[ClumsyPilot]

> a laptop alone is 4500MJ, or about 4 tanks of petrol

Doesnt matter, make it 10. My laptop is 5 years old. So, how it even close to the amount tou spend on transport or heating in 3 months. You claim is preposterous! They are small objects, they don't add up to much!

"how do you justify the mineral extraction techniques that are necessary for all of the nice shiny things we own?"

The younger generatuon owns less stuff than the generstion before. Car ownership is down, home ownership is down, tb owneship, fancy camera owneship. How many hundreds of smartphones do you think it takes to make up the resources consumed by one car?

[antisinguIarity]

>How many hundreds of smartphones do you think it takes to make up the resources consumed by one car?

Interesting question. According to this source[1], a car, weighing 20,000 times more than a mobile phone, takes 400 times the energy to manufacture. Alternatively, one car is 22 laptops, or 100 tablets. As we seem to get through electronics at maybe 5-10x the rate of cars, those numbers start to look pretty close. Hopefully, you don't have a desktop too, as there are about 10 of those to one car. Nor one of those fancy new ultrawidescreen TVs, as there are less than a handful of those to one car[2]

From that same paper, an obsession with just the energy cost of items completely misses the point. Eg:

"There is significant concern regarding the uncertainty around GHG emissions abatement for integrated circuit and LCD screen fabrication—particularly for perfluorinated compounds (PFC). PFCs range between 7,000 and 17,000 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide (CO2) based on 100-year Global Warming Potential GWP5. And while CO2 has atmospheric lifetimes between 30 and 95 years, PFCs can last 740 to 50,000 years (Pew Climate 2010)."

I'm not really sure why I'm complaining. Thanks to investments in the company my partner works for (a mining company), this renewables and tech boom is doing great things for our finances. Do you have any interests in mining?

[1]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7459114 [2]https://energy-solution.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/What-...

[ClumsyPilot]

Why do you keep trying to prove your original point which is impossible to prove because it contradicts laws of physics?

Your claim was that consumption of physical goods, and electric gargets in particular, is a bigger source of emissions than transportation and heating -> that is physically impossible because transportation and heating account for 65% of global energy use! All of industry is 20%, and only a tiny fraction of that is the smartphoens and gadgets. You are railing against 5% of global emissions and are trying to convince me that this is where the problem lies.

Also all of your 'individual choices' add up to nothing - residential energy use is 6%, less than half of industry is consumer goods, so add another 6%. So that's 12%, that's about all you can affect.

[antisinguIarity]

Here's my original comment:

>It's funny how people don't associate the endless stream of shiny gadgets they own, that are stuffed full with the latest and greatest in rare minerals, with the destruction of the ecosystem.

You and others have insisted on making this a discussion about energy use, despite me repeatedly steering us back to the topic. Electronic gadgets are terrible for the ecosystem, and in more ways than just raw manufacturing energy usage (which is very high, considering the size of the units, and how many of them we get through).

>Your claim was that consumption of physical goods, and electric gargets in particular, is a bigger source of emissions than transportation and heating

In the places where I did make such comparisons, I was talking about domestic transportation and heating, as I hope was clear. As your above figures also show, they are quite comparable.

Does your 6% figure for domestic energy usage include domestic heating? If so, it seems that a lot of your 65% figure for "global transportation and heating" will consist of transportation.

What do you propose we do (or at least, get mandated)?