Minimize CO2 emissions
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
We had an interesting presentation about Digital Sustainability at Dynamo recently that ...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
I believe most of your points are valid, but still some are just not reasonable enough. Like if I stop using Google search, will I still receive all those billion results on Ecosia. And for facts sake, if Ecosia gets as much users as google, we would be worried about it's energy consumption.
The other thing we should focus on is crypto mining, because it's now consuming more energy than anything else online. I think that's a topic you should've covered too.
The other topic is about these giant companies that own servers. Like Most servers are in Europe and Asia. Europe doesn't use coal, well as some servers in USA run on coal. Amazon is one of the top 10 companies that deal in servers and cloud computing. Even companies like Facebook and google use Amazon servers. So you should research about how these big data companies are consuming energy.
My final point is about the alternative energy sources. Earth only has a limited number of energy sources at the moment, mostly coming from Hydro power dams, Coal power plants, oil/fossil fuel and Nuclear power plants. Wind and solar power cannot really generate that much energy for industrial consumption. And our storage materials like Lead Ion can only do too much. Unless if we get some advancement in fusion energy experiments or if we discover some new mineral on Mars that we might use to make more energy.
I believe we can only do enough at the moment. Because, all these new ideas and applications that come up everyday just help make our lives easier and extend our life span. This has to come at a certain cost. We cannot choose horses over cars, we cannot choose bicycles over planes. Earth is dying either way, we can try to prolong the inevitable, or find ourselves an alternative, another way we can survive.
Further investments into wind, solar, and yes even nuclear can meet significant amounts of energy demand and reduce carbon footprint over time. You don't need fusion or magical Mars minerals to power civilization sustainably, you just need the right kind of investments, mitigation against existing infrastructure and continual implementation over time. There are a number of countries in Europe that have large portions of their energy production being green and or nuclear. (nuclear isn't renewable, but it is very clean when done properly)
Most cloud providers publicly document their environmental impact, with all major ones aiming for or are already at carbon neutral. Generally however, cloud providers don't want to run unsustainably, hence they invest into making things as efficient as possible. When the alternative to the cloud is you doing stuff yourself, or worse getting on a plane/car and going somewhere in-person, the cloud, and thus large cloud companies are actually less energy intensive than most common alternatives.
Earth isn't dying, it's just changing incredibly rapidly. It is not the end of the world, but its deeply disturbing modern civilization more or less created this problem in the last 200 years. 200 years from now the question will be how bad did it get for those still around.
We just gotta keep the march toward making things better (and really pick up the pace to stave off the worse effects). We don't need 1 solution, we need all of them.
PS Fusion is nice, and has seen significant progress recently, but engineering the sun as an energy source isn't exactly the easiest engineering challenge. Its very possible for it to take another 50 years before seeing any real gains. In the mean time, building more renewables and possibly even investing into nuclear can and will be enough.
I use Ecosia as my primary search and Google if I don't find something. Most of the stuff we search for isn't in one of those niche sites only Google indexes. Especially when searching in English.
If you find a host that uses renewables you help fund the development of renewables and slightly reduce the usage of fossil. We can fly a bit less and choose Zoom conference over flying. We can sometimes take the train over flying. We can avoid cruises and try to pick an electric car as our next car. These are small things that have a very small impact overall but they help signal financially to policy makers how important this issue is for us.
I understand your points, but still somewhere somehow we still rotate to the same thing. Because, you may not fly and use Zoom, but even Zoom and all these other internet platforms feed on some servers which in most cases run on fossil energy. Electric cars are still a long way from setting up refilling stations that cover the entire planet. There are even cases of electric cars recharging by using fuel generators. We also want to go to the moon, and to build colonies on Mars and Ganymede, but we can't travel to space with solar power.
I believe the steps have to be taken, however small they're, but we can only do too much, unless if we discover a revolutionary alternative in the near future (like fusion energy).
There are scales. A flight produces many orders of magnitude more pollution than any Zoom call. We don't need to stop pollution entirely, just reduce it to manageable reasonable amounts and plant more trees in the process. Maybe find technological solutions for carbon capture etc. Individually and at small scale each of those is insignificant but at large scales they can make an impact.
Even if we find a magical solution like fusion we'd still need to replace all the energy plants in the world and get everyone to use electric energy and do carbon capture. There's no "magic bullet", we'll need to do all of these things AND hope for SEVERAL magic bullets AND advocate for heavier government regulation.
It is certainly going to be possible to generate our energy (not just electricity) from renewables within the next 30 years weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/renewab...
As a (theoretical) example, the whole Sahara Desert receives 22 billion GWh of sunshine energy per year. Which translates, at 20% panel efficiency, to 4.4 million TWh of electricity. Which is 37 times more than 2018 total world energy demand.
For example theconversation.com/should-we-turn... and iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-s...
my toilet doest fill itself at night, I have to pull the handle in the morning to make it fill for the rest of the day. It's quite funny and I joke that it's an eco feature that saves water, but really the only way that would save water is by me dieing in the night as the next tankful wouldn't be required.
I respect this list and will try to understand the suggested, besides small changes make a big difference (we are cutting plastic out at home)
My ability to work funds my reductions and steps towards a more eco life, sooner or later my overal world footprint should be neutral... Sadly it's 30 years too late, but I will raise my children to have a small impact.
Great stuff, thanks for sharing!
Thanks @alidev ! π
it can be good point for Start Tnx for sharing