After 10 years of use, my heat pump, which was the size of about two fridge-freezers, started playing up. Couldn't be repaired either. I was left with a great hunk of metal, plastics, piping, and all sorts of electronics and other stuff, that needed to be taken away and dumped somewhere. It didn't seem right. Wasn't this solar and heat pump stuff all supposed to be part of a brave new world of green sustainability and clean renewability?
Two wise women taught me how to love wearing warm caps inside again. I was having an online chat with Viki Harvey, an expert in reducing data waste, and she was wearing a warm cap. In all the thousands of online meetings I have had, I could not remember someone else doing that. Then I was telling Wiep Hamstra, someone who does incredible work on improving online government services, that I was going to buy solar panels for our apartment. She said she was not installing solar. She was wearing warmer clothes, reducing the heat as much as possible, shutting off heat in rooms that weren't being used.
"It's a crisis. Act like it's a crisis," Greta said, or something like that. That phrase kept repeating itself in my head. I needed to do something more. I had earned enough money to buy back some conscience. What could I do? I was working in digital, the land of the Cloud, this ethereal, dematerialized place, this place of clean energy and green software, so I didn't think there was much to find.
I began research that would lead to the publication of my book, World Wide Waste, in 2020. If I was truly honest, I always had these niggling doubts about digital. I had worked with data and content for over 20 years at that stage and knew full well that most data was created for no useful purpose and was stored for no useful reason. Most intranets and websites were data dumps. Most software was awful: poorly written voluminous code piled on top of poorly written, voluminous, badly maintained code. Most digital projects went nowhere. All those apps that were developed, hardly anyone ever used them. Waste everywhere you looked. So that became a key theme of the book: reducing digital waste.
All of that got blown out of the water by the surging Bitcoin and AI, of course. Or did it? We now take more photos in one year that we took in the entire 20th century. By the early 2020s, over 10 trillion photos were being stored in the Cloud, the vast majority of which would never be accessed again. We send incredible quantities of emails, create enormous quantities of documents and files. We make videos of the most trivial of things. And on and on. The vast majority of this digital stuff should never have been created in the first place and certainly has no good reason to be stored. Every file, image, video requires materials, energy, water.
As the digital problems we face meta-size-- jump, jump, jump-- we have found a weird way of not dealing with them. We're not going to deal with our text email problem because-- why bother?-- images are a far bigger problem. We're not going to deal with our images and photos problem because-- why bother?-- videos are a far bigger problem. We're not going to deal with our videos problem because-- why bother?-- Bitcoin is a far bigger problem. We're not going to deal with our Bitcoin problem because-- why bother?-- AI is a far bigger problem. In digital, we feel no moral compunction to clean up the previous mess we've made because Big Tech is always making a newer, much bigger mess to worry about. And deep down there is this belief that there is a new tech innovation coming that will clean up all the messes for us.
I had brought the same basic tech philosophy to bear about what I now know are fake renewables. They were this wonderful get-out-of-jail-free card. It's an energy production problem, I told myself. Here's this new energy innovation that's renewable, sustainable, clean and green. Except I discovered that it's not even remotely true. Like that broken glass, twisted metal and strange colored dust from my solar energy system, all this "renewable" stuff is incredibly material intense and toxic. It has huge impacts on nature and indigenous communities.
I began to hear from Indigenous people about Green Colonialism and how their lands had been chosen as Green Sacrifice Zones for the mining of green metals and the placement of wind turbines and solar panels. As I read report after report and found example after example of the devastation all this fake renewable energy was doing, my worldview began to turn. This couldn't be, I thought. This stuff is supposed to be green, isn't it? We can consume as much as we want, once it's green, can't we? All these huge AI data centers are no problem at all once they're using renewable energy, aren't they? That's how I thought and I know that's how most of the colleagues I knew in digital thought.
As I raised these new uncomfortable truths, that digital was indeed physical, the response of most was initially disbelief. People would look at me skeptically. When I'd explain that the phone they had in their hand had 60 or more materials, that the mining of those materials caused serious quantities of CO2 and major quantities of toxic mining waste, most shook their heads.
