Charles Humble talks to_ Anne Currie__ from Container Solutions, exploring the environmental impact of technology. They look at how technology compares to other industries such as aviation and farming, how the big cloud providers compare in terms of their commitments to reducing carbon emissions, and the impact of the choices made by individual developers and software architects._

Key Takeaways

• Electricity use amounts to about 25% of carbon emissions but is one of the easier problems to solve.
• Of the big three cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google), Google and Microsoft are already carbon neutral, and have committed to be carbon zero by 2030. Google have published a number of papers in which they explain some of the ways they have made their datacentres more efficient to reach these carbon goals.
• AWS are lagging behind the other two, and say they will be carbon neutral but not until 2030. They do have some regions that use renewable energy, and where possible it is best to locate your workloads there. This is a decision that you need to make as early as possible.
• On the whole, individual code efficiency doesn’t have much impact. It is much better to use the services your cloud provider gives you as far as possible, as these are likely to be much more efficient.
• It is always a good idea to consider whether the work your code is doing is worth the carbon it will send into the atmosphere, particularly when dealing with computationally intensive tasks such as cryptocurrency or machine learning.

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