It’s heating and cooling, transport, and food. Maybe cement as well. If you buy a new conventional car, I have more to question you on climate change over.
It’s important that everyone Reduce, Reuse, Recycle properly in order to reduce our impact to the environment.
Do you really need to replace your perfectly functional doorbell with a big pile of electronics? Probably not. Would not driving to work every day make a bigger contribution? Yes. Would not doing either be best? Yes.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
LED bulbs are comically more efficient than incandescent bulbs (by a factor of 5-10), which in turn are comically more efficient (by 10-50 times) than like a candle or oil lamp. “Simple” is actually a terrible heuristic for “low ecological impact.”
A Ring doorbell has a 22Wh battery that lasts about a month or two per charge.
Having the door open for 10 seconds on a cold winter day can easily waste that much energy. About 10kW of heat loss for 10 seconds is 100kJ, higher than that 22Wh. Likewise, the embodied energy of that 22Wh battery is about 22MJ, and might dominate the embodied energy of the Ring camera. So if it saves you from opening the door 200-300 times in its lifetime, that might be enough to pay for its own embodied emissions.
Plus not having to drive home to pick up a package, etc, etc.
Plus think of other smart devices like smart thermostats that might be part of the whole Ring system. Or perhaps if the Ring device prevents destruction of part of your home from theft.
I don’t even own a Ring doorbell, but I can see how it could actually help. Also, traditional doorbells aren’t that efficient. Especially if they have a little light.
Ring could also replace a window to see who is there, which is a big source of heat leakage.
According to wikipedia [1], the transformer on a standard doorbell can use 2-3 watts of power at all times. That's 1400-2100 watt hours per month — about one hundred times as much as a ring doorbell uses (Less than 20 Wh per month).
The cost and impact of the Ring includes more manufacturing, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Ring ended up having a larger environmental cost, but it's not as clear cut as your incredulity makes it seem.
Interesting thing to know because here in Brazil we don't route PELV (Protected Extra-low Voltage) to the doorbell. The external switch just carries the full voltage from the mains (127 Vac or 220 Vac, according to the state). Maybe it's not the safest design after all.
However this constant power usage can be safely removed by using a non-rechargeable 12V battery that would power a relay that will trigger the mains-powered bell when the (purely mechanical) external switch is pressed. This removes the constant power usage and such battery should last for years with a typical usage scenario (less than one second per push or so).
You are missing the point and mischaracterising the problem. Resources are finite. Human attention spans are limited. Emissions from ships in international waters are an absolutely huge problem and addressing that will make a huge impact on future climate.
Funny how no one mentions that but we are all focused on paper straws and smart doorbells.
While we're at it, we should demand to put an end to the senseless hoarding of patents and IP, in particular those that hamper interoperability between components, and for information on interfaces to be made public, so no more proprietary connectors, protocols, APIs, no more artificial restrictions on consumables such as printer ink, etcetera.
I believe the argument is about the refining process and the chemical waste it creates, which is substantially higher when trying to extract 99.99% pure copper, zinc, gold, silver and other industrial elements which are converted into electronics. I'm a hobbyist fan of silver and know just the basics - refining for 99.99% pure silver looks like making crack to my eyes. :) Breaking Bad level chemicals.
I'm to understand the act of creating and "washing" circuit boards also uses a large amount of caustic chemicals, as does the attempted recycling/recovery (to basically eat away the coatings to expose the reclaimable metals). Refining for purity has a high environmental cost to get it from ore -> 99.99% and to reuse/recycle it, I speculate much higher than iron ore (train tracks, etc.) require/use.
99.99%, even if you’re right, only gets us to 10kg equivalent if you start with 1 gram.
(And keep in mind that these processes to make bulk materials themselves use alloying agents and specialty materials in cutting heads, etc, to fabricate them.)
Edit as I'm curious myself, this study shows it's about 150 tonnes of ore input for one ton of copper output (with other minerals reclaimed during the process): https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1988/8808/880811.PDF
So you could as well argue that nickel is a byproduct of rhodium (and platinum group metal) production.
Yeay?
Use a reusable water bottle. One can be had for the price of those 2x500ml bottles.
Charge me for the plastic for the 6 straws a year I use, which is far far less than the plastic others “waste”.
Put a price in the pollution and let the market sort it out
Maybe that's still not much compared to other industries, but in the context of the conversation here, its still something that an individual who might complain about climate change does have a little control over. I mean, if I complain, but then don't change MY behaviour, even if that change wouldn't by itself change anything, why should I expect companies to change theirs?