In our May’s episode, we went to Berlin and meet Chris Adams, an "environmentally focussed tech generalist" as he likes to describe himself. From the early days of Rail Europe to the Green Web Foundation of which he is the executive director, Chris has always been passionate about environmental topics. In the Digital Sustainability field, Chris is such an old-timer that we decided to split our interview in two parts! 
In this first part, after taking the time to know Chris a bit better and how he burnt 20M$ in VC, we discussed at length about Green Hosting and Cloud Sustainability. And we deep dived in a step by step approach to green ops. 

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This episode has benefited from the support of cloud & infra experts across Europe. A warm thank you to all of them.  Acknowledgement are in this LinkedIn post. 

Gaël: Hello everyone. Welcome to Green IO the podcast for doers making our digital world greener one bite at a time. I'm your host Gaël Duez and I invite you to meet with me a wide range of guests working in the digital tech industry to better understand and make sense of its sustainability issues and find inspiration together for the next move to green the IT we use or the digital products we build. If you like the podcast, please rate it five stars on Apple, Spotify or your favorite platform to spread the word to more responsible technologists like you. 
And now enjoy the show! 

Hello everyone. In this episode we went to Berlin to meet Chris Adams. Where to start from with someone with a track record like Chris? Maybe with thanking him and the trailblazers at loco2, now rail europe, for enabling me to travel from Paris to Berlin by train which should be the norm in Europe and is still a pretty big challenge. So thanks a lot for that. After loco2 Chris helped   many digital companies and he founded Product Science in 2013 and managed it for six years, helping people build better digital products for solving environmental and social problems. Already! Chris is now the executive director of the Green Web Foundation which is the number one directory to check whether a host provider runs on low carbon energy and much more than he’ll tell us about. Since 2018, he has also been a pillar of Climate Action Tech nickname CAT A more than 6000 members community of tech workers taking climate action together.

Welcome Chris! Thanks a lot for joining Green IO today.

Chris: Thank you for having me Gael.

Gaël: And first of all I wanted to ask you, what did I forget to mention about you and your crazy life.

Chris: I think the one, the one thing I might mention is that yes, we worked at loco two which is a low carbon CO2 locomotion and like like a triple layer pun company. But there was also another company I worked at called AMEE, which stands for avoid mass extinction engine. And around 2011, we basically burned through something in the region of $20 million of VC funding trying to figure out how to sell our carbon accounting or peer APIs on carbon calculation just like people are doing now and we pivoted lots and lots of times and learned lots of things and I, that was really, really helpful and formative for me for shaping my experiences about this. And if you look around, I'll add to the show notes, There was actually a talk all about how to grow in your cloud, by that company back in 2009 or something like that. So people, there have been people who've been working in this field for a very, very long time.

Gaël: Yeah. And you're part of the trailblazer, I don't see any other word that would describe the work that you've been doing when most of the people were not aware of it at all. Which leads me to the question how did you become interested in sustainability, especially the sustainability of our digital sector in the first place? Did you have like some kind of ha ha moment?

Chris: I think it actually came from basically me looking at this stuff, I mean, I was more interested in like sustainability and I suppose like things like Fair trade and ethics in my mid teens when I first wrote a book called No logo by Naomi Klein, that kind of gave me, helped me kind of make sense of the whole kind of story of globalization and how things are changing on this. And then I kind of took some of those values with me, I think all through university and that, and I thought, well if I'm going to be doing anything with computers, it would make sense for me to think about where the energy is coming from. I mean, it's gotta come from somewhere, right? And from there, I end up basically getting more and more interested in this and it's just been a kind of recurring theme. So, when I did graduate from university, I mean, I was environment officer in my student union, and then when I graduated, I set up a company with a friend of mine and we said we're only going to work on sustainable related projects and they will have to all be open source and that kind of, that's been a kind of theme all the way through. And I'll be honest, when I I think I might have left university, I think I might have gone, maybe it was wiser to join a larger organization first, because we did a bunch of that, but we also learned a lot about making commitments like delivering on time, managing budgets, all this stuff like that, we learned that the hard way, but it's basically how I kind of got into it and I've ended up basically pursuing projects largely based on, I guess the direction or the problem they're looking to solve primarily and then secondarily the kind of skill sets or things that might be using. And this is partly why I think one thing we spoke about before was this idea of well and my product person, Am I a tech person, There's a whole bunch there that we could talk about.

