A Sceptical Mind

I saw a new TV-add from “Elsparefonden” this morning. As many before it, it tried to get people to think about how much power they consumed and thereby consume less to save the environment. Before I go on, you can watch the add here from YouTube:

So what’s my problem with this? Well, basically it’s just plain bullshit! Sure, power consumption will fire up energy production demands and thereby harm the environment because the energy production harms the environment. However the only reason why energy production harms the environment is because of low-quality materials like coal! Why the hell try to get people to go back in technological development by using less power, instead of just making our energy production more effective and clean (which would probably also be cheaper than all does damn adds all the time).

But apparently the global warming hype has become almost a religion, with fanatics fighting to jump back in time on a lot of fronts like electronics, food, industrial production etc. For some reason they believe the world population was better off with the status we had 50 years ago! Like for example a Linux guy I heard at FOSDEM 08, whom claimed that the German government should not use Windows Vista and instead use Linux – what was his reason? Vista uses more power and Microsoft was therefore fighting to destroy the environment…. Now, there are many valid arguments for using Linux instead of Vista, however saving the environment is definitely not one of them! It really pisses me off a lot of organizations are using this global warming frenzy to push their agendas, just by coating it with some environmental bullshit.

So – My conclusion? Shift all energy production to wind power and nuclear power – and stop irritating us with demands of lower power consumption. The only real reason to consume less power is saving money – power is expensive and will probably keep on getting more expensive for a long while, so if one can develop machines that consume less power, these machines will obviously be cheaper – this however has nothing to do with saving the environment.