Technology will save us

[mobbsey]

But this is precisely why David McKay, the government's new "carbon Tzar", doesn't reduce the level of electricity consumption in his projections in 'Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air". As he states:

In the future cartoon-Britain of 2050, however, I’ve assumed that all such electricity savings are cancelled out by the miracle of growth (my emphasis). Growth is one of the tenets of our society: people are going to be wealthier, and thus able to play with more gadgets. The demand for ever-more-superlative computer games forces computers’ power consumption to increase. Last decade’s computers used to be thought pretty neat, but now they are found useless, and must be replaced by faster, hotter machines.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/with ... _156.shtml

[fifthcolumn]

In the future cartoon-Britain of 2050, however, I’ve assumed that all such electricity savings are cancelled out by the miracle of growth (my emphasis). Growth is one of the tenets of our society: people are going to be wealthier, and thus able to play with more gadgets. The demand for ever-more-superlative computer games forces computers’ power consumption to increase. Last decade’s computers used to be thought pretty neat, but now they are found useless, and must be replaced by faster, hotter machines.

This is disingenous without looking at the numbers.

Who is to say the growth in power consumption will outpace the savings?
e.g. An iphone uses less energy than an ipod, a mobile phone and a camera.

Conversely it could go the other way, the growth in demand could outpace the growth in savings.

But I think that you can't just blithely assume that growth in demand will outpace savings.

Sorry, no cigar.

[mobbsey]

e.g. An iphone uses less energy than an ipod, a mobile phone and a camera.

But it uses far more energy to manufacture!

The energy density of digital electronics means that most of the energy (in some reports, four-fifths) takes place in the manufacturing stages, not in use by the consumer. Therefore you have to make the service life of these goods far longer, which means less turnover, which means less growth.

Stop looking at the power cord and start considering the life-cycle!

[fifthcolumn]

e.g. An iphone uses less energy than an ipod, a mobile phone and a camera.

But it uses far more energy to manufacture!

Does it? It seems counter-intuitive and thus I have difficulty buying it.

In the case of an ipod compared to say a cassette player then maybe, but in the example cited? I'm not sure I'd agree.

I'd guess that in the example cited, an ipod, a mobile phone and a camera are not tons less energy cost to manufacture than just an iphone.

Therefore you have to make the service life of these goods far longer, which means less turnover, which means less growth.

I won't argue with making the service life of products longer.
That this means less growth in resource usage is not necessarily a bad thing. We can still grow the economy based on useful services instead of manufactured products if the service life of most products increases.

[mobbsey]

But it uses far more energy to manufacture!

Does it? It seems counter-intuitive and thus I have difficulty buying it.

The higher the level of integration of electrical systems the more energy they take to manufacture. E.g. the IEEE's recent work on this issue:

In contrast with many home appliances, life cycle energy use of a computer is dominated by production (83%) as opposed to operation (17%).
Revisiting energy used to manufacture a desktop computer: hybrid analysis combining process and economic input-output methods, Williams, Electronics and the Environment, 2004 --
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login ... ision=-203

Other studies highlight the problem of digital electronics in general -- e.g. there's a good digest in http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/ ... ology.html

As we reduce our use of gadgets to a few multifunctional digital devices we might have less devices overall, but their qualitatively higher spec. means that we're using the latest high bandwidth digital devices to undertake jobs that a far less powerful device could perform -- e.g. playing music. The great technical advantage of digital electronics is that a great many of the components are standardised and multifunctional – for example the same programmable logic controller chip can be used in applications as diverse as toasters to military aircraft. That means the issues related to our use of digital technologies are far more wide ranging than our use of ICT; but in turn it is our use of multifunctional digital systems that is driving the convergence of technologies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_convergence ), and thus it is the extension of these high energy/resource dependent networks into more aspects of our everyday lives that is driving consumption not just the specific design features of the gadgets themselves.

Another difficulty is that integration means that there's literally "more to go wrong". If I were to have a separate phone, MP3 player and camera, if one breaks the other two still work OK. With integrated units if it fails you use the functionality of three, not one, devices. An older example would be those TVs that had built in video players -- the service live of the video machine was only a fraction of that of the TV, and so perfectly good TVs were disposed of.

But of course what's worse is having gadgets that are super high tech. to perform menial tasks -- like an iPod; you're adding functionality just to make the gadget "look good" rather than physically enhancing its core function. There's also an argument that Moore's Law has had little effect on the performance of IT systems in the past decade because of the parallel bloat of software -- every time computers become more powerful we just try and squeeze more data through them. There was a really good paper recently on how this principle has affected the latest UMTS mobile phone architecture:

Given its larger data transfer rate, the UMTS is ecologically more favorable in terms of data transfer rate than its predecessor, the GSM. The higher energy consumption and the more complex production of the devices in the UMTS system are compensated by the faster data transmission rate. Per customer the result is inverse, however, since the higher data communication per user in the UMTS system compensates the higher efficiency. Per UMTS user and year a higher data transfer than in the GSM system is to be expected, due to the amount of inquired services. It must be noted, however, that the UMTS technology supports other services than the GSM system. Despite the higher efficiency in the transmission of data, an increase of the entire expenditures and emissions per customer in mobile telecommunication therefore has to be expected. The evelopment of the UMTS is accompanied with an increased consumption of resources and emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases regarding the entire system for mobile telephone communication.
Life Cycle Assessment of the Mobile Communication System UMTS – Towards Eco-efficient Systems, Mireille Faist Emmenegger et. al., International Journal of Life-Cycle Analysis, 2004 – http://www.esu-services.ch/download/faist-2005-umts.pdf

In many Western economies it's the retailing of expensive gadgets that keeps the economy ticking over because, now that the "utility" of our lives is largely settled, it's the fashionable elements of "expensive consumption" (the term used by Victor Lebow, who espoused this approach to governments and economists, in the Journal of Retailing in 1955), that dominate people's lives (and to a significant extent their ecological impacts) and hence drive the economy. Accentuating such things by concentrating more on "services" won't solve the problem either because you then develop economic imbalances between the people with the wealth to fund the growth of the economy (the resource producers), the people making the things people need (commodity producers/bulk manufacturers) and the people consuming within a predominantly service based economy.