Gaël: So if I had to describe you, I would say like a self-trained, generalist technologist with a knack for sustainability. How does it work? 

Chris: Yeah. That's good enough, I think. 

Gaël: And so let's let's talk about green hosting first. Last month, I shared a little survey in my close network to get insights on which pain points they experience on the daily journey towards sustainability and the top pain points where the following: two of them were very, very similar to the ones we discussed with Elizabeth last month that were raised by product managers in CPO which are the C-level deadlock: How to convince my CTO, my CEO that green hosting matters?  How do I go beyond best Green IT is no more IT issue which is a bit of a struggle when you're a head of ops. And raising awareness is the number two, how do I raise awareness in my organization? When can I switch from being just an advocate to someone starting to take actions? Do you have any feedback or insight that you would like to share regarding these two pain points?

Chris: Yeah. I think one thing that you can think about this, it would be that, let's say you're a technologist and I've written a blog post about this is like the three levers you might have if you want to do something on climate. Right? There's one thing that you might be familiar with which is basically consumption. So this is the idea that you might want to make things more efficient, right? But another option might be changing the intensity of the actual infrastructure you use. Right? So like the carbon intensity. So for it you might be able to reduce the number of compute cycles or the machines you're running, right? But another way to achieve some greater sustainability at the time will basically be to make sure those machines are running on much much greener energy. So that would be one of the arguments I would make and in many cases In the year 2022 because we have seen the cost of renewable energy fall so much, it's getting a lot easier to buy green hosting in many ways. It's a real kind of no brainer if you are going to look at a relatively no regrets option to do this kind of stuff. So I think that you can make an economic argument to basically say in the long run it will be cheaper. You can make an argument that it's going to be better for retaining staff or having people who actually feel good about what they're doing. And in many ways it's probably gonna be one of the most measurable changes you do have available to you now that we have increasing numbers of tools like say Amazon's dashboards or Cloud Carbon Footprint’s dashboards, showing you the carbon intensity of a particular computer job. So if you can see if you have control over where you might choose to run a computing job then. Then one option basically, you know, causes some avoidable harm. And the other option doesn't cause that avoidable harm, then it does feel like it would make sense to do too. I think most responsible engineers, if they knew that they had an option there, they would choose to go for the greener less harmful option if they had available to them. So I think that's one way that you can actually talk about it really. So it's like retention to kind of keep staff happy. And the other one is basically, It's in many cases there's a cost, there's a cost argument for this stuff and I think that we might be able to talk about later on that some organizations are actually taking advantage of how the cost of renewable energy has fallen by something like 90% over the last 10 years to come with entirely new business models and entirely new services to allow you to kind of essentially capture some of those savings that would otherwise not be passed on to you, to pay it from other cloud providers.

Gaël: Just to sum it up. It will be, it's a no brainer when it comes to the financial perspective, it will help retain our talents in this tense job market where Tech people are in high demand and eventually this is good for the planet. But that would not be the number one argument

Chris: because if you're a CTO or a CEO people haven't directly hired you to make the planet better. Right. And I feel like you could lead with that argument, but a lot of the time, if you can find a way to talk about how the benefits land somewhere inside your organizational boundary, then you're going to have a lot more success and there are ways to actually have that. And basically, if you think about how hard it is to find people, that's a really, really, if you're able to make it easier for you to retain some of your best people, that's a way of of a benefit staying within an organization or if you're able to get people to, to join your company because they see that you're already showing leadership in this, then again, that's the benefits landing inside your company. So I think it's important to know how to make this argument to people who are actually decision makers or budget holders a lot of time. And there's also, I forgot one other really, really crucial one. Now, basically, regulation is forcing this stuff now, like in the UK, for example, there are legal requirements for organizations to - just within public sector - to show their achieving reductions year on year in their emissions, right? And you see the same thing happening with investors now, who basically say, you need to show me that you are reducing your emissions across all of your,  across your entire organization. Otherwise I won't provide you with the same access to capital and I'm going to be less keen to invest in you because I see you as a risk compared to other other organizations. So there's actually a regulatory reason for this is that you might want to kind of be aware of or get ahead of, so that it doesn't come up come up as a nasty shock later on.

