The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures

Environment Variables

Environment Variables host Chris Adams is joined by Jo Lindsay Walton, a senior research fellow at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and co-author of the report The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures. They delve into the intersection of climate and AI, exploring the environmental impact of AI technologies and the challenges of decarbonizing the ICT sector. Jo discusses key takeaways from the report, including the importance of understanding AI's direct and indirect impacts, the nuanced roles of big tech companies, and strategies for critically assessing claims of AI-driven sustainability. This insightful conversation highlights the need for interdisciplinary approaches and robust collaboration to navigate the complex relationship between technology and climate action.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Jo Lindsay Walton: LinkedIn | Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

News:

• The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures [01:15]
• Microsoft files patents for carbon capture and grid-aware workload scheduler - DCD [07:54]
• Potential of artificial intelligence in reducing energy and carbon emissions of commercial buildings at scale | Nature Communications [16:30]

Resources:

• Digital Humanities Climate Coalition | Data Culture & Society [02:08]
• Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions by sector - Our World in Data [10:29]
• The climate impact of ICT: A review of estimates, trends and regulations [10:51]

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Jo Lindsay Walton: There's this great metaphor that Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have in their book, AI Snake Oil. They say, "imagine we just talked about vehicles. We didn't talk about bicycles or cars or buses or trains. And we tried to talk about the climate impact of vehicles." It would be very difficult to do.

And that's essentially what AI discourse does, right?

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software.

I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Like seemingly everyone else in the industry, we've been talking about AI a fair amount recently, and earlier this year, in September, the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab published their report, The Cloud and the Climate, Navigating AI Powered Futures.

It's not a small report, weighing in at around 190 pages, and it has a number of key messages we'll be exploring in this episode. Also, one of the previous guests from back in September, 2023, Jo Walton was one of the authors of this report, and he was a nice enough to make some time to join us today on the pod.

So, Jo, thank you so much for coming onto the pod again. Can I give you a bit of time to introduce yourself and what you do in your day to day for people who missed the last episode back in September?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Hello. Yes. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. So I'm a senior research fellow in arts, climate, and technology at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. My day to day is 90 percent playing with my cat, but I am also part of the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition and the newly launched Climate Acuity Initiative, which does facilitation and CPD training around climate and tech in hopefully fun ways involving storytelling and games and things like that.

And yeah, it's just, it's really nice to be back on this wonderful podcast. I feel like the host of SNL.

Chris Adams: Thanks. So, just before I check, when you say CPD, CPD is continuous professional development. People who want to build understanding of climate into their professional life, right? Is that what it is?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, that's it. Exactly. And it's, really I guess, part of my work is at the intersection of climate and technology, but I'm not personally super technical. Most of your listeners probably have a lot more technical knowledge than I do. What I am really interested in is communicating around these issues and education as well.

So I'm raising them for all the stakeholders for whom they might be important.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Okay. And, on the subject of other three letter acronyms, I've just had my cat walking myself, so if it walks across the, when we're recording, please do forgive it. It's just, that's what he does sometimes. Okay. Folks, if you are listening and you've never heard my voice before, I am Chris Adams.

I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, which is one of the members of the Green Software Foundation. The Green Web Foundation is a nonprofit based in the Netherlands, focused on reaching an entirely fossil free internet. By 2030, I also work as one of the policy working group chairs inside the policy work in, inside the GSF, as well as being the host on this podcast as well.

All right, then. So just before we dive in, if we speak about a particular paper or a report or a link, we will add these in the show notes. And if you, if there's something you're missing, please do send us an email or get in contact us because we do our best to keep these available and like useful resources for people.

All right, then. Jo, are you sitting comfortably?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Very comfortably. Thank you.

Chris Adams: All right, then. I think I'll begin. All right, then. So before we dive into the report and some of the key takeaways, which we'll be going into more detail, can we talk a little bit about why you decided to put some time into this report in the first place and how this entire project came about, please?

Because I know that you're, you said yourself, you're a researcher and in the Unix School of Media Arts and Humanities at Sussex University. And this came from the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition. Now, most software developers, when they think about AI and reports, it might be something that's within the industry.

