Green Software Foundation: On a mission to decarbonize software
Summary
Computers that piggyback on vast libraries with extraneous lines of code, developers who have lost count of the number of virtual machines they have spun off — all add drag and increase the carbon emissions related to software. While a typical email might have a footprint equivalent to 0.3 grams of CO2 emissions, software that requires high-performance computing and AI have large carbon costs. But these efforts were short on actual quantitative accomplishments, and critics were quick to call them out for “greenwashing,” alleging the announcements served only to improve the organization’s optics. Right out of the gate, the foundation found that although many individual developers had the desire to improve sustainability at the grassroots level, their organizations as a whole were not effective at pursuing a holistic policy to implement wider change. So the foundation had to produce nothing less than a culture change, from top to bottom, by increasing awareness and education within its own member organizations so it could then turn its attention outward to the industry at large.