Green Web Foundation’s Bold Mission: A Fossil-Free Internet by 2030

The digital realm, a seemingly weightless space of endless information and instant connection, carries a hidden environmental cost. As designers and developers, we wield immense power in shaping this landscape, and with that power comes responsibility. DesignWhine sits down with Hannah and Chris — Director of Operations and Executive Director at the Green Web Foundation — to explore the intersection of technology, design, and sustainability, uncovering not just the challenges but also the immense opportunities for positive change. Their personal journeys and professional dedication offer a compelling invitation to reimagine our relationship with the digital world.

Hannah’s path to digital sustainability began with a lightning-bolt realization at a WordCamp Europe conference, sparking a commitment to bring environmental awareness to the tech community. With a background as a WordPress developer and a deep connection to nature, she offers practical solutions and a grounded understanding of the issues. Chris, on the other hand, approaches sustainability from an ethical standpoint, drawing inspiration from his art background and a commitment to professional responsibility. His focus on supply chains and systemic change provides a broader perspective on the impact of technology.

The Green Web Foundation stands as a beacon of hope in the quest for a sustainable digital future. With the ambitious goal of a fossil-free internet by 2030, the organization provides resources, tools, and expertise to help individuals and companies reduce their digital carbon footprint. From offering a directory of green-hosted websites to developing innovative tools like the CO2.js Playground, the Green Web Foundation empowers designers, developers, and businesses to make informed choices and contribute to a cleaner, more responsible web. They champion transparency, collaboration, and systemic change, advocating for policies and practices that prioritize environmental sustainability across the digital landscape.

The journey towards a fossil-free internet is inspiring yet challenging. Can you each share a pivotal moment that ignited your passion for sustainability in technology? What drew you into this meaningful work?

Chris: Probably one moment when after graduation, I had just joined a coworking space called “The Hub”, in Angel Islington, back in 2008, and realised that there was a whole community of climate aware technologists I could work with on projects, rather than me having to figure it out on my own. In my final year at university in the UK, there was a thing called the “milk round”, which was essentially a massive employment fair, and it kind of confirmed my earlier suspicions that I wasn’t actually that interested in working on just returning value to shareholders with computers. So, finding a community I could learn from was a massive one for me.

Hannah: Before moving into digital sustainability full time I was working as a freelance WordPress developer, and was very involved in the WordPress community. In 2018, I headed to WordCamp Europe in Belgrade and at the end of the conference I remember thinking that neither climate change nor sustainability were present as discussion topics. At that point I hadn’t discovered digital sustainability yet, I was just concerned that the conference organisers weren’t putting enough attention into making such events have less impact. I vowed to be a positive catalyst for change in the community. Then when I was involved in organising Bristol WordCamp in 2019, I was trying my best to act on that commitment and make our conference as low impact as possible. As part of that I was looking around for some relevant speakers to bring sustainability into our agenda and that’s when Wholegrain Digital agreed to speak about the environmental impact of websites with their talk “A study in green”. It was like a lightning bolt struck me. I’d never realised that technology and climate could overlap in such a way, and realised that I’d found my professional calling.

Living amid nature can profoundly shape our perspectives. How have your environments—Chris living in urban Berlin and Hannah having lived in the scenic Exmoor—shaped your understanding of the relationship between technology and the planet?

Chris: Can make a confession? I’m really not that interested in nature, and the environment, and I didn’t realise how different this was until I saw so many other sustainability minded techies talking about how much they like the great outdoors.
My interest in technology and the planet is directly related to thinking about it in terms of being a responsible professional. Doctors take the hippocratic oath, lawyers are members of societies that require codes of practice and conduct – have lines they don’t cross because doing so would stop them being able to practice their craft.
I came to technology from an arts degree, and my first technical projects were actually art projects on my course. As a developing artist I was encouraged to be very deliberate in what I made and how I made it, because this was just as important as the final product. Think about how modern art in the early 20th century, like Marcel Duchamps Fountain was more a statement about rejection of the modernity that just led to World War 1, and all that mechanised violence than a display of painterly technique, for example.

