[huskerlug] Re: A 100 watt laptop requires 960 lbs of coal per year!
- From: "Charles Leslie" <charles.leslie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: huskerlug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 11:23:00 -0500
I love how this topic of unplugging your laptops has grown into a full
blown global warming debate. I had a feeling it would be going there
when I read the first message.
I've noticed that computer geeks and scientists seem to have a really
strong opinion over global warming, I think it's fantastic that there
are people working hard to uncover the facts about it, as humanity has
a lot to gain from their efforts.
This debate, in particular, is a really interesting one, and people
love to argue about the implications with a high level of emotional
passion. Anyone can see, by simply looking around that humans are
having a dramatic impact on the environment. To deny that we aren't
having an effect on climate change is to go against obvious facts.
However, the hard part of the debate is how to quantify the
significance of those facts. How much humans are impacting things,
compared to how they would be occurring naturally. What practicality
does human impacted climate have on the world at large? This is the
point of debate, and it's still mostly unresolved, because the debate
is so short sighted.
Personally I can take a rather nihilistic approach to the matter,
since how I personally behave towards this topic isn't very relevant
at this point in time, which is why discussions about it with such
zeal surprise me.
I think the culmination of this debate will either be that our impact
on the environment is either significant, or not significant.
Following the utilitarian ethical principle, I think that most average
people will only act on this matter when we can show that energy
consumption, and global warming is having a negative impact on their
own personal lives. Until then, it will mostly remain a debate for
intellectuals.
That said, if we want to do something about this issue before it
becomes a problem of personal-impact significance, we need to focus
our resources on increasing the awareness and education of the general
population at large, and give them a reason to care about humanity as
a whole, because of the impact it will have on them as an individual.
Until we fix humans as a species, in terms of education and
temperament, these problems will continue until the only solution is
mass death, war, and starvation as we battle over resources that
weren't conserved, or used to fuel the advancement of knowledge into
new resources to replace them.
So really the issue here isn't global warming. It's human behavior,
economics, and the individualist ethic. To fix these problems go way
beyond unplugging your laptop. The masses in capitalist servitude
aren't going to do much about these problems during their day jobs,
until the entities that employ them can no longer afford them, and
they are starving in the streets without energy or resources.
The issue may resolve naturally as a result of competition for scarce
resources. The question is how peaceful or violent that competition
might be.
In the end, the only way to prevent global warming, or any kind of
ecological destruction by humans, is to fix society, and human
civilization. That's the place to start, because personal efforts to
unplug aren't going to have much impact on the world at large.
On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Jim Worrest <jworrest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I didn't justify it, I just pointed out, that won't make much difference what
> we do, and it had better for economic reasons even more than ecological ones.
> Our neighbor to the south Mexico raise huge clouds of smoke that can be seen
> from space when they burn their fields. They really don't care much about
> the
> health of Texans. This has nothing to do with oil at all, in this case.
>
> I'm rather tired of all responsibility rests on the U.S. Perhaps we do need
> better batteries, etc. so they watch more television, play with Nintendoes
> and
> stop setting Mexico on fire? ---Jim
----
Husker Linux Users Group mailing list
To unsubscribe, send a message to huskerlug-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
with a subject of UNSUBSCRIBE
Other related posts:
