Why Optimism Is A Practical Climate Strategy

Doom and guilt might get attention, but they rarely build the kind of sustained momentum we need for climate solutions. We sit down with Charlie Sellars, the award-winning author of What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living. Through his work, he focuses not only on empowering people to act sustainably in everything they do, but also on making sustainability more fun for all of us. Charlie is also a director of sustainability at Microsoft, working to embed sustainability into the company's cloud business after having done the same for its consumer hardware business.

We dig into Charlie's "spheres of influence" framework and apply it to one of the hottest topics in tech right now: AI and data centers showing up in local communities. That means personal choices that drive digital demand, professional choices that turn everyday roles into climate jobs, and political engagement that create transparency, accountability, and responsible development, including practical examples like carbon-aware workloads that shift energy use to cleaner times on the grid.

We also get into the Ocean Plastic Mouse, the power of design-led circularity, agrivoltaics that blend solar with farming and pollinators, and why cutting waste often unlocks the fastest cost savings. Plus, we wrestle with uncertainty in AI efficiency and energy demand, and why transparency and better measurement build trust even when the numbers evolve.

The opinions expressed by Charlie Sellars in this episode are his own and do not reflect the views of Microsoft Corporation.

Learn more about Charlie or buy his book here: https://www.charliesellars.com/

If you want hopeful, concrete, and scalable sustainability ideas that don't rely on perfection, this conversation is for you. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, share the episode with a friend who needs a dose of optimism, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

The Optimist Circuit Podcast is building the circuit connecting AI, Tech, Nature, and People to spark optimism and power solutions for society. Your hosts, Ellen Spooner and Francesca Fernandez, bring decades of experience across sustainable communications, circular economy, decarbonization, and nature and biodiversity to every conversation.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Optimist Circuit Podcast, where we are building the circuit connecting AI, tech, nature, and people to spark optimism and our real-world solutions for society. I'm Francesca. And I'm Ellen. Our guest today is the award-winning author of the book What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist's Guide to Sustainable Living. He's a TEDx speaker on making sustainability fun again and an all-around optimist about creating a more sustainable future. So much of his message is about why we need to inspire people rather than shame them into caring about the planet, which is exactly why we had to have him on the show.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

Charlie Sellers is the director of sustainability at Microsoft, where he has led sustainability programs across both Windows devices and cloud operation teams, helping bring to life products like Windows PC, built with repairable and recycled components. Very cool. But even more cool, the ocean plastic mouse. He was, oh my gosh, so cool. There it is.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Here it is.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

He was named one of the uh 2024 top 100 most impactful individuals in the digital infrastructure industry and serves on the governing body of the iMasons Climate Accord. Welcome to the podcast, Charlie.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Thank you, Ellen. Thank you, Francesca. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

Awesome.

Why Optimism Drives Real Action

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Well, what really struck me most about all the messaging that you've put out through your book, through your TED Talks, through all the different podcasts that you've been on is our shared belief that optimism is not just like a feel-good, it's an actual strategy to be effective at solving the climate crisis. So can you talk to us a little bit about how you came to that conclusion and maybe examples of where you've seen that be successful?

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, what a dream to be invited into the Optimist Circuit podcast. Uh, because that is exactly, I like to think of my own book tour as the Optimist Circuit. So, like a lot of synergy here. Um, yeah, there are a million examples I can think of of where optimism trumps doism in being effective. Because ultimately, like, what do I care about? I care about the planet being better and being saved, and I care about being effective in doing that. And one of the things that um just to start off, I'll think about in my professional career that I've noticed is it's the people within the companies that are doing a lot of the polluting who are able to inspire other people to come along on the journey that are a lot more impactful than the people inside the companies who try to shame other people into acting. Because when you don't have authority or uh agency over somebody else, you really have to think about what is the motivation that will get them to act when they have a lot of other competing priorities. And so, oh my God, people love it when you come and say, hey, let's work on this really fun sustainability program uh problem together, rather than like, hey, if you don't fix this uh this keyboard right now, um I will hate you forever and uh until the day you die. So a little bit of a balance. I have I've seen both attempts uh and both directions taken, and uh one works a little bit better than the others.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

I love that. Um yeah, that that resonates deeply with my experience of working across teams and and um trying to leverage that sometimes downward, but sometimes parallel and sometimes upward influence um that one can and needs to have in order to make the work effective.

Spheres Of Influence For Climate Impact

SPEAKER_01 3:23

In your book, What We Can Do, you talk about spheres of influence and you talk about them in sort of three areas the personal choices one makes, the professional choices one makes, and the political action one can take. Uh there are a lot of arenas in which spheres of influence are now colliding with um world events and and and um current events. And in the US at least, uh data centers are making their way into communities. And one of the discussions and the um I don't want to say battlefields, but one of the areas of activation that is really receiving a lot of energy right now is how people can influence the technology development taking place in their own backyards and how they can shape the way that technology, AI in this case, um is is being stood up and how to make that process more sustainable. What thoughts do you have on that and sort of this new um this new horizon?

