An order of magnitude more would be comparable to electricity consumption by households. Its utility feels to me at least an order of magnitude higher than the one of data centers, as sheltering, cleanliness and everyday appliances are much lower in the Maslow pyramid!
Sure, housing takes ~20%. But while you are sitting in your nicely electrified house, watching Netflix, You're still using that datacenter's power. All the people in all their nice electrified houses are looking for electrified entertainment served from datacenters, along with all the remarkable shit computers get used for.
So it's not that housing isn't more important, it's that computing does so much with so little already.
This figure would have to ignore basic things like the connectivity and just be "Netflix server Wattage / user count = everything that isn't your TV". Even with an egregious TV that's still less remaining Wattage than it takes to get the Wi-Fi signal from the AP radio to your TV in your own house.
You definitely should, I know some folks that keep their huge TV on 24/7 because they like the pretty screensaver and photos it shows when idle. These same folks take a lot of other steps in their life to try to help the environment (recycle, drive electric cars, etc) but simple stuff like turning things off completely confounds them.
I'm a Brit. We don't have air con by default. For a few years me and the wife had Floridian relos (Coral Springs). We visited in summer and the house is about 17C (65F). Outside it is at least 35C (95F). The air con unit in the garage is pissing water everywhere and under quite some load.
I did ask why they kept the house so cold and was told "because we can". I got it: they had a really hard start off in life and were now able, through parental sacrifices etc, and their own hard work, be able to basically show off and keep their house cold in summer. I've seen the same in TX - my brother worked for EDS near Fort Worth a while back (20 years back). The attitude is the same there and again, I understand the individual stories of being able to conquer something that they could not growing up. Obviously you also get the "because we can" from multi millionaires too but for what sounds like a different reason but is really the same.
In the UK we constantly get badgered about water use. The fucking stuff falls out of the sky with monotonous regularity. The place is a series of islands. The Atlantic is off to the left and that's a lot of water. What is really wrong is our management of the stuff. There is rather a lot of technical debt in our water management system and it will need real money to fix.
Faffing about a TV isn't going to save the world - that bollocks is for politicians and fossil fuel companies to victim shame consumers instead of giving a shit.
A TV uses eleccy and that can be solar/wind/unicorn farts or good old fashioned gas or liquidised puppies.
My home's underfloor heating is eleccy and hence seriously expensive but I am told that my supplier - Shell Energy - only uses renewables to deliver it (Shell? RLY?). I originally signed up with a "green" supplier but they went bust along with a few other shyster energy suppliers hereabouts when the shit really hit the fan. Ukraine invasion nightmare. OPEC opportunistically taking the piss as usual and massive companies filling their boots post a pandemic.
Fun fact: average household electricity consumption in Florida is among the lowest in the US. [1] This is because heating generally requires more power than air-con, and indeed, the average British home uses 12,000 kWh on heating, vs. on the order of 8,000 for air-conditioning the the average Florida home. This is despite Florida using 4x more power for air-con than the US average, and that the average Florida home is a lot larger than an average UK home.
Actually, your reference [1] states the opposite: Florida's "annual electricity expenditures are 40% more than the U.S. average"... which is caused by air conditioning.
I think you meant to state that Florida's energy (not electricity) expenditures are amongst the lowest in the US.
Sorry, you're right: FL has low energy consumption but high electricity consumption. The point still stands though, it's still better for the environment to live in FL and use air-con than to live in the UK and heat your house through the winter.
A typical 55” TV uses ~100 watts. That’s roughly 10 LED bulbs. That’s ~900 KWh/year
A Tesla model S has between 60-100kwH battery depending on the model.
So a TV can be powered for 1/10th-1/20th a year with one Tesla charge.
In the US, our electricity generated ~0.85lbs of carbon emissions per kWh. Some places (California) can run part of the day entirely renewably. The EPA says a gallon of gas generates 20 lbs of carbon. A single car tank of 20g generates 400lbs, while a Tesla would generate 85lbs, and a year of TV would generate 765lbs. a model s Tesla has a 400m range, while the average American car has 22mpg, so that’s why I picked a 20g tank.
If running the TV 24/7 stops 2 trips a year by making the home more pleasant, it’s a carbon positive. If those same people who like the “pretty photos” drive an electric car, each “tank equivalent” is 1/8th a year of TV.
