Phil's Diary: Green

Saturday January 6, 2007

Green

Green has been a pressing force for a good few years now. But of late everyone seems to have jumped on the band wagon. Last night, as I was watching TV, HSBC were telling me about their “Green Sale”. And Sky movies themselves, had a 12 year old telling me to turn everything off when I was finished with it.

Now I’ve nothing against saving the planet a little, but turning stuff off when it’s not needed for a while, after all that’s what light-switches are for, and standbye for that matter (Though you have to go further now, and actually turn it properly off). If nothing else with the massive recent inflation in electricity and fuel prices it’ll save me a few pennies.

I’m worried though by two things. The first is sliding backwards technologically. If we’re all concentrating so much on power drain, usefulness, turning things off, but may well be that we’ll start to soften our desire for technological improvement. Imagine if the next wave of HD-DVD didn’t sell so well, not because of overbearing copy protection and format wars, but instead because households across the country thought “Blimey, 5 more Watts power demand, I’ll stick with the current DVD player”.

I’m hoping that it’ll be a temprorary blip, as manufacturers and designers suddenly realise they’ve yet another design restriction to fight against.

The other problem I have is that for some of the supposed big pollution, there aren’t many viable alternatives. I’m sure I can take a bus or train around the country, but nothing is really a viable alternative.

I can’t for example use public transport to get to and from work each day. I can get to the physical place but it won’t be my work place for long if I can’t get there until 10:30, and have to leave again at 4pm.

And there’s the problem with public transport… it only caters for the masses (And when it doesn’t), and you run nearly empty busses, surely it’s not really that green anymore?

Surely what’s really needed isn’t the government forcing us to move house, change jobs and all hop on a bus, but viable alternatives instead. And I don’t mean cutting the subsidy on LPG, but instead funding real development and then encouring us all to buy buy subsidising it heavily.

Carrots not sticks, then perhaps it’d all happen a bit quicker and with everyone a bit happier?

Posted by Phil on January 06, 2007 09:45 AM | Categories: Technology | TrackBack

Well, I am used to turning off everything that is not needed. Part just habit, and seeing a powerconverter (the typical 'brick' thing) leave a dark half charred spot on a table just reinforced that habit.

As for commuting. There is no solution.
Tele-working is possible but only for a few jobs. Some, like mine and probably yours, could make use of tele-working but not on a full time basis.

Posted by: sjon at January 6, 2007 9:16 PM