How can openness help achieve a fossil-free Internet by 2030?

Over the next six months, a series of “OpenClimate community calls” will be hosted around different topics related to the connection and intersection between the climate crisis/climate action and the open movement. We’ll do short, easily digestible write-ups for each call, but if you’re interested in going more in-depth on the topics, we encourage you to 1) join the calls, 2) watch the call recordings, 3) follow along with call notes, or 4) suggest a topic that you’d like to present about or host.

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On August 31th (call recording), for our fifth Open Climate call, we had Chris Adams as a guest. He is part of the Green Web Foundation and one of the editors of Branch Magazine.

Adams challenged us to think: what would a fossil-free Internet by 2030 look like? He reminded us about how the Internet is the world’s largest coal-powered machine and walked us through some of the key reasons why the Internet is a dirty cloud as well. He then shared with us his way of engaging with the climate problem, pointing out that you can either engage as a professional by embedding these values into your work, or as a member of society by showing up for those who are doing the work).

In his approach as a professional, he uses what he calls the “GOLD” standard: Green, Open, Lean & Distributed:

• Green stands for green energy. He shared some of the efforts that the Green Web Foundation has been doing to understand which websites run on renewable energies, which websites don’t, and how you can take practical steps so that your website is less “dirty”. While he acknowledged that sometimes it is hard to control the source of energy that powers your use of the Internet, he also pointed out that “at least you can make it accountable”.
• Open stands for open source, but it can also enable transparency, which in turn allows you to make better decisions.
• Lean is an attempt to optimize the way you work for fewer emissions: for example, by extending the life of laptops.
• Distributed means choosing to move work through time and space in order to reduce your carbon footprint. For example, is not the same to run your washing machine at 3 AM on a Monday, than to run it at 10 AM on Saturday when everyone else is also doing it. That is also true for the Internet! Adams explained that this is a good example where carbon footprint could be reduced. He pointed out Branch being one example of this, where background colors and website design changes depending on what time of day you access the website.

Branch Magazine’s background color changes depending on the time of the day.

And, of course, we also need to engage as members of society. Here Adams brought some of the great examples that Fridays For Future and other climate movements around the world are doing to accelerate the speed of this transition. In this case, speed is justice and there’s a need to win these arguments to protect the lives of children and persons.

To conclude, his presentation ended with an inspiring quote: “The internet should be a global public resource: one that is fossil-free, open and accessible to all, and in service to the diverse needs of people everywhere.”

Participants then broke up into breakout rooms. Our prompts for the discussions within the breakout rooms were the following:

• Where could openness be used to change the status quo of a fossil-fueled internet?
• What open practices and assets already exist that could help transition the internet to renewables? What actions speak to you personally?
• Who else is doing relevant work, and who else should be in these conversations?
• Any other reflections, questions or ideas sparked from this conversation?

These questions opened up a lot of inspiring conversations. Here are some (edited) quotes from the notes in every group:

• “What Internet do we want to make fossil-free? The community Internet? The big-company Internet of social media and product consumerism? The deep-dark bitcoin mining Internet?”
• “We need to involve more academics, researchers, and librarians. They are at the forefront of discussing open access to the basic science about climate change. The open movement can be instrumental in finding ways of translating the research outcomes and data into actionable projects.”
• “In exploring these questions, it’s important to distinguish open as a set of values from open as a set of practices. There is deep inter-relation between the two, but efforts that over-focus on practice and skip past communicating the values will scale less effectively and make less of a difference.”
• “The Right to repair movement should be incorporated into this conversation. Less production and consumption of devices has to go hand-in-hand with the transition to using renewable energy for powering the internet and personal devices.”

What do you think of these questions? How would you answer them?

Join us on September 28, 2021

If you are interested in following up with the conversation, please join us for the next call on September 28th, 2 PM UTC! Shannon Dosemagen will be facilitating the conversation. Register here.