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I really hate arguments about how much electricity wireless phone charging wastes because it makes people feel like they’re doing something when in fact they ar

I really hate arguments about how much electricity wireless phone charging wastes because it makes people feel like they’re doing something when in fact they aren’t. Charging a cell phone every day for a year consumes about 1-2 kWh per phone. The average American household consumes 10,399 kWh per year, meaning that a typical smart phone consumes one 5000th, (0.02%) of a typical home’s electricity (excl. natural gas) budget. With wireless charging being 60-75% efficient, the literal worst case scenario is that you go from 2kWh to 3kWh. While that’s not nothing, it is damn close to nothing compared to HVAC or commuting, some of which involve burning more fossil fuels above and beyond the 10,399 kWh figure above. And I fear that burning out consumers on changes that will literally save maybe 1lb of CO2 per year (avg. of 0.99lbs per kWh in the US) might exhaust their will to make more meaningful changes that would have a larger impact. Heck, just not upgrading your phone every 2 years would have a bigger impact, since most of a phone’s emissions happen during production. Apple themselves say that each iPhone 12 will produce 70kg (154lb) of CO2 during its lifetime, 83% of that during production and only 14% during use.

droopyEyelids 6y ago
Is it just one person who is charging their phone wirelessly, or does it have the potential to be a large societal trend?
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Assuming everybody were doing it, the percentage of residential power wasted on it would still be miniscule. And residential is only about a third of all power consumption. You may as well try to empty an ocean with a thimble.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  This conversation is already about quantifying the impact of trends. If just one person is doing it, it's not worth talking about.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
I do notice a certain glee we have when we can frame other people wasting energy in ways we don't happen to waste ourselves. As if wireless phone charging or bitcoin mining or X are the last unturned stones in the pursuit of zero waste. Some condescension we can share on HN before we drive to Walmart for a single gallon of milk. It's weird how tempting it is. I had a roommate that used our clothes dryer daily. I have to admit I felt a little bit of ecosuperiority over him as I hung my clothes. Perhaps briefly pondering how much better the world would be if everyone gave up a luxury I personally could do without (while retaining all of my preferred luxuries for myself, of course). It's even funny just to think of all the apparatuses involved in me leaving this snooty comment on the internet, a pleasure you'll have to pry from my corpse!
- MengerSponge 6y ago
  Lol at your false dichotomy with bitcoin. Bitcoin mining uses a mind-boggling amount of power, and we don't get anything useful for all those emissions. I agree that we're quick to look at other people's small wastes with condescension, but bitcoin is not a small waste.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Yup. Also, the shape of the growth curve matters. It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design. If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      > It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design. Incorrect, growth curve is driven by mining power and forces innovation in lower cost of electricity. The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.
californical 6y ago
2-3kWh seemed impossibly low to me, so I checked, and yup, that’s amazing. A phone battery at 5V and 2500mAh (probably about the average) is approximately 12.5Wh of energy storage. Even if you used the entire battery every day, we’re talking 4kW per year, costing ~60¢ in the US. Your phone battery could only power a standard 60W incandescent lightbulb for 12 minutes, but powers your phone for hours. That’s amazing!
- dheera 6y ago
  > standard 60W incandescent lightbulb Which is why nobody uses incandescent bulbs anymore. You can get the same amount of light for 1/5 of that power with LEDs, i.e. your phone could power that amount of light for an hour.
  - et2o 6y ago
    Still doesn’t seem like very long!
  - cable2600 6y ago
    No more EZBake ovens or Toy popcorn makers that use inky bulbs.
    - hyperdimension 6y ago
      >EZBake ovens Yeah, 'kids these days' just get nichrome wire instead of a good old light bulb. :) There was an article I read a while back (can't find it at the moment) that involved someone modifying a 'modern' EZ-Bake oven to be powered off a USB-C PD charger. The future we live in!
      - Naracion 6y ago
        It's from Reclaimer Labs: https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake-oven https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake...
  - theandrewbailey 6y ago
allenu 6y ago
Thanks for doing the math. I always found it funny that Apple was advertising how they were doing such a great service to the environment by not packing in a charger. If they really cared about the environment, they'd avoid updating their product every year and encourage users to keep using the same device for longer, but of course they would never do that.
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  You can encourage users to use the same device for longer and also make a new phone every year to advance technology and to serve new entrants to the market. I mean, look at iOS 14 -- it supports phones that are five years old. There is no prompting to upgrade to a new device. There is advertising on billboards and on TV, but not on the phone itself.
- megablast 6y ago
  This is just silly. And what you say is the opposite. If I need a new phone now, you think I should buy a year or 2 year old phone? That will not last as long.
- ksec 6y ago
  The Median upgrade Cycle for iPhone user are closing in to 3 years, with the whole industry trending to 4. And when you consider most of the used iPhone are being passed on to another user ( Family Members ) Generally Speaking iPhone as a product and ecosystem is doing pretty damn well. What Apple needs however is to make swapping Battery cheaper, and invest in battery technology that makes them last longer in cycles. Right now the battery replacement is $ 69 for iPhone 12. While the iPhone 8 and below are much more reasonable $49.
diebeforei485 6y ago
Do we have a % efficiency figure for MagSafe specififally? How does it compare vs wireless charging in general?
- ksec 6y ago
  It is just inductive charging. So nothing special.
- gizmo 6y ago
  It's marginally better because of the magnets that align the charger and the phone precisely.
dheera 6y ago
IMO the single biggest environmentally-unfriendly move Apple made is not allowing user serviceability. Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. But they want you to spend $$$ on new stuff, so they make it hard for you to fix. And on laptops, soldered SSDs, soldered RAM, non-swappable batteries. You HAVE to buy a new PC even if you just want a little more hard disk space.
- leptons 6y ago
  >Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. And add to that every other manufacturer that thinks they have to copy what Apple does (looking at you Samsung), and also removes ability to swap batteries and other things we used to be able to do every easily.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    I know people have ragged on non-removable batteries for a decade now--and I'm not saying there shouldn't be any phones with that option--but it was terrible in practice. I've tried juggling batteries and it was super annoying. Sure, on a plane you could swap your dead battery for a new one (after turning off your phone). At the end of the day you have two dead batteries and have to charge one, then swap. Most phones didn't have a way to charge a battery separate from the phone for some annoying reason. And the tab on the plastic door often broke off. Most people never had more than one battery and there was a lot of wasted space to make that removable door and compartment. Making all of that water resistance, like newer phones are, would be a lot more difficult. When phones (and laptops) got rid of swappable batteries you could still take off two screws, maybe remove a small amount of adhesive (putty or tape) and unhook the connector to swap it with a fresh one. It's about as user-swappable as RAM is on most workstations.
    - nicbou 6y ago
      The goal is not to swap them out during the day (that's why we have power banks I'd say), but to replace a battery when it can't hold a charge. Think of it like buying shoelaces for old boots, instead of replacing them. My phone is fine, but the battery is slowly becoming too weak for my needs. I don't want a new phone, just a new battery.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
stop supporting new devices. Do we really need them?
- uxenthusiast 6y ago
  There, yes, please.
- dagurp 6y ago
  Kind of, smartphones are not designed to last.
  - inbx0 6y ago
    Idk, my average has been about 5-6 years. Could keep even longer but at that point the battery lifetime starts to be a problem and needs to be changed, which can be so expensive that it's not worth it.
leetcrew 6y ago
the wasted energy doesn't itself matter. where it goes kinda does though. most of the waste is delivered as excess heat in the phone chassis at the worst possible time. subjecting a non-user-replaceable lipo battery to unnecessary heat while charging is antithetical to the goal of keeping a phone for a long time.
croddin 6y ago
I think there is a good chance MagSafe chargers will last significantly longer. Lightning cables seem to eventually get damaged on the connector or with the cable bending if it is being used while charging. If wireless MagSafe uses more electricity it will be worth it if offsets enough need to replace broken cables and the energy used in producing those.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  A single wireless charger requires multiple times more resources than a single cable. A fairer comparison would be against, say, ten cables.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Because of a certain someone I lost more than 10 cables.
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  They get damaged by design. The weakness is there on purpose.
  - llampx 6y ago
    Don't know why you are getting downvoted. Apple cables have a particular way of fraying, one that most other electronics cables don't suffer from.
    - PeterStuer 6y ago
