[iDC] Introducing: Real Costs & Oil Standard

[John Hopkins]

>Oh, and if anyone want to reduce their carbon footprint - I have a 
>lot of land to plant trees on. Seriously, how about integrating a 
>"click here for a donation to plant a tree" into the FF plugin. 
>Aren't some airlines already offering that as part of the ticket 
>purchase???

USE LESS ENERGY in any/all forms (heating, cooling, Light, calories, 
constructed/assembled objects made from any elements, etc, etc, etc) 
-- realizing that anything that comes into your personal system from 
the social system that you are in has an energy cost as it is created 
and then delivered to you -- when you use less of this energy, you 
move your position lower on a sliding scale of consuming.

You will lighten up...

Everyone on the earth sits on this sliding scale somewhere.  It is 
well within human nature that humans have a footprint when they move 
through the world, and they, by nature cause relative concentrations 
and depletions in the natural system, moving it at least temporarily 
out of balance...

Consider, for example, the last 5 emails sent on this list.

:-\

They totaled 28 kb in size.  Not counting the headers and other info 
necessary for proper transmission, the actual content to be read 
totaled about 2 kb.  The difference being taken up by excess reply-to 
garbage that is noise versus signal.  It takes incrementally more 
energy to send larger datasets.  Trim verbiage, turn off the quote 
function on your email client, and you'll slide a bit lower on the 
energy consumption scale.  Anything you can do to decrease personal 
or collective consumption of energy makes a difference.  Obviously 
there are larger and smaller items, and one large item can consume 
quantities of energy several orders of magnitude greater than smaller 
items, but each item counts in two ways -- lowering one's dependence 
on larger social systems (regaining personal autonomy) and decreasing 
energy consumption.  Always.

cheers,
John

I second Andreas' comments on IT-as-solution to environmental problems...!