Why I volunteer for ECCG

I went to an event at Empty Common Community Garden recently and met a lady called Isobelle who has been volunteering there for some weeks. She kindly agreed to answer some questions about her experiences - this is what she said. I hope that if you were thinking about volunteering but not sure, then this will convince you.

When did you first come to the gardens?  My first session in the garden was in late August (24th) this year and I've been every Sunday since. I first came across the garden on a walk last winter, but didn't realise it was a community project in which anyone could join in. I went to a community event by Cambridge Zero earlier in the summer and saw a flyer about the garden there, and then saw the Sunday sessions on the events page on the Transition Cambridge website. 

Reducing the mountain of e-waste

The UK produces about 6 million tonnes of e-waste annually, of which households are responsible for about 400,000 tonnes each year. That's not just phones, laptops, and computers - an ever increasing number of products and appliances now incorporate some electronics, and anything with a plug or battery qualifies as e-waste.

Working with Contractors - update

Depending on what you want to do, retrofitting your house could involve for example changing your heating system or installing solar power. This can be simple or quite complicated, possibly including hiring several contractors, and maybe a project manager too. You may be taking a ‘big bang’ approach or doing it in phases. Selecting competent, reliable contractors that you can trust and maintain a good relationship with is very important. This page is not a step-by-step approach to your retrofit but general advice about how to choose and work with contractors. Much of the advice on this page came from pooled experiences from the Energy Group members and friends.

Improvements in energy efficiency in buildings since 2000

This post is largely based on the article Advances Toward a Net-Zero Global Building Sector in Annual Review of Environment and Resources 2020 [1]. The article is open access so anyone can read it for free. It explores why energy efficiency is important for net zero emissions and charts improvements since 2000 in different regions of the world. It briefly compares the Passivhaus standard with other standards widely used for low energy buildings. The focus is on the UK although much of the evidence comes from elsewhere, primarily Europe.

The Environmental Cost of AI

With the UK Government's recent announcement about investing heavily in AI, it's appropriate to ask: what is the environmental footprint of all the computing infrastructure that this AI requires?

The answer is simple: it's massive. While there are huge uncertainties, some of the projections have the AI boom causing data centres to generate more carbon emissions than Africa and South America combined. 

The recently announced plans for AI expansion lead to huge increases in resource requirements, and on relatively short timescales. The power needed by AI might exceed that used in all the world's current data centres within 3 years.

That's going to need a lot more electricity, which is likely to increase carbon emissions in the short term, before renewable generation ramps up – and that’s not to mention the carbon footprint of putting up such massive buildings to house the servers and manufacturing the servers that go into them. 

For the longer term, some of the tech giants are starting to look at small modular reactors (SMR, i.e. small nuclear reactors) to power their data centres. Microsoft is trying to bring one of the reactors at Three Mile Island back online. Even if you can generate the electricity, generally there isn't enough grid capacity to get it to the right place, which is one reason why there's such interest in putting the generator, such as an SMR, right next to a data centre.

It's not just drawing electrical power that's a problem. Gargantuan amounts of water, already a scarce resource, are needed for cooling, as all this electricity gets converted into heat.

All this environmental damage leaves open another question: will the benefits from AI outweigh the environmental damage it causes?

For a good overview of the issues about AI and sustainability, this report from the Green Web Foundation is a good read, and this article from UNEP closes with five recommendations to “rein in the environmental fallout of AI”. A great book on the topic is the “Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence” by Kate Crawford.

To find out how to turn off AI in your search engine or on your device, just search the phrase “how to turn off AI on…” and instructions often come up.

Blog post by Peter Tribble. Peter also has a personal website: https://ptribble.blogspot.com/

Improving your web experience - and saving carbon emissions

We spend a lot of our time browsing the web, but have we thought of the carbon emissions involved in getting a web page to be shown on our screen?

There's a long chain involved. The web page has to be stored on a server, potentially processed for consumption, sent out across the network, being passed through multiple devices on its path to you, before finally being processed by your own device so as to look just right for you to read it.

Fortunately, much of the work involved in calculating the environmental impact of the web has been done for you. Sites such as Website Carbon and Ecograder can estimate the carbon emissions due to viewing a web page. This takes a range of factors into account, from storage and processing of the page, transmitting it across the network, but also whether the server is powered by electricity from renewables or fossil fuels.