7 ms·

Ditch high definition and new tech to fight climate change

25 points by vinni2 6y ago

dindresto 6y ago
As a more useful measurement, I'd like to see a comparison of the carbon emission of watching a 4K movie at home vs driving with a non-electric car to the next cinema to watch it.
atrainedmonkey 6y ago
> “To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year – but every bit of CO2 saving is significant.“ Is it worth losing people over such a small gain? This is a 5% saving on a likely negligible cost anyway... This study wasn’t just a waste of time, it’s actually detrimental to an already hard battle convincing people they can have an impact.
- ppf 6y ago
  I'm not sure how they define "digital tech emissions", but the embodied energy of a newly manufactured laptop (approx. 1500 kWh, or one barrel of oil) will get you nearly 2,500 passenger jet miles (assuming 58 miles per gallon per revenue passenger). One of the most effective ways to cut your CO2 emissions (and practially every other form of unsustainable environmental damage) is to stop buying new electronics.
Grumbledour 6y ago
Personally, I always find these kind of stories a bit nitpicky and silly. They are right at their core though and it would be good to question, if we need high definition screens and streams all the time everywhere. It's not only the environment, it is also often detrimental to the device and user themselves. Look at e-readers to see what kind of devices we good have for special purposes if not every consumer computer needed to be a media powerhouse. And then we need to go further and ask ourselves, how would it benefit the environment if we had stricter rules for unnecessary data transfers in general. Because I would think, cutting down on adware and excessive file sizes on the top 10% websites would give us significant savings on bandwidth, emissions and lets be honest, improve UX quite a bit for most people, especially on slower devices/connections. And of course, the article points out, that while these things are important and can help, the are dwarfed by other factors that really need to be tackled. No reason to ignore the smaller stuff, though.
- dannyw 6y ago
  We have a certain amount of time and interest in the day; I’d rather spend time figuring out how to reduce the biggest polluters than rounding errors.
  - Grumbledour 6y ago
    So, how do you do it? How is your presidential campaign going? Or are you more into burning down factories and Power Plants? Show up at Elon Musks house with a gun so he stops shooting his trash into space? Of course we need to tackle the big Problems, but they need consensus and time. You can decide right now to not buy a new phone or reduce your average pageload by one megabyte. It won't change the world overnight, but tackling climate change does not mean that we need to stop the largest polluter and everything else can go on as before. These changes need to be on every level and it is foolish to not start at the one you are at because "someone is worse than me".
jwr 6y ago
Why are we propagating this kind of nonsense? What this does is take attention away from the real issues that we should immediately deal with. It shifts blame onto individuals and performs the old trick of providing a method to calm our conscience (I'm not watching videos in HD, so I'm good, we can go on as normal). This trick has been pulled on us rather spectacularly with plastics recycling: manufacturers print the recycling symbol on everything, we dutifully sort our garbage and put stuff into recycling bins, and we feel good continuing to use lots of plastic, even though all this does nothing for the planet. Not to mention that the actual carbon footprint difference in this case is likely completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
- ath92 6y ago
  It doesn't shift blame onto individuals, because: "Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged." While I agree it probably won't do much, you could argue that streaming high definition video just to listen to a song is a bit pointless (and with YouTube apparently being the world's largest music streaming service, this is pretty common)
  - praseodym 6y ago
    The annoying thing is that YouTube’s audio quality is linked to the selected video quality, so watching a music video in SD will often also result in inferior audio.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      And turning off the video when you are listening to a song was until more recently disallowed on mobile, and is now a paid option.
- a_imho 6y ago
  Isn't that just the other side of the self deceit coin to have a peace of mind? If individual actions do not matter, climate change can not be our fault? I am on team Blame Others and tend to somewhat agree though. Paraphrasing David Graeber, if a small percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, the state of the world reflects how they think things should be.
dkdbejwi383 6y ago
There's quite a bit of innovation in the data centre space with regards to renewable energy, passive cooling (underwater, arctic locations). This is yet another example of putting the blame on consumers rather than big industrial polluters, intensive farming, the aviation industry, shipping and motor vehicles.