My country (just to the north of yours) produced ~0.0551lbs of carbon emissions per kWh. That works out to less than 50lbs, less than a Tesla charge for you.
I certainly don't have my TV on all the time, but I don't think much of my energy consumption as it is predominantly renewable and ultimately the superfluous usage is negated by any unnecessary driving due to my car's combustion engine. If anything, the larger concern is almost always expense, as prices here are roughly the same as there.
I don't have much of a point to make, just thought it was interesting to compare. My peers and I are pretty worried about the situation in the US, though.
> My peers and I are pretty worried about the situation in the US, though
TBH I'm not too worried. Not in the head-in-sand way, but in the optimism of the future way. The US largely has issues with coordination but tends to lurch in the right direction on things like this once momentum builds. The economics of it will inevitably lead to the healthy outcome, and enough people care to pressure big industries (slowly...). We've been rapidly converting to renewable energy lately, so we're starting to make big moves in the right direction. Thankfully we're a rich nation, and somehow have endless money to burn. It's hard to coordinate, since we have a geographically large nation to power, and an unfathomable appetite to use energy.
I'm jealous of your nation, which seems to have a sensible populace and leadership, relatively high wealth, and a relatively constrained geography with ample sources of power.
For reference, the OLED LG G3 55-inch TV is rated for a power consumption of 375 W, but that rating typically indicates a worst case scenario (eg. maximum brightness, all-white screen, loudest volume, etc). So your 100 W figure is probably about right.
What’s the relative impact of a mile driven vs. an hour of the tv being on?
Edit: Hmmm. According to gpt-4, the average TV would incur about .02 kg of CO2 per hour of usage, assuming a typical electrical grid mix in the US. While it estimates that driving 1 mile emits avout 0.1 kg of CO2.
If that’s the case, 5 hours of TV is roughly equal 1 mile of driving. Interesting.
Of course, if the grid has a higher percentage of renewables or the car is electric, that changes things.
How much does turning the TV off reduce energy consumption? I know some appliances waste nearly as much power in "standby" mode as they do during operation.
Still wasteful and frivolous. Imagine how many more people the globe could support if we stopped being so greedy and thoughtless with entertaining ourselves.
My point was more that we would collectively be much worse off without household consumption than without data centers (so no Netflix, no smartly managed grid etc.)
Funnily enough I’ve really only heard it referred to as “Maslow’s hierarchy” and not a pyramid specifically until this thread. Which appears to be proper accreditation.
In Norway I have often heard it referred to as “Maslows behovspyramide”, which translates to “Maslow's Pyramid of Needs.”
Indeed, even one of the greatest encyclopaedias in Norway mentions “Maslows behovspyramide” in their article about Maslow. https://snl.no/Abraham_Maslow (article is in Norwegian.)
30ys ago my mother spent an hour a day vacuuming the house. Now she has an internet connected robot, and spends an hour once a week. She’s doing better than she was 30y ago, even if she didn’t think she was doing bad 30y ago.
TBF that robo vacuum didn't need a datacenter to function. I had a Neato Botvac from pre-connected models that worked fine until the laser turret failed and I haven't been able to get around to repairing it yet. Roombas were around for like a decade before they started getting connected.
Django allowed me to fill the back end dev role with 10% of my time for a project that has been wildly successful at my employer (now worth multiples of billions) for five years. We’re only now getting to where the Django admin tools aren’t quite enough.
Seriously. For some internal process tools, Django admin with custom models registered gets me 90% of what I need. The remaining 10% usually gets covered in a custom command that I can run from the shell
Yes, do not let the HN anti-exception crusaders gaslight you. I still remember when I "discovered" exceptions in programming - "this is so much cleaner!"
All this theoretical mumbo jumbo is just noise. Very few of us are dealing with the type of programming every day where exceptions can actually become a noticeable bottleneck.
At GreenGo, we are trying to re-enchant local tourism for Europeans so that they are less inclined to take the plane => changing behaviours, not improving technology. We want to do that by making local destinations more desirable and making figuring out which destinations are accessible with low carbon transportation much easier.
