Your choices do not exist in a vacuum. Earth is an interconnected community of living and non-living things says ethicist Patrick Effiong Ben of the University of Manchester. African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam and Aïda Terblanché-Greeff have a helpful concept for thinking through the weightiness of your decisions: complementarity.
What we’d need to do is drastic reorganization of how we work and live and manufacture things. Things like:
- Ban advertising globally since it increases consumerism. Regulate long term guarantees and repairs and interchangeable parts
- Abolish all patents, in order to redesign the many thousands of industrial processes, legal hurdles have to be brushed away
- Make industrial meat production illegal
- Redesign cities to have all necessities within walking distance and no through traffic, similar to sovjiet style city planning
- Make climate change denial or obfuscating a crime like hate speech
- Nationalize all oil production
Of course, it’s career suicide to seriously discuss those points. That’s why we still get this inane babble from the “intellectuals”.
The sad truth is we simply don’t live in a reality that ever could have done anything about climate change. So it never even mattered if it was anthroprogenic or not. It was always like a physical impossibility, an economic-political impossibility.
Personal responsibility is really important for the media to focus on to hide the disproportionate share of blame that should be attributed to oil companies and billionaires. If I continue my current lifestyle for another 900 years, I will emit as much carbon as Musk, Bezos, or Putin does today.
I get the argument he’s making, but the comparison between individual emissions, even when taken in large groups, and corporate emissions are so lopsided that these arguments always strike me as underhanded false equivalencies.
For example, Google emitted 14.31 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, while an individual American averaged around 13.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide during the same time period. That’s more than an order of magnitude if I’m doing my math right. Sure, individuals can always do better, but even collective action won’t come close to a single corporation’s emissions. Lay the blame where it actually belongs.
How many times did you ping Google servers today? AI bullshit aside, this is still on us for using all of their services. Yes they need to find a way to deliver their services sustainably but it’s our job to regulate them and force the issue and not just hope corpos do the right thing (they won’t).
Google, and most of today’s tech bros designed their infrastructure to be wasteful and cloud-based. They very well could have designed it with a focus on decentralized equipment that does not need to be running all the time.
Beyond Google searches, just think how much power is wasted in the entire cloud compute pipeline these days, using a mobile device as an example:
- Power to run cell towers, that today consume thousands of watts of power even when idle, and in countries like the US where carriers do not colocate on the same physical hardware, 3x to 6x that.
- Power to run the data link to the cell towers,
- Power to run the infrastructure on the Internet to link that connection to whatever cloud service you use.
- Power to run the datacenter servers and cooling systems that handle your request.
- All of the above is turned on whether you are using it or not.
- Going on, power consumed on your consumption device.
- All the advertising, tracking, and telemetry-gathering that every program on your device, web browser, web sites, services, and operating system perform, eating your battery faster and causing you to have to use more power to recharge more frequently, which also limits the life of your non-removable battery in your compute device.
- All the bandwidth and power consumed with apps being set to auto update, and developers following CI/CD models “because it’s hip” but really because it’s a great way to reset and manipulate reviews on app stores, so apps are pointlessly updated almost daily despite having no significant changes, and your flash is worn, your battery is consumed, more power is consumed across the entire stack, every time this happens.
- In the reverse, apps don’t take advantage of I’ll call it “predatory” caching (even though this would also lead to flash wear) to do something like, “they’re watching episode 1 of a show, whenever I use Internet bandwidth, I’ll also download the next three episodes at the same time to minimize collective power use.” Doing so will use *some *more power, but overall if designed “smart” enough, it would effectively reduce power and bandwidth consumption at inopportune times.
- Oh, and for all this infrastructure, the energy consumed maintaining, repairing, and upgrading this entire stack by humans, electricity, water, and fuel.
- Probably other stuff I forgot.
Totally, individuals contribute to the problem, no disagreement there. I’ve tried to limit how much I use google (mostly for other reasons, but climate impact is one), but I’ve also repeatedly called my congresspeople and asked them to proactively regulate the tech industry and to divest from fossil fuel companies and to stop all drilling domestically. The corporations will never do the right thing on their own, which is kind of the point. Since the systems are set up to excuse bad behavior from the biggest polluters, who do disproportionately more damage than any single person or group of people, blaming individuals is usually a red herring to offset the real responsible parties.
I stopped using google years ago, but my adblock shows that google servers get pinged when browsing the web. Same for AWS, there is no way to avoid it without completely going offline.
That’s fair, I was more referring to the casual internet use so many folks enjoy (YouTube, maps, search for literally everything, all the apps and updates, etc). Denying them revenue through ad blockers and avoiding their direct services gets you pretty close though.
Well done, that’s exactly what those actually responsible and who are causing all the damage, and making all the money, want you to think. It’s worse than useless, it’s actively counterproductive, and serves to keep people busy with superficial nonsense that will never make a dent, while they continue to pillage all the resources.
At best, the person who wrote this demonstrates a vast misunderstanding of the scale of the problem, and either way, their piece serves those in power, not the cause against them.
