Earlier today I blogged about how a Baltimore Sun environment blog is urging readers to confess their most mortal "eco sin."
Not to be outdone in the pious-sounding eco-rhetoric, the San Francisco Chronicle's Thin Green Line blog today warns tech geeks and video game aficionados against the original sin of technological advance:
Technology, at times, offers a magic key into the environmental garden of Eden, where humans can use energy and feel good about it. But, at times, it can be the serpent tempting us to eat the apple that will mean our eviction.
Blogger Cameron Scott goes on to explain that the wages of tech are carbon, tons and tons of carbon:
Although technological advances promise reliable renewable energy in the future, right now, consumer use of electronics accounts for 15 percent of residential power use worldwide, a figure that will most likely triple by the time your tot, who's now playing with a fake cell phone, heads off to college, laptop in hand.
If indeed the numbers grow as expected, it would take 560 new coal-fired power plants to power the army of iPods, TVs, cell phones, and computers. (Don't miss the helpful graphic in the Times' article.)
What then shall we do to be saved? Scott concluded by preaching salvation in government regulation:
Of course, the problem isn't just your (and my) guilty fascination with the contraptions, however. It's that manufacturers have thus far successfully avoided the kind of energy-efficiency requirements that the government imposes on appliances (California is attempting to impose them on 2nd gen TVs). Spur the companies along by supporting the California Energy Commission's proposed rules for TVs and by buying Energy Star models whenever available.
