Amount of electronic devices increase rapidly with power demanding per family year by year more than technology progress to reduce power losses eg. brushless motors used in tools and whitegoods, GaAn chargers, LED LCDs etc. Nowdays we have ATX PSUs about 2kW sold for home use, Intel CPUs that consume more than ever and typical 65W PSU for laptop is not enogh.This is insane assuming that humans in modern games still move like toy puppets. Without power limit regulations we will kill this planet sooner than later and leave a desert for future generations. Crypto mining and AI GPU farms will speed up the process of climate changes and nobody cares about it because they sell us fairytale using „green energy” slogan. Most of nuclear plants in France that recquire fresh water (to cool reactor) have a serious problems because there is no enough water in rivers during summer months. EU charge vehicle manufacturers for exceeding emissions and set emission limits. They set power limits for vacuum cleaners used maybe 1h and twice a week while they do not set power limits for LED TVs or PCs used many hours each day or even 24hrs per day. There are so many absurds and politicians do nothing with real power consumption. Most of consumers do not care about it (they care only about a cost buying another useless „eco” device to charge from power socket) - 65”, 77”, 100”, 150”, 200” TV at home and 100W, 150W, 200W, 300W, 500W… phone chargers. Millions of fully working old chargers from EU landed in Africa countries (to be eco friendly) due to USB-C phone chargers that… consume more watts than ever! To conclude: since technology progress slowed down (TVs, CPUs, PSUs etc.) it would be good to see market regulations for total power budget limit for home use devices eg. gaming laptops (90W and later 65W), multimedia laptop/PC 50W in 2025, 35W in 2027 and so on. The same with PSUs, GPUs, TVs etc. If companies want to achieve 3000 nits brightness in 100” TV then needs to put more money on R&D to find a way how to handle it within eg. 100W power budget. Consumers are like kids who wants more and more (this is not an evolution since most of the people watch chinese Tik-Tok whose task is to remove the pulp from the american/european brain) but do we need to buy everything what our kids want? I do not think so.
I’ll have to look up the France nuclear thing, I agree about crypto and somewhat agree about GenAI demands.
I know a reasonable amount about this. Consumer devices are a drop in the bucket as far as climate damaging
power use, manufacturing is another story though.
I track my kwh and it has definitely gone down over the past 10+ years and I advocate for climate policy when I can along with some other activists. Something like 85% of my electricity comes from sustainable sources but this depends on where you live and what you have access to.
I was just saying the newest technology isn’t always using more, in the case of OLED vs. Plasma it was less, for Plasma the materials climate impact cost was likely less (although this is an informed guess) vs. CRTs, and we’ve eliminated a lot of dangerous chemicals etc. in manufacturing that means recycling electronics is now possible in many (but not all) cases.
Greenwashing is definitely a thing though, and wealthy people that drive EVs and replace them every few years or lease are doing significantly more damage than maintaining old vehicles as one example. I’ve done the math and I’d have to drive a new EV vehicle for about 12 years in order to come close to matching the low amount of pollution my well-maintained ICE vehicle produces in that time, and many households in the US and Canada will go through 2-3 or more in that period. It’s really quite shocking when you look at the numbers. Consumption is the issue that drives much of this.
We have to take wins where we can get them, and try to demand better climate action overall, but honestly the consumptive nature of our society will not change anytime soon and we’ve very likely already passed critical tipping points, which doesn’t mean to throw in the towel, but the main thing consumers can do is… not consume. Which will crash the economy because it relies on it.
The next 20ish years are going to be wild, because we’ve already hit carbon overshoot. Runaway processes are in place and if you live in an area that is getting bad due to climate change, I’d strongly suggest making a plan to move eventually if you’re able to do so because things are going to get rough.
Here’s a very good paper on this topic that shows how the capacity for the earth to be a carbon sink pretty much entirely gone as of 2023. It didn’t really make the major media because it will scare the hell out of people if they understood the ramifications:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12447
Edit to add: One final thing to keep in mind is idle power states have gotten dramatically better over the last 15 years. When I had them, my Mac Pro 2010 idled at around 140w, my 2006 Mac Pro idled at around 200w due to FB-DIMMs and being dual processor, and that again is
continuous use. Now my entire “high end” PC with discrete graphics card and monitor will use lesss than 70w when doing desktop work, and at true idle it drops below 30w. Apple Silicon is even better at this, but my UPS’ measurement tool only goes so low.
