FEED WINTER 2021 – Web

The relentless rise of carbon dioxide

160 180 200 220 240 260 280 300 320 340 360 380 400 420 440 460 480

For millennia, atmospheric carbon dioxide had never been above this line For millennia, atmospheric carbon dioxide had nev r been above this line

800,000

8 ,000

700,000 600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,00 7 ,000 6 ,000 5 ,000 4 ,000 3 ,000 2 ,000 1

years before today (0 = 1950)

years b fore today (0 = 1950)

NEAL ROMANEK: What about the big public cloud entities, like AWS or Google? How are they going to cope with this and how can they help?

BRANDON COOPER: They have to find ways to make business more efficient. Somebody, at some point, is going to have to put the hammer down. I think Amazon recently abandoned some of their ideas of reducing their carbon footprint (2). It’s become less of a priority for them, and it needs to be more. They’re the new airline industry, in terms of carbon emissions and irresponsibility. But who regulates that? The major Hollywood studios all have initiatives, to reduce everything from wastewater on their studio sites, to going paperless with call sheets, to donating food from sets. If the large studios can do that, then these public cloud companies can do the same. LIAM HAYTER: There’s a lot to be said for distributed production, too. We get bogged down with cloud and the idea that we’re going to put everything in data centres. But trying

to track how that is powered, and its environmental impact, can be very difficult. If you work on-premises, you know who is providing the energy to power your location – and who is powering the remote sites you are connecting to. You can then have some control and still use cloud where it makes sense. But just depositing everything into the big cloud companies, without getting the data about what they’re doing, is going to be part of the challenge. One of the biggest things we could do globally is ensure good connectivity. In London, I’ve got fibre, but there are still people in England who can’t even get 100Mbps. How are you going to do remote production in those places? Or how can we ensure people around the world are telling their stories? If we can get that connectivity piece globally, that is immediately going to make these challenges easier for everyone.

(2) In 2020, Amazon’s total carbon footprint saw a year-on-year increase of 19%

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