This seems like a waste of time to me when you could instead focus on Coal or things that matter
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
True, those glowing signs may waste power, but have you seen what TikTok’s army of AI-slop cringe creators burn through? Generating just one viral AI avatar or “Barbie Box” image can consume enough energy to fully charge an eletric car several times.
one viral AI avatar or “Barbie Box” image can consume enough energy to fully charge an electric car several times.
A Model 3 battery is 200,000-300,000 kiloJoules.
Absolute worst case for an image, even taking very extreme estimates and amortizing out all the training, is like 30 kJ. Maybe 70 kJ 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. For reference, a local generation with FLUX dev on my 3090 is 2 kJ per image, and that’s relatively inefficient.
I’m just saying, that is a bad comparison, as EVs take an absolute truckload of electricity to run.
I don’t think anybody turns their phones on thinking “I wonder what halfbaked AI generated video i can watch now?”
AI slop is a different topic.
Talk about climate change when cringe AI-slop burns enough energy to fully charge an electric car multiple times over.
YouTube & TikTok use far more resources than AI
The climate after i send electromagnetic waves at 2.4 GHz frequency:
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.
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Oi, when the inturnet loisence will com?
If you wanted my screen time to be more efficient, please explain all these JS and CSS frameworks you are requiring me to load.
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).
“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.
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.
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?
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.
This is our collective duty to pay for the lavish lifestyle of the 1%.
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.
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… /s
If everyone turned off their smartphones for a day it would account for less than 1% of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet in that day.
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.
Phone: under 5 watts. Heating: 10kW heat pump
Worrying about your phone energy cost would be fairly dumb. Usage/battery life can be a valid consideration of course.
Please tell me you forgot the /s ?
Thought it was obvious given how “every person in the world” and “practical” was in the same comment lol
This is the funny thing, Capitalism basically ensures, even if it were magically practical, it still wouldn’t work. 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, use their enormous energy advantage to make a bazillion dollars, and use so much power that we’d go right back to 100% (or more) electricity consumption.
The narrative of the ‘if every individual did <x>’ is pure myth. Systemic problems can only be solved by systemic solutions.
These are great, thank you for putting them together.
Unfortunately that’s not even scratching the surface
Keep going, they’re good comparisons.
Is that advert backlit ALL DAY?
Think. Think again.Think about industrial energy use and lack of government enforcing landlords to install insulation and solarEh, 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.
I think a fairer argument is to see how many people actually reduced their screen time. Then, see if that offset the run time of this ad. In that case, this sign doesn’t get a pass because we all know the answer to that question.
Wouldn’t it still be more useful to display an ad criticizing this kind of 24/7 lit ad?
It’s cheaper and easier to make people feel bad than it is to take reasonable steps to actually solve our environmental problems. Plus, this option lets you be smug and judgmental.
