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

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Michael:

There where unfortunately only very few folks attending the IETF LLC admin meeting here
the current IETF plan to simply start to estimate the IETF meetings CO2/greenhouse-emissions
was presented. But it did look like a good first small step on a long road.

For something like IETF meetings the next logical step IMHO is to discuss if or how there
is a benefit in some form of carbon offsetting. I think they've planned that as a next step.
I'd certainly like to learn more about that option because all i've read so far about it
is that most carbon offsetting seems to look fairly problematic to me. But maybe there are
some good options.

On the admin-discuss mailing list there was also an interesting pointer to a european
conference recommendations how to minimize carbon emissions for meetings. It looked
pretty good except that it didn't put different options into perspective. E.g.: it said
that reduccing video conference resolution from HD/4k to SD would reduce up to (forgot, e.g.:)
70% energy consumption. Which i think may be true that lets say some 5% of the total
video stream network required energy might be changing based on resolution, even the whole
100% of the network/end-user energy requirements. Which in itself would likely be just a small
portion of the energy of in-person meeting. In my draft-eckert-ietf-and-energy-overview,
i cited https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0140366414000620 which is a bit
old by now (aka: energy consumption of video likely having gone down already due to lower energy
per bit now), but still a good example of a comparative approach.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 10:26:37AM +0200, Michael Welzl wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 20 Sept 2022, at 21:45, Toerless Eckert <[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://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2070562.2070571>
> 
> * 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://folk.universitetetioslo.no/michawe/research/publications/wons2022_authors_version.pdf>    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://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector>
> 

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