In this article, we will be introducing ZeroTwentyFifty’s approach to Open Source. The conversation will revolve around why ZeroTwentyFifty has chosen to build an Open Source solution to the PACT Pathfinder Data Exchange Protocol. This software, eponymously named ZeroTwentyFifty, allows for organisations to provision and deploy an out of the box solution to PACT Conformance. This development is supported by another ZeroTwentyFifty solution via the pathfinder_framework python library, which models the Pathfinder Framework Version 2, and enables organisations access to a drop-in library that can be used to interact with the core building blocks of the Pathfinder Framework.
For more information on the PACT Pathfinder ecosystem, you can see this blog post: https://www.zerotwentyfifty.com/blog/navigating-the-future-of-carbon-transparency-an-introduction-to-the-pact-pathfinder-ecosystem
The rest of this article will be dedicated to detailing our motivations, reasoning and providing some commentary for our thoughts. By the end of this article, ZeroTwentyFifty hopes to have provided the reader with solid arguments for why the future of emissions data exchange, and Carbon Transparency, will be heavily led by open source software.
Fundamentally, the reason ZeroTwentyFifty have developed open source solutions is because as an organisation it is part of our values to provide zero-cost solutions to address the most pressing issues of Climate Change and Carbon Transparency.
ZeroTwentyFifty wholeheartedly believes that given the state of the climate crisis, double-spending valuable resources on the development of common software functionality is an activity that should be reduced to a minimum. I could wrap this article up right here, and I’d sleep just fine at night. However, I’m not sure that would do anyone any good, so let’s dig into why we believe it’s the “right” thing to do.
The Scale of the Carbon Transparency/Decarbonisation problem:
Under the hood of the collective problems that processes like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Product Carbon Footprinting (PCF) seek to solve, exists the overarching strategy of decarbonisation. As a global community, we can measure and analyse the facts and figures of our product processes and how we use products and services at a life cycle level in minute detail, but the rubber ultimately hits the road when we start trying to actually reduce and remove those emissions.
The scale of the decarbonisation problem cannot be understated, in fact, that’s why we’ve used a Vaclav Smil quote on our landing page, it’s also why we believe it bares repeating here:
By the time the Manhattan Project ended in 1946, it had cost the country nearly US $2 billion, about $33 billion in today’s money, the total equal to only about 0.3 percent of the 1943–45 gross domestic product. When Project Apollo ended in 1972, it had cost about $26 billion, or $207 billion in today’s money; over 12 years it worked out annually to about 0.2 percent of the country’s 1961–72 GDP.
Of course, nobody can provide a reliable account of the eventual cost of global energy transition because we do not know the ultimate composition of the new primary energy supply. Nor do we know what shares will come from converting natural renewable flows, whether we will use them to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels, and the extent to which we will rely on nuclear fission (and, as some hope, on fusion) or on other, still unknown options.
But a recent attempt to estimate such costs confirms the magnitude of the category mistake. The McKinsey Global Institute, in a highly conservative estimate, puts the cost at $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050.
That is roughly $9.2 trillion a year, compared with the 2021 global economic product of $94 trillion. Such numbers imply an annual expenditure of about 10 percent of today’s world economic product.
At the heart of the decarbonisation problem is a vast ecosystem and complex web of varying supply chain actors, all with different sizes, interests and maturity levels. For evidence of this, perhaps we should consider and consult the most recent Legislation changes via CBAM, a piece of legislation introduced as a direct response to Carbon Leakage.
Carbon Leakage is the name given to the observed phenomena of countries legislating a price on carbon and that change resulting in the migration of emissions intense activities to countries with less stringent requirements on emissions reporting.
This is just one example of how the changes of one continent or country can have impacts that result in shifts to another locale, this is ultimately also the core of the scope 3 issue, where over 75% of an economic sectors emissions are the result of Scope 3 emissions.
Reducing barriers to entry to Product Carbon Footprint exchange:
Providing a development-cost-free, and out of the box solution that enables organisations to join the Pathfinder Network, and by proxy, exchange primary data via Product Carbon Footprints, we incentivise organisations to willingly participate in furthering Carbon Transparency and climate action within their immediate supply chains.
ZeroTwentyFifty believe that reducing technical barriers to entry will enable support for rapid ecosystem growth, meaning that regardless of market conditions or whether organisations have immediate access to a more comprehensive Carbon Accounting solution, organisations will be able to go out and procure an LCA or PCF from environmental consultants, and have those results correctly formatted and immediately exchanged with their other supply chain partners.
ZeroTwentyFifty believes that in any innovative and upcoming technology network, this is a fundamental stage of transition from early to middle stage growth, as it limits the ability for organisations to reject participation and hinder overall progress on wider spread ecosystem level Carbon Transparency.
Enabling organisations to focus on delivering impact
Keeping the scale and importance of the problem in mind, it starts to make less sense for organisations to spend precious development time on maintaining an open data exchange protocol when it can be avoided.
An organisation will typically have a reason to exist, a specific value proposition, or a core business to support. This core goal, except in rare circumstances, would not generally include writing protocol code. It would however, most likely include reducing the emissions of their or their clients products, delivering climate impact or generally improving measures of carbon transparency.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, the scope of the problem is once again, absolutely massive, there are a range of complicated problems to solve, to have organisations constantly reproducing the same work should be heavily discouraged, because that is time spent away from the very important goal of actually using the data being exchanged, to lower total emissions of products.
