I applaud greentime and anything similar. Computers, video cameras & the net are not particularily green or sustainable.
So they are part fo the problem, but they have a place in helping massively with sustainability etc, if they can be used to eliminate even more wasteful uses of fossil fuels. For example I expect downloading music or video instead of it being manufactured onto cd or dvd and then shipped physically across the world, and then me driving to a shop to buy it. Likewise if you can use video on the internet as an alternative to driving or flying to meet someone, computers & the net start to look like they could be a good chunk of the solution. The electrical energy use of your camera & computer arent very high compared to a large television or heating or cooking or cooling with electric, but if its on for a lot of hours per day and isnt set to go into standby, or better yet switched off at the wall, it will add up to a significant amount. The electrical useage of servers and other net infrastructure certainly adds up, one day we may have to move away from this model somewhat and have far more 'not always available' peer to peer stuff with mesh networks. I wills struggle to calculate the carbon footprint created by the manufacture of computers etc, but I know it will be pretty bad. Just looking at the chips, rather a lot of energy is used to get silicon pure enough for the job. Lifetime of the devices is a real important thing here, the cycles are much to short at the moment, I do not expect the current pace of pseudochange can be maintained for the next 50 years. I do not take it foregranted that humans will be capable of mass manufacture of computers in a hundred years time, for all I know they may just end up being a temporary tool to make the slide away from globalisation and mass production more palatable. I have a cheap device that sits between the socket and the device, and measures how much energy is used. My backup plan for vlogweek in the event of not coming up with anything else, is to do some video involving this and a few other things Ive been mucking with in the name of sustainability. Returning briefly to how much power your own part of the setup, the computer and camera, use, it is feasible to run a laptop off a fairly small solar or wind setup. Theoretically, human pedal power could also provide enough watts. As a laptop typically uses less than 100W, this could be compared to one old type 100W lightbulb, so if you have old wasteful bulbs in your house you could start by changing them to cover the energy consumption of your computers. Solid state hard drives and LED-backlit screen promise some further computer energy efficiency gains in future but Im fairly sure all these things are wiped out by the explosion in cheap large televisions, where the screen size makes the energy use for lighting rather high. My biggest fear is that as talk of green & sustainable issues reaches fever pitch, there are going to be so mny things that sound good but are actually bad. Many of the carbon offsetting programs are murky and its hard to be sure how much genuine difference they are actually making. Its no use getting a solar panel if the energy used to make it is greater than all the energy the device will generate in a lifetime. And dont even get me started on biofuels. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, "J. Rhett Aultman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > How green is video-blogging itself? > > > > Do personal computers and video cameras grow on trees? Or, are they > > made out of petro-chemicals? > > > > What is the carbon footprint of the equipment used to product a > > videoblog? Does that include the internet infra-structure? > > > > Where can I buy carbon credits to cover the electricity used in the > > making and distribution of my video blog? What is the > > carbon-unit-per-minute-of-videoblog rate? Could I win a prize on > > "Vlogging for Dollars" to cover it? > > Well... > > * There's a company offering wind-powered web hosting. We may transition > Greentime to them in the future, depeding on a few things. > > * Vloggers can, of course, be choosy with their equipment and buy only > what they need, ensuring low use. > > * Many utility companies now offer green electricity for a tiny extra fee > (here it's about $10/month). > > * Dell will let you purchase offsets for the computer you buy. > > * You can always charge the camera and laptop battery with solar. > > ...really, all this leaves is the electricity used in bandwidth > generation, and if you can quanitfy it, you could buy an offset. > > Oh, and if you covered this, we'd love to mention it or run an excerpt on > Greentime. > > -- > Rhett. > http://www.weatherlight.com/freetime > http://www.weatherlight.com/greentime >