Personal Choices That Shift Data Demand

SPEAKER_02 4:23

Yeah, so for the listeners who might uh not know what it means to do sustainability for cloud operations, effectively it means that all these data centers going up all over the world. I'm the poor schmuck that has to figure out how to make them as sustainable as possible, which is very fun. It's not just me. Uh, we have a team, there's many of us working on it. Um, but that is ultimately a challenge uh that if you want to have a piece of the pie of solving that challenge, there are ways, if you think about Francesca, what you said, of thinking of your spheres of influence as to how you can tackle the problem. And I want to also say that there isn't like a certain primacy for one approach being better than the others. I think some people fall into that trap. Um, but let me let me explain what I mean. So in the book, I talk about making sure that we've ref, we, we, we reframe our understanding of our impact as to what we can do in our personal lives, the decisions we make as individuals, what we can do in our professional lives, the things that we might do at work, and in our political lives, the things we might do in how we vote, how we civically engage. And Francesco, since you mentioned the question of data centers, it's like, well, what can you do about that? And the personal side, so much of the demand for data centers is based on our individual choices. Uh, for better or worse, we like taking photos of things. Even though everyone seems to hate AI, they're still using AI quite a bit. Um, but there are decisions that we can make in our personal lives to uh reduce the impact of using those services. Like, here's a very interesting and a fun one. We just published actually how much energy and water every time you use an AI chatbot, uh, how much it takes, literally this week. And um, one of the things people might not realize is like actually when you decide to use AI or upload a picture, it makes a pretty significant difference. So, like, if I want to use AI in the heat of summer, it's the middle of August, it's cooking outside, um, the data center is going to be really hot as well. And so there's probably going to need to be a lot more energy for cooling it, or maybe even using water for cooling it. But if you do that same thing in the winter, you might not need to use water at all. It's super cool. Uh, similarly, when I was leading sustainability for our uh Windows and devices team, we we came up with this feature called carbon awareness. It's really cool. So the idea is like, hey, even on a daily basis, the amount of energy, uh clean energy on the grid is going to fluctuate. You know, during the middle of the day, when the sun is shining, you'll have more solar. When it's windy, you'll have more wind. What if we could shift when people update their video games or update their operating system to when there's more clean energy available? So you get that choice as an individual to align your activity to using more clean energy. Super cool stuff. Um, and when you expand that over the 1.4 billion Windows devices that are out there, which is it's a crazy frickin' amount of computers in the world, to be honest. Um, but that that starts to materialize. But you as an individual have to take those actions. And we want to make sure that people are enabled on that. The next one, and pause me, by the way, if uh if I wax poetic, because I will be guilty of that, is what we can do in our professional lives. So, you know, how we use our products, the decisions we make as purchasers, consumers is one thing, but there needs to be something that they can react to in uh, and that has to come from the companies. And so any person within a company has the potential to make their job a sustainability job, which is really exciting. So, like I am one person in a company of a quarter of a million. I cannot do everything. I don't try to do everything. But what I love doing is finding somebody else who has a really cool idea and then saying, how can I enable and support that person? But those people are often not sustainability folks. Like we have a great example. There's a random guy who works within our software business who said, Hey, what if I take that same carbon awareness idea for not just when you use the cloud, but which cloud you use? Like, could I actually, like if there's more wind blowing in Iowa today, could I shift my work to Iowa to take advantage of that clean energy? Um, he's just a guy. He's a guy with a beautiful idea. And I found him and I was like, how can I help this man actually make this something that people could use and customers? So there's so much uh opportunity in that sphere of influence of the of the of the professional sector. And it does scale really quickly. I mentioned that before the 1.4 billion Windows PCs out there. I mean, like, just for me and uh myself, like I love being able to go to work every day and say, like, hey, a decision I can make today will offset my entire lifetime's worth of emissions, just like that. Um, and that's gonna be that's a lot more than like not using a plastic straw for the rest of my life. I mean, I'm still gonna try to do that too, you know? But but when it comes to um the political side, that is right now where the hotbed is on data centers, because ultimately a data center cannot get built if a community in which uh that that where they want to build it, they have to say yes. And so the way in which you get to yes with a data center company, like you could just say straight up no, in which case that data center company will pack up, leave, and then build in a community that cares less, which is actually kind of from on a global basis not that good. But you can also get to the point where you negotiate as a community, showing like showing up to town halls, showing up to these meetings, um, and saying, like, hey, here's the conditions that we see as individuals. Like, hey, council members don't say yes to a data center unless they commit to not take tax breaks, to not do NDAs, to, you know, fix our sewage system, you name it. We've heard crazy uh, you know, requests from communities, left, right, and center. But like, that only comes from people activating the political side of their sphere of influence. And that can be a make or break determinant on whether, if a data center is going to come into the community, it's actually done in a in a responsible way versus in a way that is the Elon Musk way, which they're actively getting sued by the NAACP for all of their smog and all it don't get me started on him. He is not an optimist in the way that I like to think of it.

