- I grew up in Miami. There were hurricanes, but it was usually fine, except for Andrew.
- I was always left-leaning, politically, an “environmentalist” teen, but I never did much about it, aside from taking out the recycling.
- In college I went vegetarian, then I went vegan, then I was an animal rights activist for a while.
- Years passed. I was vegetarian for a long time. I married a physicist who worked on making solar cells more efficient as a graduate student. She’s pretty awesome.
- We lived in Santa Cruz, California, while she was in graduate school. I went to graduate school, too, and became a journalist. And a technologist. Both at the same time, really.
- Our first winter in Virginia was the snowiest ever. Our first summer in Virginia was the hottest ever.
- Years passed. We drove hybrid cars, had kids, reduced, reused, recycled.
- I moved from working for media companies to working for a technology company.
- Two months into my job at Automattic, I went to one of our data centers. I needed ear protection. Because of all the fans.
- The data center was in my neighborhood. Many data centers are in my neighborhood. My neighborhood is AWS US-East-1 and until recently, the old AOL building. My neighborhood is 20+ data centers between my house and the grocery store. At least that’s how many you can see from the street. I counted. Once. Six years ago. (See below for a map.) There are more data centers now.
- Two years into my job at Automattic, Jack Lenox did a flash talk at a meetup in Rotterdam. Five minutes on the very basics of the concept that more performant code uses less electricity. This had not occurred to me before, to be honest, perhaps because I had not watched the full-length version of the talk Jack gave at another WordPress event. Jack left Automattic and became an elected representative in the UK under the Green Party banner, then he opened a nice looking electric bicycle shop. (Kudos, Jack.)
- Later, I read a book. The Ministry for the Future. The first 50 pages were the scariest thing I had read since spending way too much time with my parents’ Stephen King collection in the spare bedroom as an 11- to 14-year-old.
- One day at work, someone asked a good question about how we could help our customers with sustainability, and someone else shrugged it off a little too easily for my liking, so I went to check what the Sustainability ERG was up to, wrote an annoyed (and probably annoying, to be fair) internal blog post about how we could help, joined the group in earnest, and went down the rabbit hole of learning about our data centers and the state of measuring our impact on climate change.
- Soon after, a colleague invited me to join a small sub-group to attend a OnePointFive Academy accelerator course. It was really great. There was more content and calls and community than any of us had time for, but I learned the basics, and we started making the case internally to spend more time and effort on sustainability.
- In parallel, we had big customers asking challenging questions. By the time I left Automattic, we had lots of momentum and good reasons to keep moving.
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[…] In places like Virginia (where I live), coal is nearly phased out (that’s good), but new natural gas plants are coming online to meet the electricity demand of data centers, where processing power for generative AI is in turn, in demand (that’s bad). And as previously established, there is no end in sight to the data center construction in my personal neighborhood. […]