Creating A Sustainable Future - In the Cloud

The challenge being thrust upon our generation is for us to "solve" climate change. And that represents a huge fallacy in thinking that actually holds us back.

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

The truth is that since no single human caused climate change, no single human can “solve” it. But working together has a clear path to success, and there are more strategies for making progress than you may be aware of.

This space will focus on just one part — which is how to lessen the impact that our modern global computing infrastructure has on carbon emissions.

This includes data centers, the electricity to power them, the hardware and materials to build them, and cooling infrastructure to remove the heat they produce when the servers run, currently estimated at almost 3% of total global emissions, or ~900 million tons a year.

And for those of us working, as I have, for our entire careers on building these structures and systems, we need to understand what ways are available to us to improve the efficiency of how much energy they consume. But we also need to question the value that aggregating and operating a store of digital assets has to our lives.

Sustainability as a Daily Practice in Your Career

If you want to have the biggest impact possible on reducing carbon emissions, Project Drawdown gives you a powerful ranked list. And all it takes is to pivot your career, and instantly become one of the most powerful and influential corporate leaders in banking, oil and gas, cement, human rights, and the beef industry….. yeah, that’s grand, but I want to give you something you can do TODAY.

We have to think beyond individuals that we think could transform the world in a single act, and start to integrate sustainability into the areas where WE personally have the most influence and experience.

This means that every career can contribute, when people take the thing that they are best at doing, and modify it as much as they can in pursuit of greater sustainability.

So if you despair in your daily work as a cloud technologist, platform engineer, network planner, web developer, hardware procurer, etc. you need to know that there are practical ways that you can advocate for changes in your company’s operations. Not only will these actions reduce the carbon footprint for your company, but they will also have beneficial side effects such as lower operational costs, improved public relations, reduced complexity, and a stronger professional community.

Find Your Leverage Point

The biggest mistake holding people back from reducing their carbon footprint is feeling helpless because they can’t work on the big problems. People who feel helpless get depressed and give up, which allows the system to persist, unchanged.

The key to actually fostering change is to find the place where you personally have the most expertise and influence, and find the ways to decrease carbon emissions from that leverage point.

It will seem inconsequential at first, because while eliminating just one server from your cloud stack will reduce carbon emissions by about 1-2 tons a year, this seems petty in the scope of the gigaton reduction that is necessary. But it’s about the same as eliminating beef from your diet, or foregoing a 3,000 mile air flight. Plenty of people find that impact personally significant enough to have taken those small actions, because these have been identified in the media as feasible. Part of the sustainability revolution that needs to happen in tech is for similar small actions to be actively considered in technology decisions at all levels of the company.

The next step is to find like-minded people in your organization, work together to find all of the opportunities in your company, and make slow and steady progress towards a shared goal. If sustainability is discussed, rewarded, and seen as a company priority, your coworkers will become your allies, and you can achieve far more than working on your own.

The last step is to make sustainability gains at your company a part of the standard list of tradeoffs for every product launch and technological architecture decision that is made. Some sustainability measures around efficiency will have strong co-benefits in terms of cost-savings. Others will be longer term benefits, such as a positive public relations blog post or corporate press release that raises your company’s image and attracts talent or business deals.

Sustainability can be like accessibility and security — something that is baked into the company culture, because it reflects the values and quality of the product that you are building and selling. The more common it becomes for companies to talk openly about their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint, the more progress we make globally to reduce greenhouse gases and preserve our future.

Finding and Sharing Repeatable Success Stories

This space will become a repository for success stories that I’m seeing around the industry, as well as a place for thought leaders to share what they see as achievable technological advancements that will make a difference.

If you have a story for me that you’d like to share, please reach out to catharinestrauss@gmail.com and I’d love to hear all about it!