Anyway, I knew there was a supply chain involved in building digital projects and services, just like I had learned that there was a supply chain in my clothes, after I read No Logo by Naomi Klein in my teens. If there was a supply chain, then I ought to take steps to reduce avoidable harm, and that’s how I came to be interested in clean energy and climate. As a technologist, it seemed like something I had some control over through my choice of supplier,

Hannah: Right now I’m lucky enough to live in the heart of a temperate rainforest in Exmoor National Park. It’s a beautiful and rural place where I’m very connected to the weather, the land and fellow creatures around me. I find it extremely peaceful and grounding.

But since I’ve lived here we’ve experienced two very serious, unprecedented storms which knocked out our electricity, water and internet for five days. We also experienced the road to our small hamlet being blocked by fallen trees and completely impassable by vehicle or foot.

The experience of being completely cut off from modern utilities by force is uncommon in the UK. As a society we’re very used to always having these utilities, and most households do not have the physical or emotional resilience to cope without them. These kinds of experiences make me treasure the access we have all the more – we are incredibly fortunate. Technology, and electricity in particular, is absolutely amazing and enriches our lives so much. Directly feeling the impacts of such storms, which are documented as being more severe because of climate change, strengthens my resolve to ensure that everyone has enough access to technology, especially in developing nations, but at the same time those of us in developing nations don’t take more than our fair share and cause harm as we do so. It’s a delicate balance to get right, and one that requires a lot of difficult conversations and compromises across nations.

The CO2.js Playground sounds like such a wonderful resource for everyone to engage with! How do you envision tools like this changing the landscape of digital sustainability education and engagement?

Chris: The one role I expect these to play is to help people understand that choices we make as technologists, and have been encouraged to see as having consequences, actually do – and there are some choices we have direct control over to minimise avoidable harm.

They’re a starting point, obviously, and the more you learn in this field, the more you realise it’s probably more about systemic choices like policy, procurement than technological choices. But there is value in starting small, and incorporating some considerations into your professional practice before working your way up to things that take more political and social capital.

Hannah: It’s not obvious to most people that there is a relationship between our use of technology and physical harms to people and the planet. Tools like the CO2.js playground have been developed to bring these issues to life. If you can model what kind of impacts happen when you have oversized images or auto-playing videos, it becomes much easier for people to care and do something about it. So much of our work is in that education space. There’s a lot of narratives to challenge from big tech. One being that digital is environmental by default because clouds are fluffy and immaterial. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

The development of grid-aware websites highlights the importance of community collaboration. How have dialogues within your technical advisory group shaped the development of your projects? Can you share some insightful moments from these discussions?

Hannah: We’re still in the early stages of our grid-aware websites project but already the advice and challenge from our technical advisory group has been invaluable. Our advisory group has helped us understand that one of the biggest blockers to adoption of new ideas like grid-aware is being able to convince your bosses of the benefits. You can see a full write-up of the questions and our responses from our first advisory group meeting on our blog.

If we fast-forward to a future where grid-aware websites are a standard practice in web development, what’s your most hopeful vision for how this could transform the digital ecosystem and its relationship with energy use?

Chris: For me, the key thing is exposing the materiality of digital services to more people, and encouraging people to think about a wider supply chain involved in providing a digital service. There’s the ethical angle, which I’ve detailed already, but I think there’s tremendous scope for creativity in rethinking our relationship to things as mundane as electricity and grids, because there’s just so much change taking place at the layers beneath our ‘stack’ of technology that make up the internet we can take advantage of.

I’ve written a bunch in the piece in We need a fossil-free internet by 2030, about how getting off fossil fuels can also mean getting off the chains of dependency that keep billions of people spending trillions on fuel for energy from a tiny number of countries and companies, instead of being able to harvest it for themselves, or sharing with geographic neighbours the way electricity grids work. This notion of distributed interdependence is one thing I found appealing about the internet when I first came to it, and the ideas of grid-aware for me work best when they emphasise this.

Hannah: Well I’m definitely an optimist, so I really like this question! My big dream is that we don’t need to build grid-aware websites at all because the digital industry and society in general transforms itself so absolutely that everything we do has little to no harm by default. I’d be even bolder and say that my biggest dream is that aside from doing little to no harm, digital infrastructures are actually regenerative to the environment and communities they sit in, and make things better because they are there.

A more mid-term, and perhaps conservative goal is that by getting website teams to consider the concepts of grid-aware websites they become more engaged with digital sustainability issues. I love the idea of seeing our toolkit used to create digital experiences that not only adapt to the energy around it, but that also educate and inform people about where their electricity is coming from and how to use it more responsibly. I dream of seeing a ripple effect that helps us make more considered choices rather than taking the magic of electricity and digital infrastructures for granted.