So far we have built an airbnb-like platform (https://www.greengo.voyage) with a host selection component, but we have big plans to differentiate thanks to a recent 1.6M funding round. People who want to embark on this mission don't hesitate to contact me at felix@greengo.voyage :-)
Amazing. I wish there were more discussions about this most important topic on HN, and more generally on describing how we are depleting earth’s resources and dispersing them everywhere, transforming it into a giant pile of garbage (gaseous garbage in the case of GHG). Sadly, climate change is not even the only imminent threat, when 60% of vertebrae have disappeared in 50 years for example, among many others…
We need to invent a new storytelling for society to have an organized energetic and material de-growth, so that we don’t have to undergo a disorganized one, forced upon us by nature, that would be orders of magnitude worse.
Technology can be a huge help in organizing this de-growth, so I guess HN could be a great forum for collectively imagining how to do it!
De-growth means lowering humanity's total energy output. Lowering our total energy output means lowering humanity's average life expectancy, quality of life, and the size of our overall economic pie. These are all negative side-effects with comparable potential for societal destabilization as the effects of rising sea levels or increasing global temperatures.
There are solutions to climate change that avoid de-growth and its many negative consequences, such as increasing our investment in nuclear energy. Some states already see things this way, such as China, where the government has announced plans to build 150 new reactors by 2050:
De-growth shouldn't significantly lower average life expectancy - after all in developed nations a high percentage of deaths are due to lifestyle decisions that are only possible because of our high use of technology and exogenous energy sources. As long as we still retain the knowledge on how to treat most diseases, and the physical infrastructure of our health-care systems, there's good reason to suppose average human health/life expectancy might well improve with the right sort and amount of de-growth.
"Quality of life" is much harder to judge. It would definitely feel like a step down for many people used to just having everything and anything they want delivered to their door at the click of a mouse button. And it's true there's no good example that I know of a large population smoothly transitioning into a lifestyle with a significantly lower material standard of living. But I'm not convinced it couldn't be achieved in such a way that most people would come to accept that we've gained more than we've lost.
Our ability to transform matter at always bigger scales and rates, which is proportional to the energy we master, is what has driven the current environmental crisis (were not all the imminent existential threats are climate change, although climate change is the most obvious one).
If we keep the same consumerist and expansionist culture and add more energy to the mix (even if it’s climate-friendly energy), i.e. more capacity to extract resources deeper and deeper, become more dependent on them and disperse them in our constructions, devices, ground, water and atmosphere, what do you think will happen?
Energy will be key in amortizing the pains of de-growth, but de-growth will happen on a planet with finite resources, whether we want it or not.
We have no issue with finite resources. We have plenty of energy and raw materials for everything we want for a long time.
The challenge is working out how to access those resources in ways that don’t harm our lives. That is a technically possible challenge, but the problem is that it is much more efficient in the short term to harvest resources in a destructive manner. Without some sort of collective action, the destructive manner simply outcompetes the sustainable methods.
Agreed about the fact that collective action will be the solution.
But about resources it is true that we can harvest them in a less destructive manner, will that be enough? Or do we also need to harvest less of them?
The gap we need to bridge is to harvest in such a less destructive manner that 1) they can regenerate themselves at the same rate as we harvest them, making our civilisation actually sustainable 2) they don't harm us directly indeed.
Can we bridge that gap by harvesting in a less destructive manner?
1) How is the phosphorus - vital for our current food system - that we harvest in mines concentrated for us during billions of years going to regenerate? Same for oil, gas, rare metals, all the silicon and metal that we disperse in our devices etc etc going to regenerate themselves? Should we bet on our ability to figure that out in the next 30-50 years?
2) so far the rate at which we harm ourselves due to the amount of garbage we throw at nature (i.e. everything we make, build and reject) has only increased with progress. Should we bet we are going to reverse that just with technology in the next 30-50 years?
If we lose the bet, the consequences are never seen in history.... I'd rather bet on more reliable methods to survive...
Which resource is really limited? Raw materials are rarely destroyed, only converted to other things... if you have enough energy, you can reuse them... so energy is the limiting factor, and there is PLENTY of energy to harvest.