Gaël: So regulation, external pressure, winning the talent war and a no brainer when it comes to the financial perspective. Makes a lot of sense. And some questions were more focused on the specific ops in infrastructure topics. The first one being what I would call the information maze, how do I get the right level of information? How can I have a hosting provider blasting that it runs on renewable energy when we know that the local grid is coal-powered, how would you deal with this lack of access to fully transparent information?

Chris: So this is actually one thing that is a ongoing struggle and this is actually why I joined the Green Web Foundation in the first place because I was looking around to find some services that I both was comfortable using because they provided a good user experience or they were secure enough or they work quickly and had a convincing track record on sustainability. One of the reasons I joined the Green Web Foundation is because they were working to create some transparency around this stuff. And if you actually start looking into this, you'll realize that it's pretty much a fractal of complexity in that Yes, you might be say if a company is saying they're running on green Power then, is that because they're running say they're one on site solar or like or on site renewables because there are examples of companies that do do that, you can basically choose to run infrastructure in, say Switzerland, for example, in a disused factory that's been refitted with service that runs on a run of the river hydropower and with the other 1% that… with 99% power coming from hydro and 1% coming from say, solar, you can have those options. But if you do that, then you may be trading off the fact that you were used to having lots of convenient and mature services from other places who might be taking other approaches to say, well we've purchased offsets or we've purchased a set of green energy credits, for example, to basically say that what was kind of carbon fossil power grids is now considered green. And this is basically because in order to actually they'll, you know, plumb the depths of look into this, you need to start to understand quite a lot of energy policy and for most people it's they don't have the time to do something like an MSC in this stuff. And like when I was initially getting into this, when I spoke to some people who work for energy companies, I was like, wow, this is really complicated. Do I need to do an MSC? And they were like, yeah, that's what I did. And I feel like it's … this is because we don't really have this transparency right now, I think there are tools and their organizations making it easier to understand. So you do have some kind of metrics for this. So the Green Software Foundation is one example, but so is the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance I think they're doing some really, really good work to make it easier and provide guidance on what kind of metrics to track, so that you know that you're having some kind of impact. But it's an extremely complicated discussion basically. And it's really not helped by the fact that a lot of time the transparency is not there at multiple levels. So that as a responsible technologist, it can often be very difficult for you to have like… take a data informed decision basically.

Gaël: And as someone calling the shots when it comes to infrastructure and hosting, whether I'm a CTO, a head of Ops or a devops why should I get interested in the Green Web Foundation tools? How could they help me navigate the informational maze?

Chris: Okay, I would say. And this is one thing that we're working on doing is to make it easier to basically green your stack. Alright, so there will be theirs, you will be able to achieve some progress by thinking about, say, the efficiency of what you do and basically doing things like turn off computers or make architectural decisions so that you're not wasting as much compute, but you're never going to efficiency your way to zero. You will need to find another way to actually account for the unavoidable amounts of compute to meet the demands that you are not necessary for you to provide, whatever service you're running. And at that point, Yeah, you will need to be looking at say things like green hosting, but if you are looking for that, I think there are things you might want to look at are some tools which do make this easy to see and the thing and there are some metrics you can look for now. There are things like the carbon intensity of the electricity that various providers have or you might look at things like say the for want of a better word coverage, like how much of their energy that they're using each year is matched with renewable energy for example. So when most organizations say they're running on green energy, what they're basically saying is we can point to green generation over a year that matches the amount of energy that we've used for our service over that year. And that's not … there are various ways that you can achieve that for example. But there are some organizations now which are being quite a bit more aggressive on this, so Google and Microsoft, they're increasingly talking about how they match things on an hourly basis. So they'll basically say for every hour of power that we're using, we are matching that power with green energy and that might be from, say on site solar or on site wind or things like that, where it might be them being able to point to the fact that they have invested in green energy generation, which is generating power at the same time as they are using so that when they are so they can make a reasonable claim to say, for example, at night that the servers they're using that are running at night are being powered by wind power running at night. And like this is a difference from the annual approach because on an annual basis you're taking an average over the entire year. It may be that energy might have all come from, say solar during the day, for example. But if your servers are running at night, I think it's a much bigger claim to make to basically say, well because I've paid for a bunch of solar panels to be deployed over here, then my computer at night is being matched by that, that's a different thing. And that's something we might touch a little bit later because there are now increasingly standards and things to kind of track this will make it easier to be much clearer about where the energy is coming from.