So I want to give you a bit of space to talk about why it's interesting or why it's relevant to have people who aren't inside technology, who aren't like practitioners per se, talking about some of this. Because I think there's a different, a couple of perspectives that you might have that is worth.

Making clear for people, for example, or some techniques that humanities people might actually have that, the developers or techies might not be so cognizant of.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Oh Yeah. Absolutely.

So the report, as well as the kind of DHCC toolkit, which is an online resource, these are, they're very much community projects and they have an open source ethos and a part of that is an aspiration to interdisciplinarity. The report itself is a kind of stretch goal or spin off from a small innovate UK project that I was doing with GreenPixie, who are this fabulous cloud carbon data company.

Yeah. And we were basically exploring how to talk to a wider set of stakeholders about the cloud and about the climate. So not just IT people, but also, for example, chief sustainability officers, people who need to know about this stuff. That might not be quite so up to speed on the technical detail.

And over the course of that, it grew apparent to me that there was a gap really for an accessible resource that didn't oversimplify and that really tries to be a bit holistic. Can you really understand one bit of it without understanding the big picture? Can you, I don't know, understand how your little piece of software that you're trying to optimize is going to have an impact without thinking at least a little bit about carbon accounting and the greenhouse gas protocol and carbon offsetting? Can you really understand how green a data center is without understanding a little bit about how energy gets into the grid and then gets into a data center and the kind of energy procurement rules around that?

Chris Adams: Okay. I hadn't actually realized that you've been working with GreenPixie and just for people who are new to that term, GreenPixie is a UK-based SaaS provider of essentially carbon accounting tooling for cloud, just like, so if you're using Amazon's or Microsoft's or Google's cloud carbon calculator, they provide something very similar, but with a more kind of open methodology that allows them to be comparable to each other.

Really nice to know that there's, I didn't realize that you two would be working together on that. And that's cool, actually.

Jo Lindsay Walton: So, I mean, they, particularly that collaboration informed the green ops section of the report. But as you allude to, there is this attempt throughout the report to also bring in DHCC type perspectives, that kind of humanities flavor, really drilling into the details of the cultural factors.

So not just how we communicate things, but also how we imagine things, I guess. Big tech and tech communities don't just have direct impacts. They also shape the way that we imagine the future. So Google is not in the business of building kind of direct air capture, giant reverse hairdryers that are sucking carbon out of the sky. That's not something they do, but they do influence the way we think about technology and climate. And so they also influence the way that we think about things like greenhouse gas removal technologies.

Chris Adams: Although, earlier on this year, we saw that Microsoft patented, actually, some of the use of some particular things around carbon capture in data centers to use some of the waste heat to actually separate captured carbon, so it can be actually stored in other places. So, there's maybe more links than we actually had, yeah, exactly.

Jo Lindsay Walton: That's really interesting.

Chris Adams: Yeah, I'll share, we'll share a

Jo Lindsay Walton: link in the show notes for sure.

Chris Adams: Definitely. All right. Okay. So that gives me a good idea and then provides a bit of context to where this was and for people who are not used to the UK, Innovate UK is one of the government funding agencies that has provided some of the funding for some of this.

So that's where that has come from. All right. And so maybe we should talk a little bit about the report. So there's a number of takeaways. In fact, I counted more than five when I was running through the report. So there was a lot there, right? And there are some things which probably don't need too much attention because we're, because of the listenership.

So for example, we probably won't spend too much time dwelling on one of the takeaways being we're in a climate crisis or the other one bang, yeah, that digital has a physical basis. These are things that we can assume that people have internalized already, right? But there was actually some nuance to this because.

While people do talk about that, the kind of magnitude of the numbers might not be something that people are quite so comfortable about. And also, it's an area of contention in many cases, many places. And as someone who's been looking at a lot of the literature, I figured it might be interesting to have a bit of space to talk about one of the other takeaways, which you shared was basically the ICT sector is not a leading contributor to global warming, but it still must decarbonize rapidly.

