Nobody cares

I recently learnt about the closure of CarbonRunner, a service that aimed to enable running of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in the cleanest available region (in terms of grid carbon intensity). The idea behind CarbonRunner was a sensible one - location shifting the running of automated workloads to the cleanest available location should result in a lower carbon impact from these tasks. This vibes with the ideas we explored last year in our Grid-aware Websites project.

The CarbonRunner website today has a few short paragraphs announcing the closure of the platform. These are grouped under three headings, which explain the reasons behind the closure. The first of these headings is “Nobody cares”.

Nobody cares

Building environmental based products is hard because nobody really cares. People care about money, they don’t seem to care about environmental savings, even if they’re faster

This theme gets carried forward in to the second point:

The cost of switching is too high

Switching services takes a lot of mental energy, it requires due-diligence, plenty of testing and teams that want to embrace it. Going back to point #1, software developers, on the whole, do not care about carbon savings, even if it would have been the easiest thing to swap over their CI jobs. Software developers do not have to think about the carbon emissions of each function they write.

People care but the incentives are not there

The two statements above feel loaded with emotion. I get it. The team behind CarbonRunner put loads of time and effort into building and promoting their product. It sucks to see all that work fall flat. But the sentiment that “nobody cares” doesn’t truly reflect the reality.

People care, but their ability to influence their organisation’s decisions is limited. At the level of the decision makers, there just isn’t the incentive to care enough about digital sustainability. I saw this in action at the W3C’s TPAC event last year, where I had multiple conversations about web sustainability with individuals from a number of large web technology companies (and not just Google, Microsoft, and Apple). However none of those large organisations are actively engaged in the process of developing the Web Sustainability Guidelines, at least as far as I’m aware. Despite their own sustainability claims, they just don’t have the incentive to work on sustainability on the web in way they do for, say, performance.

Selling sustainability is tough

This, again, is anecdotal. After around 6 years focusing on digital sustainability I’ve seen a good share of many a web sustainability focused company come and go. From analytics platforms, to ones like CarbonRunner focused on developer tooling, a common theme has been that “there’s not enough interest to make this viable”. I think that’s going to keep being the case until there are genuine incentives for organisations to care about digital sustainability.

At the moment, if you’re in the carbon reporting game - providing carbon emissions data to organisations for their annual reports - then there might be something in it for you. That’s where the legislation is at the moment - “show us your data”. Legislation is a large driver of organisational incentives when it comes to sustainability. I’d love to see web standards or customer demand replace that, but I just can’t see that happening. What non-reporting based legislation there is around digital services these days seems to focus on efficiency, but is targeted at data centers and large energy consumers rather than smaller organisations and workloads.

Unfortunately, I feel that in the years to come, we will continue to see that selling sustainability as an add-on to a larger product might be a feasible strategy. But solely sustainability focused products will remain a hard sell. Not because nobody cares, but because the incentives just aren’t there to drive organisational adoption.