lewurm 6y ago
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. There are lower hanging fruits. Avoiding animal products in your diet is your best bet as individual to fight climate change: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
- st1x7 6y ago
  Expecting people to make changes in their behaviour does absolutely nothing apart from making a tiny minority of people feel superior for their choices. It simply doesn't scale well to the entire population. You need systemic changes and big developments in technology to actually make a difference in climate change.
  - spectralflux 6y ago
    Agreed. Especially since the actual biggest individual contributor (for people living in the developed world) is having children, and we really don't want this kind of individual focus to land there.
  - hannob 6y ago
    You can make systemic changes to reduce the amount of animal products that people consume. For a start, you could stop subsidizing them. For the long term you could fund a massive meat replacement research project. (Though I disagree with the OP that this is the biggest issue, it is a large enough issue that it's worth tackling it, and certainly larger than streaming video.)
  - lewurm 6y ago
    My pessimism tends to agree with you. OTOH social distancing and wearing masks has shown recently that (most) people are fine with changing their behavior, if necessary.
    - st1x7 6y ago
      The parameters matter a lot though. With social distancing/mask wearing there is a very measurable risk that's immediate to you and the people around you. With climate change your actions make a tiny tiny impact that's spread disproportionately over the entire planet and takes effect over decades - this makes it much easier to ignore. If people could get infected with climate-change disease and x% of them die, there would be a lot more action to prevent it.
Aardwolf 6y ago
As the article itself admits: > Another co-author of the report, Prof Corinne Le Querre from the University of East Anglia, told BBC News: “To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year – but every bit of CO2 saving is significant. This is the technology that allows people to avoid travel/commute, how about let's not cripple the experience of this and focus on what are large fractions.
Traubenfuchs 6y ago
The only real way to reduce ones climate footprint is by not procreating. Everything else is a joke.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Proof: https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full.jpg https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1ful...
  - imtringued 6y ago
    This graph does not consider that CO2 conscious parents can teach their children to be CO2 conscious. This means the effect of consciously having less children to fight climate change is highly overstated. I mean, imagine being a parent who is only eating a plant based diet, buying green energy, not flying at all and living car free. Somehow you are assuming that your children will violate all of these rules despite living in the same household as you. They somehow eat meat, they somehow fail to use the green energy you bought for them and they go on transatlantic flights on their own and they even have a damn car! By definition no matter what you do for yourself is going to matter because you are creating a CO2 spewing monster according to this graph. Is that really what happens in practice? I doubt that. It is far more likely that your child has learned some CO2 saving measures from you and therefore when you are having one child less you aren't eliminating the CO2 monster, you're eliminating a CO2 saver. There is also another more obvious issue with the graph. It is double counting emissions by counting your children's emissions as your own. Meaning there is no real upper bound to how much CO2 you save. If humanity colonizes the entire universe the impact of your decision to not have one child would be literally astronomical. Your decision could have avoided hundreds of trillions of lives being brought into existence or even infinite if all humans die without having children. Just think of the CO2 savings! Because the last section of the graph is highly misleading I hope nobody bases their decision to have children on it. If you really want to have less children then first consider whether your child will be a CO2 monster or not.
- adrianb 6y ago
  This gives a good impression how much that reduces the footprint compared to the commonly blamed activities: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
0xy 6y ago
This argument is patently ridiculous. New efficiencies in electrical devices has partly driven a huge decline in real emissions in both America and Europe. Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of emissions get a pass. Again. Thanks BBC!
- tjansen 6y ago
  "New efficiencies in electrical devices has partly driven a huge decline in real emissions" Maybe. How many people have convinced themselves to buy a new device because the new one is 'environmently friendly'?
ppf 6y ago
