ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Host Chris Adams is joined by Asim Hussain to dive into The Week in Green Software, exploring the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence and how the growing adoption of AI technology affects carbon emissions, as well as the growing complexities in the measurement and reduction of these. They discuss a primer on AI's direct environmental footprint, regulatory trends in Europe and the US, and the complexities surrounding the renewable energy credits tech companies use to offset emissions. The conversation touches on real-time cloud data initiatives, carbon accounting in AI, and the future challenges of balancing sustainability with technological innovation.
Learn more about our people:
Find out more about the GSF:
News:
- The Environmental Impacts of AI -- Primer | Hugging Face[03:12]
- How Tech Companies Are Obscuring AI's Real Carbon Footprint | Bloomberg [22:25]
- AI analysed 1,500 policies to cut emissions. These ones worked | Nature [32:48]
Events:
Resources:
- Does the EU AI Act really call for tracking inference as well as training in AI models? | Chris Adams [12:21]
- Simon Willison on openai [14:15]
- EnergyStarAI (AI Energy Star Project) | Hugging Face [16:12]
- Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct · Hugging Face [21:28]
- Jevons paradox and greening software—why increasing efficiency makes sense | ASIM.DEV [21:51]
- Olivier Corradi [27:43]
- Real-Time Cloud | GSF [28:41]
- GitHub - Green-Software-Foundation/real-time-cloud
- Reviewing the evidence we accept for Green hosting verification | Green Web Foundation [31:06]
- The Week in Green Software: Modeling Carbon Aware Software | TWiGS with Iegor Riepin [37:18]
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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Asim Hussain: Three, four years ago, everybody treated all carbon offsets the same. They didn't realize there was nuance between them. Now that's changed. Everybody needs to now pay attention to the same thing in terms of renewable energy. If you do not pay attention to the fact that there is a lot of variability in a lot of this stuff, it's all going to get tarnished with the same brush in the future and any renewable energy claim is not going to be trusted.
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 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. This is our news roundup show in the Green Software Foundation podcast. So we aren't doing a domain expert news roundup. Deep dive where we go into a deep narrow subject, but rather we're taking a more broader view.
So we'll try to add some context and commentary to the stories that have been shared with us that we discuss with our guests. With me today is my friend, colleague and mushroom enthusiast Asim Hussain of the Green Software Foundation. Asim, it's really good to see you again. How are your holidays?
Asim Hussain: Yeah, it's been quite a long time off and just gently dipping my toes back into the swing of things. Glad to be on the show. It's a nice gentle introduction back into the world of green software. So, glad to be here again, Chris. Asim Hussain, I'm the executive director of the Green Software Foundation.
And yeah, I spend my day probably similar to you thinking about how to advocate for green software. What do we need? What do we want? What are the questions that need to be answered and what are the levers that we need to pull to get action taken in this space?
Chris Adams: Reduce the environmental impact of digital services. Yeah. Okay, cool. Thanks. I should introduce myself as well. Hello, folks. My name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. That's a smaller, a different organization. We are a Dutch non profit focused around reaching a fossil free internet by 2030.
And we do that using open as a lever. So we do loads and loads of stuff with open source, open culture, and things like that. As a quick reminder, we're going to share all the stories that we have and any projects or things that come up, we'll add to the show notes. So if you want to continue your quest to learn more about green software and how to reduce the environmental impact of digital services yourself, just look at podcast.greensoftware.foundation to see this. If you're ...
