[mr_mitm]

An iPhone battery can maybe hold 20Wh. 1kWh of electricity produces maybe 500g CO2 assuming the current power generator mix in the USA. Even a typical european easily causes 30kg of CO2 a day. 10g of that would go to charging an iPhone once a day. So the impact is completely negligible.

[theluketaylor]

The tragedy of commons at work. Each individual iPhone is a very small consumer of energy, but Apple has 2 billion active devices in the wild. 10g x 2 billion devices is suddenly quite significant and worthwhile. It's an interesting win that probably didn't actually take that many resources to implement. It won't come close to solving climate change on its own, but it's certainly not doing any harm and I'd much rather Apple implement it rather than not bothering.

[mr_mitm]

No, it's not more significant or worthwhile if you compare it to the emissions of 8 billion people. It's still negligible.

[theluketaylor]

There is a reason reduce is the first R. Not consuming energy in the first place is less carbon emitted today and less generation capacity that needs to be transitioned. It really is an 'every little bit helps' situation. Dismissing solutions as too small ignores the fact we need hundreds of thousands of small solutions along with many, many big ones.

[forward1]

Eating an animal-product based lunch will use more energy than years of iPhone usage. This is certainly not a "every little bit helps" situation - it is about managing our attention on things which actually matter, when there is a war going on to distract us from it.

[ezfe]

There are over 100 million iPhones in the US...

[mr_mitm]

And over 300 million people. What's your point? The percentages stay the same. Or even go down.

[ezfe]

My point is they’re still preventing carbon emissions. It’s not like it took the whole company halting work to get it done.

[mr_mitm]

The question was whether it's a meaningful contribution to climate change. I showed with my back of the envelope calculation that it's not. I did not say that it shouldn't be done.

But that you're saving a minuscule amount of carbon still doesn't change the fact that it's feel good activism that does nothing about the real challenges, which lie in transportation, agriculture and infrastructure. These contribute to huge chunks of our emissions, are indispensable and at the same time cannot be solved simply by switching to green electricity. Every time we feel good about saving 0.03% of our emissions gives us a reason not to feel so bad about the 70% of our emissions that are the real problem for which practically anyone has not even a good idea yet.