How do you view the incorporation of “grid-aware websites” as a metric at the Green Web Foundation, and what other unconventional metrics or indicators do you think could enhance the evaluation of sustainability efforts among social media platforms and digital companies?

Chris: I’ll leave the grid aware website part to Han, as she’s leading on that, but we know for example that climate disinfo is a real issue online. We also know that groups like CAAD, have all kinds of guidelines to address it substantively. For social media companies, just having meaningful indicators of how well they are following the 7 policy asks CAAD has would be really helpful.

I’d also say the other thing would be just making it easy to see what existing steps are being taken. We are working on a project, carbon.txt that is intended to make the sustainability data companies have to publish easier to discover and use now, and many of the measures are not as easy to game as conventional sustainability reports.

So the percentage of companies publishing any meaningful data and linking to it, from their own domain, might sound like a low bar for a metric we’d love to see (or help generate!), but it’s one most companies with websites do not do yet.

Hannah: We have four hypotheses we wish to investigate in this project –

1. There will be a reduction in power consumption on user devices when grid-aware driven, low-impact designs are implemented.
   
2. Implementing grid-awareness at the server level is less energy intensive than client-side.
   
3. Grid-aware websites can be a vehicle for providing a superior user experience.
   
4. Providing a grid-aware toolkit will unleash more creative ideas for raising awareness about the relationship between digital and physical resource consumption.

I hope by the end of this project we’ll have some metrics that will either prove or disprove these ideas.

In terms of other unconventional metric or indicators, in 2023 I did a lot of work thinking about the concept of grid-aware and what it stands for. I came at it from the angle of how do we make digital infrastructures parts of the solutions, rather than part of the problems. One of the key indicators I thought about a lot was where the boundary of electricity use for digital should be. How much electricity is it ok for digital to use, and when should its energy use be prioritised over other sectors in society. What’s the fair share?

Ultimately I think the industry is fixated on optimising what it’s doing which will create some gains. But the much harder questions are around what we are actually using all this tech for and who is benefiting most from it. The rapid introduction of AI by the big tech firms really shines a light on this. So much of what generative AI is doing is rubbing away our humanity for the sake of efficiency. Is this really what we want to embrace?

With Branch Magazine (a sustainable online magazine edited and funded by the Green Web Foundation) as a shining example of carbon-aware design, what insights or surprises have you encountered along the way that might inspire others looking to tread a similar path?

Chris: The biggest one was how we had to take the weather into account more than we thought after launch, and as conditions changed on the UK’s grid!

Since we launched, the UK has switched off its last coal fired power station feeding power into its grid, as well as steadily growing the share of power coming from wind generation. These have both changed how clean the electricity can get on the grid – particularly on very windy days.

During a storm, this new low carbon intensity of the grid at one time broke the code on the website, so we actually had to push an update to account for new, cleaner than expected electricity.

The flipside is true too. In 2022, we saw the grid get dirtier, particularly when the wind was low, and the cost of gas was high, and some coal fired generation came back on because it was cheaper than gas.

Hannah: I am still surprised by how many people love the concepts of Branch magazine, and are willing to accept lower quality or no images when the electricity is dirtier. Despite the work we need to do in educating people about the impacts of digital on the environment, there are a lot of people who do already get it. And those people appear to be willing to accept that shifting a digital experience to reduce it’s harm at certain times is a worthwhile thing to do. It gives me hope that as a species, we can adapt our behaviours and expectations.

In your ambitious mission to achieve a fossil-free internet by 2030, what recent achievements or ‘small wins’ have brought you joy and encouragement? How do these moments inspire you to tackle the next challenges ahead?

Chris: One of the big ones for me lately was seeing a bunch of friendly nerds with laptops and open source software influence national policy by modelling a path off fossil fuels in the UK and various countries in the European Union. In the early 2020’s Google funded some researchers to work on PyPSA (open source grid mapping software) to help them figure out a path to running all their infrastructure on carbon free power, every hour of every day by 2030 – that’s pretty close to a fossil free internet by 2030 right there. From conversations with that group, we also know the same modelling software and models were used to convince governments in the UK and Poland to be much more aggressive on decarbonising their grids. We’re now looking at the UK achieving a decarbonised grid by 2030 too, and Poland has gone from being a laggard to a leader in Europe.