It's very interesting watching the HN response to this. So far, it largely consists of: 1. It's not the responsibility of consumers to adjust their habits, it's up to governments to mandate behavioural change 2. Tech will fix this In response, I would say individual behavoural change could result in some of the biggest gains. My personal purchasing habits, which consist of buying almost everything second hand (and most specifically for this discussion, electronic items), minimising the number of electronic gadgets I own, wearing an extra layer before turning up my home heating, and minimising fossil-fuel based travel, have an enormous impact on my total emissions and pollutants produced. This is without me needing to outwardly display much sign of my choices, nor abidcate responsibility to some central power. As for the second point - tech largely got us into this mess. Semiconductor manufacturing is incredibly energy-intensive, and electronics in general consume an huge amount of non-renewable minerals without much hope of recovering them. The mess generated by e-waste recycling has created some of the most persistently polluted places on the planet (take a look at Agbogbloshie, in Ghana). I don't see how increasing dependence on tech will reverse this.
- lazysheepherd 6y ago
  Well thank YOU, but not everyone is YOU. This is like saying: "I've been a huge strong male for 35 years and I haven't killed anyone so far. I think murder should not be a crime, we can regulate ourselves. Take me for example." No, you are not the example, you are the exception.
  - bserge 6y ago
    The "you're the exception" excuse doesn't work here because no one is forced to buy a new phone every year, a new laptop cause the old one doesn't have nvme for Chrome, or a new dishwasher when the old one smells. No one is forced to go on vacation thousands of miles away or throw out half the meat they eat. It's all a choice, not a result of circumstances.
    - harimau777 6y ago
      No one is forced to murder either.
lazysheepherd 6y ago
How about we tax environmental damage to manufacturers and suppliers, so everything auto balances itself? I see this and similar conversations just as distractions to keep few clinical psychopaths profiting few more decades on a non renewable business model. Tax the pollution fist, then we can discuss these things.
- worldofmatthew 6y ago
  That would cause inflation for the working class.
  - mrob 6y ago
    Redistribute the pollution taxes as UBI. This is logically equivalent to polluters paying compensation to everybody else for polluting their environment, and could be framed as such if "UBI" is politically nonviable.
    - worldofmatthew 6y ago
      You know this won't happen.
bserge 6y ago
Yeah the first half seems questionable, but the second one is great. Use your phones, and everything else, for longer. Fix stuff if it breaks. It's not rocket science.
jgilias 6y ago
Nice. It's good that research like this is carried out. However, it's totally an 80-20 kind of a game. If we have any chance of stabilizing the climate, its only through focusing aggressively on the 80% part of the above. For example, reading 'ditch new tech to fight climate change', I was hoping to get an article on massive reforestation schemes, agroforestry, or something old-new along those lines. Sure, it would be a massive effort, but that's low cost highly available and accessible carbon sequestration tech right there. You just need to incentivize people and organizations appropriately. Actually, we could just start by doing something about the aggressive deforestation going on in Brazil right now.
imtringued 6y ago
I don't know why there is this insistence on avoiding low co2 activities. The alternative to watching someone produce a lot of co2 is to produce that co2 yourself. Someone who watches races or plays racing games could just as well drive to the circuit with their car and watch or participate in races in real life and cause far more emissions.
dimitar 6y ago
"Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged." No, instead of doing such silliness regulators should focus on the big CO2 emitters like power plants, SUVs and home heating in the short term. In the long term legislators should implement carbon taxes and caps covering all carbon use. Having carbon taxes will increase the prices of streaming (iff they are not running on renewables) and new devices (less so if they are made from recycled materials), achieving the same goals with much less legislation and inconvenience to businesses and consumers.
- Angostura 6y ago
  It’s not a zero-sum game. CO2 efficiency needs to become a baked in consideration in ALL industries, it’s something we can all do but requires a change in mindset.
vimy 6y ago
Behavioral change is pointless. 2020 has proven the climate activist narrative is flawed. The narrative being ‘less of everything, stop consuming (sinning), the sacrifice in comfort is worth it.’ In 2020 airplane travel cratered, car traffic halved, tons of factories were shut down, ..., life came to a screeching halt. Basically 2020 is what climate activist tell us is the future. And the result? A measly 7 % drop in CO2 and many many people being miserable living like this. You might think that’s worth it except it needs to drop like this every year and you can only shut down travel and factories etc once. The only solution is geo-engineering.
