Revisit the carbon slides of the environmental impact module

[JaroCamphuijsen]

The current slide deck in the environmental impact module called "carbon" needs a better story and flow. Some things that we noticed during the pilot:

• First question is "what does this mean for carbon production?" but it is not clear from the context what "this" means.
• Too much text on the slides in general
• Slide about energy carbon intensity only mentions spatial variability with examples, better to first explain the concept and introduce why we calculate "carbon"
• Also give examples of temporal variability
• Better introduction for the electricity map
• in general, add more notes to tell the story
• most of the slides only talk about CO2 footprint of HPC/datacenters, also discuss footprint of personal devices
• previous point will also lead into the discussion about whether carbon is a good measure, introduce the term "CO2 equivalent"
• typical footprint slide gives little context, would be nice to put examples in a table like in the previous chapter. Related to that, it would be good to put more "computing examples" in that table, because currently it only holds "real life" examples that you can sort of relate to. Perhaps add the following items:
  • daily energy usage of all data centers
  • daily energy usage of scientific computing
  • energy necessary to watch an episode (hour) on netflix
  • etc.
• Dutch specific energy mix (nowtricity) has no introduction or notes, not sure why we need this since we have electricity map
• Estimating impact, should discuss why this is the first thing we should do. Know where you spend energy before you act! Not useful to optimize every single part of your workflow. Now this slide only discusses Loic and his green algorithms
• Think about how and why to discuss the online and HPC calculator
• Perhaps move green DiSC to end, discuss several of the aspects that green disc uses as part of "what can we do"
• Will these things help is a very important section, but now starts with the assumption that we require researchers to justify their requested carbon budget in project proposals in a similar way we ask researchers to justify their monetary budget. This assumption is never mentioned explicitly and should actually be a slide in the previous part about "what can we do"
• Discuss the fact that science is only a very small part of the problem.
• Perhaps discuss jevons paradox in this section and not in the "optimizing energy usage"
• Perhaps discuss that raising awareness and setting an example are the most important parts