SPEAKER_03 10:29

Yeah, I think we can all agree on that. And so essentially what I'm hearing you say is I should take a summer vacation and use AI less in the summertime. That's what I'm taking away from that.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

If I can be your excuse, Ellen, like please.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

Yeah, do your digital spring cleaning in December. Um, counterintuitively. That's interesting. Uh first of all, I love how you've taken that framework and unpacked it in the three different ways for that one specific example. It makes it really come alive. And I uh I must say that the the professional piece in particular resonates because that has informed so much of how I've shaped my own journey. It also seems to be pretty um prevalent, if I if I may make this observation, it seems to be pretty prevalent in the halls of Microsoft, not least of all with your uh former colleague Drew Wilkinson, um spearheading the charge of every job is a climate job. And it's there's a fun game that I like to fun to me, less to my immediate friends and family, but I love to play, you know, a I love to set a challenge and say, like, name me any job, I bet you I can find the sustainability angle to it. And they have yet to uh to to beat me on that game. So I wanted to ask, uh, given that this seems to be something that you, your colleagues have in common, is there something in particular about your team and your environment that has that has this nurturing effect on that mindset of like every job is a climate job or every job is a sustainability job? And how are you and and if there isn't a structured way that that's happening, how are you perhaps personally trying to grow that?

SPEAKER_02 12:03

So,

Making Sustainability A Joyful Team Sport

SPEAKER_02 12:04

you know, this is the Optimist Circuits podcast, so uh, or the Optimist Circuit podcast. And so the um the way that you kind of do it internally is you take the circuit, but you try to inspire people along the way. Like the first thing when I moved into the cloud business, I took over an existing team. And the first thing that I told them in terms of my priorities, it wasn't save the planet, obvious. It wasn't grow revenue or cost, boring. It was we're gonna have fun and other people are gonna have fun with us. And that sounds like trite and maybe not like that strategic, but I'd like to think it kind of is because what we were finding with some of the early history of the teams working on sustainability within the company is that it was not necessarily a joy-forward approach to trying to solve the problems. A lot of uh sustainability within these big companies is often born out of compliance. And compliance isn't all about like, hey, let's have a fun moment together. It's like, you need to follow the law. Cool. But then when it gets into voluntary activity, that's where those same levers of like, you need to do this, otherwise we get sued, they kind of fall away. And so it's all about, you know, going to the people who have the right ideas and the great instincts and then nurturing that by encouraging them to think about, you know, the art and the realm of the possible. And a great example of this is when I started at Microsoft on the devices side when I was leading sustainability there, um, we had a group of folks who said, like, hey, we're really passionate about solving the plastic crisis in in the oceans. But like, we don't, like, we don't know what, like, what should we be doing about that? And so the the way that we directed them was not like, hey, you need to take a mouse and you need to take all the bad stuff out of it, and you can't do this and you can't do this. We could, we weren't, we weren't the party of no. We were the party of like basically just dumping a bunch of gross ocean plastic on a table and being like, this smells, it's awful, it's disintegrating. What can you do with this? Figure something out. And that was and that was a bunch of people without sustainability backgrounds for the most part, saying, let's see what we can do. And uh back in 2021, this was my first ever sustainability product for the company. This cute little ocean plastic mouse, it's 20% of its ocean plastic. It would be more, but it actually does disintegrate beyond that amount we found. And the thing is that's so so cool about it is I don't know if you can see it, but there's a lot of little speckles on it. Oh yeah. And the speckle design was a great insight from our design team. They said, like, hey, we can't get a consistent color. The plastic is too bad. And so we said, like, well, what can we do to make this a benefit to us? And so the idea was like, let's lean into the beautiful imperfection, let's make it speckly. Let's actually add more speckles to it. And because every single mouse, like I have another one here, completely different pattern, although it's, you know, you probably didn't memorize the first pattern. But like, but every single one of them has a little bit of its own unique look and feel. And that really resonated with customers. This is one of our most pre-ordered mice of all time. And it's uh a mouse that costs five or used to cost five dollars more than a regular mouse. And it's literally just called the ocean plastic mouse. But people loved uh how it came together, and it was all because a bunch of people were inspired to dream of the art of the possible, not being told to take an existing product and make it worse.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

Yeah, and I love whether intentional or or um serendipitous, I love the biomimicry there. It's like making me think of a Robin's egg or you know, some other um beautiful nature artworks um out there.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

And that sort of take on let's invent something together, rather than just saying like no, you can't do that or you're bad for doing that, is something that I feel I'm seeing more and more sustainability leaders take that lens, especially right now with all of the headwinds, like you have to be innovative, you can't just say no.

Clean Energy That People Actually Want

SPEAKER_03 16:00

And so I'm curious how do you bring that sort of fun and joy and innovation into like the energy side of things? We're trying to convince a lot of data center developers to choose renewable energy. So, how do you bring innovation and fun into that aspect of things?