Now, I think It'd be useful to unpack some of this because a lot of the time, a lot of the stories do talk about either data centers as like this new monster or new kind of like media baddie, for example. And it seems like there's, you've got a kind of more nuanced take on this and I wanted to give a bit of space for you to allow you to talk about some of that.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, I mean, coverage of the drivers of global warming is totally out of proportion to what those drivers actually are. We've seen data centers be in the mainstream media quite a lot recently. So I think maybe that's falling victim to that a little bit. Where do most emissions come from? Food production, for example, is absolutely huge.

And we hear a little bit about food miles. But food miles are not a massive part of it. A much bigger determinant of the impact is, "has the food come from a cow or from a nut?" Constructing and heating and lighting homes, road transport, fugitive emissions, fossil fuel companies basically being a little bit sloppy as they extract these fossil fuels and letting them escape.

There's a good, a lovely breakdown on Our World In Data, which is maybe we can put in the show notes as well, although a little bit dated now. ICT? What is the impact of ICT on global warming? Would like to offer a provocation and hope that maybe one of your listeners can, prove me wrong. I think nobody knows.

I think nobody knows ICT's impact on global warming. There's that 2021 Freitag et al. estimate that gets quoted quite a lot, but it's been a very, busy four or five years. I feel like I've lived through the AI singularity. And there's more complexity than that, right? When you factor in secondary and tertiary impacts, both good and bad, from the digital, then you're in the realm of deep uncertainty.

There is unlikely to be any expert consensus. Even so, despite that complexity, it's not controversial that tech needs to decarbonize along with everything else. It's all hands on deck. Everybody's on board with that. All the big companies have these ambitious pledges. What's concerning me a little bit is how that discourse is shifting.

So for example, Microsoft in 2020 sets out its pledge to achieve net zero.

Chris Adams: Moonshot. The zero carbon moonshot you're referring

Jo Lindsay Walton: yeah, yes, And we talk about that term moonshot in, in the report, actually, cause it's a, it's an interesting metaphor. And the moon has, is now said to be

Chris Adams: 5 years further away. Yeah.

Jo Lindsay Walton: The moon has moved five times. So actually I think that's incorrect.

I think the moon. The moon has been vaporized. The moon, as in Neil Stevenson's science fiction novel, Seveneves, the moon no longer exists. The target has already been missed. And that happened this year. "Okay, how is that possible?" you're asking. Does Microsoft have a time machine? How can they fail their net zero pledge of 2030 in 2024?

Well, that's the way that net zero pledges work. They are about cumulative emissions. They're not about a snapshot of emissions at a particular date. They are about the pathway from the date of the pledge 2. 0 staying within a given emissions budget, right? So you could draw a descending line graph and it's about the area under that line, not about the point at which the line intersects the axis.

And to their credit, Microsoft absolutely was transparent about this back in 2020. They showed the linear descent to zero. And by my estimates, that budget was burst sometime this year. maybe now, maybe as we are recording this podcast. And poverty is no effect. The concerning bit is that this isn't being talked about more openly.

It's much more this discourse, as you say, of "okay, now we have AI." In 2020, we didn't know about that, but now we have AI and AI has these sustainability benefits. Okay, so if that's the argument, if that's the implied case for emissions increasing, let's be very clear about that. Are we saying that it is prudent to increase emissions from the tech sector for the next few years?

Are we saying that the tech sector has been doing the right thing emissions-wise for the past few years, because those emissions on a robust methodology are shown to be more than offset by the sustainability benefits that they can provide on an appropriate timescale?

Chris Adams: We'll be touching on that a little bit later, but, alright. Okay. Thank you that I appreciate you providing a bit of extra context on that. And just to check if I understand, you said one or two things about, okay there is, the way you could work out the environmental footprint of the ICT sector when people talk about the direct impact, you said there's like a primary, tertiary, sorry, secondary and tertiary, presumably you're talking about like there is a direct impact, but there's an impact from people, what you enable with that computing and stuff like that. Is that what you're referring to with that primary, secondary and tertiary stuff?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, absolutely. So you and I are on a, Zoom call now. If we weren't on the Zoom call, I probably would have ridden to you on a giant lump of blazing coal. Or some more carbon intensive mode of transport. And those are very, complex calculations to do. You have rebound effects where, things look like they're providing efficiencies, but those efficiencies are mitigated or more than offset by increased volume, it's complicated stuff.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. All right. Thank you for providing that extra kind of elucidation or like clarifying that part there. Okay. There's another thing I wanted to give a bit of time for actually was this one. You said, and given that we just spoke about kind of cloud giants and one of the takeaways, which was none of the cloud giants is a monolith.