      And every cable engineer knows the solution, a cable-end guard that distributes the sheering force gradually over the final stretch of the cable. It's not just Apple that is turning something that would be durable into a consumable for profit. At work for decades Dell notebook power-supplies would fail in the exact same manner, cable fraying at the hard edge with the connector plug. It was such a predictable issue Dell at one point even offered a power supply renewal option together with their battery replacement subscription.
acqq 6y ago
> With wireless charging being 60-75% efficient, the literal worst case scenario is that you go from 2kWh to 3kWh. Maybe the difference isn’t so low as you estimate it? Maybe the wired chargers use much less power when the phone is not being charged, compared to the wireless chargers? Then the difference could be approximately 0 (as your phone is charged only a few hours per day) to approximately N kWh (due to a constant power draw — nobody will buy a wireless charger to keep it unplugged). Otherwise, I agree that not upgrading the phone saves even more.
- SifJar 6y ago
  In principle, wireless chargers can have very low power use when idle; I've seen figures quoted as 0.1mW i.e. over the course of a year 0.876Wh (so ~0.0009 kWh). Of course, this will likely vary based on the specific charger in use. I don't think this is substantially different to the idle draw of a wired charger.
  - acqq 6y ago
    The practice is often very different from the principle. I’ve had a set top box that in the “off” state used 29 watts, 24 hours per day. In the “on” state it used 30 watts. In principle, it didn’t have to be so but it was.
funnybeam 6y ago
Just because the waste is small doesn’t mean it is insignificant when you consider how many phones there are. A quick search indicates there are 3.5 billion smart phones in the world, assuming these are all wirelessly charged and wasting 1kWh per year that gets you 3.5TWh which is more than the annual consumption of many countries I had a similar discussion with a friend recently about all the cars driving around with lights on in the middle of the day - even if they might be using LEDs, when you multiply by the number of cars on the roads that is still a lot of petrol being wasted for no reason at all
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  Those lights are on for a reason. They're called Daytime Running Lights, and are mandated by law in most countries because they reduce accident rates by as much as 20% for a negligible cost. If you think running some LEDs are expensive, you don't want to know what a serious accident costs society. The type that totals two cars and puts multiple people in hospital. I have a car that pre-dates DRLs, and I always drive it with the lights on. The "horrendously" inefficient incandescent bulbs might cost me an extra dollar or two in fuel, but could save my life. I'd rather have my life.
  - funnybeam 6y ago
    Thanks for educating me - I was unaware of that and have changed my opinion. For anyone else thinking like I was, this is the evidence from the UK government site [1]: Research has shown that DRLs are likely to reduce multiple vehicle daytime accidents and fatalities by up to 6% once all vehicles are equipped. DRL are likely to result in a small increase in fuel consumption and CO² emissions of around 0.5% but this is expected to be lower when LEDs are used in place of filament light sources. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/daytime-running-lights/daytime-running-lights https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/daytime-running-l... Doesn't apply to wireless phone charging though, so I'm standing by that comment until someone disabuses me of that too..
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > which is more than the annual consumption of many countries Yes, countries like Liechtenstein, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Even a generous upper bound estimate like 3.5TWh is vanishingly small in the face of our ~21PWh annual global energy consumption. [0] The point is: by focusing on wireless charging, we'd be investing effort in ineffective endeavors while there's far more low hanging fruit we could pick. And people's willingness to put in effort for the environment is a finite resource as well. So we should be smart about spending it. For example: instead of worrying about daytime lights, how about cycling instead of driving, even just once in a while, whenever the weather is nice and you're feeling like it? That's sure to have a greater impact on the environment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
tasogare 6y ago
Yep, most of what is said by "green" partisans is total bullshit because they don’t take into account the magnitude of things: they put emphasis on some kind of moral instead of backing claims with science. This is how you get people advocating changing a nuclear power plant with a bunch of wind turbines. And honestly I’m tired to be asked to change lot of little things in my life when all of them cumulated won’t even account for the pollution generated by a random factory in a day.
CrazyStat 6y ago
I drive an electric car. I was giving a friend a ride one day and offered him a USB port to charge his phone, since he was low on battery, but he was reluctant because he didn't want to waste my car's battery. We did some quick mental math and figured that charging his phone from empty to full would take about as much energy as driving the car a few inches. He plugged the phone in.