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. Um, and sometimes you pair the fun with the passion. Like, I don't think it's like going just joy forward, no matter the context, can be a little tone deaf sometimes. And I'll give a great example of this is um I'll actually go point back to the Elon Musk situation, which is he's powering his data centers in Memphis, Tennessee with a bunch of unregistered, basically natural gas and diesel turbines, uh, which were not permitted and are actively creating all this smog that's going into the communities, unfortunately, mostly communities of color, um, that is going to be a very big issue for their health uh if it's not mitigated. Um, and thankfully they're being sued to stop it, although the federal government just said, oh, don't worry about it. I'm not going to get into those details. Listeners can look it up if they want. But what I will say in those cases, tying it to something that they're passionate about beyond just saving the planet is also, I think, a really valuable lens to take on the energy side. And so, you know, like it's kind of beautiful in some regards that it's like, hey, you want an energy source for this data center that isn't going to create a bunch of smog. Hey, you want an energy source that's not going to use a bunch of water to generate the energy. Like, hey, you want an energy source that's relatively quiet. Guess which ones tend to come to the top? Solar and wind. And then, you know, you can even do like cool geothermal stuff too. Um, but that's when you start getting into these really interesting other lenses of kind of following the passion for people wanting to take care of themselves. But then if you want to go on top of it, then you start getting into, I think, the way in which energy can become fun. Now, what is it, what does it mean for energy to be fun, right? And I'll give uh give a great example of this. There's a uh a lovely uh farming community in Minnesota called uh Morris, Minnesota. And they're one of the nation's kind of leading rural sustainability hubs, which is cool. And one of the things that they like to do is something called agrivoltaics. Do you both know about agrovoltaics?

SPEAKER_03 18:24

I just read it in your article.

SPEAKER_02 18:27

It's so fun. It's so cool. So for the listeners who don't know what agrovoltaics is, it's the idea of like, hey, instead of just taking up a bunch of farmland with solar panels, what if we integrate the solar panels into the farm experience? And what does that mean? Well, it means like literally something as simple as just making the solar panels on poles so that when cows are hot during the middle of the day, they can go get shade underneath the solar panels. It sounds so simple, but it actually makes a happier cow and you know, a better, uh, a better milk, like you name it. And it's still getting the benefit of the clean energy. And I think what's really fun is not on the data center side, but on the side of my humble little book here, is um the energy that we use to make this book is pollinator-friendly, uh, sheep-grazed uh solar farms. And so what's so fun is like someone will be like, hey, what does that mean? I can hand them a jar of honey, being like this was produced as a byproduct of the energy to make the book. Um, it's very fun to be able to have like here, yep, here's some like honey nuts that are just from bees that were around the solar panels.

SPEAKER_03 19:39

That is incredible. And I did read the article that was just published about that entire process that you worked with your publisher to make the book made more sustainably. So much so, correct me if I'm wrong, that they pot enough solar certificates to pay like cover the emissions of all of their books for the whole year, not just your book. And I was like, oh wow, that's like going way above and beyond. So could you explain a little bit more about like buying that solar certificate, what that process is like? Like, did that cost them more money? How did they cover that, that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Yeah, no, it did cost them more money. But I think what's really fun about that is this goes back to that same question of like leading with inspiration and joy is, you know, I have the great um privilege of having a publisher. It's really hard for people to find publishers if they're authors. And I happen to find one that I really like local to me in Minnesota. And one of the things I was looking at when I was looking across the various publishers is like, who's willing to not just make my book happen and my book about sustainability, but who's like willing to make my book sustainable? And there are not really any publishers out there for whom that is a primary focus. I think partially because there have not been enough authors who have just said, hey, I this is a priority for me. Can we figure this out together? And to my publisher Wise Inc.'s credit, they said, we don't know what this means. We have no sustainability people in our staff, but it sounds neat. Let's see what we can figure out. And there were all these really cool things we did beyond just the energy, you know, even like font selection. I learned this after we wrote the book, is that one of the fonts that we picked uses 30% less ink than uh like Ariel, which is cool. So it's like even font selection could be in this, in addition to like not using plastic or spot gloss, thinking about the margins, thinking about the distribution model. They realized for them that it was in their best interest as a publisher to attract authors that they wanted to have this be now a part of their value proposition because nobody else was doing it. And frankly, I wouldn't, you know, I might not have gone with them if I didn't sense a willingness to kind of take that sustainability focus. So now, yeah, they're doing it for my book, which is awesome. I'm glad I was able to agitate in a fun way for that to happen. But now they're doing it for every other author, and they can lead into that. Like, hey, we're a mission-based publisher, and here's the proof. You know, it's not just the like who we choose to platform, it's how we're platforming them. And I'd like to think that they're going to get some really cool authors down the line as a result of what is relatively a pittance to get the clean energy for all the manufacturing.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Very cool. It's also a great case study, and something that you mentioned within the book itself is that for companies, uh, sustainability, you know, can be a cost savings. It can also be a revenue driver, um, an opportunity to differentiate. Conversely, though, I think if I if I remember correctly in the book, you make the case that cost savings is actually sort of a lower-hanging fruit to start with rather than the innovation or revenue piece. Um, can you tell us a bit about how that plays out, why you think that's a good place to start, and just sort of some of your favorite examples of where that has come to fruition?

