A wireless router consumes single digit watts of power. A tablet or mobile phone consumes 1/10 or less of that. Making a slice of toast and a cup of tea uses more power than both of those devices all day combined. This is another silly attempt to shift blame from corporations and billionaires down to consumers and everyday people. Don’t buy it.
Honestly the amount of energy needed to print and put this ad probably costed more than every amount they save.
There is some truth to it, in that the data centers that host a lot of digital content are environmental catastrophes. But like, again, that’s the fault of companies, not the consumers. Companies could choose to optimize their websites better, choose to streamline their systems and minimize the amount of data they’re collecting on users. Choose to use solar power and batteries and eat the upfront capital cost (it would even save them money over the lifetime of the facility.)
But they choose to ignore all that and just boil lakes and chug methane instead.
Kind of like how a 1000 LLM prompts equate to a microwave running for a second.
The real consumers of power are corporations.
Like, if millions of homes all had a 55" 4K TV running 24/7, and decided to turn it off at the same time, that still only equates to 300MW/h.
Which is the same as ONE large factory.
We don’t have energy shortages, we have distribution problems.
Kind of a weird message. The paltry amount of energy my screen time uses pales in comparison to the footprint left by massive careless corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and it would be far more effective at helping the environment to convince them to make even small adjustments.
Putting the onus on the average person just seems cruel. It leads to people like my wife desperate to do every little minor thing she can to adjust her footprint, making almost no difference in the grand scheme, while the real causes continue on unabated.
It also pales in comparison to the carbon cost of printing out the poster and lighting it.
Many small things are important too, like recycling, and voting for parties that enact green policy. “Screen time” is too vague to mean energy intensive.
Capitalism isn’t the problem. Consumers are.
Yeah… fuck that.
I object. Look at the CoVID-19 pandemic when most of us were at home staring at screens to talk to each other, receiving money from our governments not to work, gas prices were negative, we actually meaningfully paused the pollution of CO2 into our atmosphere for a very short time.
Not that everything was peachy then but we could use some of the ideas we learned there for the good of us all.
Even if I had my phone open 24/7, it would be nothing compared to the ecological damage done by private jets, fast fashion, golf courses, grocery stores throwing out perfectly good food, truckloads of trash dumped just about wherever, destroying ancient woodlands to make toilet shitty particle board furniture, using a shitton energy and water for ChatGPT to give someone dangerous health advice, make single-use plastic shit that’ll get thrown into the ocean, chopping down a rainforest to raise cattle that fart all day so that people can eat tons of meat on every single meal, and whatever millions of things capitalism has given us. Not to mention the irony of this “WiFi doesn’t grow on trees” message apparently being displayed on a screen and thus using energy. (although miniscule amounts, but still)
Out of all the lifestyle changes we can make, this is so unbelievably minor it is not worth mentioning, let alone make a campaign for.
Until the government and corporations take climate change seriously, making changes on an individual level won’t make a meaningful difference. Doesn’t mean we should do nothing… but come on, this is just stupid.
Why do I feel like this sign eats more energy per day than my phone?
Maybe stop giving all the electricity to the AI datacenters then you bloody gits.
Same thing as personal carbon footprints. A meaningless change being pushed on individuals when their total contribution to the problem is a mere rounding error on the amount contributed by the big corporations
You can’t guilt consumers into submission, it just doesn’t work. I’m not saying lifestyle choices can’t make a difference, because they can, but people can’t be forced into it. Environmentally friendly choices need to become more competitive
I agree that guilting people into submission won’t work, but you can absolutely force people into living more environmentally friendly lifestyles. Taxes for one, to make products like beef too expensive compared to more environmentally friendly alternatives. Problem with that method though is that it mostly hits the working class instead of everybody, so I prefer laws to make environmentally friendly choices the only option instead. As an example, construction projects in Denmark has to calculate the total emissions of the project, and can’t exceed certain thresholds. The same principle could be made for stuff like food production, car production, any type of production really. That way every single company is forced to be environmentally friendly, and will stay competitive.
Just hoping that the envronmentally friendly choices will become competitive by themselves will take too long though, if it will even happen at all, because the established products don’t have the same expenses as something new and unproven.
Privatized guilt.
This is like recycling. Or like plastic straws. It’s a way to blame individuals for systematic issues, and even if everyone bought into it and cut their use to zero, it would be a tiny, meaningless, drop in a very big bucket
It makes me wonder about the environmental cost of printing and lighting those posters.
yeah, definitely blame the individual people using wifi for damaging the climate and not the companies / billionaires whose decisions actually effect things at a substantial level. it’s 100% the homeless guy using wifi at the library who is going to cause the water wars in a few years. /s
I think the University of East London is a low tier educational institution, and so to attract attention it resorts to advertising like this.
It is interesting how much climate research is being done at frankly low quality universities. This is not to say the overall science is wrong, but rather it shows how the research economy works with low quality universities “jumping on the bandwagon” to get research money and try to build up their media reputation.
The University of East Anglia is another example of this. They like to play on how they are one of the “most cited” research centres in the world. But this is a bad metric as it just reflects the nature of the research economy. There is a massive volume of frankly shit “research” in all fields, and only a small percentage in any field is of any value. Also to be clear, this also not to say that all research from the UEA is crap or all the people working for them are poor. Rather, it is just an example of how lots of institutions operate in a bloated and overly commercialised research & university sector, and the newer or lower reputation places are aggressive in marketing themselves.
So yeah, a marketing poster from the University of East London is not worth contemplating too hard.
I guess it’s the university form of ragebait.
