the world up ends up poisoning
lots and lots of people. It saves money because, as we know, fossil fuels are not cheap if
you've tried heating your house recently. And yeah, people like being in green firms,
and yeah, there's a whole geopolitics thing that I think people in Ukraine will be very
aware of, and as Germans, we were also, or as Europeans, we're aware of too. So that's
why I'd stay there. Now a framework to think about this is what we use where I work. We
have a model that we call CID, consumption, intensity and direction, where consumption
is about, can I change how much we need? Intensity is, can I change how much harm is
done by the things that we have to do? And direction is about changing, where do we want
to go? What kind of future do we want to build? So the first of these is the lens is consumption.
Because our society is largely still based on fossil fuels, using pretty much resources
in any way, or create some form of carbon pollution and waste. And to start off with,
if there are things that we want to do, it's a good idea to try to minimise the amount
of resources we need to do that, no matter what. So with that in mind, we know that we
should be reducing this, reducing emissions. What do the trends look like for the last
year, right? This is a chart of historical CO2 emissions created by Dr. Robert Rode at
Berkeley Earth, a kind of environmental data science non-profit. You can see the direction
we're heading in. And the good news is that in 2015, almost every single country on Earth
agreed at COP21, a climate conference, that we really should aim to reduce emissions and
we should go for well below two degrees of warming for this century. Since then, we've
actually found out that we need to be aiming for not just well below two degrees, but more
like well below 1.5 degrees, which is a much more aggressive target. And that's what you
can see. These are the potential pathways we should be on. And what does that mean for
our sector, the tech sector? Well, the Paris Agreement will require for the information
and communication technology industry to reduce greenhouse gases by 45% by 2030. So that's
about 7% year on year if we started in 2020. And I'm not sure it went down the last three
years, all right? So this was actually something that was put together by the Science Based
Targets Institute, the ITU, which is the International Telecoms Union, I think, and
a number of other kind of official organizations who spent a decent amount of time looking
at this. And this is just for two degrees. So we need to be doing more than 45% really.
So how are we doing so far? Well, there's good news and there's bad news, I suppose.
So the good news is that like two billion people who have been connected to the internet
in the last, say, five or six years, and we've been able to use the internet a lot more,
which during the pandemic was very, very useful. I really appreciated having access
to the internet during the pandemic. And what I want to draw your attention to here
is that while we've increased usage of digital services, we haven't necessarily increased
the usage of energy at the same kind of proportion, except for cryptocurrencies, which to be honest,
the less said about that, the better. So I'm not going to really be talking about that
too much if that's okay with you, folks. However, and I should ask, why have the figures,
why have the figures not been higher? Well, the simplest answer is that Moore's law has
been helping us. And Moore's law is basically where computer chips have been getting steadily
faster and more power efficient over time. And as the sector has grown so fast, the average
efficiency has increased. So the thing is Moore's law is not infinite. So going forward
improvements in efficiency will likely have to come from new places, not just the chips
themselves. And this is what this diagram from a paper in Science magazine illustrates.
This paper is called There's Plenty of Room at the Top. What will drive computer performance
after Moore's law? It's a fun read. And the general argument is that for efficiency gains
to keep up with, but will keep pace with growth and really need to be going faster than growth.
So we don't just stay flat, but actually go down. We'll need to start applying all these
ideas at the top, all right? Which basically means it's going to land on us as developers
and designers of digital services a lot more than it otherwise would have. We can't just
rely on Moore's law doing the work for us. So that's consumption. And as Saul Griffiths,
the author of Electrify says, you can't efficiency your way to zero. If we don't want to be cold
and wet and without Wi-Fi, at some point there will be a minimal amount of resource usage
that takes place. Faced with that, we need to think about the harm that occurs as a byproduct
for every unit of usage that we have to make. So in our framework, we talk about this in
terms of intensity because there are multiple dimensions of intensity from water usage to
resource depletion to soil toxicity, air quality. But for the purpose of this talk, I'm going
to focus primarily on carbon pollution. Now, in Germany, where I live, the carbon intensity
of electricity is influenced by two main things. There's a lot of wind and solar for sure,
but the majority of our power comes from burning coal. And these machines, that's what's powering
our data centers. These machines, you can see, they destroy forests, they destroy people's
homes just to dig up coal, which we then burn to heat up water to create steam. The steam
turns a turbine, which generates electricity, which is what we end up using. Along the way,
we lose about two-thirds of all the energy through cooling towers, and we emit a lot
of carbon. So a kilowatt-hour of power is around, like, a kilogram of CO2. This isn't
the only way. An alternative approach would be to directly harness the energy around us,
using either solar or wind turbines, geothermals, and so on. Now, we're not burning fuels in
this case. So we're no longer wasting lots of energy in the form of waste heat that we
need to put into the sky. And it means that there's no need for the kinds of cooling towers
that you frequently see, so it looks somewhat different as well. Also, the carbon emissions
are much, much, much lower. Even when you factor in the actual making of the solar panels
and disposing of them, for example, you can see the figure here, but it's something like
17 times lower. So this is why it makes sense to not be running on fossil fuels. Now, globally
speaking, about 60% of the electricity we use right now comes from burning fossil fuels.
