If the whole tech industry generated 50 million metric tons per year, that’s about 6 kilograms per person on the planet per year, about a watermelon, and if you consider that even half of those are served by it, it’s a manageable amount of waste. The fact that it’s consolidated is a responsibility but also an opportunity to make big changes with every gain. I wish the tone here focused more on that opportunity.
The world CO2 emissions are 36 billion tons. 4.5 tons per person per year. The tech industry is .1% of that. There are more important things to worry, like how got to the store.
More importantly, the tech industry is a lot of electricity and some other energy in production. Decarbonize electricity and electrify everything possible, which we must do, will solve the problem with tech. There is nothing extra that needs to be done.
> Decarbonize electricity and electrify everything possible, which we must do, will solve the problem with tech. There is nothing extra that needs to be done.
Except that you don't have a miracle low-emission energy source. So whatever you "waste" in the tech industry, you don't use in, say, electric trucks.
Also the tech industry emissions are growing pretty fast. For what? Mostly for people to swipe TikTok 4h per day.
> Except that you don't have a miracle low-emission energy source.
Sure you do. Solar and wind with battery storage, and fission to fill in the rest. Nuclear being politically unfeasible doesn't change the reality that it's pretty damn clean. Waste disposal/storage is a solved problem except for -- of course, again -- the politics.
Yes, you can argue that "the politics" is important, and that makes it not "solved", and I'd agree. But we do have a low-emission energy source, and it's not a miracle, it's just science from the middle of the last century.
I kindly disagree. Solar and wind are marginal, and they have developed a lot thanks to fossil fuels. For society to not collapse, we would need them to scale in a world without fossil fuels. That is very far from being remotely proven. Then you can't control solar and wind (if there is no sun and no wind, you're screwed), so you need something else. If you have that something else, then probably you don't need that much solar/wind. Don't get me wrong: some solar and some wind is probably appropriate in many situations, but that is far from remotely replacing fossil fuels.
Fission is nice, but it takes a lot of time to build new plants (we as a society will be screwed pretty soon, so we don't have a ton of time before deciding to build new ones), but still they won't replace fossil fuels entirely.
Which means that we are going towards a future with less energy. If we screw up (and keep not doing anything like now), we're essentially dead. If we do it really well, we will have some energy, but not as much as today.
Therefore we need to prepare our society to deal with less energy. That has nothing to do with politics, it's just physics. Politics will make the difference between society completely collapsing and society dealing with less energy.
Philosophically, it’s up for debate, but whether they’re served well isn’t as important as if they’re using the products at all. Lowering the average consumer’s waste by just a few grams a year adds up fast.