So this is a bit of a kind of more nuanced take on big tech bad, big tech good that we often see in the discourse, because it's very simple and attractive way to talk about that, but it sounds like you're trying to go for something a bit more sophisticated there, a bit more multidimensional there.

Maybe we could spend a bit of time trying to see what you were trying to get at there or what the report was trying to really get across to people.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah. I think climate invites us to really reflect on our roles in our professional lives and other aspects of our lives. And sometimes to challenge and push back on the parameters that are set for us in those roles. And that may mean that your company is pushing a particular line or your bosses is pushing a particular line, but there is a kind of, there's a practical incentive and there's, frankly, there's a kind of ethical duty to be critical about that and to step outside of the boxes that you're asked to perform in.

And definitely these companies are huge companies. There's a great diversity of knowledge, a great diversity of kind of politics, really, within any particular industry. big tech company, nevermind between tech companies as well. So in the realm of the greenhouse gas protocol and how we do carbon accounting, there's a lot of disagreement within big tech between on the one hand, Amazon and Meta who want one kind of particular set of rules as the greenhouse gas protocol is revised and Google and perhaps Microsoft who would like to see it go another way.

I think we look at this a little bit in the report. We look at a nature article that is largely authored by, Microsoft researchers. And spend a little bit of time in a hopefully good natured roast of the estimate of the carbon impact of AI, which the methodology there just isn't really fit for purpose.

If you drill, really drill, drill, drill baby, drill down into the details, you find that it is based on one back of envelope kind of estimate by Vijay Rakesh, who is really a stock market analyst who said that he expected NVIDIA to deliver a hundred thousand AI servers in 2023.

It's not a sufficient basis for estimating the global impact of AI, but that's hopefully not the main point because the bigger part of this article, which I think speaks to your question about companies not being monoliths and trying to build alliances for progressive and robust climate policy that cut across your loyalty to a particular company.

The proposal of this article is that AI researchers should work more closely with climate, the climate modeling community, and that AI should be integrated into the IPCC's shared socioeconomic pathways and integrated assessment modeling. Which is, I have mixed feelings about that. Like the closer collaboration sounds really great. It does feel like in that particular article, there isn't yet a very deep understanding of how those climate models work. They're not really scenarios. They're more like building blocks for scenarios. And to some extent, they already do build in the possibility of technological change.

So you could go down a rabbit hole as to whether or not AI is already priced into these models or not. I think what it speaks to is a certain kind of nervousness here, like, okay, so we are big tech, we are AI, we're presenting this AI powered future, and we're increasing our emissions, and we're doing this on the basis that we think, we believe, that AI is going to unlock all these fantastic sustainability benefits.

But can somebody please check our working? We recognize that we may have conflict of interests. We need to do this in a more collaborative way. We need to have all kinds of expertise and we need to have more independent voices. I think that's what that article is ultimately calling for.

Chris Adams: Okay. So there was one thing you said that you were getting at there was the idea that cloud giants not being a monolith isn't just within the cloud giant. If you think about it horizontally, like Meta and Amazon having one point of view. And I think you're referring to the emissions first versus the 24/7 kind bond fight about how do you count energy as green?

Because the current process has a few significant issues with basically, there's people trying to work out a new approach and you have two camps. So that's one thing you were talking about. And then there's almost one within each company. Like there are different people who have different drivers inside that. If you just assume that someone's working for say Amazon, that ends up being a very lossy way of talking about, okay, what are they doing? And like, what might, the drivers be, for example?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Absolutely. And some of those disagreements might not be so visible for obvious reasons. People have to be tactful and work in constructive ways with their colleagues. I mean, to respond to that, I think that I, share a bit of alarm about timescales and, solutions being proposed that aren't immediately referred back.