But this is the global average in certain parts of the world. Energy is much cleaner.
In other parts, it's much dirtier. Now, the numbers look tiny on this part. What you can
see is that wind and solar, in the top right, are growing, and they've really been plummeting
in cost over the last 10 years. Solar energy is nearly 10 times cheaper than it was 10
years ago. And something like 90% of all the new energy capacity that comes on stream these
days is coming from renewables. So there is some hope. It's not just going to be that
awful black line forever. So because the carbon intensity of compute is not uniform, like
I said, all around the world, if you want to reduce the harm done by carbon pollution
from the energy usage that powers your servers or powers any digital services, you have two
main options. You can move work geographically to run things where the energy is cleaner.
So this is like geographic migration. That's like the Iceland, the Nordics, and so on. Or
because the energy, the carbon intensity of energy changes based on how much where the
generation is coming from, you can basically move things through time. So you can wait
to run things at a different time of day, for example. So you can wait till it's windy
or sunny, or send it to where it's windy or sunny. So that's consumption, intensity, and
direction. Finally, we have direction. If you care about open source technology and
free software, you know, they're very important ideas that are kind of re-embed into free
software. And this is like you choose into work on one project over another, you're making
one version of the future more likely to actually happen than another. And this is the quote
that I find really useful. It's from a guy called Cade DM. He says, technology is a social,
political, and environmental accelerant. I think it's useful because it really kind
of gets across the idea that we're making a deliberate decision about what we're supporting.
And to give you some idea, this is a graph showing the direct emissions from a number
of companies you've heard of in 2019, plus a single contract from Microsoft with Exxon
Mobile, one of the oil companies that recently, like in the last month, announced $150 billion
in profit last year. All right? Basically, the consequence of using AI to help Exxon
Mobile basically drill for more oil and gas is basically around 6 million tonnes. So that's
about a Facebook, all right? And this is the same figure. And this is actually something
why I talk about actually thinking about what you use it for, not just can I make my stuff
efficient basically. It's not all bad again. So Microsoft, they do this, but they've recently
been doing more work about actually finding ways to actually get coal-fired power plants
off the grid and replacing them with other forms of power, like geothermal or nuclear
sometimes, all right? And every single time, that's like more than a Facebook, more than
a Facebook, more than a Google's worth every single year coming down. So this is why it's
important to actually be thinking about what you use it for. So let's use this framework
to talk about some of the policy changes ahead of us. So remember that chart that I showed
you before about emissions going up when they need to be going down, all right? Okay. For
better or worse, this idea of reducing emissions to within safe limits has started to be referred
to as net zero. And we're finally starting to see some consensus about what it actually
means. Now, this is the ISO, the people who set standards. They've created some guidance
about what net zero should really mean. And the actual guidance is pretty strident. They
basically say net zero claims are no longer considered credible if they're not halving
emissions by 2030 for an organization. So if your organization doesn't have a net zero
target and it's not doing that, not really credible. They also say it needs to include
the entire supply chain, not just like your own stuff, basically. And also you need to
have interim targets. So targets for 2025 or 2026. And this is because seven years is
roughly the typical kind of tenure of a CEO that you can say, we'll be net zero by 2030,
leave and then leave it for someone else's job to actually fix. And this is why it's
actually quite important to actually do this, because you need to have something which actually
brings action early. Also in Europe, the, it's a bit of a mouthful, the European Corporate
Sustainability Reporting Directive. In 2024, that's what organizations above 250 employees
now need to be reporting, which means you need to have started reporting two months
ago for 2023, if you haven't already started reporting. So this is a thing that's important.
And then finally, the IFRS, they're a bit like the kind of Pope of accounting standards.