droopyEyelids 6y ago

Is it just one person who is charging their phone wirelessly, or does it have the potential to be a large societal trend?

bigbubba 6y ago
Assuming everybody were doing it, the percentage of residential power wasted on it would still be miniscule. And residential is only about a third of all power consumption. You may as well try to empty an ocean with a thimble.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
This conversation is already about quantifying the impact of trends. If just one person is doing it, it's not worth talking about.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

I do notice a certain glee we have when we can frame other people wasting energy in ways we don't happen to waste ourselves. As if wireless phone charging or bitcoin mining or X are the last unturned stones in the pursuit of zero waste. Some condescension we can share on HN before we drive to Walmart for a single gallon of milk. It's weird how tempting it is. I had a roommate that used our clothes dryer daily. I have to admit I felt a little bit of ecosuperiority over him as I hung my clothes. Perhaps briefly pondering how much better the world would be if everyone gave up a luxury I personally could do without (while retaining all of my preferred luxuries for myself, of course). It's even funny just to think of all the apparatuses involved in me leaving this snooty comment on the internet, a pleasure you'll have to pry from my corpse!

MengerSponge 6y ago
Lol at your false dichotomy with bitcoin. Bitcoin mining uses a mind-boggling amount of power, and we don't get anything useful for all those emissions. I agree that we're quick to look at other people's small wastes with condescension, but bitcoin is not a small waste.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Yup. Also, the shape of the growth curve matters. It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design. If an evil overlord wanted to exacerbate our climate and energy problems, pushing Bitcoin to mainstream use is probably the ideal way to do it.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    > It's superlinear with the number of participants, and even with no new participants, the amount of waste grows over time by design. Incorrect, growth curve is driven by mining power and forces innovation in lower cost of electricity. The worldwide cost of Bitcoin usage in KW has been compared to the headquarters of Bank of America's usage.

californical 6y ago

2-3kWh seemed impossibly low to me, so I checked, and yup, that’s amazing. A phone battery at 5V and 2500mAh (probably about the average) is approximately 12.5Wh of energy storage. Even if you used the entire battery every day, we’re talking 4kW per year, costing ~60¢ in the US. Your phone battery could only power a standard 60W incandescent lightbulb for 12 minutes, but powers your phone for hours. That’s amazing!

dheera 6y ago
> standard 60W incandescent lightbulb Which is why nobody uses incandescent bulbs anymore. You can get the same amount of light for 1/5 of that power with LEDs, i.e. your phone could power that amount of light for an hour.
- et2o 6y ago
  Still doesn’t seem like very long!
- cable2600 6y ago
  No more EZBake ovens or Toy popcorn makers that use inky bulbs.
  - hyperdimension 6y ago
    >EZBake ovens Yeah, 'kids these days' just get nichrome wire instead of a good old light bulb. :) There was an article I read a while back (can't find it at the moment) that involved someone modifying a 'modern' EZ-Bake oven to be powered off a USB-C PD charger. The future we live in!
    - Naracion 6y ago
      It's from Reclaimer Labs: https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake-oven https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake...
- theandrewbailey 6y ago

allenu 6y ago

Thanks for doing the math. I always found it funny that Apple was advertising how they were doing such a great service to the environment by not packing in a charger. If they really cared about the environment, they'd avoid updating their product every year and encourage users to keep using the same device for longer, but of course they would never do that.

