Submitted 1 day ago by Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk
https://media.piefed.social/posts/Fx/BU/FxBUNEqceqU0jNx.jpg
This seems like a waste of time to me when you could instead focus on Coal or things that matter
Updated version of the “turn the water off while you’re brushing your teeth” ads in the 80s/90s. If you can afford ad spend, you’re a bigger problem than the people targeted by it.
This is part of a larger UK campaign to make people feel bad about energy usage while Starmer is filling increasingly large amounts of UK infrastructure with AI stuff that requires 100x the amount of power.
Only 100x?
“YOUR screen time is destroying the environment!” Says screen that is using electricity 24/7.
The fluorescent tubes to power this thing all day for months probably uses more power than my router does in its life time.
Segregate your garbage so we can later throw it all into the same heap anyways.
Remember to turn off every power source when you leave home everyday the whole year to compensate for one day of McDonald’s signboard glowing 24/7.
Lease an overpriced EV so that the planet may survive another billionaire’s wedding.
Ok but have you considered that if literally every person on the planet did this, climate change would immediately be fixed??
You’re just a HATER of practical solutions…
Please tell me you forgot the /s ?
If everyone turned off their smartphones for a day it would account for less than 1% of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
If you have a fridge in your house it’s likely using almost 100 times more power than your smartphone. Your heating or air conditioning is using far more power. The steel industry, agricultural industry, transportation, are all pumping out greenhouse gasses at a rate that using electronics is negligible.
AI is becoming another one of those industries, but if everyone turned off their personal devices, they would still need to get up, go to work, which would likely use AI, because they need to buy groceries and pay rent and keep their home powered, and capitalism churns.
Being outraged at the systems around us is a good thing, pointing the outrage toward people living daily lives while wealthy corporations and people do everything in their power to do as little as possible for social good while farming maximum personal benefit, power, and profit is not.
This is the funny thing, Capitalism basically ensures this is never true. Even in utopia, where everyone was super-pooper efficient and saved 99% electricity usage overnight, just one profit-seeking business (and they’re all profit seeking businesses) would buy up all the cheap electricity, make a bazillion dollars, and use so much power that we’d go right back to 100% electricity consumption.
The narrative of the ‘if every individual did <x>’ is pure myth. Systemic problems can only be solved by systemic solutions.
I just stopped buying stuff…I buy food, that’s it. my garbage has gone from 3 bags biweekly, 2etal and 3 cardboard down to maybe 2 garbage, half a metal one and maybe 1 cardboard.
it’s amazing how much garbage they force on us when we buy companies junk
sometimes there’s more packaging costs then product…it’s absurd.
These are great, thank you for putting them together.
Unfortunately that’s not even scratching the surface
YouTube & TikTok use far more resources than AI
I have to agree!
If you wanted my screen time to be more efficient, please explain all these JS and CSS frameworks you are requiring me to load.
Individualistic solutions to systemic problems have zero chance of working.
they 100% work.
that’s why they do it.
they make sure to shift the blame, to make sure the system remains unchanged and people who are profiting from what is basically omniside keep profiting from killing the planet and everyone in it.
They don’t work though, they just convince people it does.
I agree with you. Most energy comes from renewables these days, and your wi-fi usage is a negligible amount in the scale of things. How about going after corporate energy waste like AI instead?
AI is negligible compared to Coal & private jets etc. Or just gross spending by billionaires
It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.
Weird take…
Is that advert backlit ALL DAY?
Think. Think twice. Think about industrial energy use and lack of government enforcing landlords to install insulation and solar
Eh, I can give a pass to this because even if it wasn’t this ad, another one would be in its place burning the same amount of energy.
If this university hadnt bought this meaningless advert it would have a tiny reduction in the demand for advertising potentially leading to less always lit billboards being made. So no, they dont get a pass for it.
Wouldn’t it still be more useful to display an ad criticizing this kind of 24/7 lit ad?
And yet somehow bombs seem to grow on trees for dropping on innocent children by the IDF in Gaza.
This ad was a waste of the energy it took to print.
It’s not printed.
It’s on a screen.
Ironic innit?
It is not on a screen.
It is printed with a backlight. You can see that it is just a poster.
The UK does not sell bombs to Israel anymore.
Did they actually stop? Yeah it seems like the UK is further along the process of disengaging but our connections to the genocide of palestinians run so deep it is hard to fathom the US government listening to its people and stopping arming Israel.
If the internet is demonised with enough propaganda about it being full of porn and bad for the environment, while steadily becoming more and more difficult to access, then the British public will stop knowing about the atrocities Kid Starver is spending their tax money on.