- Someone 6y ago
  I think “people being miserable” is because of the short-distance social isolation, not the long-distance one. I don’t think the world would be any less happy if personal air travel returned to 1970s level, cars were half the weight and drove a bit slower, etc. Certainly not if we compensated lower consumption with a four-day working week. And yes, that wouldn’t solve everything, but it is unlikely there will be a silver bullet. If solar/fusion/whatever turns out to be one, we can always scale up again, if we want to. Meanwhile, do whatever we can to give us more time to work on solar/fusion/whatever.
- ben_w 6y ago
  The impression I have is that people are miserable because (a) higher unemployment and fear of unemployment, and (b) limited social opportunities because anywhere with people in it has been closed — not specifically because of the lack of flights or commuting. (Also, most factories are still running; for example in the USA, 16% down between Feb and April and 5.6% down between Feb and Oct [0], which is still almost all being open even in the worst periods). Much as I like international travel (and despite my mother moving to an Alzheimer’s care home in a country I don’t live in), not flying this year is really low on the list of things that have been troubling me. I believe human nature will probably cause geo-engineering to backfire; I anticipate a politician will claim that it is pointless and the running costs are too expensive, cancel funding, and proclaim loudly that the lack of immediate severe negative consequence “proves this was the right decision” in much the same way that current politicians who do not wish to spend money on improving the climate make similar claims about winter. I’m in favour of renewables + storage + global power grid. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/
jnwatson 6y ago
1. Pass a carbon tax. 2. Producers will be incentived to make the pipeline more efficient, or pass the cost onto the consumer, which will influence consumption. 3. Profit.
Tycho 6y ago
It would be good to see a breakdown of the environmental benefits brought by modern tech. For instance: - switch to streaming/downloading from physical media eliminates manufacturing and transport - switch to online retail lowers transport/delivery costs of physical goods due to better logistics - high bandwidth internet plus office collaboration software has enabled WFH, eliminating commute - availability of information online saves unnecessary trips to speak to people - online market places provide much more efficient markets for 2nd hand goods - better safety, security and fuel economy tech in cars reduces waste - better surveillance reduces crime such as vandalism Any others? Quantifying things like that could be a nice morale boost for the people who think we'll be swimming to the office in 12 years. There's also a few things which have potential for much greater impact because of the decoupling they bring. Eg. electric cars will work just the same with a greener grid that what we have today; WFH will enable people to relocate based on factors other than where their employer is - maybe going where there is cheap, plentiful renewable energy, for instance, or less need for aircon.
hyko 6y ago
“To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year” Move along, nothing to see here.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
The depressing thing is that, in this pandemic, we're longing for things to be as they used to before, rather than take the chance to change it into something good. But we're subsidizing air travel and mass tourism, and push for governments to act as stake holders in those industries big time, while there's no chance for returning a profit for years to come; let alone the fact that overtourism contributed to the pandemic's spill. When just last year, the generation that'll have to pay the bills for our spending, negative interest, and rampant state financing, voiced their protest in Fridays for Future. But yes, we absolutely should look at our power and data budgets, especially with "modern" mobile web (= ads and JavaScript for the sake of it) use.
yodelshady 6y ago
FYI, I cannot find a source report for this. I would expect better from a UK accredited charity with "Royal" in it. Why no link to source? Or numbers? In an era of "fake news", does traditional media not differentiate itself by providing those markers of quality? The last report I saw on this theme credited half an hours' netflix with 1.6 kg CO2 emissions, by "the Shift project". With a typical grid, that's 4 kWh in half an hour, or 8 KILOWATTS to sling video. By their own emission, they overestimated by a factor of 8 (https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-06_Did-TSP-overestimate-the-carbon-footprint-of-online-video_EN.pdf https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-...). Even after that they're still an outlier. About the only thing vaguely correct is that mobile data does appear much more intensive than landline. Knowing CO2e per GB would be useful (possibly CO2e per GB.km). Unfortunately, and inevitably, the space is filled with bad actors. The BBC should know better than to give them oxygen.