diebeforei485 6y ago
You can encourage users to use the same device for longer and also make a new phone every year to advance technology and to serve new entrants to the market. I mean, look at iOS 14 -- it supports phones that are five years old. There is no prompting to upgrade to a new device. There is advertising on billboards and on TV, but not on the phone itself.
megablast 6y ago
This is just silly. And what you say is the opposite. If I need a new phone now, you think I should buy a year or 2 year old phone? That will not last as long.
ksec 6y ago
The Median upgrade Cycle for iPhone user are closing in to 3 years, with the whole industry trending to 4. And when you consider most of the used iPhone are being passed on to another user ( Family Members ) Generally Speaking iPhone as a product and ecosystem is doing pretty damn well. What Apple needs however is to make swapping Battery cheaper, and invest in battery technology that makes them last longer in cycles. Right now the battery replacement is $ 69 for iPhone 12. While the iPhone 8 and below are much more reasonable $49.

diebeforei485 6y ago

Do we have a % efficiency figure for MagSafe specififally? How does it compare vs wireless charging in general?

ksec 6y ago
It is just inductive charging. So nothing special.
gizmo 6y ago
It's marginally better because of the magnets that align the charger and the phone precisely.

dheera 6y ago

IMO the single biggest environmentally-unfriendly move Apple made is not allowing user serviceability. Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. But they want you to spend $$$ on new stuff, so they make it hard for you to fix. And on laptops, soldered SSDs, soldered RAM, non-swappable batteries. You HAVE to buy a new PC even if you just want a little more hard disk space.

leptons 6y ago
>Even a simple ability to swap your phone's battery for a new one would reduce a lot of emissions. And add to that every other manufacturer that thinks they have to copy what Apple does (looking at you Samsung), and also removes ability to swap batteries and other things we used to be able to do every easily.
- pfranz 6y ago
  I know people have ragged on non-removable batteries for a decade now--and I'm not saying there shouldn't be any phones with that option--but it was terrible in practice. I've tried juggling batteries and it was super annoying. Sure, on a plane you could swap your dead battery for a new one (after turning off your phone). At the end of the day you have two dead batteries and have to charge one, then swap. Most phones didn't have a way to charge a battery separate from the phone for some annoying reason. And the tab on the plastic door often broke off. Most people never had more than one battery and there was a lot of wasted space to make that removable door and compartment. Making all of that water resistance, like newer phones are, would be a lot more difficult. When phones (and laptops) got rid of swappable batteries you could still take off two screws, maybe remove a small amount of adhesive (putty or tape) and unhook the connector to swap it with a fresh one. It's about as user-swappable as RAM is on most workstations.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    The goal is not to swap them out during the day (that's why we have power banks I'd say), but to replace a battery when it can't hold a charge. Think of it like buying shoelaces for old boots, instead of replacing them. My phone is fine, but the battery is slowly becoming too weak for my needs. I don't want a new phone, just a new battery.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

stop supporting new devices. Do we really need them?

uxenthusiast 6y ago
There, yes, please.
dagurp 6y ago
Kind of, smartphones are not designed to last.
- inbx0 6y ago
  Idk, my average has been about 5-6 years. Could keep even longer but at that point the battery lifetime starts to be a problem and needs to be changed, which can be so expensive that it's not worth it.

leetcrew 6y ago

the wasted energy doesn't itself matter. where it goes kinda does though. most of the waste is delivered as excess heat in the phone chassis at the worst possible time. subjecting a non-user-replaceable lipo battery to unnecessary heat while charging is antithetical to the goal of keeping a phone for a long time.

croddin 6y ago

I think there is a good chance MagSafe chargers will last significantly longer. Lightning cables seem to eventually get damaged on the connector or with the cable bending if it is being used while charging. If wireless MagSafe uses more electricity it will be worth it if offsets enough need to replace broken cables and the energy used in producing those.

sudosysgen 6y ago
A single wireless charger requires multiple times more resources than a single cable. A fairer comparison would be against, say, ten cables.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Because of a certain someone I lost more than 10 cables.
PeterStuer 6y ago
They get damaged by design. The weakness is there on purpose.
- llampx 6y ago
  Don't know why you are getting downvoted. Apple cables have a particular way of fraying, one that most other electronics cables don't suffer from.
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    And every cable engineer knows the solution, a cable-end guard that distributes the sheering force gradually over the final stretch of the cable. It's not just Apple that is turning something that would be durable into a consumable for profit. At work for decades Dell notebook power-supplies would fail in the exact same manner, cable fraying at the hard edge with the connector plug. It was such a predictable issue Dell at one point even offered a power supply renewal option together with their battery replacement subscription.

