Today is Blog Action Day, and the theme for 2009 is Global Warming. Yes, that was last year’s theme too. The environment’s still fucked up, people. The ice caps, while up some from 2007, are melting enough that now Canada, Greenland and Russia (and a number of other interests with no proximity, such as the US) are jockeying for rights over a northern passage, and any natural resources found therein. In the meantime, I’m a mere computer geek with precious little sway in this world — so I’m doing what I can to continue living in the modern era, while expending as little unnecessary energy as possible.
To start off with, when choosing a new computer, I realize that laptops do cost a good deal more carbon-cycle-wise than desktops do, but given how long between upgrades I generally go, and how much I use computers (pretty well every waking moment of every day for both work and recreation), the simple fact that a laptop sips at power where desktops guzzle is a prime motivator for my choice.
I have a work laptop that I use for everything — downloading, movie and TV viewing (as we don’t have cable, our television hardly gets used except for Wii gaming), and especially blogging. The fact that I’m using work’s laptop for personal stuff (though technically against work policies, shh) means I don’t have a second laptop, meaning that much less carbon wasted. If I get an upgrade, I’m one of the few IT managers at my company that would prefer to keep old but functional equipment in service as long as possible, so this laptop would probably become a hand-me-down for someone with a less worthy one, and theirs would go into the spare stock rather than being decommissioned outright. Additionally, I’ve implemented scripts that shut down my network’s computers at night, saving probably hundreds of dollars a month of power wastage.
There’s also stuff we do that non-IT people could benefit from — like using a Brita filter instead of getting bottled water, to take some of the chlorine taste out of the otherwise horrible town tap-water. We turn off the power bars for appliances that sit idle waiting for remote control signals, like our entertainment stand, TV and Wii. We wear sweaters and keep our doors closed in the wintertime, and only heat the house to a bare minimum to keep the pipes from freezing, as well as heating to comfort only those rooms we’re in at the time. We also turn our ceiling fans on reverse, to suck heat upward and circulate the air, warming the room more quickly. Undercoating your car with eco-friendly undercoat, for those of you in climates where road salt is a necessity, is a also good idea, as well, so that you’re not replacing parts every other year and adding these new parts unnecessarily to the carbon load (*ahem*… lesson learned from having to replace our muffler two weeks ago). And another good car care tip, no matter how the Republicans scoffed when Obama suggested it, is to keep your tires adequately filled so you’re not wasting gas on poor mileage that’s easily corrected.
Not only do all these little steps reduce our carbon footprint, they save us a lot of money and we’re not losing out on any of the convenience of modern living. A lot of them are just good sense, and none of them are terribly large sacrifices.
I have no illusions that what we’re doing will singlehandedly stave off global warming — for that, the time is probably already past, and could only have been avoided if heavy polluting industries and the entire petroleum-addiction cycle had been fixed a decade ago. In aggregate, though, if all of us chips in, we can mitigate the destruction we’re wreaking on our own ecosystem — you know, the one we rely on to survive.
That’s not to say I think we’ll all die. Humans are uncanny at adapting to change when change is upon us. They aren’t so great at adapting to change to avoid unnecessary and dangerous discomfort later, especially if it means any measure of discomfort now.
So, what tips do you folks have for living a bit more green?