25 points by vinni2 6y ago

As a more useful measurement, I'd like to see a comparison of the carbon emission of watching a 4K movie at home vs driving with a non-electric car to the next cinema to watch it.

atrainedmonkey 6y ago

> “To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year – but every bit of CO2 saving is significant.“ Is it worth losing people over such a small gain? This is a 5% saving on a likely negligible cost anyway... This study wasn’t just a waste of time, it’s actually detrimental to an already hard battle convincing people they can have an impact.

ppf 6y ago
I'm not sure how they define "digital tech emissions", but the embodied energy of a newly manufactured laptop (approx. 1500 kWh, or one barrel of oil) will get you nearly 2,500 passenger jet miles (assuming 58 miles per gallon per revenue passenger). One of the most effective ways to cut your CO2 emissions (and practially every other form of unsustainable environmental damage) is to stop buying new electronics.

Grumbledour 6y ago

Personally, I always find these kind of stories a bit nitpicky and silly. They are right at their core though and it would be good to question, if we need high definition screens and streams all the time everywhere. It's not only the environment, it is also often detrimental to the device and user themselves. Look at e-readers to see what kind of devices we good have for special purposes if not every consumer computer needed to be a media powerhouse. And then we need to go further and ask ourselves, how would it benefit the environment if we had stricter rules for unnecessary data transfers in general. Because I would think, cutting down on adware and excessive file sizes on the top 10% websites would give us significant savings on bandwidth, emissions and lets be honest, improve UX quite a bit for most people, especially on slower devices/connections. And of course, the article points out, that while these things are important and can help, the are dwarfed by other factors that really need to be tackled. No reason to ignore the smaller stuff, though.

dannyw 6y ago
We have a certain amount of time and interest in the day; I’d rather spend time figuring out how to reduce the biggest polluters than rounding errors.
- Grumbledour 6y ago
  So, how do you do it? How is your presidential campaign going? Or are you more into burning down factories and Power Plants? Show up at Elon Musks house with a gun so he stops shooting his trash into space? Of course we need to tackle the big Problems, but they need consensus and time. You can decide right now to not buy a new phone or reduce your average pageload by one megabyte. It won't change the world overnight, but tackling climate change does not mean that we need to stop the largest polluter and everything else can go on as before. These changes need to be on every level and it is foolish to not start at the one you are at because "someone is worse than me".

jwr 6y ago

Why are we propagating this kind of nonsense? What this does is take attention away from the real issues that we should immediately deal with. It shifts blame onto individuals and performs the old trick of providing a method to calm our conscience (I'm not watching videos in HD, so I'm good, we can go on as normal). This trick has been pulled on us rather spectacularly with plastics recycling: manufacturers print the recycling symbol on everything, we dutifully sort our garbage and put stuff into recycling bins, and we feel good continuing to use lots of plastic, even though all this does nothing for the planet. Not to mention that the actual carbon footprint difference in this case is likely completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

ath92 6y ago
It doesn't shift blame onto individuals, because: "Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged." While I agree it probably won't do much, you could argue that streaming high definition video just to listen to a song is a bit pointless (and with YouTube apparently being the world's largest music streaming service, this is pretty common)
- praseodym 6y ago
  The annoying thing is that YouTube’s audio quality is linked to the selected video quality, so watching a music video in SD will often also result in inferior audio.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    And turning off the video when you are listening to a song was until more recently disallowed on mobile, and is now a paid option.
a_imho 6y ago
Isn't that just the other side of the self deceit coin to have a peace of mind? If individual actions do not matter, climate change can not be our fault? I am on team Blame Others and tend to somewhat agree though. Paraphrasing David Graeber, if a small percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, the state of the world reflects how they think things should be.

dkdbejwi383 6y ago

There's quite a bit of innovation in the data centre space with regards to renewable energy, passive cooling (underwater, arctic locations). This is yet another example of putting the blame on consumers rather than big industrial polluters, intensive farming, the aviation industry, shipping and motor vehicles.

