Net zero

I was at the Schools North East Summit last week, another excellent event at Newcastle United’s conference facility. Our stand was next to Zenergi, a company specialising in sustainable energy solutions. They had gin to give away and so it was very difficult to compete for interest. (There was a surprising amount of alcohol being given away on the stands this year and I don’t know if this says more about me or the state of the learning system.)

I took the opportunity to say hello to my new neighbours and ended up in a conversation about net zero. This is a phrase that is bandied about and, while I get the broad principle I get stuck with the detail.

According to the Energy Savings Trust: To reach net zero, emissions from homes, transport, agriculture and industry will need to be cut. In other words, these sectors will have to reduce the amount of carbon they put into the atmosphere. But we don’t manufacture anything and so our energy consumption, apart from IT, is limited to travelling to events and meetings.

How can CyberNorth, for example, achieve net zero? It is a company with no employees and no assets other than the data and goodwill. Where do we even begin?

Well, we can start with travel. We can commit to reducing the amount of travel we do by our own cars and stick, where possible, to public transport. This is fine when we are meeting in Newcastle or Sunderland but anywhere outside those makes public transport quite difficult. 

We could commit to reducing the amount of IT processing power we use by reducing the amount of data we retain and decreasing file sizes we send though I have no idea whether or not this will have any effect.

This all seems very trivial to me, along the lines of replacing plastic bags with paper and thinking you’ve cracked it.

Perhaps the biggest impact we could have is to understand better the carbon cost of cyber security and work with our members to reduce its contribution to the carbon load. This has the potential to make an enormous impact as  long as the balance is retained between energy and security.

Now where do I begin with this?