admin November 15th, 2008
I believe there are good and practical reasons for simple livers not to invest so much of our time and money in high tech gadgetry like PCs, cell phones, PDAs, etc. I hate sounding like an old fart throwing a wet blanket on all the fun – after all, I own and enjoy using some of these things myself (you hypocrite!). BUT, it seems to me there are clearly diminishing returns on these gadgets: diminishing each of us personally as well as the world as a whole. IT’s actual total cost could put us all in the poor house and help turn the planet into a cinder.
I know this will not go down well with most people, because we have become addicted to all things IT, and most people can’t conceive of living without them – either because we love electronic toys (like me) or because we deeply believe that it is the best and most efficient way to live in the 21st Century.
I’m writing this because I think it reinforces, from a purely rational, economic, and environmental point of view, a basic tenet of Christian simple living – that we shouldn’t put our time and energy into accumulating money and stuff – in this case electronic stuff. Although my comments below are arguments from reason and research rather than faith, I think it’s useful for Christians to know that economics and reason also support Jesus’ most basic teachings about how we should live. In fact, some of the side effects of the high tech revolution might be a parable that Jesus himself might tell if he were preaching to us today.
Just one declaration before I begin: there is precious little research data or knowledgeable analysis out there on this topic, and I certainly have not done the research myself, so what follows is based on my own observations and reasoning as well as having read as much as I can find on the topic. And my bias, of course, is based on many Biblical citations that warn us to beware of accumulating stuff – especially complex and expensive stuff (for example, the parable of the rich man in Luke 12:15 ff and the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-10) – regardless of current research or the lack of it.
Love is Blind
As a world-wide society we have fallen in love with high tech, but like most lovers, we have been blind to the substantial down-sides of it. Many of us assume that IT and other high tech ‘solutions’ will help us become sustainable because it will make things more efficient and will enable new greener ways of doing things. A basic assumption underlying this is that there is always a technological solution to resource degradation, pollution, global warming, and energy needs, so we don’t really need to do anything difficult ourselves, like be satisfied with buying less stuff! However, it is likely not true that technology will solve all of our problems because our biggest problem in this regard is not our lack of green technology, but rather human psychology which most often defeats the intended outcomes of technological solutions as well as reason and common sense.
Manufacturers and marketers always tell us that using high tech devices of all kinds is much more efficient and environmentally friendly than using old fashioned analog or manual systems, and that they will save us money as well as save the environment. But in making this argument, they only focus on the operational efficiency of the devices, i.e., how functional are they when we use them, and how much the devices minimize energy use and environmental damage, in addition to the amount of work they can accomplish while being greener.
There is a major error in this kind of reasoning. In fact each device has a much longer economic-environmental history and impact than what occurs during the short time we actually use it. It seems obvious to me that leaving these longer-range costs and side-effects out of the efficiency equation is an economic, environmental, and social mistake.
Unintended Consequences
Let’s start with some of the unintended consequences of IT and other technologies.
1. It makes everything much faster: Gee, isn’t that great?
· Not really. Computerization of all kinds speeds up our consumption of everything, resulting in far greater resource depletion and dramatically increasing pollution, including production of the high tech devices themselves (and their inappropriate disposal). The Web, for example, makes it vastly easier to buy virtually everything, thereby greatly cranking-up consumption in general. IT also makes it possible for businesses to produce and market more, faster. These two factors, in turn, increase the amount of packaging/shipping material used and increases resource depletion and adds to global warming with the inefficient distribution system it has spawned. All those little UPS and FedEx trucks delivering the items we would not even have bought before the advent of the Web, waste a tremendous amount of fuel and contribute mightily to air pollution.
This means that we are burning our furniture (natural and non-renewable resources) to keep ourselves warm (or, in this case, merely ‘happy’) at a faster and faster rate. This would be impossible if we were not riding the crest of the “IT revolution.”
· Both good and the bad things travel around the world within seconds. Our current financial crisis is a good example of a bunch of bad practices (CDOs, CDSs, MBSs, SIVs, and other securitized obligations, hedge funds, lending abuses, etc.) which were invented in the U.S., spread very rapidly around the world eventually creating universal havoc rather than a hiccup in just one place. IT made the rapid spread to every corner of the world possible.
It seems similar to the problems caused by computerized stock trading where computer programs choose what gets traded when and in what quantities – automatically with little human intervention. This became such a problem several years ago, that now trading can be halted to prevent market crashes because thousands of computer trading programs reacting simultaneously to an event can easily precipitate such a crash. Not a good thing!
2.But isn’t it a lot more efficient?
Maybe not.
High tech, broadly understood,may not be very efficient, cost effective, or cost efficient as is almost universally claimed!
· When you include in this calculation, as we must if we are going to be honest with ourselves, all of the costs of design, raw materials, manufacturing, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposal of both the hardware and software, it looks like a net loss to our already unsustainable economy and the physical world which unfortunately has to support it.
My informal efficiency calculation includes:
o The environmental costs of mining all the materials, some of which are highly toxic and often mined in Third World countries where workers are abused and where social justice is unheard of. For example, coltan (columbo-tantalite), a critical semiconductor component, is mainly mined in The Congo where the mining process has devastated wide swaths of natural areas while holding many of its workers in poverty.
Then there is the transportation of the raw materials to plants in many locations around the world which obviously uses a great deal of fuel and produces prodigious amounts of pollution;
o The manufacturing process which, for most electronics, requires vast amounts of water, huge amounts of power, and use of highly toxic materials: it turns out that although most manufacturing plants don’t produce a lot of thick, black smoke from their smokestacks, they are quite ‘dirty’ industries when you look beyond their ‘clean rooms’ to the materials they work with and the large quantities of waste that is produced, then stored, or otherwise disposed of.