If you've got any kind of plan to do with the climate, check it against IPCC timescales. We were supposed to, in the next six years, cut carbon emissions by more than half, four of which are going to be under a Trump administration. And I would definitely, I would celebrate that kind of all hands on deck approach where everybody's doing everything they can in their role and maybe rethinking their role in creating alliances.

At the same time, I also think we need a little bit of reflection on actually which hands are on deck. Are there problems that aren't owned by anybody, risks that are not being addressed by anybody. And I think that we need a little bit, in the AI space, there has been talk of pauses and kind of moratoriums, not always for the best reasons, but I do think these are really important tools in our toolkit rather than, "okay, we're going to just keep doing what we're doing and, hope to sustainabilize it as quickly as we can,"

actually, saying "maybe we need to pause this and maybe we can pick up where we left off, but we need to pause it while we're gathering more data or we're greening our energy supply or we're building capacity" or whatever it might be. I wrote an article about this in the Fantastic Branch magazine called Pause.

I just realized this morning, I should have called it after Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I should have called it How to Blow Up an AI Pipeline. But yeah, I something else for that.

Chris Adams: Yeah. All right. All right. Okay. Thank you for that. Let's move to the next one. Cause you spoke a little bit about AI and, in the report, you actually spend a bit of time talking about sustainability. Basically the sustainability of AI, but also AI for sustainability. Right. And these being two somewhat different things.

Now we talk about sustainability of AI on this podcast quite a lot. So we talk about how to use like more efficient algorithms or how to clean the energy and some of the steps you might take. And obviously the report talks about that, but there's actually something that you speak about in terms of the claims about AI for sustainability goals that you spend some time talking about and like you also raised, like "these are some of the red flags you might be looking for." Could you maybe, are there any like specific messages you might use or anything you draw to people's attention to when they're trying to navigate claims about AI for sustainability and like, "yes, there's a massive energy footprint, but the upside is this, for example, and these are the upsides that we're delivering."

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah, absolutely. And all that kind of sustainability of AI stuff is extremely exciting. And, as you say, we, touch on that in the report. AI for sustainability. There's this great metaphor that Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have in their book, AI Snake Oil, they say, "imagine we just talked about vehicles.

We didn't talk about bicycles or cars or buses or trains. And we tried to talk about the climate impact of vehicles. It would be very difficult to do." And that's essentially what AI discourse does, right? We don't on a regular basis make these kinds of fine differentiations in public discourse, in journalism, in conversations with friends.

So right before the show, actually, we were talking about acronyms and I tried to come up with an, acronym of the things that you might want to ask when you find a claim that AI is delivering some kind of sustainability benefit. So the first thing to consider is maturity. That might be technology readiness level whatever it may be.

Often there is a claim is inflated. It says something is already happening when actually what we see is that there's been a study that says it might work. It could be rolled out commercially, scaled up in five, 10, 20 years, whatever it might be. So maturity is one. Then additionality. So AI is responsible for delivering this sustainability benefit.

Well, do your best to identify which bit the AI is responsible for. Often an AI sustainability project will involve data collection and analysis, and then some kind of efficiency gains from that. What could have been delivered with the, with more kind of traditional data analytic methods? And then generative or discriminative or some other type of AI.

What kind of AI are we talking about here? These are often conflated. Is it even machine learning at all? Is it something, some cool new thing like, I don't know if it's new, but active inference, for example. And how big is the model and so on? What kind of AI are we looking at? And then finally adaptation versus mitigation.

So these are the two broad categories of climate action that most climate scientists will recognize. And they're interrelated and they overlap in various ways, but mitigation is really about decarbonizing,

Chris Adams: Yeah. Green energy instead of fossil energy. And then the mitigation might be building the seawalls because the sea levels have risen. Stuff like that.

Jo Lindsay Walton: other

Chris Adams: I say, yeah. adaptation is building the seawalls because the sea levels have risen. Mitigation would be switching out of fossil fuels and burning, using greener energy, for example, which

Jo Lindsay Walton: Absolutely.

