Re: We need to define a path for Debian to climate neutrality
On 4/8/22 20:35, Julian Andres Klode wrote:
Sponsors: When receiving sponsored resources like electricity, we
should inquire about the carbon footprint of those resources, and
what the sponsor's approach to environmental affairs is.
Most of the time, "green energy" is just "green washing". If you buy
"green energy" in France or Swiss (these are the only places I know for
sure what's going on), you get a higher electricity bill, and a slot in
the green energy consumers. But the electricity may well come from the
nearby coal power plant, even if you bought a slot of green electricity.
IMO, you're much better off fighting this at another level: lobbying
your government to do what you think is right.
Budget: We need to determine our current CO2 emissions as a project,
and then define a roadmap to carbon neutrality by an acceptable date,
I think 2035 or 2040 are commonly referenced. This is likely to be
exponential. We should use project funds to hire an expert consulting
firm to do this for us.
If I had my say, I would vote against (wasting) money for such an
expert, and wasting contributor time on this. I'm tired of reading about
CO2 emission in the data center, when old servers are just trashed, and
when electricity production is out of the control of the data center
owner (see above).
I pushed my company to recycle old server and re-use them as long as
possible, and we went from a 10 years lifetime to 15. That's IMO a much
nicer and efficient approach for protecting the environment than just
the green-washing CO2 propaganda.
Monitoring: Once we have determined our CO2 emissions and defined a
roadmap, we need to constantly monitor our CO2 emissions to make sure
we stay on target. I propose quarterly environmental impact reports.
A quarterly environmental impact that only takes CO2 into account is
only part of the reality. Do you have any idea about the environmental
impact of mining these rare minerals needed to produce a server? Another
example: producing the aluminum needed for a server chassis use a huge
amount of electricity.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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