yearly iphone replacement costs $1 a day. Cheaper than your daily latte. Hate to break it to you, but $1 a day won't save the earth.
If you instead gave that $1USD/day to whatever carbon ofsetting startup out there you would neutralize your carbon footprint and even go into "negative emissions" territory.
So yes, that dollar could save the earth.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/the-biggest-problem-with-...
Anyone could, thus, opine in the opposite direction and we're back to where we started.
To be fair she raises some valid points but they all revolve around tree-based carbon offsetting.
On the last couple years, there has been an explosion in carbon removal techniques and startups who, as the term says, literally and measurably take carbon away from the atmosphere. I believe this to be the kind of solution that makes sense, and, regarding costs, it is still within the realm of "offset your personal emissions for $1/day".
Citation needed.
I am familiar with the field and can tell you that there's plenty of honest, transparent companies working on this.
I'm actually looking for ways to offset my emissions, so I'd really appreciate some pointers if you're familiar with the space.
One of the most mature ones, though, is Climeworks [1], and you can buy offsets from them already.
But let's look at the US alone. The 2020 census says there are 258 million adults over the age of 18. If all of them followed your model then that would be 95 billion dollars a year. That is an amount of money that could do a lot of good or a lot of harm.
Looking at stuff at the micro level doesn't look impactful. But human behavior at the macro level is very impactful.
The decision to not change personal behavior because your action by itself does not make an impact is a way to rationalizing a death of a billion cuts.
Edit: Here is the link. Looks like the price went up, but when it started I remember it being $30/month. https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program