1) Energy is the limiting factor IF we decide to do different things than we have done so far. So far what we have done with energy is mainly deplete and destroy things. In other words: we are very clumsy in the way we control matter, we cause tremendous side effects with our actions that are going to end up swallowing us back into the abyss if we don't change.
2) Energy being the limiting factor is in itself a huge problem, given the amount of energy your problem requires: the amount of energy required to get the original quality raw materials back from an iPhone is orders of magnitude bigger than the one that was needed to extract them from nature in the first place. It seems irrational to bet on this as a means for getting to a sustainable model in the short term (30-50 years).
This is an unscientific viewpoint. The current climate crisis has been driven by man-made carbon emissions. Our ability to transform matter at always-bigger scales, or merely at the scale of our current rate of consumption (see declining global fertility), does not rely solely on carbon-emitting forms of energy production.
> Lowering our total energy output means lowering humanity's average life expectancy
This is totally illogical -> oversized cars and consumption of meat are the biggest consumers of energy, and they only cause death. They serve no practical purpose society wide.
Rather, what we need is lowering humanity's total energy input. That same approach has been preached by MBA business types for decades, under the moniker "efficiency". I don't see why we can't do for energy efficiency what we've been doing for labour efficiency for decades, but it does require a more comprehensive management focus.
I don't see a-priori how "de-growth" should lead to lowering living standards, other than by implication of the (IMHO ill-chosen) word.
I'm pretty sure the average person in my country consume at least half the average american does, and we still have a better life expectancy. And i'm not sure, even not accounting for the hapiness treadmill, that the QOL is higher for the average american. Depends on your hobbies i guess?
Your reasoning is flawed, technically if we make things last longer, be repairable, skip vacations on the other side of the planet and stop buying so much cheap plastic crap we would most definitely "degrow" but the quality of life would at least remain unchanged.
Capitalism is a beast that needs constant feeding, it doesn't do much good in many cases, it's just growth for the sake of it.
The vast bulk of global energy production does not go towards "cheap plastic crap" or vacationing. It goes towards transportation (which affects the base cost of practically all economic activity), industrial uses that are essential to healthcare, construction, and agriculture, and the heating and cooling of our living spaces and places of work. These expenditures will only increase as the world's human population increases to a projected ceiling of around 10 billion. In addition, replacements for "cheap plastic crap" may consume more energy to produce, even if their production emits less carbon.
There are certainly efficiency gains to be had. They will not be made overnight. America's housing stock alone can't be replaced in a week, or a year, or a decade with hyper-insulating, low-emission construction materials. Changing from one mode of construction, consumption, or production to another has an energy cost, too.
Kate Soper makes the case that quality of life would improve significantly if we took these steps. The carbon-intensive "good life" leaves us time poor and stressed.
You can argue how much a change in quality of life it is, but not being able to travel or buy cheap plastic things is certainly a reduction in quality of life.
About transport - we can always switch to greener alternatives. Forbid oil-based flying, and the need to travel will bring new solutions.
Plastic is a crap and poison from the time of manufacture, not enhancement of quality of life. There is nothing (except medical equipment maybe) positive about it.
You aren't going to get anyone to embrace de-growth by telling stories. Instead, find ways that technology can enable continued growth while simultaneously decreasing environmental impact. If you force people to pick between global warming versus a major step down in living standards, a lot of them are just going to say screw it and pick global warming.
Everyone tells themselves stories. Like « what’s cool in life is to try and be a billionaire so I can get a private jet and everybody treat me like a king », or, at the level of a country « we should build entire new cities and airports and stimulate growth to increase GDP which is the main metric measuring our success » or, if you are an economist: “what nature has concentrated for us for free for millions of years, like oil, clean air, water, sand for construction etc, is free”.
I’m not talking about telling stories to people but about changing theses stories they already tell themselves that have been implanted into them by a system
Absolutely agree, I didn’t want people to fixate on this fact so I preferred focusing on the positive and not mention it, but technology alone without deciding collectively how to repurpose it (this is a huge philosophical/cultural change where we need to decide together that black Friday and going to space for fun are lame, for example) is not going to be the solution.
As you said so far we have observed it has only made the problem worse, year after year after year! And with the little margin we have left, it’s irrational to take the bet it’ll change by itself and just “improving”.
