I get the same look every time I tell people I started my career in IT and construction management before becoming a practitioner in sustainability. Just like most, I have had a very odd pathway to working and thriving in sustainability.

It’s a fair reaction. On paper, designing physical infrastructure or building facilities seems a world away from cloud computing. But if you look closer, the difference disappears.

The “Cloud” is a marketing term. The reality is steel, copper, fans, and electricity. It is the largest machine humanity has ever built. And like any massive construction project, if the blueprint is flawed, the building inevitably cracks.

I don’t look at a server rack and see “digital transformation.” I see a load-bearing wall that needs to hold up the global economy. I learned early on that you can’t argue with physics, and you can’t bluff your way through a structural failure. Today, I apply that same “build-it-better” mindset to the internet.

That brings me to #MyThreeCents.

We live in a world of hot takes, video shorts and “two cents” opinions. Usually, that’s just noise. I want to offer something different. This blog series is my way of cutting through the slogans to get to the mechanics of how we actually fix the digital ecosystem.

Not Your Typical Climate Practitioner

I work in climate, but I don’t fit the typical mold.

I believe in common sense. I believe in a healthy planet. But I also believe, fundamentally, that you can grow your bottom line while ensuring you are actively lowering your impact on the climate.

We are often sold a false choice: Profit or Planet. I reject that. In my view, if your sustainability strategy isn’t driving efficiency and cutting costs, it isn’t a strategy—it’s philanthropy. I am here to prove that a greener business is a stronger business.

Here is the blueprint.

1. The Physics of the Internet

Let’s be clear: Data centers are the engines of modern life. They power medical research, connect families, and are currently training the AI models that will define the next decade. They provide immense value to society.

But we can’t treat them like magic boxes. They are physical facilities that turn electricity into computation. That process comes with a cost on both sides of the equation.

First, there is the input: Emissions. The cloud is tethered to the power grid. Every server rack is plugged into a system that, in many parts of the world, is still burning coal or gas. If the local grid is dirty, the digital services running on it are dirty. You cannot separate the code from the current that powers it.

Second, there is the output: Heat. The byproduct of all that computation is thermal energy. Thermodynamics is the one stakeholder we can’t negotiate with.

The good news is that the industry is waking up to this reality. Leaders are moving away from the old models of “build it big and worry about the cooling later.” We are seeing incredible innovation in liquid cooling and heat reuse.

However, we still have work to do on water. Evaporating drinking water to cool servers isn’t the long-term answer, and the best minds in the sector are already solving for Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). The goal isn’t to stop building; it’s to build smarter.

2. The “Emissions First” Reality

There is a massive debate happening in sustainability right now, and if you aren’t paying attention, you’re missing the plot. It’s the difference between Attributional and Consequential emissions.

• Attributional is accounting. It’s “Paper Decarbonization.” It asks: “Did I buy enough credits to match my usage?” It allows companies to claim they are green even if the local grid they operate on is burning coal.
• Consequential is reality. It asks: “Did my action actually change the amount of carbon entering the atmosphere?”

I care about Consequential Emissions. And this mindset is driving us toward a new standard: 24/7 Carbon Free Energy (CFE).

The old way of doing business—matching annual usage with annual renewables—is obsolete. The wind doesn’t blow on an annual average; it blows when it blows. To be honest about our impact, we need to match our consumption with clean generation hour-by-hour, 24/7. This granularity gives us the visibility to see exactly when we are pulling dirty power.

But let’s be clear: We can’t get to a 24/7 reality unless we work on cleaning up the dirtiest areas on the global grid.

Simply matching hours isn’t enough if we aren’t cleaning up the mess. We need a well-defined consequential approach focused on displacement. This means identifying the dirtiest grids in the world and building renewable capacity there. It means shifting our compute loads to follow the sun and the wind.

If we want to fix the climate, we have to stop optimizing for our sustainability reports and start optimizing for the atmosphere. A kilowatt-hour saved in a region reliant on coal or gas is worth ten times more than one saved on a clean, hydro-powered grid.

3. The Efficiency Imperative

For too long, sustainability was viewed as a tax on the business. A “nice to have.”

That era is over. Efficiency is currency.

The industry is obsessed with buying better chips, but we need to look at the logic of deployment. The tech sector has a massive “over-provisioning” addiction. The standard practice is to deploy far more compute than necessary as a clumsy insurance policy against downtime. This leaves millions of servers running at single-digit utilization rates, burning electricity 24/7 while doing absolutely nothing.

In construction, if you buy too much steel, you go broke. In tech, for some reason, that is called “redundancy.” It’s financial waste and carbon waste.

But it’s also about the code itself. In the dial-up days, developers fought for every byte. Then bandwidth became cheap, and the industry got sloppy. Teams started shipping bloated code because they assumed the infrastructure would just handle it.

Lazy code is a climate liability, but it is also a financial one. Every extra millisecond of processing time and every gigabyte of wasted storage goes straight to the cloud bill. In a usage-based world, inefficiency is a direct tax on margins.

When the industry strips away the digital fat—compressing images, refactoring inefficient queries, and killing zombie processes—it isn’t just saving carbon. It is saving cash. Bloated systems are slow systems. They frustrate users and drive up cloud bills. By optimizing the architecture, companies can serve more traffic with less iron. In my experience, a leaner system is a greener system.

4. Radical Transparency

I promise you one thing: I won’t sugarcoat the data. I’m not here to sell you a polished narrative; I’m here to tell it like it is.

Transparency isn’t just about supply chains, though that is a massive challenge. We need to expose the friction points where the industry often hides the truth:

• The Water Reality: We can’t keep hiding evaporation numbers in the footnotes. If a facility is consuming millions of gallons of water in a drought-stricken region, we need to own that number and fix it. “Net Water Positive” sounds nice, but it doesn’t help the local reservoir if you’re evaporating the drinking supply.
• The Energy Reality: There is a convenient accounting trick called “Market-based” reporting that lets companies claim they are 100% renewable by buying cheap certificates (RECs), even if they are plugging into a coal grid. That might satisfy the auditors, but it doesn’t fool the atmosphere. We need to get to a world where “Location-based” reality—the actual electrons flowing into the rack—is the standard. And the fastest way to get there is by deploying clean energy in the dirtiest grids, cleaning up the actual mix rather than just the paperwork.
• The Hardware Graveyard: We treat servers like disposable razors. The standard practice of shredding millions of tons of high-grade electronics every few years because of a “refresh cycle” is unsustainable. We need to talk about circularity, extending hardware life, and the massive carbon cost of manufacturing the chips in the first place.

I want this blog to be a place where we discuss these tough topics. The uncomfortable realities where the technology lags behind our ambition. We earn trust by showing our work—scars, evaporation rates, and dirty electrons included—not just our trophies.

The Road Ahead

Think of the modern internet like a jazz ensemble. It’s complex, improvised, and relies on a dozen different players hitting the right notes at the right time. The infrastructure layer plays the bass line—providing the rhythm and foundation that holds the track together.

Those of us working at this foundation level have a unique obligation. We aren’t just laying pipe and wire; we are setting the rules for how energy flows through the digital economy. If we get the architecture right, everything built on top of it—from AI to streaming—runs cleaner.

So I welcome you follow along with #MyThreeCents. I’m not here to preach or be an arm-chair quarterback, I roll up my sleeves to build.

Let’s get to work.