Talk - Better than the New Oil
In Short
Compared to a decade ago, we have become much more aware about the climate destructive impact of our way of living, our industries and our society. Nonetheless, IT has always been hauled as a force for green, rather being self-critical. After all, the emissions resulting from IT should not be underestimated and are more and more becoming pushed away through (corporate) greenwashing.
In order to call for action as well as to inform our IT industry of our current footprint, how we get here, where it is going to and how you as an individual developer/engineer can contribute, I prepared a talk and gave it on multiple occasions.
Most notably, Blipz on the Radar 2022. For Blipz I also developed an initial version of my sustainable Tech Radar, a sustainable variant of Thoughworkz Radar. Next to that, I gave the same talk on several more informal occassions.
Details
I’ve spent several months passively gathering the input for the story, which I mostly gathered throughout personal research and discussions within the SDIA community. Roughly, the storyline consisted of explaining how to think about Carbon Footprint as well as why we’re carbon-illiterate, before explaining the public stakeholders involved in the debate through the Netflix streaming emissions debate (how many km’s driving an EV equals 1 hour of Netlfix streaming). This debate really shows that top-down measurements don’t really enable developers/engineers to get a grasp on the footprint their work produces, which happens to be exactly the line reponsible for implementing possible improvements. Hence, it’s a call to action to fellow engineers and a good openin to explain what cloud providers are doing, why that’s not sufficient and what you can do as an developer/engineer instead.