For example, a typical plant producing semiconductors uses 240,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and over 2 million gallons of water every day. While recycling and reusing of water does occur, extensive chemical treatment is required for remediation, and in dry or desert areas such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, home to plants for Motorola, Philips Semiconductor, Allied Signal and Signetics, Intel, and other high-tech firms, the high consumption of water necessary for the manufacturing of semiconductors can pose an especially significant drain on an already scarce natural resource. 1
o The transport, literally half way around the world, of countless numbers of components from manufacturers to assemblers, and finished devices to suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers results in a huge amount of resource waste and pollution;
o The tremendous investment business and industry has to make to install hardware and software, train users, create large support systems, maintain, replace, and dispose of equipment each year, not to mention construction and maintenance of the server farms required to store, protect and distribute the trillions of files we create.
Home user’s costs are proportionally just as high as those of business and industry: we have to buy, figure out how to install and use the equipment, use a lot of electricity to keep it running (of course even after we turn it off unless we unplug it all, including peripherals), spend a lot of time and/or money to maintain and upgrading the hardware and software – often at unconscionably frequent intervals. What did we ever do with our time and money before we bought these gadgets?
o Then there is the well-known disposal problem at the end of each machine’s life cycle, with much of our disposed electronics ending up in Third World electronics dumps where the toxics leach into the water and sicken or kill people and wildlife. Although this might improve over time, it is a very big current problem, and any future systemic solutions to the disposal/recycling problem will have a substantial cost attached to it and will never be 100% effective.
I believe that when we add all these costs together, they at least match if not exceed any potential efficiencies – especially when you consider that some of these unanticipated (and unplanned-for) consequences, could be catastrophic for our world.
But Won’t Productivity be Lower Without Computers?
Yes!
It has been an article of faith in neoclassical economics, and particularly for Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics, that we must always improve productivity, i.e., grow (a lot) in order to raise the GDP and make increasing amounts of money and we must endlessly become more efficient in order to achieve that. All economists, except the small but growing, group of ecological economists such as Herman Daly, tout this as the only real possibility.
I disagree, and in fact I believe that if, as a society, we don’t voluntarily shift into low gear instead of overdrive, the world of physics, the natural world in which we live, may force us into what Daly calls “steady state economics.” This would be an economic system based on no growth in the neoclassical economic sense. It is a system that does not require ever-expanding consumption, resource degradation, and pollution, and it does not require technological miracles to achieve sustainability.
However, being ‘forced’ is almost always a very painful train wreck, as opposed to consciously, purposefully shifting to a new economic model with better prospects for sustainability. Never-the-less, I believe economic down-shifting will happen, either voluntarily or involuntarily, because the pyramid scheme that we call our economy will eventually collapse. That could be a good thing!
A steady state economic system might put us in a world where more people work to produce fewer goods and services. This would certainly decrease productivity but, much to our benefit, use-up far fewer resources, reduce pollution, slow global warming, and ensure that most everyone has a job even in a down-turn rather than having massive layoffs. In such a system we might actually begin to focus on the value and quality of the work we do and the products we produce, as well as the folks we sell them to, rather than being mindlessly focused on increasing stock prices, market capitalization, stock options, and the size of golden parachutes.
Yes we would probably have substantially fewer glitzy gadgets from cell phones to SUVs and McMansions. Our country (the USA in my case) might not always have the largest economy, the biggest military, or the most clout as a result, but then we don’t need to always be the biggest and best. Many countries and societies have done very well without all that, thank you very much. (I can hear the screams about that thought even as I write) but instead we might have a great deal more joy, real security, better family lives, and sanity. Sounds good to me!
But I also believe that from a purely Christian perspective, our nationalism and what our governments might or might not do or be, is not of primary concern. It is our behavior as individual followers of Christ that matters, whether the whole country or the whole world follows or not.
Jesus may have known better than the economists!
Tell me what you think: comments@christiansimpleliving.org
Web Resources on this Subject
John Nolt, University of Kentucky, Environmental Effect of Computers, http://web.utk.edu/~nolt/radio/computer.htm
Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, http://www.etoxics.org/site/PageServer
Info world: UN study: Think upgrade before buying a new PC http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/07/hnunstudy_1.html
IPS: Environment: Where That “Recycled” E-Waste Really Goes, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44707
USA Today: Don’t recycle ‘e-waste’ with haste, activists warn http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/environment/2008-07-06-ewaste-recycling_N.htm
National Science Foundation/Jackson State University: IE-Waste Research, http://e-waste.jsums.edu/
Washington Post, EPA Lets Electronic Waste Flow Freely, GAO Report Says, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/16/AR2008091603225.html
Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, Computer Productivity Defies Definition and Confirmation, http://www.afcea.org/signal/archives/content/Feb00/computer-feb.html
University of Guelph, The Environmental Impact of Desktop Computing, http://www.accessola2.com/superconference2007/thurs/307/green.ppt
United Nations University, Study tallies environmental cost of computer boom, http://update.unu.edu/archive/issue31_5.htm
University of Michigan, Coltan Mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo http://sitemaker.umich.edu/section002group3/coltan_mining_in_democratic_republic_of_the_congo
DieOff.org, Steady-State Economics, Herman Daly, http://dieoff.org/page88.htm
Footnotes:
1 Taken from The Environmental Impact of the Manufacturing of Semiconductors, Connexions, http://cnx.org/content/m14503/latest/
Tags: Commentary