I think one of the challenges that the movement faces is that since the 1960's, there have been many disaster claims - sometimes bordering on the fantastical - and they simply don't come to pass.
Not sure why this go-around should be given more credibility.
Let me give you an example. Back in the 1990s the ozone hole was considered a serious problem. Scientists argued that with unchecked emission of CFCs the hole will grow larger and cause serious harm.
Limits on CFCs were implemented, the hole stopped growing.
Pfft, scientists, warning against a disaster, which never comes because we worked to prevent it. What do they know?
Because climate models have largely delivered accurate predictions since the 1970s.
> In general, past climate model projections evaluated in this analysis were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST warming in the years after publication. While some models showed too much warming and a few showed too little, most models examined showed warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between projected and observationally informed estimates of forcing were taken into account. We find no evidence that the climate models evaluated in this paper have systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over their projection period. The projection skill of the 1970s models is particularly impressive given the limited observational evidence of warming at the time, as the world was thought to have been cooling for the past few decades (e.g., Broecker, 1975; Broecker, 2017).
For the past 20 to 30 years, the climate science community has been consistently nothing but EXTREMELY conservative in all their predictions in order to not being labeled as alarmist. Newsflash: they were STILL labeled alarmist AND also ignored because whatever happens in 50 years is Someone Else's Problem, can't be bothered to think beyond the next quartal or election cycle. Look! A shiny new thing! Consume! Consume! Now it's becoming clear that almost everything is happening way faster than the conservative models estimated. Humanity just. can't. win. against itself.
> conservative in all their predictions in order to not being labeled as alarmist. Newsflash: they were STILL labeled alarmist
It doesn't matter how reasonable you try to sound, some people will still hate what you stand for. They don't require logic to hate you, and they don't require the claims against you to be true. And if you compromise your principles to appeal to these people, you will loose support from both sides.
So you might as well stick to your guns and put these people on blast.
Using the past to try and predict the future, in particular unusual and impactful events is a reliable way to constantly miss the main events of history.
Also there is no equivalent to the current disaster claim… and contrary to previous ones you can already observe the beginning of the effects of the current one… even though we are just at the beginning of its exponential-driven effects.
Long story short: that’s fine if you are still skeptical we’ll start working on it and in 5-10 years the people who are still skeptical will join us once they are more convinced by what’s happening in the world, down to their neighborhood.
Maybe we because we can observe these disasters happening in real time?
I find it absolutely wild that you can claim not to see climate disasters that are actively unfolding around us.
The first thing that really woke me up was the sudden loss of global sea ice in 2016. Take a look at the arctic death spiral if you aren't familiar already [0]. In 2012 if you mentioned that the response was "well yea but the antarctic is growing!!". There were good explanations for why that what happening during global warming, but that's no longer necessary since the antarctic is also declining rapidly [1].
Then there's lake Mead. I can't imagine you haven't been paying attention to what's happening there but we're on the path to reaching dead pool in a few years [2]. And yes, this is also due to poor resource management, but it is exacerbated by climate change and desertification of the region.
Then there's the amazon rain forest, which was once a carbon sink, becoming a net carbon emitter [3]
But the most important part of all of this, is that these events (which represent just a few examples of the impacts of climate changes) are not the new normal. Because the rate co2[4] and ch4[5] are being emitted is accelerating we're no where near a new stability point. All of the things we see now are just the beginning of a process that will only continue to accelerate each year for the rest of your life.
And that's just what we can observe and predict. Thwaites glacier, for example, will very likely collapse at some point in the next 100 years. We have no idea when, but when it does it will cause massive and near instant sea level rise. Far more concerning is that this tons of geological evidence that there are feed back triggers that cause rapid rise in GHGs and temperature and we don't know exactly when we might cross these. The book Under a Green Sky, by paleontologist Peter Ward lays out rather convincing evidence that the majority of extinction events have been caused by rapid climate change triggered by changes in CO2.
I'm not sure why you don't give these things more credibility.
I mean if we're going for snarky takedowns how about "if you identify most strongly with the attention-seeking liar in the story I don't think I need your advice."
But more seriously you can take more than one lesson from a tale. "A threat may be real even if the one relaying it lacks credibility" is not a neat or satisfying morality lesson to feed to children, but it remains true in my experience.