lewurm 6y ago

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. There are lower hanging fruits. Avoiding animal products in your diet is your best bet as individual to fight climate change: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

st1x7 6y ago
Expecting people to make changes in their behaviour does absolutely nothing apart from making a tiny minority of people feel superior for their choices. It simply doesn't scale well to the entire population. You need systemic changes and big developments in technology to actually make a difference in climate change.
- spectralflux 6y ago
  Agreed. Especially since the actual biggest individual contributor (for people living in the developed world) is having children, and we really don't want this kind of individual focus to land there.
- hannob 6y ago
  You can make systemic changes to reduce the amount of animal products that people consume. For a start, you could stop subsidizing them. For the long term you could fund a massive meat replacement research project. (Though I disagree with the OP that this is the biggest issue, it is a large enough issue that it's worth tackling it, and certainly larger than streaming video.)
- lewurm 6y ago
  My pessimism tends to agree with you. OTOH social distancing and wearing masks has shown recently that (most) people are fine with changing their behavior, if necessary.
  - st1x7 6y ago
    The parameters matter a lot though. With social distancing/mask wearing there is a very measurable risk that's immediate to you and the people around you. With climate change your actions make a tiny tiny impact that's spread disproportionately over the entire planet and takes effect over decades - this makes it much easier to ignore. If people could get infected with climate-change disease and x% of them die, there would be a lot more action to prevent it.

Aardwolf 6y ago

As the article itself admits: > Another co-author of the report, Prof Corinne Le Querre from the University of East Anglia, told BBC News: “To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year – but every bit of CO2 saving is significant. This is the technology that allows people to avoid travel/commute, how about let's not cripple the experience of this and focus on what are large fractions.

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

The only real way to reduce ones climate footprint is by not procreating. Everything else is a joke.

fsflover 6y ago
Proof: https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full.jpg https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1ful...
- imtringued 6y ago
  This graph does not consider that CO2 conscious parents can teach their children to be CO2 conscious. This means the effect of consciously having less children to fight climate change is highly overstated. I mean, imagine being a parent who is only eating a plant based diet, buying green energy, not flying at all and living car free. Somehow you are assuming that your children will violate all of these rules despite living in the same household as you. They somehow eat meat, they somehow fail to use the green energy you bought for them and they go on transatlantic flights on their own and they even have a damn car! By definition no matter what you do for yourself is going to matter because you are creating a CO2 spewing monster according to this graph. Is that really what happens in practice? I doubt that. It is far more likely that your child has learned some CO2 saving measures from you and therefore when you are having one child less you aren't eliminating the CO2 monster, you're eliminating a CO2 saver. There is also another more obvious issue with the graph. It is double counting emissions by counting your children's emissions as your own. Meaning there is no real upper bound to how much CO2 you save. If humanity colonizes the entire universe the impact of your decision to not have one child would be literally astronomical. Your decision could have avoided hundreds of trillions of lives being brought into existence or even infinite if all humans die without having children. Just think of the CO2 savings! Because the last section of the graph is highly misleading I hope nobody bases their decision to have children on it. If you really want to have less children then first consider whether your child will be a CO2 monster or not.
adrianb 6y ago
This gives a good impression how much that reduces the footprint compared to the commonly blamed activities: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...

0xy 6y ago

This argument is patently ridiculous. New efficiencies in electrical devices has partly driven a huge decline in real emissions in both America and Europe. Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of emissions get a pass. Again. Thanks BBC!

tjansen 6y ago
"New efficiencies in electrical devices has partly driven a huge decline in real emissions" Maybe. How many people have convinced themselves to buy a new device because the new one is 'environmently friendly'?