Chris Adams: the

Jo Lindsay Walton: As can imagine with AI, if the AI has a problematic carbon footprint, but delivers substantial adaptation benefits, that again is a very hard calculation to do. You, can't simply. Subtract one, one from the other. The acronym unfortunately came out as MAGA, which has already been taken. So, I'll keep working on on it.

Chris Adams: Okay. All right. I don't know how far that's going to go. I'll be honest. But. All right then, so, so that's one of the things you're speaking about was this idea that these are two separate things and it's worth being aware that there's, there, there are different ways you can essentially critically engage with some of these claims.

And I think I'm get where you're going with some of that now. And I've realized that I'm basically an Englishman in Germany, speaking to someone, to an Englishman who's also in the UK. And this was a report that came from a UK research unit. And obviously there's a UK research focus on this, but it's also, we're also in a scenario where there is new government in the UK who have very aggressive goals of like decarbonizing the entire grid by 2030.

So we spoke about 2030 target before, and like, this is one where there is a goal to decarbonize the grid by 2030 and reduce nationally carbon emissions by more than 80 percent by 2035. So this is like, in many ways, this is like a similar kind of moonshot thing we have here, but there's also, it's the government is also very, Gung ho right now on the increased deployment of data centers around the UK as one of the kind of drivers for growth, for example. So I wanted to ask you, like, when you look at this, do you see these goals as complementary or compatible or are there any specific areas of attention for the UK that are like for policymakers should be thinking about if they want these goals to be possible, for example?

Because yeah, there's, it sounds like it's, there's probably a lot of nuance to it, and this is something that you've been having to navigate or have to think about.

Jo Lindsay Walton: Yeah. And I mean, I don't know. I really don't know. And I wonder what guests we will need to assemble on your show to solve this question. It's definitely a, it's an interdisciplinary type question, right? We need people who can think about the counterfactuals, the opportunity costs. If data centers are not expanding at this particular rate in the UK, what's happening in that alternative universe?

There's in the report, there's a quite upbeat section lead authored by my colleague, Benjamin Sovacool, which is all about the wonderful things data centers can do to be more efficient and environmentally friendly. And so from a UK perspective, you can see those things going together. Yes, we're going to, we're going to be a leader on net zero.

We're also going to be a leader on data centers. And we're going to do that by having the greenest, the best, the most efficient data centers. Microsoft is shifting from concrete and steel to a special new timber. The new exciting innovations happening all the time. As a thought experiment. If we were building global data center infrastructure from scratch, knowing everything that we know, how would we design it?

Maybe you can get some experts on your show and ask them this. I've heard it said that data centers are these kind of fabulous heat generators that just happen to be able to do computation as well. One of the reviewers of the report said that. And so we should really go in hard on small and medium data centers woven into the fabric of our urban environments.

Anne Currie, who, we did that previous really fun episode about data centers on the moon and various things. Anne has said that a key consideration is that you really don't want to be competing with other local energy needs. So this is a contrasting view. You don't want to be displacing demand into carbon-intensive, generation then claiming that you have these wonderful green credentials.

So then the question is really, where in the world would you locate a data center and the green energy to power that, data center where it otherwise wouldn't be used for, anything else? How will data center expansion in the UK affect data center expansion in the EU or in Trump's America? Who is doing all this?

This is the real question for me. Who is thinking about these things? I mean, I'm here and glimpsing how huge and complicated a question it is. Who is doing this difficult holistic joined up thinking, including thinking through those second and third order effects? Are policymakers in the UK thinking in those terms?

Is SECR reporting going to have any impact? The Environment Agency, they like the detail and the nuance, but their remit has tended to be a bit more narrow. Their budget has been absolutely slashed under the conservatives. Is the onus on civil society to, to work through consultations, local planning authorities on a kind of data center by data center basis?

Is it maybe up to Environment Variables? Maybe it's on you.

Chris Adams: Well, what I can share with you is that we've got someone who's leading one of the distributed data center companies to give their side of the story in a future one, precisely to talk about okay, just how you spoke about the idea of like you mentioned that quota of AI, and imagine if we only spoke about vehicles, I wonder if there's maybe a thing where we talk, there's a similar comparable way of thinking about data centers, right?

