pauldjohnston

We have a big problem in tech to do with how we use the Cloud and Climate Change. Our Greenhouse Gas Emissions from just data centres are equivalent (and probably higher) than the aviation industry.

https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

We can do something about this. Anne Currie and I have written a whitepaper on this.

https://bit.ly/2024

So we'd like everyone to move to sustainable servers (cloud providers are self reported):

* Google is 100% offset * Azure is 100% offset * AWS has 4 carbon neutral regions - Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt * Move to a Data Centre using/offsetting with renewable energy * Request Data Centres to move to renewable energy

These are simple things we can do now.

So it is relatively difficult to get exact data and all we can really get from the information supplied is electricity usage. That, plus the mix of electricity in the Data Centre location gives an approximation (again, it's an educated guess) of carbon emissions related to a site. Efficiencies are actually an irrelevance due to the rapid increase in usage swallowing up any gains caused by efficiencies.

Oh and the 2% from Data Centres is a conservative estimate. It's probably higher. We simply don't have the data because it's not required to share it.

Well, having done some research into this recently, the tech world has something it can do right now. Switch to sustainably powered Cloud and move to renewably powered/offset Data Centres.

e.g. Google (100% carbon neutral), Azure (100% offset), AWS (Oregon, Montreal, Ireland, Frankfurt regions are 100% carbon neutral)

Cloud/Data Centres emit around 2% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (bet you didn't know that).

There is also research showing that we're going to increase our Data Centre usage by 5x in the next 7 years.

So change that 2% to something much much higher... because that much compute requires that much more energy and we don't have the worldwide renewables infrastructure at scale to cope with the extra capacity.

https://bit.ly/2024wp

https://www.change.org/p/sustainable-servers-by-2024

* Sign the pledge please * (if you agree with it of course)

It's almost the simplest thing we can easily do, and it should put pressure on tech companies to switch to renewables.

If we believe the tech industry is an innovator and a force for good, why not start with the means of production - the energy industry?

Sign up... switch... go!

PS I wrote the whitepaper with Anne Currie - we have not been paid for the work and was entirely voluntary. I used to work for AWS up until June this year.