Cutting Waste Saves Money Fast

SPEAKER_02 22:52

Yeah, totally. Uh, I'll give an awesome example from my time back in the devices part of Microsoft is um, you know, a game developer is not necessarily incentivized to reduce their energy costs. They're incentivized for a lot of other things. Um, but you know, like they want to have the great, the best graphics, they want to have the best gameplay, um, all the really cool artwork. But when it comes to like, do they care about the amount of energy the game itself uses? The answer to that is typically as long as it can still run on the Xbox, we don't care if we like we, there's no benefit to going below that. We said, what if we challenge that? What if we can actually save folks some money by thinking about strategically how we decarbonize games? And like, are either of you gamers or do you play games at all?

SPEAKER_03 23:40

I have played Mario Kart.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

All right. So that's Nintendo. They did just put a posting for a job for a sustainability specialist, so maybe they'll get there. They're a little behind us. Um, but um, I assume a lot of people listening to this will have at least heard of Fortnite, uh, or maybe played it themselves.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

My brother plays that.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

Yeah. I it's it's fun. Um, it's it's crazy how many people have played it. And what's also crazy, Ellen, is like you wouldn't think about this, but because there was not that earlier incentive to um uh to think about the the the cost of the energy, um, whenever you would like be in the lobby or another like non-gameplay moment where you don't really need to do anything, we were still running uh that game at like full blast. And so we have this thing called the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit. We apply it not just to Fortnite, but things like Call of Duty, Halo, you name it. Um, and we said, like, what if we just like turn down the resolution and the frame weight rate when you've paused the game or you're just sitting around in the lobby? Because like we don't need to use the power then. It's not getting in the way or making someone's experience worse if we do that. We saved 14 wind turbines of power from those changes. 14. Wow. That is 14 wind turbines that do not need to get built. Um, and so like you start to see more and more games realize like, hey, if this doesn't get in the way of the gameplay experience, which you shouldn't try to get in the way of the gameplay experience, um, this is an easy way to reduce the power draw for the consoles. It's an easy way to reduce the power draw of the of the cloud, and we save a couple bucks along the way. So, like, it's it's amazing how many places, and this is not just in video games, but in just how many places just waste is happening that that no one has ever asked the question, why and can we stop it?

SPEAKER_01 25:29

I think a lot of those interesting conversations are also at least um among the sustainability LinkedIn voices. Um, uh a lot of folks are paying more attention to like, all right, how am I responsibly using um my my LLM? How am I responsibly framing, prompting, um yeah, uh deploying this this use? And I it it remains to be seen. I think there's some great studies to be done uh that quantify that. Um, but I know Ellen, you wanted to really bring bring in the energy question here. Was there something that you wanted to tee up about that?

SPEAKER_03 26:06

Well, yeah, I just know that you know all of these AI data centers are requiring much more, have a much higher energy demand than ever before.

Will Data Centers Accelerate Renewables

SPEAKER_03 26:17

But also to the joy and innovation, I personally think it's also a huge opportunity to accelerate the green transition faster and with more capital than we ever have before. Because we are seeing more renewable energy being generated, but at the same time, we're also seeing reports about increases with the use of like behind the grid oil and gas, like you mentioned with the Elon Musk example. So I'm curious, like, what's your take on that? Do you think that the signal of clean energy demand for these data centers will surpass or outgrow this short-term use of oil and gas?

SPEAKER_02 26:57

Yeah, well, I mean, also let's just take a moment to celebrate that for the first time in human history, solar energy produced more power than I think coal did. Um just pretty freaking cool. Uh so um, so there is a lot of forward momentum here. Ironically, the current uh uh Strait of Hormuz situation is probably going to accelerate things even further. Because from a geopolitical point of view, uh if you're a country that doesn't produce its own oil, and at any moment someone could do something to kind of cut you off of your supply, you might start thinking about how to supply your own power. Um to your question of um, you know, does this added electricity demand help or hurt? It's a mixed answer. But I think like I would start by putting putting us all in the mindset of like, let's say I'm a solar developer. Ultimately, I have a product and I need to have demand for that product. And so one way to have demand for that product is that as utility grids in a world where there's no new energy generation or like no new energy demand, your your business model is kind of just dependent on old sources of energy retiring. So it's like you kind of have to wait until the coal plant is uh through its life cycle or the natural gas plant is through its life cycle. And then those are your moments to bring clean energy online. Um and that's a different kind of tougher financial business to be in, one that can uh attract a lot of capital and a lot of innovation in the clean energy space. For better or worse, um, and I'm not gonna say if it is better or worse, we are in a place where we are using a lot more energy than anybody predicted. Like people thought that EVs were gonna create a lot more of energy demand. That's that's true, that's still happening, but data centers have, you know, really gone really high. But that also puts enough demand in the system for innovation to happen in the clean energy space that otherwise might not have had the business case to do it. And solar, you know, the price per kilowatt hour continues to drop, which is cool. Wind has gone down as well. But in a place, in the two places where you'd be surprised is like the nuclear industry is kind of a renaissance that would not have happened without that added demand for energy. And the battery industry, uh, in a similar vein. Um, the one of my favorite quotes from someone I know is that like in the future, the question isn't going to be what is the best source of energy for the uh it's gonna be what is the best way to charge the battery, what's the cheapest way to charge the battery? And yeah, solar tends to be the cheapest way to charge the battery.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

