Ebooks and ereader help save the planet
By Paul Biba
From an article in the Toronto Star:
In his 2003 thesis, University of Michigan student Greg Kozak studied the life-cycle assessment of paper books versus e-books. He found that a paper book created four times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader.
Print books needed three times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books.
In another study out of the University of Berkeley, reading a newspaper electronically released 32-140 times less CO2 and used 27 times less water.
For more information see Resource Shelf here.
March 8th, 2010 at 11:37 am
This argument is pointless when you realize that the claims of for man-created global warming are joining the following:
1. Eugenics in the 1920s (‘the menace of the feebleminded’) accompanied by forced sterilization and Margaret Sanger’s birth control clinics targeting poor, immigrant neighborhoods.
2. The alleged failure of capitalism and the need for authoritarian, centralized economies (1930s) during the Great Depression. We were lucky, all we got was the New Deal. Germany got Hitler. Europe got WWII. The Soviet Union got the brutal Ukrainian genocide, only slight less murderous than Hitler’s war on the Jews.
3. Overpopulation (1960s), and a new Ice Age along with resource depletion (1970s). The goal of the former was federal funding for programs to lower black birth rates and legalized abortion.
All were lies driven more by political agendas and convert bigotry than science, although all found plenty of support (and even consensus) among scientist. Try to find a scientist, for instance, who was an actual opponent of eugenics in the 1920s. The only real vocal criticism came from G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils and Chesterton was a Catholic writer.
A good general guideline is to ask yourself it an idea is popular among Ivy League professors and if is being loudly trumpeted by the NY Times. If both are true, then you can rest assured that the alleged crisis doesn’t exist.
If you follow the British press, you’d realize that the climate warming hypothesis is in rapid collapse, driven by leaked emails and other revelations that demonstrate that the top global warming proponents believed their own claims so little that they cooked the books, concealed data and brutally attempted to silence opponents.
Get a Kindle or the new iPad if you want, but if you can’t afford either, don’t fret that you’re somehow an enemy of the planet. We’ve actually been in a very slight cooling trend for fifteen years and if the Medieval Warming is any indication, a warmer planet would actual be better for people. We should almost regret it isn’t happening, not worry that it is.
March 9th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
@Mike:
There is absolutely nothing that “links” the environmental movement, and the evidence of man-made global warming, with the programs you listed above. Trying to lump it into other ideas, however misguided or wrong-headed, is applying obvious scare-tactics in an attempt to “ridicule” the idea. Alas, it won’t work.
Ignoring the science does not change the fact that man is warming the planet and damaging it, no matter how much the business-based pundits and lobbyists (who have a vested and selfish financial interest in the status quo, and couldn’t care less what kind of a planet we leave for our descendants) would deny it.
The fact that you threw in overpopulation as a sample of “lies and propaganda” suggests that you are simply regurgitating someone else’s agendas, and that they clearly cannot see what is right in front of their faces. Overpopulation is not only the biggest problem mankind faces, it is the direct cause of almost all of its other problems.
Preserving our ecosystems by choosing lower-impact electronic hardware over heavily-polluting paper harvesting and pulp manufacture makes perfect sense to everyone… except those who are part of the tree-harvesting and manufacturing process. There is nothing crazy or half-baked about it.
March 10th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Obviously, the truth lies between the two extremes of burying your head and watching for a falling sky. Overpopulation was a problem, but technology evolved to the point where we can sustain the current levels. Similarly, there is strong evidence for man-made global warming, but that leaves out two very important points:
1) Technology has evolved to the point where we can cheaply counter-act the warming effects we’ve had (admittedly, by dumping “scary” chemicals into the upper atmosphere).
2) Our warming has all but canceled out what was supposed to be a global cooling phase that would have been very hostile toward humans (especially at the current population levels). The concern is that when we turn the corner back to the natural warming phase, our effect on the planet will be felt all too keenly.
Having said that, encouraging people to consume less energy and fewer material resources (i.e., to become more efficient) is obviously a good thing(tm). The scary aspect is fear-mongers attempting to use this to force changes in quality of life or cripple certain governments. (Steve Jordan’s Evoguía has a side-plot where “carbon credits” are used to cripple the United States government; in reality, you typically see plans by first-world countries that would put developing countries at a disadvantage.)
For a concise and interesting book on the science of global climate change and theories relating to human impact, check out “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum” by William F. Ruddiman (unfortunately not available in eBook format).
March 10th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Steve, do not feed the trolls. Read this and this first.