Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

> To address these challenges, action is needed on many fronts. What will you do to make frugal computing a reality?

I dunno, isn't this the same thing as blaming climate change on the people who take a single vacation by plane per year, no matter what else they're doing the other 51 weeks to try to live a non-wasteful life?

I like my home server and having my data here, on LAN speed. Of course that's probably not the ideal thing from a power usage perspective. Does it offset the fact that I am hardly using a car? Am I allowed to use up the old lightbulbs I still have or is it really better to go out and buy LEDs for everything? Should I replace my hardware all the time because it uses less power or keep the old stuff that is just fine? What can I do if the damn phone manufacturers won't ship updated after 2 years when I'd gladly use it for 4 years? Must I buy Apple now?

Sure, everyone has their own 'I will not give in' topics, but more and more I am getting disillusioned that I personally can make any impact.

There is no point in trying to fight climate change as an individual. The scale of pollution by industry is so mind-bogglingly massive that there is nothing that we can do to make a difference. We could all turn off every device, never buy anything new, and go back to eating foraged berries while living in a cave and climate change would still happen.

To give recent example of how industry works with no regard whatsoever to the climate, the German airline Lufthansa flew 21,000 entirely empty flights during periods of lockdown so that airports didn't change their schedules[1].

We are at the point now that unless industries change we should really start thinking about how we live with climate change, not how we stop it.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/airplanes-empty-slots-covid

Industry ultimately exists to serve individuals.

> We could all turn off every device, never buy anything new, and go back to eating foraged berries while living in a cave and climate change would still happen.

If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end.

If consumers disappeared then its not like industry would keep on churning pollution to no end.

Airlines carried on flying without passengers.

Temporarily. Because they were expecting the consumers to return, which was in this case reasonable expectation. Do you really think they would continue to do so indefinitely?

It'll always be a series of temporary things though. Companies will always use whatever makes a convenient, reasonable-sounding excuse to carry on doing massively stupid stuff that kills the planet if they can. They expend huge amounts of energy thinking up reasons to not do good things. It's not even for the sake of profit, because a lot of the time these things don't make them any money. They just lurch from one thing to another in order to put off a dip in the share price because shareholders are terrified of losing any money (plus people working in the business have taken a big chunk of their salary in shares, which incentiveizes maintaining a higher stock price...)

So sure, they're not doing whatever they're doing today permanently. They're doing a series of temporary things forever. Because that's different!

> I dunno, isn't this the same thing as blaming climate change on the people who take a single vacation by plane per year

It could be, yep. And it could be accurate. Although that behaviour is probably what a lot of us consider normal, an estimated[2] 80% of the world's population have not travelled by plane at all (not once per year -- ever!)

(travel and travel by air is not intrinsically the problem - it's the negative externalities of doing so. but it's interesting how normalized a damaging behaviour can become simply based on the behaviours of people around us)

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/transport

> I dunno, isn't this the same thing as blaming climate change on the people who take a single vacation by plane per year, no matter what else they're doing the other 51 weeks to try to live a non-wasteful life?

It’s the opposite. The article is targeting people in the software industry. Their actions are multiplied by every instance of their software being used.

So it’s more like asking people who design aircraft what they will do about the climate crisis — not the individual consumer who buys a plane ticket.

If you havent noticed UN and west blamed people from developing countries who mostly use one light bulb. They do anything but reducing consumtion.

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