Gaël: And do you make this distinction in the repository maintained by the Green Web Foundation?

Chris: This is the thing we're looking to move towards actually. So the way that we present it, we basically say that if you want to have a green service or a green site, we say you need to demonstrate steps you're taking to either avoid, reduce, or offset the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the electricity using to run that service. We asked that to be on a yearly basis right now because basically what I spoke to you about this kind of hourly example, right there are even Google even Microsoft with who are basically like trillion dollar companies with essentially infinite access to capital. They've said we're not, we reckon that we'll be able to match all of our electricity usage on an hourly basis by 2030. But for the most part, most organizations, they might be an annual basis and they are and when people are in our directory, we've basically asked them for to provide evidence that they've shown that they're matching this on a yearly basis. But the thing we would like to do and they want one thing we're really pushing for is people to show to move to showing evidence about how they, how much they match on an hourly basis because we feel that's actually a much more in line with what most people expect when they think about green energy. And there are ways that you can do that now by matching the amount of power you use based on the kind of amount of green energy that's on the grid or like in the case of say, folks in Switzerland, for example, literally running your infrastructure on things like run of the river hydro, which will run all the time. So that's the kind of stuff that we do. And it might be worth saying that different parts of the world have different ways of counting energy as green. And while in say europe for example, you may be able to choose a green provider, There are certain parts of the world where the energy market is structured so that you literally cannot choose a different energy provider you have, there is a monopoly and the best you can do is maybe purchase some green energy credit or agree to use some other financial instrument. It's really, really difficult and this is why we say we have this kind of relatively broad statement simply because the constructions of all these markets is such that you can't basically just say “we have to have well except one form of energy basically”,

Gaël: which makes the work of the Green Web Foundation so important. Now, going back to the survey, another question was “what is really the true impact?” “Does this really matter compared to other areas where I could invest energy to make things greener and it kind of makes sense when you see the complexity of the energy market as you just described it. Don't you think so?

Chris: I think it very much depends on …, just like you, like just like your previous guests have said, you need to establish a baseline to see what the changes would be. So France for example, France because it actually has a very, very low carbon grid. It may be that's really focusing on the greenest possible hosting is going to have a relatively small increase compared to say if you're hosting something in Poland, which has a very, very kind of cold heavy grid for example. So in those kind of scenarios you'd want to really see where you are now and then see what steps you might take. So there is actually a word for this and there's a really lovely blog post from the electricity map blog recently talking about this, which they refer to as like emissionality. It's basically “will this change result in lower emissions for my operations?” for example. And in many cases, that's one thing that you need to take into account here. So if you are running things in France already, the changes brought about - assuming you actually have all nuclear power working right now in France, for example, because that isn't always the case. Right. It may be the changes you make to kind of use a green provider within France won't be that large. If then if you were working with another provider for example. And it may be something like if you are running in say a significant chunk of your infrastructure in maybe the East data center - AWS East - in America, for example, that's quite a coal heavy grid. It may be that you might want to switch to the AWS West because it's going to be a lower carbon thing, a lower carbon set amount of compute there because the energy is green. It is largely because it's coming from things like hydroelectric electricity and stuff like that. So you need to know where you are first in order for you to know what your steps might be. But increasingly that's getting a lot easier because this data is increasingly available. There are companies like there are organizations like Ember which basically gives you the carbon intensity for various parts of the world. And there are tools which actually incorporate this so that you can track this like Cloud Carbon Footprint for example, if you're a CTO

Gaël: Is Cloud Carbon Footprint a tool which is provided by the Green Web foundation as well or is this a different initiative?