They basically set a decree that everyone ends up following. And they've said that no,
if you're going to talk about the carbon footprint of your organization, you need to talk about
not just your organization, you need to talk about your supply chain as well. And that's
actually really important because around 90% plus is makes up most people's emissions in
the supply chain, not really your own emissions. So let's use our framework we spoke about,
consumption and all that. Okay, can I change how much we need? Joseph did a really good
job talking about things like the Blau angle and things like that. There are now emerging
standards to actually try to label sustainability of digital services. And as he mentioned,
yeah, there is Ocula was the first ever product that got some decent, got actually certified
for this. This is important because people who spend money on digital software, like
say, public sector or large, large companies, they can they can write these into contract
and say you need to have a blue angle certificate in order to actually for us to spend tens
of millions of euros with you, for example. If you want to like work with this stuff yourself
or work out the environmental footprint of this, we mentioned before, the guy called
Arna Tarara, he actually demonstrated a really, really cool piece of technology that does
this stuff. If you have a digital service, it will show you, it will basically create
a system. So you can see this and then it will come up with all these cool charts. So
you can see this is like a chart, this is the output showing me doing various things
and seeing how it creates spikes in usage. So that's testing something from the outside.
You can also look at something from the inside. So the Firefox Profiler, that will actually
self report its own information. So it will tell you I'm using, I'm using this much power
and this part of my browser is using this much. That's really, really, really cool. And there's
a whole talk about that later. We did some work with them to actually turn some of these
into carbon metrics. So you get an idea of what these figures are from. And this is the
kind of stuff that my organization tends to do. If you know this, then you can actually
figure out, okay, now that I understand there are hotspots in what I'm doing, what do I
do? And this chart has been shared, or this table has been shared quite a few places.
Basically different languages have different kind of memory footprints. And this might
give the impression that you should just rewrite everything in C or something like that. That's
not the end of the message you should take away. But in many cases, it may be that there
are certain parts that are already being rewritten for you. Or it's worth remembering that you
might be using a language for other reasons than just efficiency. And like if you are building
something super efficient that help people dig for more oil and gas, probably not that
useful. So intensity, can I change how much, how much harm is being done? So as you might
be aware, renewable energy from wind turbines and solar panels depends on the sun and the
wind and they don't always blow. Data sensors are normally on 24 seven though. So how do
you power something that's on with 24 seven with energy like that? The truth is that most
of the time we rely on averages. So when Google says and said that they already run on green
energy, they're basically saying they've used the same amount of energy as they view as they
have they've generated. So they've generated the same amount of energy from green sources
as they've used over the year, right? That sounds fair. Yeah, it's not quite that simple.
Because you know how, say people say you should get eight hours of sleep a day, more or less.
So over a year, which is maybe 9000 hours, that means you should probably get 3000 hours
of sleep, all right? Now if I got 3000 hours of sleep by a beat by sleeping from January
the 1st to April the 1st, then survived on Red Bull and chocolate bars for the rest of
the year, I mean, it's better than no sleep. But I'm not sure it's 100% sustainable, right?
And like this is actually one of the things that we'll be talking about later. So this
is the difference between annual and hourly and why it matters. And as I mentioned before,
if you don't have massive solar farms and you can't invest on all this stuff yourself,
some things you might need to do is think about how and when you run computing jobs
or how you do stuff like this. Now there was a talk all about this. And if you've heard
of Kubernetes, right, there's basically, you can basically say please run this computing
job where it's green, where it's sunny, or please run it when it's when there's lots
of energy on the grid, all right? There's a really good talk about it. So I'm not going
to talk too much about it. Okay. So what I will talk about though is just going a bit
more detail about what our computers run on really, I suppose. So when we think of computers
just using energy right now, what we're really using is a mixture of electricity from different
sources, each with slightly different properties. So if you have some onsite renewables connected
to say a building, that's one source, it'll be very low carbon. But you won't have much
control over when the power comes on because it's basically the wind and the sun that's
deciding this. And you're dependent on the outside environment. If you've ever used a
laptop, you've used battery storage here. And like that means it comes on when you want
it to be. I mean, a laptop that only turns on when it's sunny is would not be that useful.
