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.
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.
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.
Yeah, my computer would definitely be wasting less energy than running a car for equivalent useful work.
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)
Capitalism isn’t the problem. Consumers are.
Yeah… fuck that.
Why do I feel like this sign eats more energy per day than my phone?
Not really. Smartphones, tablets use virtually no power compared to other sources. This looks like BS.
Maybe stop giving all the electricity to the AI datacenters then you bloody gits.
Removed by mod
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.
An ad like this uses about 1920W constantly, your phone uses about 10W when active and in use. Lets say your city has 100k inhabitants and all use their phone right now than thats 1MW or about a 1/5 wind turbine. So you break even with 521 of these adverts. While I can only see how they run ~100 of these ads for a city that size, we can also roughly estimate that people “only” have a screen on time that matches this figure. So yeah, they are roughly using the same amount of energy to display the ads compared to the problem they are trying to solve.
In a sane world they would use all the effort to build a single wind turbine and then shut the fuck up.
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
This is absolute bs. You want me to feel bad about my screen time when AI data centers are taking up all the water?
My mom used to say that “money doesn’t grow on trees” because we didn’t have enough money to go around. Is this poster implying we may run out of WiFi if we don’t limit our screen time? Did it become finite?
ETA: If WiFi doesn’t grow on trees, then I don’t really need trees for WiFi, so if I just want WiFi why do I care about the climate? /s
Im fairly certain wood-burning generators exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Group
The uk government keeps giving them renewable energy subsidies because trees can regrow but ignore the fact that they cut down trees the other side of the world to burn them here. It releases all the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere and then they capture a small percentage of it back and pretend to be the good guys.
