Clean Coffee #1

Published in

Clean Coffee

4 min readApr 3, 2019

At 1 pm CET on Friday 15th February, 6 people working in tech came together online to discuss what we can do to make the tech industry greener.

We followed the lean coffee format and dubbed it “Clean Coffee” 😏 Below is a recap of the topics that came up and links that were shared during the discussion.

Topics that we discussed

Visualising energy system transformations to increase public access to models used for policy, assumptions, etc., awareness of consequences of climate action, etc. cf. https://model.energy/ — Tom 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
How do I talk about the emissions from travel, and implications about their growth with my co-workers, without people getting defensive? — Chris 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽
Where can we find information on how to calculate the carbon emissions and energy consumption of heavy file? For example a 300GB file on the cloud, how much energy and emissions does it represent? — Aurelie 🙋🏽🙋🏽🙋🏽

Topics that we didn’t have time to discuss

I’m looking for example of models and data informing policy to affect change — are there ones I can look to? — Chris 🙋🏽🙋🏽
What are good examples of low emission websites or apps? — Aurelie 🙋🏽
How do we encourage candidates in the upcoming EU election to consider e-waste and other tech-related issues in their platforms?🙋🏽 — Michael
How I find the biggest impact where I work, and what I can do? — Chris 🙋🏽

Links and notes shared during the discussion

Intro

Mozilla’s policy coverage for climate — https://internethealthreport.org/2018/the-internet-uses-more-electricity-than/

Tom Brown’s work on making explorable energy models to show a path to decarbonisation throughout Europe — https://model.energy

Talent tree — recruiting for green jobs in tech

Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick

Topic 1

Visualcapitalist.com often features infographics about energy (it might be useful)

https://www.llnl.gov/missions/energy — energy flow charts from the Lawrence Livermore Lab

https://www.iea.org/digital/ — they have good stats showing the usage by data centres and so on

Matthias Fripp’s Switch model was used to get the 100% policy in Hawaii, showing it was possible:

And the accompanying slides from Matthias and more presentations to Hawaii stakeholders.

I don’t know whether there was visualisation involved — Tom B.

Matthias Fripp is in openmod:

We’ll arrange an openmod meeting at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Boulder, CO in summer 2019 to discuss open modelling in the US.

Matthias’s Switch model was also used in California:

CEOware — a term used to describe tools that allow executive leadership to see the implications of different policy decisions by projecting trends forwards. sensible policy versus explorability to help people to feel more confident.

OSS UX — advice for https://simplysecure.org/

Where the green UX https://sustainableux.com

Topic 2

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20170815_aviation_the_dirty_not_so_little_secret_of_internet_governance/ — I addressed this here.

Some tips:

Give up meat (if you haven’t already)
Travel less, teleconference when possible
Be more strategic (one big meeting instead of three small ones)
Use alternative methods (train, bus, carpool, etc.)
Don’t fly in business class (if that’s an option)
Offset carbon using verifiable sources (Cool Effect, Atmosfair, etc.)

Thread on twitter here about organising a remote conference:

Flying less is a movement in academia — stuff to learn from there — https://t.co/ATvFVg5AEt

Also here: acm-climate@googlegroups.com and their SIGPLAN.

Do you have written policy? Having it written down — yes. We don’t refer to it, but it’s useful to have as justification to push back.

Travel avoidance — the term used in business.

Wholegrain Digital no fly policy listed at the bottom here — https://www.wholegraindigital.com/about-us/

Topic 3

Jerome from Wholegrain Digital did a talk on this at SustainableUX: https://sustainableux.com/talks/2019/you-cant-manage-what-you-cant-measure-a-carbon-calculator-for-websites/

Chris’s talk at SustainableUX covered some of this:

https://sustainableux.com/talks/the-state-of-the-sustainable-web-in-2019/

Supporting notebook with links and data.

Example of data savings from last year when ad companies switched off their ads:

https://github.com/productscience/planet-friendly-web/blob/master/binder/co2-savings-usatoday-gdpr.ipynb

Tweet showing the energy saving from migrating cloud — it’s offset much of the increase in use:

The Greenpeace most recent reports help shed light in this area https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/click-clean-virginia/#cleaner-cloud

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/click-clean/

There’s prior work here:

https://www.ictfootprint.eu/en/ghg-protocol-%E2%80%93-software-factsheet

https://ictfootprint.eu/ has a self assessment for working out the carbon footprint of an IT organisation

Want to join us next time?

You can sign up for upcoming Clean Coffees here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/clean-coffee-tickets-55462916075