The Internet of Emissions Data
“The Internet of Emissions Data” is a concept introduced by a number of organisations (including us) when describing the PACT ecosystem, so it should come as no surprise that we are here to advance that vision.
When you consider the Pathfinder Network as the start of this “Internet of Emissions Data”, you become very attuned to the fact that nobody maintains their own IP protocol stack, if someone in your organisation suggested managing the internet stack yourself, you would start to wonder if they were drinking on the job.
As the development and progress of the internet proceeded, organisations started to rely on default and reference implementations of the various internet protocols, allowing them to become relied upon as a given, not as something that needed to have development resources dedicated to the support and maintenance of.
It’s important that as we develop important emissions data standards, we also commoditise and democratise solutions that deliver the functionality promised by the standard, so that solution providers that follow have a stable base on which to deliver further innovations and progress the vision of the Internet of Emissions Data.
One development team
By coalescing around open source implementations, it allows the community to gather resources and contribute to a number of rapidly improving solutions, with the contribution of small amounts of development time, from numerous sources, organisations could utilise shared implementations, which now not only leverage the collaborative power of the open standard, but also the collaborative power of open source technologies and communities, allowing for even more innovative solution building and contribution back to the standard.
We could have the benefits of a multi-person development team, where everyone is paying a fraction of the development costs whilst gaining the experience and insights of multiple teams in order to create a more consistent and reliable implementation.
Now this is obviously an interesting spot for those involved in standards development, who will clearly need their own implementation to test, but as a community, we could probably benefit from taking some learnings from the Bitcoin Core community, which has developed around an open core and made that software some of the most reliable in the world, allowing organisations around the world to trust that it does exactly what it should do, with minimal (historically, zero downtime).
Core Building Blocks for Developers, Developers, Developers
In the words of Steve Balmer:
“Developers, Developers, Developers”
In conjunction with our development of ZeroTwentyFifty, we have also developed pathfinder_framework, a library that models the basic building blocks of the Pathfinder Framework.
With this contribution, we support additional development using these building blocks. Think of what could occur in the Scope 3 and Product Carbon Footprinting space with a common library, think of the applications that could be developed, the innovative Carbon Transparency that could be delivered.
ZeroTwentyFifty enables developers, scientists, engineers and solution providers who ordinarily might not have access to, or an interest in these technologies, to start engaging with the core building blocks of the new Internet of Emissions Data, providing all community participants with the access and benefits of innovation that previously wouldn’t have been possible.
ZeroTwentyFifty as a reference implementation
When ZeroTwentyFifty started its investigation into the Pathfinder ecosystem, we took the time to inspect the currently available solutions but ultimately, we didn’t see what we wanted to exist. What we wished for, was an up to date, well tested, production ready solution that was PACT Conformant and that would enable and integrally support the ease and flexibility of Carbon Transparency.
We are extremely proud to be able to say that that solution now exists.
This is not to say that there are no other open source implementations that exist in the space, our friends over at SINE Foundation have built the demo-endpoint implementation (ZeroTwentyFifty are also members of SINE foundation) which is used a test bed for new developments. This is an extremely important development activity that should always exist due to their role as the technical partner of PACT, but even that implementation clearly states that it doesn’t currently wish to be a reference implementation, and therein lies the difference between the demo-endpoint code base and our solution.
ZeroTwentyFifty does wish to be the reference implementation.
Velocity and Network Effects
We have a need for speed, we want the network to move at breakneck pace, allowing it to start to exchange the amount of data that is necessary for organisations to be able to reliably participate and start to expand their development teams and encourage further investment.
The faster we create a network effect within our ecosystem, the stronger the landscape becomes, the more equitably it serves all participants and the better we as an ecosystem can move from questions of how we exchange the data, to what we do with the data and how we best utilise it to deliver real climate impact.
Good Corporate Citizenship
With the current trend towards organisations becoming B-Corp certified, along with increasing pressure and eyes on measures of ESG, it’s important to be the change you wish to see.
ZeroTwentyFifty cannot provide this good corporate citizenship by more expensive means available to larger organisations, we can’t fund large scale DAC projects like Salesforce, and we definitely can’t install and test Small Modular Reactors like Microsoft, and why would we want to develop the existing when our ethos revolves around developing for technological gaps that bolt-on and cohabit alongside currently existing developments.
We facilitate good quality corporate citizenship by making sure our development efforts are open whenever we can, and we actively work everyday to spread the ability for organisations to exchange and access primary product carbon footprint data at scale.
Developing Trust
ZeroTwentyFifty believe that by developing our Carbon Transparency solutions openly, with high levels of reliability, quality and a constantly developing expertise, we provide potential and future clients and users of our software with the assurance that are we experts in product carbon footprint exchange solutions, and that we can solve your most pressing issues of Carbon Transparency.
We appreciate your time in reading this article, and would encourage you to share it with your circles, even something as simple as “starring” our repositories on Github would help us immensely.
If you’ve resonated with this article, I’d really appreciate you sharing this article on whatever platforms you use. Alternatively, you can follow ZeroTwentyFifty or add me on Linkedin. I release all writing on our free newsletter. You can also book a 30 minute no-obligation call with me.
