Re: [recipe] FYI: [admin-discuss] REMINDER: IETF carbon emission measurement workshops on 20 and 21 September

[Cedric Westphal <[e-mail]>]

HI Michael & Toerless:

Michael: thank you very much for the data points.

Regarding your paper: I really like the idea that protocols can help saving energies. When we wrote our draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cx-green-ps/ we were a bit disappointed that the protocol side of things didn't have great opportunities for reducing energy consumption - aside of course of facilitating sleep modes as you suggest in your paper. If you have a chance to read it, we would welcome your comments. I'm currently updating it for London.

Your paper seem to argue that short/high bandwidth transmissions are better than longer/slower ones - we wrote something like this in our paper https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&citation_for_view=5WcgOxMAAAAJ:rJyh6hJnyfgC (upon which the draft is based on) and we got some pushback to the extent that: short/fast = burstiness = high buffers = packet loss = re-transmissions.

I checked the spreadsheet on the other paper - they haven't been updated. It's a strange paper, that makes a lot of assumption regarding energy consumption, but you have to start somewhere. I'm surprised you're saying there hasn't been follow up to that, it's such an important topic. I definitely will add some paragraph or section on "emergy" in the next version of the draft.

This paper evaluates the emissions from virtual conferences - to keep in mind when comparing with IETF emissions from combined hybrid/in-person conference: https://forum.legacy-events.com/uploads/short-url/zmI7aFu6X6ojBESqz9IWKke4GW4.pdf
This paper assesses the value of in-person vs virtual to be 66 times higher from the travel alone (but that's 99% of the in-person energy cost!)

Toerless: was that paper cited at the workshop???

Best,

C.







From: Michael Welzl <[e-mail]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2022 1:27 AM
To: Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>
Cc: Cedric Westphal <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [recipe] FYI: [admin-discuss] REMINDER: IETF carbon emission measurement workshops on 20 and 21 September




On 20 Sept 2022, at 21:45, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 06:12:51PM +0000, Cedric Westphal wrote:

Interesting that for a typical meeting, the airplane leg comprises 99% of CO2 emissions. I had no idea it was so much.

Yes, i wonder about that too. I think this is based on the CO2 emission multiplied by a factor
for having the emission in the stratosphere, and that factor i think does not
necessarily have a widely agreed upon value. But i am not quite sure. I can also
not imagine that the whole hotel energy consumption does not factor into the CO2
emissions significantly, especially not when its in a hot US american city
and still freezing the attendees.

Difficult to say, about the building vs. flying thing....   but generally, regarding the CO2 cost of flying and what this group is trying to do, there are some interesting relationships:

* if the numbers above are roughly right, then we're better off meeting online than flying from the perspective of CO2 emissions from meetings  (btw I'm not sure CO2 is even the right term here: I believe I read somewhere that, while planes do emit a significant amount of harmful greenhouse gases, different from most other things, these are not necessarily CO2). I believe in this; this paper also suggests that meeting online is better, and surely the CO2 emissions of the Internet are worth it:  https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2070562.2070571<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.acm.org%2Fdoi%2F10.1145%2F2070562.2070571&data=05%7C01%7Ccedric.westphal%40futurewei.com%7Cdd67af594bf14970b42008da9bab02f6%7C0fee8ff2a3b240189c753a1d5591fedc%7C1%7C1%7C637993456072363097%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=BDrRD6jTlR4oedHvtabaFnoxeUIe5TA91P7cYdS27LY%3D&reserved=0>

* then again, considering what this group wants to do, let's consider the GHG emissions of the Internet. I think there's reason to believe that these are in the ballpark of half the aviation industry... this is super rough, as it's obviously hard to get good numbers on it!  but for my rationale, see the introduction of this paper:  https://folk.universitetetioslo.no/michawe/research/publications/wons2022_authors_version.pdf<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffolk.universitetetioslo.no%2Fmichawe%2Fresearch%2Fpublications%2Fwons2022_authors_version.pdf&data=05%7C01%7Ccedric.westphal%40futurewei.com%7Cdd67af594bf14970b42008da9bab02f6%7C0fee8ff2a3b240189c753a1d5591fedc%7C1%7C1%7C637993456072363097%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kkYs0j9xH06CCDA97S6%2BWti%2ByvzHuUS1jXdkPdggEgs%3D&reserved=0>    it would be good to have a more in-depth analysis on where we really stand!  E.g., the HotNets paper I mentioned above is quite old... one thing the envisioned group should do, IMO, is to start a collection of material on estimates of Internet GHG emissions, perhaps in a wiki.

* If we really manage to pull of something that reduces Internet energy, even only a tiny bit, at a global scale...  then one can start thinking about what that would mean in terms of plane trips, in relation to the above...

=>   I'd say: if *anyone* should be allowed to fly for the sake of more constructive meetings, then it's probably us   :-)

Cheers,
Michael

PS: this is all really quite tiny (but nonetheless important to reduce!) compared to other things:   https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fourworldindata.org%2Femissions-by-sector&data=05%7C01%7Ccedric.westphal%40futurewei.com%7Cdd67af594bf14970b42008da9bab02f6%7C0fee8ff2a3b240189c753a1d5591fedc%7C1%7C1%7C637993456072363097%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=fvvx5l3e%2FZxgmUzTi4JXTiOKlMvEXEAsP5kukdMFX0U%3D&reserved=0>