ppf 6y ago

It's very interesting watching the HN response to this. So far, it largely consists of: 1. It's not the responsibility of consumers to adjust their habits, it's up to governments to mandate behavioural change 2. Tech will fix this In response, I would say individual behavoural change could result in some of the biggest gains. My personal purchasing habits, which consist of buying almost everything second hand (and most specifically for this discussion, electronic items), minimising the number of electronic gadgets I own, wearing an extra layer before turning up my home heating, and minimising fossil-fuel based travel, have an enormous impact on my total emissions and pollutants produced. This is without me needing to outwardly display much sign of my choices, nor abidcate responsibility to some central power. As for the second point - tech largely got us into this mess. Semiconductor manufacturing is incredibly energy-intensive, and electronics in general consume an huge amount of non-renewable minerals without much hope of recovering them. The mess generated by e-waste recycling has created some of the most persistently polluted places on the planet (take a look at Agbogbloshie, in Ghana). I don't see how increasing dependence on tech will reverse this.

lazysheepherd 6y ago
Well thank YOU, but not everyone is YOU. This is like saying: "I've been a huge strong male for 35 years and I haven't killed anyone so far. I think murder should not be a crime, we can regulate ourselves. Take me for example." No, you are not the example, you are the exception.
- bserge 6y ago
  The "you're the exception" excuse doesn't work here because no one is forced to buy a new phone every year, a new laptop cause the old one doesn't have nvme for Chrome, or a new dishwasher when the old one smells. No one is forced to go on vacation thousands of miles away or throw out half the meat they eat. It's all a choice, not a result of circumstances.
  - harimau777 6y ago
    No one is forced to murder either.

lazysheepherd 6y ago

How about we tax environmental damage to manufacturers and suppliers, so everything auto balances itself? I see this and similar conversations just as distractions to keep few clinical psychopaths profiting few more decades on a non renewable business model. Tax the pollution fist, then we can discuss these things.

worldofmatthew 6y ago
That would cause inflation for the working class.
- mrob 6y ago
  Redistribute the pollution taxes as UBI. This is logically equivalent to polluters paying compensation to everybody else for polluting their environment, and could be framed as such if "UBI" is politically nonviable.
  - worldofmatthew 6y ago
    You know this won't happen.

bserge 6y ago

Yeah the first half seems questionable, but the second one is great. Use your phones, and everything else, for longer. Fix stuff if it breaks. It's not rocket science.

jgilias 6y ago

Nice. It's good that research like this is carried out. However, it's totally an 80-20 kind of a game. If we have any chance of stabilizing the climate, its only through focusing aggressively on the 80% part of the above. For example, reading 'ditch new tech to fight climate change', I was hoping to get an article on massive reforestation schemes, agroforestry, or something old-new along those lines. Sure, it would be a massive effort, but that's low cost highly available and accessible carbon sequestration tech right there. You just need to incentivize people and organizations appropriately. Actually, we could just start by doing something about the aggressive deforestation going on in Brazil right now.

imtringued 6y ago

I don't know why there is this insistence on avoiding low co2 activities. The alternative to watching someone produce a lot of co2 is to produce that co2 yourself. Someone who watches races or plays racing games could just as well drive to the circuit with their car and watch or participate in races in real life and cause far more emissions.

dimitar 6y ago

"Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged." No, instead of doing such silliness regulators should focus on the big CO2 emitters like power plants, SUVs and home heating in the short term. In the long term legislators should implement carbon taxes and caps covering all carbon use. Having carbon taxes will increase the prices of streaming (iff they are not running on renewables) and new devices (less so if they are made from recycled materials), achieving the same goals with much less legislation and inconvenience to businesses and consumers.

Angostura 6y ago
It’s not a zero-sum game. CO2 efficiency needs to become a baked in consideration in ALL industries, it’s something we can all do but requires a change in mindset.

vimy 6y ago

Behavioral change is pointless. 2020 has proven the climate activist narrative is flawed. The narrative being ‘less of everything, stop consuming (sinning), the sacrifice in comfort is worth it.’ In 2020 airplane travel cratered, car traffic halved, tons of factories were shut down, ..., life came to a screeching halt. Basically 2020 is what climate activist tell us is the future. And the result? A measly 7 % drop in CO2 and many many people being miserable living like this. You might think that’s worth it except it needs to drop like this every year and you can only shut down travel and factories etc once. The only solution is geo-engineering.

