Digital sobriety
Sobriety, efficiency and offsetting told apart; the levers of a person and of an organisation ranked by order of magnitude, and the actions whose gain is negligible.
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- 4 topics
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A few cards from the deck
Digital sobriety: what is it?
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An approach that questions the need and cuts the number of devices and the amount of use, rather than making the same uses more economical.
Unlike efficiency, it gives no hold to the direct rebound effect: a use that has been given up cannot grow.
Which action gives the smallest gain on a person's annual footprint?
- Deleting thousands of old emails
- Keeping the phone two years longer
- Watching in standard definition rather than 4K
- Giving up a second screen
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Deleting thousands of old emails
A stored email weighs very little and storage uses little: the gain is negligible. Big gains come from devices (manufacturing), video and the network.
… reduces the need, … delivers the same service with fewer resources, … funds an action elsewhere.
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Sobriety reduces the need, efficiency delivers the same service with fewer resources, offsetting funds an action elsewhere.
These three approaches are not equal: only the first two cut emissions at the source, and the first escapes direct rebound.
Energy efficiency: what is it?
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The ratio between the service delivered and the energy consumed to deliver it: the same service with less energy.
It says nothing about the volume of use: if use doubles when efficiency doubles, total consumption does not fall.
A company replaces all its workstations every three years and asks employees to sort their emails. Which lever weighs most?
- Extend the workstations' period of use, repair them and reassign them
- Impose an email quota per employee
- Buy more efficient workstations every year
- Offset the fleet's emissions with a planting scheme
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Extend the workstations' period of use, repair them and reassign them
Most of a workstation's footprint comes from manufacturing: renewal repeats it. Sorting emails is marginal, annual buying worsens the problem, planting reduces nothing at the source.