Another big one was the World Wide Web Consortium the W3C, starting a new official sustainable web interest group that we’re part of. This makes it much easier to help set the expectations and standards in future that the web should be more sustainable by default.

Hannah: Embracing opportunities for joy is very dear to my heart. If you’re going to stay sane working in a field like sustainability this you need to make time for this.

For me, publishing Branch issue 8 in April last year brought me a lot of joy and comfort. We themed the issue around the concept of finding beauty in the imperfect. I think that’s another mindset that’s important for feeling successful in any sustainability field. With the help of 35 authors, and a great collaboration with Wholegrain Digital, we explored what it meant to find beauty in the imperfect in the field of digital sustainability. I learned a lot through that process, met a lot of wonderful new people with very hopeful and pragmatic perspectives. It makes you feel that the change we need is possible.
The other thing I really enjoyed about last year was attending the Green IO conference in Paris in December. This was the first time I was in a conference full of people who are also working on the mission of making the internet more just and sustainable. I am invited to speak a lot at events, and usually find myself there to introduce the idea to people for the first time. To be able to have deep and meaningful conversations with people who already get it was a joyous moment. I also gave the final talk of the conference and decided to lean into the topics of storytelling and creativity as a means for creating sustained, and rapid change. Doing the research for that talk gave me a lot of hope to keep working. There’s a full write up that talk called “Start at the end” on our website.

If you had to speculate, what do you think the internet of the 2030 will look like if we fully embrace sustainable practices today?

Chris: it would be normal and expected that websites and digital services have sustainability statements detailing the steps that the people responsible for the service have taken to design them sustainably. We do this already with accessibility, and particularly in the public and third sector, there is already interest in creating standardised, open source approaches for this that anyone can follow.

This is exactly the kind of work where talented content designers, user researchers and UX designers would be disproportionately effective, by the way (hint hint!).

Hannah: I think Chris said this really well and so I’d echo his thoughts. I imagine an internet where there’s complete transparency about the thought-processes and actions taken by website/service teams to consider the impacts of the resources going into their digital products and services.

I’d also like to think that the content on the internet would shift too. We’d see a lot less stuff generated by AI, or at least be able to know very quickly if it is machine-generated. I like to hope that creativity and craft would become front and center again, and that the internet would help us embrace our humanity in healthy ways.

Finally, what heartfelt advice would you give to budding technologists/ UX and product designers who are passionate about merging their love for tech with a commitment to environmental sustainability?

Chris: Find a community. If you can’t find a geographically located one, then there are ones online you can find, or see if there are others already interested in your own existing communities.

Learn about the new laws affecting your work – these will often provide the pretext for experimenting in this field, because getting ahead of changes in regulation is almost always cheaper and less stressful than finding out about changes at the last minute

Acknowledge the emotional side of dealing with the climate crisis and use it to give you purpose – we’re in a stressful time right now, and thinking about climate will often be emotionally exhausting. Learn to acknowledge it, because ignoring it won’t work as you learn more. I’ve found the work on Radical Climate Acceptance by Professor Kimberley Nichols really helpful here, and this talk I gave at Front Conference offers a brief summary of the model.

Hannah: Find time to take care of yourself. The issues and scale of change required here are enormous. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you start to critically look at how our systems need to change. Remember that you are not alone, and that there are lots of beautiful things that humans do for each other all around you if you take the time to look. Celebrate every step you take, and every step that those around you take, even if they are not perfect.

Get started by educating yourself. I gained a lot of knowledge about learning and unlearning through the fellowship I did with the Green Web Foundation. One of the main things I learned was about the importance of equality and human rights in sustainability. In order for us to achieve true environmental sustainability, we’re also going to need to examine societal, human issues. I also learned to be open to challenging my beliefs around economics and politics.

It’s ok to only change what you can around you. A lot of people are under the impression that in order to make a difference they need to change role completely. In some cases that might be true. But in most cases having people who are willing to speak up wherever they are, in all sorts of roles and in all sorts of organisations speaking up makes a huge difference. You don’t need to have “sustainability” in your title to work on sustainability issues. Just speaking up is a form of action.