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by theluketaylor 935 days ago
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.
1 comments

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