While one option is not zero impact, it is still many orders of magnitude lower impact. They aren't equivalent, he wasn't fooling himself.
Paper is made through an energy and chemically intensive process. I'm sure someone can math out the kwh that go into each sheet of paper, but it is far from 0. Paper costs anywhere from $0.005 -> $0.02 per sheet and that price point is going to be very closely tied to the energy used to produce that paper.
Here in Idaho, power goes for around $0.11/kwh and is primarily non-co2 emitting sources (hydro is the big one with nuclear, solar, and wind up next. Coal exists on our grid but isn't the prime source of power here). So, that'd put the power cost for one sheet of paper at a max of 45 -> 181wH.
If he wants to be energy conscientious, then I'd argue a raspberry pi with a low power oled display will beat the pants out of paper and pen in terms of energy consumed per page. Especially since writing with a keyboard is much faster than pen/paper or a typewriter.
Rpi = ~5W of consumption OLED display = ... idk, can't really find good numbers on this but certainly less than 100W which is where a 65' oled display maxes out. For a 13' display, that's what, ~9W?
So, with a 15W system, you can write for 3 hours before you get to the max possible energy cost of a piece of paper. I'm guessing the author can use more than 1 piece of paper in that timeframe.
And, of course, you can pair such a system with a solar + battery setup to get completely coal free writing (except for the cost to produce the chips for the rpi, display, solar, and battery)
The solar power for the pi -- we could be generous to him again, and say that it is hypothetically possible to power either setup with solar, although there is something to be said for the fact that he has direct control over what he plugs his pi into.
On the other hand, a chalkboard could be used for first drafts.
IDK if, without an in depth study, there's a better way to to figure out wH per piece of paper. My inclination is the cost based method I used will end up being in the same order of magnitude. Obviously, I can't prove that.
The reason I think it'll be pretty close is paper is, for the most part, highly mechanized so the cost of human labor will be somewhat low. Further, profit margins are (I'm assuming) somewhat low (lots of competition). So, pull those two things and what are you looking at? Mostly shipping and processing costs which go pretty much directly to the power used to produce a piece of paper.
But, consider what it would take to run the thing. Unless you power your computers by solar energy or somehow have a nuclear reactor in your back yard, you're probably expending non-renewable energy to power it. The typewriter, being made in 1956, is almost certainly a manual model and only uses ribbon and paper to keep it going. I daresay the typewriter has a lower lifetime environmental impact than any computer.
If I wanted Silicon Valley to have good air and soil quality, I would simply not have built suburbs and auto infrastructure on top of all of it.
The idea that single family homes aren’t pollution and industry is comes from 70s boomer environmentalism, which is part “if I don’t see it, it’s not happening”, part pastoralist NIMBY (because you just read Cities as Growth Engines), and part explicitly trying to stop people from having children (because you just read The Population Bomb).
I would’ve said the modern examples are Marin County NIMBYs and MCU’s Thanos. But it seems like the guy in the article is an even more orthodox example.
Note that the Bay Area’s residential only zoning may be commonly thought to keep away dirty industry, but since it was invented here in Berkeley you can just look up what the inventors thought they were doing, and they just wanted to keep out Chinese people. “Residential zoning” meant “no home businesses” and by that they meant “Chinese laundries” with a side of “immigrant corner shops”. It wasn’t about factories.
> I did not say that I proposed to end forthwith all my involvement in harmful technology, for I do not know how to do that. I said merely that I want to limit such involvement, and to a certain extent I do know how to do that.
He has a workflow that works for him and has produced great works with it. Where this all goes awry is when his criticism strongly implies that the computer might not be better for others (who may not have a wife that types everything for them, for instance).