I am writing from a decidedly un-Christmasy culture.. They aren't Christians, 97% of them anyways, and they aren't that consumeristic, although that is changing (spreading like a flower scented cancer from the malls of the capital city)... but they aren't my readers in any large measure I would guess either, and my readers are staring down the barrel of a loaded 'fun gun' called 'Christmas in America' right about now.
I get it, I grew up with it, I wanted my Red Rider BB Gun once, and I felt no shame in the filthy orgy of misinterpreted Christianity and greed it was...it was fun, some of the presents did change my life and the life of my family and friends for the better, and it was one of the only times of the year that anything approaching reverence crept into the cocky wreck we called a family. And I get the Christianity part too.. I took it quite seriously for a while...and I like to think that my now South Park version of Jesus would be kind of shrugging with amused chagrin at it all...
So my defense of Christmas aside... it's fair to say that something much maligned as 'Consumerism' is a main driver of many of our Environmental woes. It's 'consumerism' when other people do it.... when we do it, it's the Christmas Spirit... I ain't casting stones... but all this buying stuff, stuff beyond food and basic necessities, a nice example of how adaptive and successful our cultures have been, is really screwing things up in the planet department, in general (again, no pointed fingers... we cool? We cool...).
One huge example is electronic goods. I am pretty sure although you don't need one to survive, they don't issue them to Buddhist Monks, that your nose is buried in some light producing screen spitting out info-tainment as we speak... in fact, I can almost guarantee it...
There are perhaps 2 billion of the things, maybe more, for a population of 7 billion... and they take a lot of resources to both produce and run... just think about that.. 2 Billion Computers, when you could count them on your hands after World War II.
They came into my house, perhaps at Christmas, as a way for us to keep up with a trend... this was the early 80's. They were cumbersome and labor intensive ( We had a Texas Instruments) but you could smell something amazing was happening...
I watched the first MTV video from a spot on the carpet where we used to plug the TI into the TV, next to the spot where we dragged the phone to drop onto the modem... Media was coming on strong..
The First MTV Video: Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
Imagine the combo of these three instruments I was crawling behind the TV to make work by unplugging the VCR (the Fourth) and plugging in the TI... You don't have to imagine it, it's 2 billion strong.... and you are nose into one now... how did I know?!
Now when this all first started to happen, it was the Government using these huge IBM mainframes to do what at the time were considered huge calculations.
These things needed their own Power Plants.. then Cray Supercomputers helped us refine the Nuclear Age (so last century!) and perhaps the energy demand was dropping, but it was well past affordability for the householders of the world. Then the personal computer came in, and made it easy to do so many things, from Skyping relatives across the world for Christmas, to making Christmas plans, to shopping for said Christmas, to even getting directions to the relatives in Jersey, where you have to go for Christmas even though you hate to, so you used to print them out because you always intentionally forget the confusing route, and now your phone just tells you...
All that computing, it takes energy...
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
like a brain needs vitamin B to keep up with the endless stimulation (Anyone want to get a Pizza?.. they have Christmas specials! Reindeer Sausage and Red and Green Peppers!). Multiply it by two Billion, and the energy demands likely exceed those of some large fraction of the smallest countries on earth ( I am guessing.. it's Christmas, I don't want to do the math... but imagine an average of say just 100 watts per computer, x 2 billion... agh... moving on...).
You can imagine the demands this places on energy grids, and we all know that unless you live in Iceland, your grid is doing something bad... heck, even in Iceland, you flood valleys to get 3/4 of your power, so let's make it a blanket statement. The US only get's 20% of it's grid power from non carbon sources, and they still have environmental consequences and costs in production, so yeah, your computer, it's doing something somewhere, as we speak, unless you are powered by solar, and planted a tree and remedied a rare earths mineral mine to cover your footprint.. The idea of coal is a double whammy on Christmas (My jerk sister used to love to stuff it in my stocking, just to let me know what Santa might be too nice to say...) so I won't bring up that depressing subject, but you better live in Hawaii or maybe Puerto Rico to not think you aren't getting some juice from it in the collective right now.
So let me bring up a guy named Steve Jobs... he's no longer as concerned about his legacy I would guess.. because he's dead... if you didn't know, you must not own a computer, so I will assume you do. The guy was no Jesus, he was a businessman... He made addictive little contraptions, and leveraged insecurity, pretension, and a love of media to make money selling them to you. Bill Gates, who is still alive, did something a bit different.. he might have had less ideas, but he had some slightly more Utopian visions, no matter how much the marketing of Mr. Jobs was swaddled in Utopianism.. and is now spending his days of idly pursuing a sainthood of sorts. Those of you on a more modern Version of Windows wish he was as obsessive as Jobs, because Windows sucks without Gates there to supervise, but this accentuates my point that although no saint, Steve Jobs was the ever acclaimed perfectionist and made a good product. His single minded pursuit left something else by the wayside too... the Environment.. which is why he will seem an unlikely hero in a few lines. Maybe it is just the scrutiny it gets from it's ultra hip bloggy mc-graduate degree customers (although mac's increasing popularity is watering that gene pool down a bit these days.. yup, your tacky housewife cousin who Facebook posts too many pics of her kids has one... the sorority girl.. yup.. her), but Mac might have come in a lot of colors, but very few, Jobs included, saw it a green. They got Flack for not pushing for recyclable or sustainable materials, and more flack for the pollution caused by it's Southern China factories and the methods used to extract and refine metals used in it's production. He was single minded in pursuit of sales, and if that collaterally led to greenness, he was all for it, but it is my assumption that Jobs didn't want to get side tracked by making bamboo and banana leaf computers when that in and of itself would have required a pretty huge and un-demanded investment. But, with market demand, he did start another revolution, a word I begrudgingly use because it used to make me cringe whenever the Beatles Song of the same name was blasphemed from it's sacrosanctity by being used in his campaigns to sell his idiot boxes with extra buttons...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXhtFik-vI
sorry, it was Nike, but same difference to some of us..
