Ditch high definition and new tech to fight climate change
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
"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)
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.
Yes digital streaming accounts for a tiny proportion of CO2 emissions, but if the report is correct and HD video streaming on a phone generates about eight times more in emissions than standard definition, then it is the kind of thing that service providers should be thinking about when developing services.
These days ‘how can we minimise CO2 footprint’ should be standard step in service design. Information on where carbon costs are is useful
Incentives are _completely_ broken. Until we handle this at a government level we're effectively punishing people who are trying to do right by the planet.
I prefer low definition for other reasons and will therefore do this anyway, but saving the environment (or improving any other metric) is function of cost and benefit — while switching to SD is low cost (in my case negative cost) it is also not beneficial enough to make a noticeable dent in annual emissions, given the more detailed estimates for energy cost in the following article:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-foo...
Because if it contributes .01% to climate change (the number is made up since the article doesn't actually say), then you're making a relatively significant inconvenience to yourself for a benefit that is entirely dwarfed by someone taking an extra plane trip.
Someone quoted in the article says as much.
> 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. [emphasis added]"
This is not a rational statement in the slightest. Most religious dogma is more sensible. There exist vast swathes of "savings" that are not significant (including, IMO, watching SD video). It is in fact counterproductive if it means that people sacrifice in a variety of ways to fulfill their mythic "every bit of savings is significant" duties while taking part in behaviors that contribute to climate change. (And this ignores the central dogma that all climate change is necessarily destructive and will have no benefits to humanity or Earth whatsoever.)
My favorite nonsense recommendation in the article is to run all computing in the cloud - I guess the Google donation is paying off[1]. ARM is listed as another donor, so if Apple joins, expect buying M1 Macs to be yet another way to help the planet! Sarcasm aside, we could consider things like nuclear energy, traveling by train (it's quite affordable and enjoyable), "trillion tree initiatives," and a host of other programs that might actually make an impact assuming climate change seriously concerns you (it's only of mild concern to me).
[1]https://royalsociety.org/about-us/funding-finances/support-u...
In particular as Professor MacKay puts it: "Obsessively switching off the phone charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is."
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.
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.
(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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...
All the while: "even inside the restaurant, some 84 percent of the water use happens in the kitchen and the bathroom"
It was like a cult. and this cult-like pattern gets applied to other things now, too.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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-...). 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.
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.)
OTOH social distancing and wearing masks has shown recently that (most) people are fine with changing their behavior, if necessary.
If people could get infected with climate-change disease and x% of them die, there would be a lot more action to prevent it.
Reducing meat consumption doesn't increase emissions because animals already have to eat plants and they already fart on our behalf. If you cut out the middleman (the animal) you need less plants and also fart less. It's a major inconvenience with a major gain.
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.
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.
No, you are not the example, you are the exception.
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.
That's not the point I was making. I was referring to the idea that "nothing can be done without government mandates, and this kind of article that implies to conumers that it's their fault or that they need to take individual action is harmful".
You can have an enormous impact on your personal emmissions, but the impact you have nation-wide is negligible.
Ofcourse if everyone acted like you there wouldn't be a problem, but it's a prisoners dillema. If we all choose to give up a little luxury we could have a huge impact. But if we leave that up to personal choice then anyone can choose to emit more carbon and reap the benefits of doing so.
There's also the question of limiting the carbon emmissions of corporations. When emitting carbon is free most companies will choose to emit more if it helps their profit margins. And expecting those companies to limit emissions in exchange for goodwill is a bit naive.
My neighbours all cut turf from a local bog and burn it - one of the only fuel sources WORSE than coal! They handily destroy biodiversity and emit enormous amounts of carbon at once.
We are reforesting land and grow our own veggies. We compost as much of our own waste as possible.
We drive a 49 MPG 11 year old vehicle about 6000 miles a year between the four of us.
And my neighbours enjoy their free turf, subsidized roads, big-ass Land Rovers, ecological desert lawns, and as an added benefit climate and the connection to their actions _doesn't even cross their minds_ while I'm sitting here agonizing over accidentally introducing plastics to the compost and its impact on earthworms.
I'm tired of being a chump. We need governments to make it more expensive to kill the planet than to not kill it. Unti then every liter of fuel I save is just more for my neighbour's second Land Rover.
If your neighbors cheat by emitting more carbon then you will eventually start cheating as well. The only way to solve the dillema is by ensuring that people can't reap the benefits of cheating.
It is making people fight with each other instead of with the actual perpetrator. We should not fall for it.
And as for your energy source - is there anything renewable about powering your house with energy generators manufactured far overseas, using brown coal to fuel that energy-intensive process?
Also the Land Rover I see most is a 2008 (in Ireland, model year is on the number plate)
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of emissions get a pass. Again. Thanks BBC!
Maybe. How many people have convinced themselves to buy a new device because the new one is 'environmently friendly'?
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.
Use your phones, and everything else, for longer. Fix stuff if it breaks. It's not rocket science.
Move along, nothing to see here.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...