I think people are needing to rightly move in the direction without there necessarily being a clear um endpoint or even necessarily a clear quantification method for progress, but uh we know we need to go in that direction. With solar outpacing coal at the moment, like you said, that's that's a great hard evidence point. There was a lot of anticipation around EVs driving energy demand. Uh in practice, it has been increasingly around um data and compute. So it does feel like we are still in a very reactive place in terms of cleaning the economy, in terms of um moving uh the needle on sustainable um and renewable energy, among other sustainability issues such as circularity.

Transparency When The Future Is Fuzzy

SPEAKER_01 30:10

How do you get to continue to move um towards a more sustainable future, though, when it's when you don't have the clear evidence yet? So in the face of uncertainty, what do you recommend teams who are trying to continue moving in a more sustainable direction in spite of all these unexpected factors?

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Yeah, I mean, I think waiting and doing nothing is not the right answer, is something I've increasingly found. Is um, you know, there's always going to be a cloud of uncertainty on the future of things. Um, I mean, like as a great example of like how efficient is AI, we we had an initial assumption that it would take all this compute to do it. And then China comes out with Deep Seek. So then there's the uh assumption that you don't need a bunch of compute to do it, but then now we're back to needing a bunch of compute to do it. So like it's amazing how much that fluctuates our understanding of like how many data centers do we need because of all this ambiguous uh this uncertainty. I mean, this is one of the fastest infrastructure build-outs in history. Um, but that is not an excuse to not act. Um, the I think the right thing to do is to bring certainty into the uncertain. And if that means that uh you need to kind of make a judgment call in some places, awesome. But it also can be like reorienting yourself to where you know certainty needs to happen and getting that done so you can continue to just keep making progress. Like a great example of this is um, you know, I personally have been pushing my company for a long time and we finally have started publishing it. How much energy and water does it take to use AI? Like little things like that. Whether who whether that or not the uncertainty of the future pans out in any particular way, that doesn't obviate the need for us to at least do the table stakes of transparency of what it actually means to use this technology. And so the numbers may wiggle over time as the energy gets, hopefully gets things get more energy efficient. But um sitting around and waiting, being like, well, the numbers might change, let's never publish them. I don't think that's the right way to do it. And and like every number is wrong, or like every model is wrong, but some are useful. I think that's the phrase. Like these are these are going to evolve over time. And you know, I even think about when I started uh in started up the devices sustainability team, we do these things called life cycle assessments, which say, like, hey, literally, from from the raw mining of the raw materials all the way to the uh end of life of the computer and all the usage in the middle and distribution of it then. How much energy does that take to do? How much emissions does that create? When we started, we only had 20% primary data. 80% of it was modeled, or I don't want to say guessed, because I think we did a little bit better than guessed, but like we didn't know. We we only had 20% of the data being like we're confident this is, you know, primary data. Um, but we started, we said we're still gonna publish what we know, but we're gonna be transparent along the way of how that methodology evolves and how our data is gonna get better over time, knowing that it might make the numbers change and look worse or better. And now it's flipped. Now it's about 80% of the data is primary, 20% is modeled. Um, it has meant that the reported emissions of some of our devices have gone up because we have gotten better data. But we are transparent about that, and we're also transparent about the things that we are doing that had we not done them, what the emissions would have been. And so, like a great example is for some of our newer surface PCs, um, it's about a 40% reduction in the emissions of what that computer could have looked like had we not taken these sustainability actions of using recycled materials, um, you know, decarbonizing our suppliers and getting them to move to renewable energy, um, shifting how we think about distributing the thing to stores, uh, even those little things like the carbon awareness and energy efficiency features in Windows. Um, that all does add up. Um, and so I think that is kind of part of my answer is you kind of just got to be transparent with what you got and uh understanding that it is wrong and it will be wrong and it will get corrected at some point. But if you wait for perfection, you're never gonna do anything.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, as they say. Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. I love that. And I actually want to bring some of that thinking um into potential leapfrogs and other aspects of the um the credentials of these products and these services, right? So um we sort of touched briefly on circularity uh previously, and and we talked about how fossil fuel um infrastructure is increasingly becoming stranded given the diversification and increased demand for more renewables. Is there uh a way that you or have you seen some of those lessons being learned as we build out new infrastructure for compute, new infrastructure around renewables?

