Those of you who have followed my pivot to sustainability in recent months know that I’ve been focused on how I can help slow down climate change in the area where I have the most expertise and experience, working with the software that powers the Internet.
Estimates of the size of the problem vary.
Most public presentations about green software kick off with a statement and accompanying data visualization explaining that “data centers” or “the internet” or “software and hardware” account for one to four percent of global carbon emissions, roughly the same as global aviation.
It’s a good way to grab the attention of newcomers to the problem, and the comparison to airplanes gives everyone something tangible to imagine, even if they’ve never seen the inside of a data center, lived near them, or paid attention to the energy consumed by them.
Whether the real number is one or four or 40 percent matters less than the fact that the web is responsible for any carbon emissions at all, and our responsibility is to make that number smaller, by doing the next right thing.
The next right thing for your organization might be to change data centers, run heavy processes at different times of the day, turn off forgotten servers, sunset products no one is using, or with a little more effort, to make improvements to applications that make them more performant, and conveniently for our purposes, performance improvements sometimes reduce the amount of energy required by applications.
That’s a long list of things you *could* do. And some of those tasks are kinda big!
If you want to take your time deciding what to do first, you can measure your organization’s carbon emissions, estimate the potential emissions reduction of any particular effort you could make, and then prioritize your to-do list to build a roadmap of actions starting with some “low effort, high impact” tasks and increasing effort from there. Maybe mix in some “low effort, low impact” bits, too. They add up!
If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. That’s doing The Next Right Thing™ at scale, and it’s the sort of full-fledged carbon accounting and sustainability reporting that should be reserved for larger corporations and organizations.
But it doesn’t happen without individuals making small adjustments along the way.
I am absolutely not here to tell you that diligent household recycling is ever going to have an equal impact to the phasing out of coal-burning power plants, but it helps. Changing one light bulb from an incandescent to an LED doesn’t do much, but changing them all? Low-effort, high-impact.
There are plenty of incandescent light bulb equivalents in our digital applications, and they can be replaced, if we can find them.
What I am definitely here to tell you is that I start a new job on April 1, helping people who build the aforementioned Internet better measure the impact of their work on the planet.
It’s the next right thing for me to do.
More on that soon.
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