acqq 6y ago

> With wireless charging being 60-75% efficient, the literal worst case scenario is that you go from 2kWh to 3kWh. Maybe the difference isn’t so low as you estimate it? Maybe the wired chargers use much less power when the phone is not being charged, compared to the wireless chargers? Then the difference could be approximately 0 (as your phone is charged only a few hours per day) to approximately N kWh (due to a constant power draw — nobody will buy a wireless charger to keep it unplugged). Otherwise, I agree that not upgrading the phone saves even more.

SifJar 6y ago
In principle, wireless chargers can have very low power use when idle; I've seen figures quoted as 0.1mW i.e. over the course of a year 0.876Wh (so ~0.0009 kWh). Of course, this will likely vary based on the specific charger in use. I don't think this is substantially different to the idle draw of a wired charger.
- acqq 6y ago
  The practice is often very different from the principle. I’ve had a set top box that in the “off” state used 29 watts, 24 hours per day. In the “on” state it used 30 watts. In principle, it didn’t have to be so but it was.

funnybeam 6y ago

Just because the waste is small doesn’t mean it is insignificant when you consider how many phones there are. A quick search indicates there are 3.5 billion smart phones in the world, assuming these are all wirelessly charged and wasting 1kWh per year that gets you 3.5TWh which is more than the annual consumption of many countries I had a similar discussion with a friend recently about all the cars driving around with lights on in the middle of the day - even if they might be using LEDs, when you multiply by the number of cars on the roads that is still a lot of petrol being wasted for no reason at all

jiggawatts 6y ago
Those lights are on for a reason. They're called Daytime Running Lights, and are mandated by law in most countries because they reduce accident rates by as much as 20% for a negligible cost. If you think running some LEDs are expensive, you don't want to know what a serious accident costs society. The type that totals two cars and puts multiple people in hospital. I have a car that pre-dates DRLs, and I always drive it with the lights on. The "horrendously" inefficient incandescent bulbs might cost me an extra dollar or two in fuel, but could save my life. I'd rather have my life.
- funnybeam 6y ago
  Thanks for educating me - I was unaware of that and have changed my opinion. For anyone else thinking like I was, this is the evidence from the UK government site [1]: Research has shown that DRLs are likely to reduce multiple vehicle daytime accidents and fatalities by up to 6% once all vehicles are equipped. DRL are likely to result in a small increase in fuel consumption and CO² emissions of around 0.5% but this is expected to be lower when LEDs are used in place of filament light sources. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/daytime-running-lights/daytime-running-lights https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/daytime-running-l... Doesn't apply to wireless phone charging though, so I'm standing by that comment until someone disabuses me of that too..
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> which is more than the annual consumption of many countries Yes, countries like Liechtenstein, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Even a generous upper bound estimate like 3.5TWh is vanishingly small in the face of our ~21PWh annual global energy consumption. [0] The point is: by focusing on wireless charging, we'd be investing effort in ineffective endeavors while there's far more low hanging fruit we could pick. And people's willingness to put in effort for the environment is a finite resource as well. So we should be smart about spending it. For example: instead of worrying about daytime lights, how about cycling instead of driving, even just once in a while, whenever the weather is nice and you're feeling like it? That's sure to have a greater impact on the environment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

tasogare 6y ago

Yep, most of what is said by "green" partisans is total bullshit because they don’t take into account the magnitude of things: they put emphasis on some kind of moral instead of backing claims with science. This is how you get people advocating changing a nuclear power plant with a bunch of wind turbines. And honestly I’m tired to be asked to change lot of little things in my life when all of them cumulated won’t even account for the pollution generated by a random factory in a day.

CrazyStat 6y ago

I drive an electric car. I was giving a friend a ride one day and offered him a USB port to charge his phone, since he was low on battery, but he was reluctant because he didn't want to waste my car's battery. We did some quick mental math and figured that charging his phone from empty to full would take about as much energy as driving the car a few inches. He plugged the phone in.