Chris: So Cloud Carbon Footprint was a project that ThoughtWorks initially invested a bunch of time working in to build a open source tool because one thing they found was that - just like the discussions we're having here - people who are responsible for the infrastructure don't really have a kind of … don't know too much about what tools are on there and like we did a project back in 2018 which was called Amazon Green Cost Explorer, which basically told you which infrastructure, which were the green regions when you're in your cloud bill. So it would work by, you would kind of give it a token like an IAM set of credentials and it will basically say this much of your computer is running in green regions and this much is running in green regions which are where there is no evidence of action taking place and you can think of Cloud Carbon Footprint as basically taking this idea of “Well can I get information from my usage patterns and can I could come up with some action or benefits?” That's essentially what Cloud Carbon Footprint was and we've contributed some small bits of code to it. But the thing that we are probably most … the thing that I'm expecting us to be doing with Cloud Carbon Footprint this year is probably designed a … is contribute a way for people who are not currently the big three cloud providers to share this information. Because if you are using Microsoft's Azure, if you're using Google Cloud Platform or if you're using Amazon AWS, then you can get these numbers but there are groups who obviously are not just using this stuff. So if you might be using Digital Ocean or you might be using Scaleway or you might be using Webheads now, you might want to have these numbers too. And once you figure out what numbers are actually being exposed from the kind of metrics and the usage data or even like the billing APIs from these providers, it's totally possible to build that yourself so that you can get a kind of multi cloud view of all of the actual infrastructure you're running so you can then start optimizing for carbon.

Gaël: So we talked a lot about energy consumption and the Holy Grail to have it on an hourly basis, if not real time. But what about the other environmental costs of running a datacenter? Do you believe that in the near future we will be able to incorporate the embedded carbon of a server for instance or its impact during the manufacturing phase on resource exhaustion? The idea being to measure all the savings made when we use our equipment longer and then to take action to actually make them last longer.

Chris: I think we … the extent to which we can actually get there is very much governed by the extent pie which organizations are prepared to share this information about how long they hold on to servers, how long they're used or any of these things here because - like you are correctly identified - there is a huge amount of energy that does go into turning sand into silicon, into like silicon chips for example. And if you, once you've done that, the thing you probably want to do is amortize that embedded carbon cost over the lifetime of the server to make it last as long as possible. But a lot of the time, the assumptions we might make which say well a service obviously going to be around for maybe five years, that's not necessarily the case. So there'll be some very very large providers who might run things from much much shorter periods of time. And this is one thing that it's been really difficult to find numbers on and you can basically see … this is actually one of the things that we really struggle with and why I'm really glad that some tools like Boavizta works or - as I understand it - Negaoctet works as well is in there now so we can actually start getting an idea about this. But the thing to bear in mind is that once you have done this it's worth thinking about what the second life of some of these tools might actually be. So there's an example I quite like of a company called IT Renew. What they do is they take end of life service and they basically build new datacenters from these kinds of end of life ex-hyperscale service from the companies like say Facebook for example. Right. How do you account for the embedded carbon there for example, do you allocate all the actual emissions to Facebook? Do you allocate the emissions to the second life for it. There's a whole bunch of unanswered questions that we haven't really figured out yet. And I think this is one thing that we do need to get a handle on and I think that having some of the data really does help, but it's early days. We are starting to get some of this data together. And I suspect that what we might end up having to do is basically have models. But model data that can be updated to basically be explicit about our assumptions and see if those assumptions are really matching the reality really.

Gaël: Absolutely. And these model data are badly needed to truly empower ops on their sustainability journey. Speaking about it as a journey, the most popular question in the survey was actually where do you start to analyze in today, concrete actions? What would be your advice on both?