Soon, I began to get pushback. It wasn't that green software was actually "green", I was told. Nor that clean nuclear, hydro, solar or wind energy were "clean", "renewable" or "sustainable". I needed to understand relativity. Relative to coal, relative to oil and gas, all these things were green. This new energy tech reduces CO2-- and reducing CO2 is the only thing that matters. And anyone that opposed "renewables" was "shilling for the oil companies", I was told. What we desperately needed was a massive acceleration in the mining, manufacture and rollout of all these wonderful life-saving technologies. We needed to move fast, and if we broke some things along the way that was okay, because the sunny uplands of the Green Transition awaited the adventurous and the brave who were willing to embrace change rather than resist it. Yet the stubborn facts show that-- even if this tech was truly renewable-- it wouldn't matter because there is no energy transition. There never was one in history and there never will be. It's always been more coal, oil, gas, wood, hydro, nuclear, solar, wind. More. More. More.
CO2 is one card in a 52-card deck of pollution and poison. And yet reducing it is being held up as the answer to everything. We can kill more fish, destroy more forests, wipe out the Andes ecosystem, dump more nuclear poison in Navajo and Hopi reservations, basically do whatever damage we want, once we can pretend-- for most often it is pretending-- that we're reducing CO2 with our fake renewables.
We refuse to face the real problem. We consume vastly too much. We waste vastly too much. The material demands from our advanced civilizations will soon be causing a Mount Everest of mining waste every year. And that, I learned, is where the truest of the true story lies. If you want to see the future of a civilization, don't go to its great buildings to talk to its great men. Instead, walk among its dumps, particularly its mining dumps. There you will see the future written large. For you will always find the clearest and most honest story among the stuff that we throw away. There you will come to know that collapse is coming. It's only a matter of time.
The Scientific Revolution. It was great, wasn't it? Didn't depend on the massive destruction of nature, not at all. And that wonderful Green Revolution that flowed from it? I grew up on a small farm with no tractor. My father used to cut hay by hand with a scythe. I spent long days walking up and down fields, turning rows of hay with a fork, chasing some rare Irish sun. That '10-10-20' brand of fertilizer we got, and that my father spread on the fields by hand from a bucket, that was magic stuff. It quadrupled the amount of hay we got from a field. And when the neighbor's tractor roared in through the gap-- doing us a favor-- that was magic too. Jack Flood did the work in 20 minutes that would take us a day. We never thought about nitrogen and phosphorus overload and slurries damaging rivers and killing fish. We never thought about soil degradation through constant use and monoculture crops. We never thought about killing the birds and wild animals because we ripped up their homes in the hedges to make bigger, neater fields. Those bigger fields were easier for the ever-heavier tractors whose wheels were compacting the degrading soil and killing the life below, along with the liberal use of pesticides and herbicides. This was all wonderful progress delivered by the Green Revolution. I mean, who could be opposed to something that's called "green"?
I so longed to be away from that small farm where we had to depend on the modern farmers around us for handouts from the table of technology. Bringing in the hay with an ass and cart was fun in a certain sort of way, once I could hide the humiliation. Wearing the same worn out clothes year after year, I so wanted to be a modern man who was materially wealthy. When I made it, I promised myself, I would buy the very latest and greatest and most innovative.
And I was true to my word. Once I made it, I changed my computer set-up every two years. Because so little in tech was standardized, that often meant new cables, docking stations, and why not the latest, biggest "energy-efficient" screen? I had a large closet piled full of computer stuff that became invisible as soon as I closed the door. Around then, I had an African couple that used to clean the house. They told me that they were quitting because they were setting up a new business. They were going to export back to Africa second-hand electronics to support schools and small businesses. What a wonderful idea, I thought, and opened up the closet and let them take everything in it.
The first real digital horror I discovered during my research for World Wide Waste was e-waste-- the fastest growing waste stream in the world, and extremely toxic. And the Global North was dumping huge quantities in the Global South, pretending it was for schools and such. Those cables I had given were likely going to be added to a huge pile in a poor neighborhood and set on fire by schoolchildren, who would breathe in their toxic air as they poked and stirred, searching for the useful metals that they would sell for the price of a day's food, if they were lucky.
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