3rd of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve
Note: This is the third part of my week-long series of posting 5 reasons why I think the printed media will have to evolve and what I think it should evolve to. The steps will be posted daily starting with this on a Monday, and ending on this week’s Friday.
If you missed the first part “Time is of the essence”, you can find it here.
The second part “Advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere” is here.
3. Ecology and global warming
A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.
Dr Wissner-Gross’s study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.
Oh come on, you know this was coming. Cap-tain Pla-net, he’s a hero, gonna take pollution down to zero! About at the same time, some newspaper conglomerate released some research that stated that the internet is, like, totally bad for the environment and newspapers are really healthy.
I think it might be plausible, that IT could cause 2 percent of global emissions, but then again without IT we’d still be using couriers to deliver messages in cars and would have to take the bus to the library to find out information – and even more, about 25% of all people in Western countries would be out of a clean IT job doing something which quite possibly would create much more emissions. I’ll bet my life that my MacBook Pro was less polluting to make than a delivery truck.
And even if I would stop using Google and do pretty much anything else but use the web, some high-class executive flying a private jet to a tax evasion resort in the Caribbean would make all my efforts pretty much useless.
So, even though we have managed to drag ourselves to the year 2009, cut the use of coal energy, reduce emissions from cars by huge amounts and started uncounted projects to save the planet – we’re always Luddites when it comes to new technologies. 20 years ago we had no idea what the hell are carbon emissions and no one gave a damn about carbon footprints. Does anybody even know whether the 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide is little or a lot, does it really matter if I search something from Google?
To set the scale, the human race produces about 27 gigatonnes of CO2 ( that’s a 27 with 15 zeros grams of carbon dioxide) every year, so on average, every person produces about 4 153 grams of CO2. That’s a bit over four kilograms each, or about 11.4 grams per day, which to me doesn’t seem that much taking into account that that number includes EVERYTHING of the human race.
Well, is it a lot?
The consumption of terrestrial vegetation by animals and by microbes (rotting, in other words) emits about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 every year, while respiration by vegetation emits another 220 Gt. These huge amounts are balanced by the 440 Gt of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere each year as land plants photosynthesise.
I think we just don’t know. But I’ll take a more personal approach:
Even eco-guides use laptops, case solved.
First of all, I don’t think I couldn’t find a magazine that would offer me the news I want and the time I want. Second of all, I will not believe that my RSS reader (and the HTTP requests) creates more emissions than my share of a massive printer printing my newspaper, my share of a car driving those newspapers to a postal office (not even including the people who have to drive to work, since they can’t do it online) and all other relative emission-producing-elements of this plot.
With digital information delivery so omnipotent, more and more people have computers. In the olden days, the computers we had were clunky big boxes and hard to take along – unlike newspapers, and even if we had a laptop, their batteries usually died before Windows managed to get itself started. Today, not only we have really small laptops with really big batteries (relatively speaking), we have wireless networks everywhere and even if we don’t there are flat rates on our mobiles that can be tethered to our laptop. In short, we can be connected all the time with a media that will update as is – no need to go out to pick up the new paper or order someone to bring it to us.
So, the printed media industry is changing anyway, might as well say it has something to do with the ecology.
Come back tomorrow for our next episode: “Less news for more money“
Related posts:
- Euphemisms of Markus
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