Chris: Where do you start right? So, well, I think the thing is: it's useful to bear in mind that most of the actions, if you're looking at the consumption of power, are going to be things you wouldn't do anyway. Right. So there are tools which have already been built which will track how much network your usage or how much or how big a page is or how much compute you've paid for. Right. And if we basically take into account the fact that yes, there's obviously a kind of - that the energy has to come from somewhere - just reducing the consumption will help and there are a bunch of tools that exist like right now there are kind of plugins for things like site speed if you do stuff on the web, there are plugins now, like some Scaphandre, which … Is it how you pronounce it? I've never spoken to a French person about it actually

Gaël: Scaphandre

Chris: Scaphandre. Yeah. Yeah. So that thing yeah. There are tools which now make it easy for you to understand how much energy is being used or where the energy hogs are in a given system. For example, I would actually start with stuff like that because if you're going to make the case for this, then if you're able to show that you've basically reduced the costs of something, you're immediately winning some social capital for example, and until people price carbon for example, they … - you might be rewarded for showing some measurable carbon reductions - but until people are pricing carbon or you've got any way of talking about that, I suspect that you're more likely to be rewarded in ways if they provide a kind of co benefit for some other thing that you already want anyway. So if you want to be reducing cloud bills, for example, then starting there is a nice way to do this. Or if you want to show that you're maybe making a website load faster or be more accessible, you might start there because that would actually have both sustainability benefits in terms of opening your devices and tools, I mean your services to a wider set of people, but it also has a sustainability benefit in that you are no longer inducing or requiring people to have the latest and greatest equipment to actually access any service. So I'd probably start with the consumption stuff first and then think about things like intensity, even though I'm running an organization where we track things like carbon intensity basically. So I would start there and then you can move to the other ones and then later on you can talk about things like say, well, now that we've got an idea of what our missions are and how we're actually able to manage that part, then you can have some of the longer the bigger discussions about, well, what product decisions do we want to focus on? Like what behavior do we want to enable for example? That stuff is totally relevant and probably higher leverage stuff, but you kind of need to build up some of the social capital elsewhere first, especially because if you've been hired as a developer to build good websites which are efficient, then demonstrating how you're making some websites efficient, which also happens to make them greener, it's probably quite a nice way to start introducing these ideas, especially if you don't have control over a budget for example, or you're not at kind of executive level.

Gaël: So if I wrap up everything we said about green hosting, it would be and correct me if I'm wrong. Step number one: make your case pushing for the three big reasons being “this is an economic no brainer”, “this will boost our employer brand” and “at some point it will become a compliance issue”. Then step number two would be: start focusing on consuming less electricity, which is the easiest way to kickstart. Once you've done this, you will move to paying attention to the energy mix for the electricity you still consume and eventually step number three: now that you have matured in green hosting, welcome in a more complicated world where you would try to take into account the embedded carbon and even the e-waste. But knowing that the data and the resources you'll be using are more R&D than commonly agreed framework or referential.

Chris: I think that would make sense. I mean the thing that's kind of interesting right now is that this is actually kind of early and there’s scope to have quite a lot of outside leverage in this early phase later on because people haven't figured out. They are very, very few places providing this kind of training right now and it's very much feels like maybe what accessibility was, say 10, 15 years ago, for example, or even just where similar fields were… like play blogging in the early 2000's like. Yes, this has been around for a while and people have been writing for ages for example, but right now there is this kind of uptick in interest in sustainability and digital sustainability and I feel that there's actually a chance to, yeah, kind of have quite outsized impact simply because we haven't figured out who that person should be reporting to or how to actually even define it really.

Gaël: Yes, I agree. There is a boulevard for whoever wants to move things forward and that's very encouraging. So thanks a lot Chris for being with us today, awesome insights and feedback, especially on navigating the information maze in green hosting and how to start a more sustainable policy. Big kudos to the gold approach. I really love it,

Chris: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this girl. Thank you.

Gaël: You're welcome. Literally. Next month we will go to Bristol and meet another trailblazer in digital sustainability and a world renowned expert in Wordpress, Hannah Smith, aka haopcan but wait, that's actually not entirely true. We will meet Hannah next month but we had such a great chat with Chris on the latest trends in digital sustainability, all the initiatives popping up etcetera that we decided to give you a bonus episode. So let's meet in one week for the second part of this interview, make sure to subscribe to our mailing list or on your favorite podcast platform not to miss the release and that's it. Thank you all for listening to Green IO. If you have liked this episode, please share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who would enjoy it ,or learn from it. Green IO being a nonprofit podcast our dear listeners are our true communication power as well. So feel free to share with me your idea for new guests who want to make our digital world greener … one bite at a time!