Designing Infrastructure For End Of Life

SPEAKER_01 35:03

How how do you think folks should go about um thinking about the end of life of that infrastructure? And and um, as mentioned, lead fracking some of the the uh the pitfalls we've already experienced in other remote.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

Yeah, we're actually my company is invested in um a company that focuses on how to recycle solar panels. So, you know, there are these really interesting end-of-life considerations for these assets that eventually will happen. Um, but that doesn't mean that we can't start thinking now about what those transitions might look like. And a great example of this is for all these natural gas turbines that are being built. Objectively, those create emissions and methane, and that's probably not good. But uh, you know, you do eventually get to an environment where you can substitute in blue or green hydrogen in place of that natural gas. So you have some of the existing infrastructure, you don't necessarily need to throw it away, but you can figure out how ways to substitute more sustainable feedstock into those things. I'll give two other uh very fun examples is um diesel generators. Nobody likes diesel generators. They're loud, they're smelly, they swab people out. Um, but that is an unfortunate reality for most data centers is you need some form of backup power in case things go out. So then the question is like, okay, well, long term, maybe we don't need them at all. Maybe we just start putting batteries in there and we call that a day. But in the near term, it's like, well, are there more sustainable diesel alternatives that exist? And like, there kind of are. It's really cool. It's um, you know, everyone's heard of biofuels. Biofuels is like grandma's old, you know, uh sustainable fuel. That's like the ethanol stuff. It's the old school ones that are actually worse for the planet than not doing it at all, potentially. Um this new, this new renewable diesel movement is saying, like, what about all the waste feedstock? Like, you know, all this agricultural waste that's otherwise just going to landfill. Can we take that, repurpose that, and turn that into a fuel? Turns out you can. It's called HVO100 in Europe. It's our RD99 or RD100 here in America. So um, one of the really cool things that uh we have here in Minnesota is a giant sustainable aviation fuel production facility. And it's using a lot of that same kind of agricultural waste stock to fly planes. And it's expensive right now, it needs to scale up quite a bit, but that is, you know, maybe a good transition away from thinking that, like, oh, we can't use a plane at all. Like maybe in the future we only have electric planes, although that'll be pretty tough uh pretty tough. But in the meantime, like these transition uh feedstocks for these existing infrastructure, like they do kind of exist in a lot of places. And where they don't, then we probably do need to think about how we responsibly take these things out of production.

SPEAKER_03 37:46

And I feel like all of that work that you guys have been doing, like more sustainable diesel um use, and then also the transparency that you were talking about, I have to believe that that's paid off, like literally, like more customers because you guys have been transparent, because there's so much lack of trust right now in the news with like all of these AI data centers.

Rebuilding Trust With Communities

SPEAKER_03 38:11

So when you admit that, like, look, we're not perfect, but we are trying, here's the transparency. Have you seen that? What are the sort of sustainability stories that you guys are seeing land most with customers?

SPEAKER_02 38:25

Yeah, and I think it's not just a data center question. It's like, you know, I I looked at a couple examples in my book, like Lego is a great example. Lego set a goal of it's like, hey, we're gonna use 100% recycled plastic in our Legos. And then they're like, hey, actually, as we got smarter about this, we learned that that actually is worse for the planet because of the extra emissions to recycle the plastic. So we're gonna figure out something else. Like, I'd like to think that that kind of transparency is rewarded by consumers. Um, but unfortunately, I think it is fair to say that one bad actor in the in an industry can negatively influence all the actors in the industry. And so, like, a great example of this that we hear all the time at Microsoft is people being like, that our that data center is gonna use all of our water. Um, and there are companies out there, data center companies, that do use a lot of water for their data center to cool all the servers. We said that we were gonna move away from water for cooling in our future designs two years ago. And so, like, a lot of times uh when we go into a community and say, like, someone's like, hey, this data center, how much water is it gonna use? It's assumed that we're gonna use a ton, but we are able to say, like, actually, we're not. And the problem is, though, that they don't believe us because of all the other bad actors out there. They're like, Well, of course you're gonna say that, Microsoft, but like, how can we trust you? So I think this is, you know, even thinking at the systemic programmatic level of like, what does the full industry need to do? It needs to be regain the trust that's been lost because of the bad actors like the Elon Musks and the Kevin O'Leary's of the world. And this is why I'm on the iMasons Climate Accord. You know, I'm there. For those that don't know what that is, it's a it's a consortium. I represent Microsoft. I'm alongside Google, I'm alongside Meta, I'm alongside Amazon, I'm alongside folks like Dell, uh Schneider Electric, Digital Realty, like a whole bunch of companies saying, like, we're gonna put aside our differences here. We're gonna like, you know, playfully, you know, make fun of one another on stage, which I love doing with my Google counterpart. Um, but we're like, hey, what can we do to come together to try to like solve this stuff holistically so that we can keep the industry accountable? Um, it's a longer journey, but I've the hope would be that the work that we do pays off and that like the communities understand that we're trying to be better than everyone else. Like another great example is, and I love doing this by the way, because like I get to talk to communities, and it's like we said publicly we are no longer going to do non-disclosure agreements with governments. Sweet. So it's really fun for me to go to like uh, you know, uh like a the head of a pollution control agency or something and be like, hey, so now you know that if any data center company is coming in and says, hey, I need an NDA with you, you can just say, uh, no, thank you.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