anyhow, so I am about to describe something that will seem small.. it is small, but multiply it by 2 billion, and it isn't so small. Let's start by describing how it was small in a good way. I am talking about the IPad... what it is, is a solid state computer, and by solid state I mean no moving parts. it's magic is that it's just a series of circuits.. it's somehow our privilege that Planck's Constant gave us RAM that could be hand portable without ROM before the guy who knew what to do with it died... make it snazzy and give it a really nice touch screen. If the last sentence went past your head, this one will make sense to anyone who passed high school physics or pays attention to plugs or their electric bill. These Tablets that Steve Jobs introduced, because they have no moving parts, use something like 1/10 of the energy of their recent predecessors. I'm talking about Tablets, which were led by the Ipad, the newest incarnation of the Computer Revolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9qbgQdAxls
This was under 4 years ago, and I would have to guess that IPad's and their new derivatives, the Tablets, number in the hundreds of millions today.
I had one for a bit.. a good buddy made me get one so I could communicate easily during a trip abroad. Addictive little thing. I had to literally destroy it to go cold turkey. It didn't brake easily either ( I was literally in a war zone, so shooting it like Elvis would have been pretty dramatically misinterpreted by the soldiers guarding my hotel.) I had to bounce it against about 4 walls (making NEWS: North, East, West, South) because it was so solid state. Before that act, I could literally never disconnect from my wired state.. I could wipe and keep watching The Daily Show at the same time without even putting it down.. I don't know how to explain it's power better than that... Jobs was plunging his system deep into my psyche, and pulling cash out as well...which didn't escape the observations of the South Park Guys:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e01-humancentipad
But my addiction aside, let's go back to the whole solid state thing again... Remember hard drives? They spun.. they moved.. the required power to do so, and Desktops... they had a big ol' TV attached to them.. must have used 50-100 watts or more...gone...now even mouses are obsolete.. not that they used much power.. they were, well, mouse-like, dainty in their consumption... but now, again.. obsolete with the touch screen, well, credit to the touch pad, but still an investment and a power user... but the touch screen? the coffin is sealed...
So right before my NEWS incident, I left my charger behind in a major city.. like cars before the gas crisis, I had never really wondered how much power they used because it never was an issue.. no one thinks about efficiency in computers.. we need them too badly to question them...we take what they give us... but Jobs, in his pursuit of something better.. the reliability and hand held possibilities of a tablet, not to mention the battery life possible in 2010 (the beginning of the age of Lithium) addressed this problem without us even knowing it..
Where I was looking for Ipad Chargers, I was in the land beyond them.. the city I had just left, was a city of 3 million, and had two mac outlets.. I went into a province with no paved roads leading to it, but due to the miracles of the Cell phone and cheap Chinese crap being everywhere, I could buy IPhone chargers there.. it created about half the charge, but it was enough to trickle charge my IPad.. now the big moments.. how much does an IPhone charge on.. 5 watts... the Ipad.. about 10... 10 watts.. no, not 10 kilowatts, which might have been what the first plasma screens needed.. There are clock radios that run on more than 10 watts, and they sure as heck don't do what this thing can.. it's pretty amazing.. and it uses next to no power.. it runs on about 2.5 watts
http://techlogg.com/2011/03/qa-whats-ipad-2s-power-consumption/2322
that's an almost negligible amount of power.. there were too many things to sell it on to have this be a selling point... to even talk about power consumption almost breaks that magic.. implies limitations and weakness.. Jobs might have been right to never mention it.. but he has launched a revolution for real.. This whole commercialism thing that is slowly sinking the planet... there are two routes out... Luddite solutions (make some NEWS!) and innovation... efficiency was an afterthought here, but if you do the math, every minute that you are curled up with your IPad in bed instead of sitting in front of your desktop or laptop, you are saving the planet, relatively.... and any time you ask a question of your IPhone instead of your laptop or desktop.. again.. triple bonus points.. unless you have it sitting asleep but on all the time, waiting to be cranked up if the tablet or phone stops entertaining you... then you suck!
I wonder how many hours it takes to get past the environmental costs of the production of that devious little Monolith (My god.. it's full of stars!) and be in the black on power usage... you could run it for over 2000 hours without incurring 1 dollar's charge on your power bill, in California where energy costs are the highest in the Contiguous US states by some rough math.
And the world has followed suit.. Samsung and Asus and now Chromebooks are all essentially IPad variants.. no moving parts but the buttons, using 1/10 if not 1/40th or 1/100th of the power of the device they replace...
So since Santa and Jesus made peace, consume away if it brings these kinds of (relative) savings.. not Black Friday savings, but black coal savings.. leaving it in the ground and not in the environment, from China to Charlestown, WV!
..... wait.. you didn't watch that.. it was literally the first South Park even made by Parker and Stone as film Students at UC Boulder..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSQczYEeB2w
watch guilt free.. on a tablet, of course... you info-tainment gobbling consumer.. just don't shoot yer eye out!
Oh and...
there might even be innovations in the big screen category to come, just in case you can't give it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED
http://www.oled-info.com/flexible-oled
Merry Christmas Every One!
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