OM DENNE EPISODE
This Week in Green Software has Dr. Daniel Schien from the University of Bristol, UK, joining host Chris Adams to talk about old research, recent news, and future prospects all revolving around digital sustainability. This conversation touches on some of the work Daniel has done in the past (and plans to do in the future) as well as their thoughts and reckons on this and how it can be used to steer our efforts towards a sustainable future. Together, they cover topics such as streaming being the new flying, and some ways in which new research has changed their perspectives on some problems in green tech.
Learn more about our people:
Find out more about the GSF:
Resources:
- The True Climate Impact of Streaming - About Netflix [04:06]
- The carbon impact of streaming: an update on BBC TV's energy footprint [05:07]
- Does not compute: Avoiding pitfalls assessing the Internet's energy and carbon impacts - ScienceDirect [21:10]
- Evaluating Sustainable Interaction Design of Digital Services | Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [40:50]
- A low carbon kubernetes scheduler — University of Bristol [41:47]
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Daniel Schien: If we are saying streaming is bad and instead consumers jump into their car and go to the cinema, that would be the worst thing that people could do. And same if we are saying streaming is bad and consumers swap to terrestrial broadcast, makes hardly a difference in the short term to the energy consumption that is associated to the delivery of the service.
Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. 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. Welcome to another episode of The Week in Green Software, where we bring you the latest news and updates from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Daniel Schien, a member of the Green Software Foundation. Daniel teaches and researches sustainable software at the University of Bristol, England.
Hey, Dan.
Daniel Schien: Hi Chris.
Chris Adams: Dan, if any of our listeners lurk on the Green Software Foundation forums, or the kind of IETF E-Impact mailing list, they might be familiar with you. But for folks who are new, would you mind taking a second to introduce yourself to the pod for our listeners, please?
Daniel Schien: Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Daniel Schien, and I, as you said, teach and research at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. I'm a computer scientist and work here in the Faculty of Engineering, researching questions of sustainability of ICT. And here in Bristol, I'm part of a small but dedicated group of researchers looking at the environmental impact of ICT.
Chris Adams: Okay. And I did a bit of research before this call and I realized the first paper I saw from you was back in 2011, researching the dynamic carbon footprint of digital services back in 2011. So it sounds like you've been doing this a while and you've worked with a number of organizations in the industry as well.
Is that correct?
Daniel Schien: Yes, that's true. Indeed, I joined the University of Bristol at the end of 2010, working on a project for the Guardian newspaper, actually. And at that time, they were interested in understanding the transformation of their business from a paper-based delivery to a digital delivery, reading the news online. And at that point there were no methods, no existing similar analyses of environmental impact from the distribution starting at data centers over networks to user devices. And in this void, we helped to come up with an assessment that can compare the quite well understood print side of delivering news with the digital version.
Chris Adams: Wow. Okay. And you've worked with a few other organizations as well. And I think we're going to touch on that a little bit later on. So wow. Thank you. The little story about the Guardian. I had no idea that the Grawn was doing that stuff so long ago already, actually. Okay. Um, cheers for that, Dan. If you're new to this podcast folks, as mentioned before, my name is Chris Adams.
I work as the chair of the policy working group at the Green Software Foundation. And I'm also the executive director of the Green Web Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit working towards an entirely fossil-free internet by 2030. I'm also going to share that whenever we mention a story or a project or a paper in this podcast, we'll do everything we can to find a link so you can actually research some of this yourselves and learn somewhat more if anything caught your interest.
And if there's something that you heard us talk about that you didn't see in the show notes, please do send us an email or get in touch and we'll do everything we can to capture that information and make sure it's available for everyone else. Okay, Dan, are you sitting comfortably?
Daniel Schien: Yes, I am. Thank you very much.
Chris Adams: All right, I think we should begin then.
So a few years back, one of the tropes that just would not die when people started talking about sustainability in the digital realm was this idea of streaming being the new flying. And, um, I saw your name linked to some work that was published in 2021, uh, working with Netflix that actually, in my view, helped shed some light into this and, uh, hopefully might put away some of the kind of poorly written part articles that you often see in the newspapers...
