Microsoft Director of Sustainability Charlie Sellars talks 'climate optimism' at Duke
Charlie Sellars, director of sustainability for the Cloud Operations and Innovations team at Microsoft, talked technology and the environment at an Oct. 8 event titled “The Case for Climate Optimism” hosted by the Fuqua School of Business.
Sellars — who was introduced by Katie Kross, managing director of the Center for Energy, Development and the Global Environment at Fuqua — discussed a wide variety of topics related to climate optimism, a central idea in his recently published book “What We Can Do: A Climate Optimist’s Guide to Sustainable Living.”
Despite having no formal training in sustainability, Sellars has led the development of products such as a computer mouse made with recycled ocean plastic and the integration of recycled parts into new Windows PCs.
For Sellars, climate optimism is a shift in people’s perception of climate change that emphasizes individual lifestyle change and impact over “climate doomism.” He measures the success of his book at least in part by “how many people actually engage with what’s in there and then feel empowered to make a change in their lives as a result.”
Sellars then shared that Microsoft’s Life Cycle Assessments revealed that “75% of the lifetime emissions of an average computer come from just making it in the first place,” adding that Microsoft has taken steps over the years to significantly improve the repairability scores of its computers.
Microsoft recently announced its plans to finance a “green steel” manufacturing facility in Sweden as part of its sustainability pivot. Despite being a tech corporation, the largest contributor to Microsoft’s emissions is capital goods, which Sellars defined as “anything we have a capital expenditure against,” such as buildings, servers and associated equipment. Being “a technology company making steel” renewably is one way for Microsoft to work towards lowering these emissions, he said.
Sellars also recognized the potential for sustainability in other industries, citing his book as an example. He described how he improved the recyclability and environmental impact of his book by using sewn thread binding and reducing page margins to use less pages. Sellars did, however, draw the line at “hard to read” sustainable fonts, choosing not to “pursue pure sustainability at the expense of making a good product.”
After his own experience publishing his book, Sellars concluded that the fast-moving and nascent nature of the sustainability movement meant many industries hadn’t thought about incorporating sustainable practices into their business model.
“Oftentimes, sustainability is not happening because nobody has asked about it yet,” he said.
Sellars emphasized that one does not need to have the word “sustainability” in a job title to begin thinking about these problems. Referencing sustainability employees’ efforts at Microsoft, “upwards of 80% do not have sustainability in their titles at all,” he said.
A popular question in the technology and sustainability space recently has been the question of how much energy new artificial intelligence technologies and data centers use. For Sellars, this is a hard question to answer.
“Do I include the building material embodied carbon in the cost of using AI? How do you amortize a building against using a technology?” Sellars asked, pointing to the subjectivity inherent in such measurements.
But he concluded the talk by reminding the audience about the fact that climate optimism does not require a formal education in sustainability, but rather a willingness to layer sustainable practices into your current work — a fact evidenced by his own career trajectory.