We have to re-learn the value of "utility", as espoused by Bentham and others, in order to create a balance between our need to consume and the ability of the economic system around us to pay for it; but that by it's nature means less growth, and no politician in the present environment of Alice in Wonderland economics will even consider such an approach -- until of course they're forced to by circumstance (the literal implementation of Galbraith's definition of "conventional wisdom")

[fifthcolumn]

But it uses far more energy to manufacture!

Does it? It seems counter-intuitive and thus I have difficulty buying it.

The higher the level of integration of electrical systems the more energy they take to manufacture.

How much more?

Is it 1.1X, 1.5x, 2X, 5X, 10X, 100X?

It makes a difference.

And in the case of an iphone I stand my ground.
I seriously doubt that the additional energy required to make an iphone is significantly higher than an ipod, a modern mobile phone and a digital camera.
These three items are ALREADY very high tech. I just don't buy that the energy required to put them together is vastly more. Some, sure, maybe I could buy that. Vastly more? I don't think so.

[mobbsey]

How much more?

But that's precisely the life-cycle argument; things like mobile phones are rarely used to their design lifetime. If we then reduce all consumer electronics to an integrated 'gadget' that we regularly replace on the basis of fashion, irrespective of the utility/serviceability of the device, then that just adds to the problems of the higher energy used to manufacture the device -- I could halve the impact by using something twice as long. Therefore the issue of "how much more" isn't just a matter of the energy in manufacturing or use, it's the life-cycle, and that's also determined by the mode of use -- as outlined in my previous post.

By the same contention, your argument that combining three high-tech. gadgets into one would be deductively true, since today they're pretty much the same type of digital electronic system -- but on the back of the short service life you'd have to do a net calculation comparing the service life of the X number of previous devices to the life-cycle on the multi-functional gadget. Given the high turnover in such devices, driven by the superfluous fashionable functionality that in turn drives the bloat which nullifies the advantage of greater processing power, I don't see that you would be using any less energy/resources. Then again, considering the relative cognitive bias, I've never had a mobile phone, my 'work laptop' (the newest computer in the house) is 4 years old, and I'm still using my 8 year old digital camera -- so just about all the new gadgets I see down the High Street look pretty superfluous to me.

There are no hard and fast figures on the production side because the industry doesn't divulge precise data, but each new generation of digital electronics requires a step change in the energy intensity of manufacture in proportion to the increased level of integration, if only because they begin to incorporate elements (e.g. rare earth metals like hafnium) that themselves are significantly more energy dense than the less integrated (MOS/NMOS etc) technologies that went before. Changes in manufacturing systems, to try and reduce costs per unit and increase production capacity to meet demand, have also pushed up the ecological impacts. E.g.

Due to their increased size, 450mm wafers will require more chemicals, energy, and water per wafer but efforts should be made to significantly reduce usage on a normalized (per cm2) basis.
Environment, Safety and Health, International Technology Roadmap For Semiconductors (ITRS), 2007 -- http://www.itrs.net/Links/2007ITRS/2007 ... 07_ESH.pdf

[Mark]

A few more to add to the list:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/07/29/top ... nventions/

I agree that more needs to be done on LCAs, but unfortunately the ones I've seen have been very heavily influenced by the people funding the study. A good example of this was the LCAs conducted to compare paper towels vrs hot air dyers to dry hands in a public toilet. Quelle surprise, the paper industry funded study came out better for paper towels and visa versa for the hot air blowers........

The LCA argument can also sometimes fall down in the face of corporate marketing. As mentioned, a mobile phone (even the latest iphone), is merely an incidental 'add-on' to the mobile phone contract. The phone is used for 2 years & then sent back to get an even newer version when the contract is up. Any LCA is irrelevant whilst the mobile phone companies persist with tactics such as this.....

[JohnB]

A few more to add to the list:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/07/29/top ... nventions/

With the weather we're having at the moment, the PETaPOTTY looks like a good idea to me . Do you know how many times I've got soaked, and how many towels I'm getting through, satisfying doggy calls of nature?

[JohnB]

This is one bit of technology I've just got to tell everyone about. I don't know how the world has survived for so many millennia without it.

http://www.neuticles.com

I'm so afraid that more than 10 years of Charlie's life have been ruined without them.

[Vortex]

What a load of typical American b*****ks.

[JohnB]

What a load of typical American b*****ks.

That's not fair. I've been living with a severely traumatised dog for over 10 years, and I never realised that was the problem. You haven't met him, but other PowerSwitchers have

[madibe]

So reading this you can have your poodle neutered and then fit a really big set of godolphins. Let your dog look the bollocks, so to speak. Great.