Someone 6y ago
I think “people being miserable” is because of the short-distance social isolation, not the long-distance one. I don’t think the world would be any less happy if personal air travel returned to 1970s level, cars were half the weight and drove a bit slower, etc. Certainly not if we compensated lower consumption with a four-day working week. And yes, that wouldn’t solve everything, but it is unlikely there will be a silver bullet. If solar/fusion/whatever turns out to be one, we can always scale up again, if we want to. Meanwhile, do whatever we can to give us more time to work on solar/fusion/whatever.
ben_w 6y ago
The impression I have is that people are miserable because (a) higher unemployment and fear of unemployment, and (b) limited social opportunities because anywhere with people in it has been closed — not specifically because of the lack of flights or commuting. (Also, most factories are still running; for example in the USA, 16% down between Feb and April and 5.6% down between Feb and Oct [0], which is still almost all being open even in the worst periods). Much as I like international travel (and despite my mother moving to an Alzheimer’s care home in a country I don’t live in), not flying this year is really low on the list of things that have been troubling me. I believe human nature will probably cause geo-engineering to backfire; I anticipate a politician will claim that it is pointless and the running costs are too expensive, cancel funding, and proclaim loudly that the lack of immediate severe negative consequence “proves this was the right decision” in much the same way that current politicians who do not wish to spend money on improving the climate make similar claims about winter. I’m in favour of renewables + storage + global power grid. [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/current/

jnwatson 6y ago

1. Pass a carbon tax. 2. Producers will be incentived to make the pipeline more efficient, or pass the cost onto the consumer, which will influence consumption. 3. Profit.

Tycho 6y ago

It would be good to see a breakdown of the environmental benefits brought by modern tech. For instance: - switch to streaming/downloading from physical media eliminates manufacturing and transport - switch to online retail lowers transport/delivery costs of physical goods due to better logistics - high bandwidth internet plus office collaboration software has enabled WFH, eliminating commute - availability of information online saves unnecessary trips to speak to people - online market places provide much more efficient markets for 2nd hand goods - better safety, security and fuel economy tech in cars reduces waste - better surveillance reduces crime such as vandalism Any others? Quantifying things like that could be a nice morale boost for the people who think we'll be swimming to the office in 12 years. There's also a few things which have potential for much greater impact because of the decoupling they bring. Eg. electric cars will work just the same with a greener grid that what we have today; WFH will enable people to relocate based on factors other than where their employer is - maybe going where there is cheap, plentiful renewable energy, for instance, or less need for aircon.

hyko 6y ago

“To be honest, digital tech is a small fraction of your emissions compared with, say flying even once a year” Move along, nothing to see here.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

The depressing thing is that, in this pandemic, we're longing for things to be as they used to before, rather than take the chance to change it into something good. But we're subsidizing air travel and mass tourism, and push for governments to act as stake holders in those industries big time, while there's no chance for returning a profit for years to come; let alone the fact that overtourism contributed to the pandemic's spill. When just last year, the generation that'll have to pay the bills for our spending, negative interest, and rampant state financing, voiced their protest in Fridays for Future. But yes, we absolutely should look at our power and data budgets, especially with "modern" mobile web (= ads and JavaScript for the sake of it) use.

yodelshady 6y ago

FYI, I cannot find a source report for this. I would expect better from a UK accredited charity with "Royal" in it. Why no link to source? Or numbers? In an era of "fake news", does traditional media not differentiate itself by providing those markers of quality? The last report I saw on this theme credited half an hours' netflix with 1.6 kg CO2 emissions, by "the Shift project". With a typical grid, that's 4 kWh in half an hour, or 8 KILOWATTS to sling video. By their own emission, they overestimated by a factor of 8 (https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-06_Did-TSP-overestimate-the-carbon-footprint-of-online-video_EN.pdf https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-...). Even after that they're still an outlier. About the only thing vaguely correct is that mobile data does appear much more intensive than landline. Knowing CO2e per GB would be useful (possibly CO2e per GB.km). Unfortunately, and inevitably, the space is filled with bad actors. The BBC should know better than to give them oxygen.