So this is like what you refer to as dispatchability or things like whether they're dispatchable
or not, all right? But they have limited, they have limited amounts of power, or sometimes,
but it's getting a lot better. Finally, there's the grid energy. Sometimes it's clean, sometimes
it's dirty, and you can normally rely on it. But when like awful geopolitical political
events happen, they kind of change how much it costs, both in human terms and in actual
kind of financial terms. Now, I apologize for going super nerdy on some of this stuff,
but if you've ever used a virtual machine, you'll understand that what we do with like
virtual machines is we take a big server, and then we use virtualization to turn it
into kind of abstract set of resources like compute, like computing power, network, RAM
and storage. And once we've got this kind of broken down way of thinking about it, we
can then turn it into a series of like smaller machines. So there might be one virtual machine
that has lots of RAM, but only a little bit of storage. And by doing that, I can basically
make much, much more efficient use if I have a set of computers. And this idea of like breaking
things down and breaking them up again, I think is one thing that you can use when you
think about energy as well. And there was a really cool paper that was published last
year about this idea of ecovisors. And the general idea is that you can do the same with
power as what we've been doing with like computing resources. So if you virtualize the power
as a kind of grid made up of three different things, that you can allocate maybe a significant
amount of battery for one program that needs to be on all the time, and maybe less to another
which doesn't need to be on all the time. So you can basically allocate it in these
different ways. And this allows you to then do something like this. You could basically
create virtual machines with certain amounts of virtualized power that you can actually
work with. And this is actually something that you can then share visibility of to the machines
because computers generally just aware of them having power. They don't really know
about what the kind of power is like, whether it's green power, whether it's battery or
also one. But you can make some of this available to people to see. And there are ways that
you can implement like an API. So a program can be aware of its own power that it's using.
And that allows you to then actually basically design a system so it's aware of this and
can make much, much better use of this or turn things off when it doesn't need or actually
use more when there's an abundance of green energy, for example. So that's kind of one
of the ideas which I think is super exciting that haven't seen anywhere else. You can also
do some cool stuff with networking, carbon away networking. And I've got a few more slides
so I'm going to have to run through this quickly. But the short version is, if I want to visit
a website in England, sorry, and the website and the servers in Poland, that's to go all
the way through here. Now, every single time there's going to be different kinds of energy
that I use. But if the internet was aware of the network, I could go, I could take different
routes which are cleaner and greener and some kind of like low carbon trick shot thing.
So this was actually was A, this exists right now. There's a network program called Sion
that does something like this already. There's also a way to extend IPv6 like this. We shared
a paper specifically to this IETF internet architecture board workshop all about this
stuff. There's 26 papers all about this and it's super exciting and interesting in my
book. And a funny direction, can I change where we're headed? So we work on this idea,
a fossil free incident by 2030 because we think the internet should be a global public
good and it's healthy for the planet and you should be healthy for people who use it. And
do you remember I spoke about the idea of hourly figures like annual versus hourly? Google
as one company, they've actually put a lot of time and money behind the idea of saying,
well, we're going to run 24 seven carbon free energy, none of that red bull and chocolate
stuff. We're going to do it properly, which is good. And this is something that we didn't
realize was possible. Microsoft is now doing the same thing as again, but they're coming
up with their own words because they can't possibly have the same words for some reason.
And I thought, wow, this is really, really cool. And then I found out literally like
a month ago that this company here, Peninsula Clean Energy, they're a small nonprofit organization.
They've said, oh yeah, we're already at 99% 24 seven matched and we reckon we'll do it
by 2025. So this is a small company, maybe that is reaching say 100,000 people in California.
They've basically built this into their governance to say, no, this is a priority over share buy
backs, dividends to sharehold is everything like that. It's about intention. And they've
basically got there. But what's super cool and for the FOSDEM group is that they've open
sourced how they're doing it. They've actually shared the model they use to actually figure
out where they buy the power from and the ideas behind this. And like, I think this is
pretty freaking cool. And it's like, basically why am I excited about open source and everything
like that? Finally, I've only used American examples so far. But now I can't say that this
was entirely Europe's plan because Nord Stream was kind of switched off by like Putin and
everything like that. But they've span it this way. They've basically said, well, we've
completely got rid of our dependence on Russian fossil fuels now. It went much faster than
we expected. So we now have the possibility to redirect the money we would have spent
on gas to repower EU, 250 billion euros to net zero industries. So this is basically
a quarter of a trillion euros. So basically to talk to deploy the kind of cool green stuff
rather than the bad brown stuff that I think we should be getting away from. So that's
the my recap. I wanted to share a model with you, but I call CID consumption, intensity
and direction. Can I change how much we need? Can I change how much harm is done? Can I
change where we're headed? And I want to tell you about a fossil free internet by 2030.
It's achievable. We've seen that big firms do this, but small firms do it and faster
and better. We've seen how it basically saves carbon. We know that doing this saves lives.
It saves money because we know that fossil fuels are actually really, really expensive.
And I've already done this slide once. I'm just going to skip it because I'm running
out of time. But folks, I think that's the time I've used. So if you want to know more,
our organization, the Greenbelt Foundation, we publish open source code, we publish open
data and we work with other organizations who are trying to do the same. We also offer
training and consulting. If I've been speaking too quickly, there is a transcript of this
entire talk at that website. And I'm also online as Mr. Chris Adams on Twitter, but
less so these days. And on Mastodon, social was there. And also if you use email, I use
email too. Yeah. Thanks, folks.