I feel like what I have found, at least in my own work, because I also do a lot of community engagement in Pacific Island nations trying to help them sustainably develop their ocean economy. You you just can't work without engaging the community. Totally. And at first it's so disheartening because they are kind of upset and they're like, we've heard this story before, why should we believe you? Totally. Then something happens and it usually takes years, but something turns, and then you find champions who are like, No, I've been working with these people for years, like this actually is good. And it just shown to me that even like through the work that you're doing with the i Masons and your other colleagues, even if we're not seeing those benefits right now, they will benefit in ways that you can't even fathom years from now, just putting in the effort and being honest and trying. So I just want to applaud you for that work, especially working across the industry, I think is very essential. Um, and that definitely makes me optimistic.

Doomscrolling, Hope, And The Close

SPEAKER_03 42:21

But one of the questions that we love to ask all of our guests at the end of the podcast is what makes you optimistic about the future?

SPEAKER_02 42:32

Yeah, you know, what makes me optimistic about the future is something we should always ask ourselves. Because um, did you guys see this recent uh article looking at like falling birth rates around the world? Yes. Um, it's so fascinating for listeners who haven't heard it. Basically, it's like, what is happening that every country in the world, whether it's developed or developing, whether it's Western or Eastern, whether it's who knows what, all have experienced this more or less the same population decline around the same time. What is like the common element to it? The common element is basically when they got smartphones. And the smartphone is a portal right in front of your face that's constantly giving you either dopamine or anger. And so much of the um the algorithms by these uh social media companies in particular are explicitly modeled after slot machines in like Las Vegas. And they're saying, like, what can we do to keep someone here and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling? And unfortunately, like everyone here has Doom scrolled before. That is a strategic thing that these social media companies are betting on to keep you engaged. And so one of the things that I think makes me optimistic on that note is that like people are starting to realize that maybe social media is not very healthy and that there's a lot of joy and uh excitement happening in the world, but you're not getting fed that through your algorithm. You are getting fed the anger, you're getting fed the lack of faith in your fellow. Your fellow countrymen in the in the direction that the world is going. Now, to be clear, the world the direction is going, or the direction the world is going, is not great yet. But I will say that something that's optimistic is that, you know, the most uh concerning forecasts for how much the world might warm have been categorically ruled out. There was a there was uh concerns, like there's a big range of how much the the world might warm uh for anything from nothing if everyone gets to net zero up to like four or five degrees Celsius. Some of these worst um case scenarios have been erased from the modeling. And the reason they've been erased is because we've been able to transition to clean energy so much faster than uh anybody might have expected. And if I look at the market development globally of where things are going, um, you know, clean energy is is accelerating so fast to the point where it probably doesn't need subsidies anymore to continue doing so. EV adoption, and it doesn't feel like it's very fast in America because it's not as fast. But if you look at China, if you look at Norway, almost every single car sold in Norway is an electric vehicle at this point. Um, the long-term transition to these more sustainable technologies is I don't want to say inevitable because a lot of weird stuff can happen, but there's more and more and more um weight behind this being the reality that we end up in.

SPEAKER_03 45:27

Oh, that was really great and added more optimism into my little optimism piggy bank that I have going on. Um, so if people want to learn more about you, if they want the opportunity to read your book, where can they find that information?

SPEAKER_02 45:43

Yeah, it's a great question. So uh you're not gonna believe it, but you can go to www.charleysellers.com and uh which is just my name. And that's where you'll find the book and some talks and uh and your podcasts I've been on. Um it is S-E-L-L-A-R-S. Although if you misspelled my last name, I bought that uh domain as well. So you should be able to get there if you put in charlie sellers.com of any variety. Um, otherwise, uh I'm I'm the weird millennial who doesn't have social media and hasn't for a decade. So maybe that's why I'm optimistic, Ellen, because like I got out of that whole doom scrolling thing a little easier. Um, so you can find me on LinkedIn, but uh, you won't find me on Instagram or uh Facebook or anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Well, I'm so glad that we found you, Charlie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for regrounding us in everything that has been achieved, despite having such a long trajectory, long history of doom and gloom narrative. So imagine what we can do going forward with the likes of you injecting more joy and fun into the sustainability um conversation, into people's careers, into the policy realm. So thank you, Charlie. We really appreciate you.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

Yeah, it's been a blast. Thank you for what you both do for bringing optimism uh in all facets to the world. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

Thank you also to everyone listening. If this conversation sparked something for you, share it, send it to someone who needs a dose of optimism, and let's keep building the circuit together. You can find us on LinkedIn alongside Charlie, uh, on Instagram or at the Optimist Circuit, and please do subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to the Optimist Circuit on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

And let's keep the conversation going. Follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram at the Optimist Circuit for more insights and inspiration. Until next time, stay optimistic, stay curious, and stay inspired.