Like if we only think about data centers as one thing, rather than being like, there's a typology of this giant, gigantic out of town hyperscale data centers, like gigawatt scale. And there's one at the other end, which are not the same, for example. Maybe there's a need for a kind of different strategy to think about what kinds of data centers make sense in what circumstances.

So like, maybe that you want to have certain kinds of computation. Like you mentioned that word, like inside the urban fabric, and there's certain things where you don't want to have it because you might have a different use for this. This makes me think of actually China. So China does have something along these lines, where in China, there's a really aggressive target to A, get lots and lots of data center, lots and lots of computer computation out of relatively old data centers into much more advanced centralized hyperscale kind of facilities, which are being paired with the kind of energy bases where there are just significant amounts of clean generation being put together there.

So you've got co-locating hyperscale data centers with the kind of generation that you have. So that you have different approaches and maybe there's something that you might see like that in the UK. I, don't know, but, I found maybe it's someone we should speak to. And if you're listening to this podcast and who is thinking about that.

Please do suggest them because we'd like to cover that in a bit more detail. All right then, you've spoken about two of the things that I think we, I'd like to just, if I can, jump into. You mentioned SECR, I don't know, could you maybe expand on who that is or what that is for people who aren't familiar with that acronym?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Oh, Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting regulations.

Chris Adams: okay, all right, so that's basically UK government has that data centers above a certain size have to report, basically, right?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Companies, yeah.

Chris Adams: Oh, okay, got it, okay, thank you. All right then, okay, so we've touched on quite a few, we've gone into a number of different areas for this and we're coming up to time. So I guess to ask you, you've spent this time and you've put a labor of love into this report, for example, but that came out in September, in the last, in the kind of subsequent months.

And are there any, is there any kind of, what work is exciting you? What things do you want to, are you looking at, you think, "this is really exciting, I wish more people would, who are interested in sustainable software, I wish they would look at this," for example. What's on your radar these days?

Jo Lindsay Walton: Well, it's been a very kind of busy and strange couple of months. So just even as you say that, it just reminds me how quickly these things move. Basically, I feel like I'm a little bit behind and I need to listen to some podcasts and click on some LinkedIn links and, bring myself up to speed.

I continue to be delighted by the work of the Green Software Foundation. I'm a big fan of your podcast. The GARP Climate Risk podcast is one that I like. Top three podcasts, the other one would be the Bunta Vista podcast, but that's not actually about climate and environment. That's just people getting high and reading news stories.

I'm interested in further collaborative work at a smaller scale with individual kind of companies and organizations. We've been doing a little bit of work with kind of cultural heritage organizations, thinking about their carbon impact. The focus of that work is under the rubric of climate acuity.

Which we've recently launched. It's connected to the DHCC in that we have a workshop that we do called the Digital Sustainability Game. So I'm, excited about continuing to iterate that work with all the constant barrage of developments that happen week by week in this space.

Chris Adams: It's pretty exhausting. I could, I can definitely share that. I struggled to keep up myself and this is pretty much my job.

Jo Lindsay Walton: I think, yeah, I think we do need to take a break every now and then. Pause, moratorium.

Chris Adams: Okay. On that note, we're coming up to time actually. So Jo, thank you so much for coming onto this and providing extra context to the report. If people are curious, where should they be looking if they wanted to read this report themselves?

Jo Lindsay Walton: It will be in the show notes, or if you type in The Cloud and The Climate AI powered or Navigating AI-Powered Futures, I think it should pop up.

Chris Adams: As the first result in pretty all the search engines.

Jo Lindsay Walton: I hope so anyway, otherwise something's very wrong.

Chris Adams: Well, in that case, folks, that's what to look for then. All right then. Well, Jo, thank you so much for coming on to this. This has been really, fun. And let's do this again, maybe next year. Like continue this tradition of every 12 months, we have you come on and tell us what you've been up to.

Jo Lindsay Walton: I would absolutely love that. Thanks so much for having me.

Chris Adams: All right. Thanks, Jo. Have a lovely afternoon. All right. And take care of yourself. Bye! Hey everyone! Thanks for listening! Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing.

It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again and see you in the next episode.