Protesting anything the government disaproves of is a criminal offense and journalists have already been imprisoned over reporting too accurately on the Palestinian genocide.
I get the feeling the internet sanctions and propaganda will just keep coming now till the government can control the narrative and we will always have been at war with East Asia.
Why not use AI as a example
What if its local ai?
Local AI probably uses more CO2 per prompt than datacenter, unless you’re running off your own solar panels or something
I am talking about Non Local ai here
Oi, when the inturnet loisence will com?
A high-end estimate of the energy cost of data transmission is 0.1 kWh per GB. If a household uses 350 GB per month, that’s still only 35 kWh, a drop in the bucket compared to a typical household monthly energy usage that includes an electric stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, microwave, tea kettle, air conditioner, and heater.
The back lights that it takes to light this electric billboard probably take more electricity than the total energy cost of 3 people being online on their phone (or maybe 2 people on a laptop, or maybe 1 person on a desktop).
Data centers use massive amounts of power. Reducing that power consumption would be a net positive on the environment.
That said, looking at the site, I can’t see anything that suggests they’ve done any research into that. Instead they seem to be promoting their research into keeping kids safe online, with the only mention of the OSA being a short description in their recent June report with no comment about anything to do with it’s obvious shortcomings.
Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.
Absolute fucking horseshit when we’re talking about massively expanding our energy use to fuel AI datacenters and total surveillance. It’s like scolding people for not recycling while increasingly making everything single-use plastics.
If my goal was to try and damage the organization of groups looking to drive environmental initiatives, this is what I’d do. One of the things, anyways.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Group
The uk government keeps giving them renewable energy subsidies because trees can regrow but ignore the fact that they cut down trees the other side of the world to burn them here. It releases all the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere and then they capture a small percentage of it back and pretend to be the good guys.
AI dataceter water cooling doesn’t grow on trees.
Your showers are hurting the profits.
Is this the sequel to “delete your old emails to save water”?
Honestly the biggest thing I think you could do (other than dying) is quitting animal consumption, but 90% of people can’t be bothered to make that simple change and would rather drivel on and on in endless debates about their sudden “health problems” and cultural norms that insist they keep it up. 😒
Not everyone can live fully vegan. Just look at Alex O'connor's vegan journey.
But a lot of people can try, and everyone can cut out beef if they want, which would already be a big win
Just look at Alex O'connor's vegan journey.
Can you summarise? Ngl, I'm skeptical tho.
DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO ELECTRICITY
As far as activities you can do in your leisure time go, browsing through your phone probably has less environmental impact than anything other than napping. Even say, reading a (physical) book is usually going to require you to go to a bookstore or library (or worse, have it delivered) which will have carbon expenditure.
Exercise, board games, write, read a book you already own, socialise with housemates/neighbours, do any of a billion hobbies, do anything where you only have to walk to the place. Go for a walk, go foraging, sit in the sun, do some gardening, plant some seeds from your own fruit, volunteer somewhere local, draw stuff, craft stuff, daydream, do some puzzles, do some DIY repairs.
I’m not saying these things are ideal, some will be more possible than others due to circumstances. But I mean it did take two minutes to come up with that list of (typically) enjoyable stuff to do in your leisure time that has net neutral or even net positive environment impact. I don’t think it’s good to say the phone usage is the second best possible thing you can do for environmental impact.
All of those are way more rewarding than scrolling on a phone, but most of them actually have a higher carbon footprint. Not that life should be lived purely on that metric, but the ad aims to guilt people for their screen usage. Reminds me of a discussion I read around this chart:
Modern batteries are so efficient that an e-bike has less carbon footprint than traditional cycling- which in itself is much more efficient than walking.
Sounds like it wants me to not care about trees because what did they ever do for us?
Fruits? Wood? Oxygen? Soil Fixation? Spices? Truffles? Shade?
Ok, but besides fruits, wood, oxygen, soil fixation, spice truffles and shade, what have the trees ever did for us?
Maple syrup.
Damn, where’s the pancake mix
Yeah, ok, but this is obviously just an ad, when have they become relevant to anything?
Look I see what you mean but we finished coal. We closed the last coal power station last year.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
The light that powers that sign likely uses more power than is going to be saved by people turning their screens off because of it
midtsveen@lemmy.wtf 3 hours ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
A Model 3 battery is ~200,000 kiloJoules.
Absolute worst case for an image, even taking extreme estimates and amortizing out all the training, is like 20kJ. Maybe 60kJ for a slop video that takes under a minute to render, which is on the order of browsing Lemmy on a laptop for a bit.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
AI slop is a different topic.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
I don’t think anybody turns their phones on thinking “I wonder what halfbaked AI generated video i can watch now?”