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AS climatologists keep warning about tipping points in the climate crisis, the real tipping point, which must always be searched for in human behavior (otherwise it wouldn't be called an "anthropogenic" climate crisis), was reached long ago when mankind decided to trash its perfectly marvelous telephony infrastructure and replace it with the architecture necessary to support smart phones for stupid people ... you can see them as they drive around in their smart cars, dressed in smart clothes while guzzling smart water from bottles made from non-biodegradable plastic.
Thirty years ago, when the Kyoto Protocols were introduced in 1992, there wasn't a smart phone anywhere on earth. Yet, fully knowing the environmental impact, they were used as a means to destroy the far more democratic Ma Bell network that could be accessed by anyone for a mere nickel. Now, the means to access the telephone network is restricted to those able to slap down a cool grand just for an access terminal, and then forced to sign a contract that will force them to keep paying whatever price the ISP demands to keep their smart phone from from turning into dead weight.
Thus, three decades after Kyoto made plain that the path down which humanity was so casually strolling led to the abyss, we have reached what will be seen, in retrospect, as the tipping point for climate alteration via humankind's willful geoengineering of the atmosphere. The Annus Horribilis of all mankind has ironically fallen during the same year that an aged British Monarch, who used the term to describe her own self-absorbed travails, has died, making its passing, as though it were just another year, that much easier to docket.
Sitting on my desk is a landline phone.
It requires no power until I lift the receiver and start to push the buttons on its keypad.
The stupid smartphone you are using, however, sucks in power on a constant basis, and, unlike my phone, which can be use by anyone in the household without my risking them looking at my personal data, or erasing it, or stealing it and/or the phone, which is cheaper than a tee-shirt at Macy's, and which I've owned for 20 years, your phone, however, is subject to all of the above ... and should you find yourself on a street corner without it, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll allow you to use theirs, for the above notated reasons. In other words, there is no mendacity necessary in the reluctant potential phone-lender, but a serious risk of them losing everything on the (for the most part) only computer terminal to the wired network in their possession, and risking the danger you will then have access to their data, data they would no longer have access to. To risk such a loss to benefit a stranger is unadvisable.
But the convenience cell phones offer is apparently worth geo-engineering the atmosphere for, so, together with the ubiquity of the automobile and the pleasure derived therefrom, damn the consequences.
And the power usage?
As Europe goes through energy withdrawals, its industries in turmoil because of the cost of power, a new energy regime is being created on the back of the old one, a regime that will for the first time force industry to pay the true cost of power, and that will mean the end of the global economy as it has been known since the decade of greed, when a band of zealots calling themselves the Moral Majority, swept into power under Reagan in America, and Thatcher in anything-but-Great Britain.
And just as nobody saw fit to remonstrate about the gall of a religious organization claiming their superior morality to the rest of the population while it enshrines the deadliest of the deadly sins in a catafalque of Virtue, no one said a peep about the world imposing on its billions of citizens an entirely unnecessary telephony infrastructure that would result in a rapid, ever-escalating expansion of the tonnage of CO2 annually added to the atmosphere; "Paying it (climate chaos) forward" by decades, delivering another Roaring Twenties: only this time marked by roaring wildfires and roaring torrents of floodwaters. Far in advance of the even the most pessimistic of "alarmist" climate prognosticators, all thanks to the ubiquity of remote control computer terminals with voice capabilities that we instead like to refer to as "phones." Siri-ously?
These terminals are in constant need of Upgrades, both in the hardware and the IOS, the one dependent on the other, such that a phone not upgraded soon loses its ability to accommodate the ever-expanding memory and cpu-cycle requirements of its bug-infested software.
By now we should all be aware that this is not a fluke, but a feature of the entire computer industry, of which the phone-capable terminals everyone carries are but an offshoot. Every component along the way, which is to say the network itself, is constructed using the exact same paradigm of rapid, built-in, energy-intensive, obsolescence. When AT&T bought the company I worked for in the nineties, there was still 60's-era communication equipment installed in the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. There are no products that are manufactured by Cisco, Apple, or Microsoft-compatible PC's that come close to that longevity. Even now, while the world is experiencing its most intense energy crisis (one from which it hasn't the capacity to overcome), supply-chain problems, and computer chip shortage in our entire lifetimes (and I'm seventy, so that's quite a span of time), Microsoft has sent me a warning that my perfectly working HP PC, with which I have had no problems, must be entirely scrapped and replaced with "Windows 11-capable" hardware, because they will no longer support my functioning system. That entails millions of systems around the globe, pressuring supplies of microchips whose quantities are in such strained capacity that SUV's are sitting in manufacturers lots because the chip needed to move the sideview mirrors are unavailable. The push to replace older systems instead of offering to support them at least through the shortage demonstrates the real state, as opposed to the pseudo-concern for the turmoil, grief, and destruction that climate change is wreaking on an escalating basis, the corponations constantly pat themselves on the back for evincing. Maximizing profits trumps everything else. That is the Corporate mandate, not "doing something" to benefit mankind, or help alleviate a shortage their own strategy of planned obsolescence with a methamphetamine rush has helped to create.
And just as the hydraulic fracturing of the North American continent changed the paradigm of energy usage forever, in that the amount of energy consumed, and therefore the number of O2 molecules in the atmosphere replaced by CO2 molecules year-after-year increases, for every joule of electricity produced, the onus of the networks' energy requirements gets heavier and heavier with each passing year, as billions of remote terminals download TIK-Tok videos, and youtube seminars, full-length movies and fashion seminars, closing shops all around the globe that employed local help and hired your youngsters, who are now side-lined so that all the money that once stayed in the local economy is more and more efficiently vacuumed out of that local economy and sucked into the accounts of billionaires who have no accountability to anyone other than their "investors."
Although its mentioned time and again that the mining of crypto-currencies uses as much energy as that of a modern industrialized State, it is just as assiduously ignored that the entire internet and its vast array of wireless devices deployed around the globe in the hands of billions of citizens, does exactly the same thing, and for the same reason: to fill the pockets of Corponations like Google, that publicly preens itself for its "Zero-emissions" policies even while its vast hordes of users unknowingly allow electronic hit-men to churn up their devices: hijacking CPU cycles, bandwidth, and memory (ie gobs of ENERGY), that the user must pay for despite it's being unwanted and unwarranted intrusion. All these devices are enabled by Google to combust vast stores of fossil fuels, of every kind, all over the world, to provide Google exec's with their golden parachutes and its "investors" with dividends for delivering to customers exactly what they don't want: useless onerous advertising for products they neither want nor need and making them pay for the privilege.
And unlike broadcast TV, this advertising is downloaded first, so the data you go to a sight for is treated secondarily, by the time it gets loaded, an advertiser, or two, or three, or dozens, have been given the information Google has been paid to deliver, while your "free" content is held hostage. Some sites, such as Accuweather.com, have even had the temerity to switch their content to a small sidebar while all the ADS appear larger and bolder in the main viewing pane while (literally) hundreds of companies that have paid for your data are allowed into your device to access your hard drive, use your cpu cycles, and hijack your memory resources to collect it.
This is a paradigm shift of the same scale as that of our energy infrastructure, such that its energy requirements, far from taking into account the ever-increasing burden of CO2 we are asking the atmosphere and oceans to absorb, ignores them completely, as they have been for decades, and EXPANDS the number of electrons set in motion to do the simplest of tasks, even as we pay the price for such arrogance on an ever-expanding scale. And electrons are set in motion only by the input of more energy, while, like the telephone system, the less energy-intensive method of accomplishing the same task is gutted so completely there is no going back to it.
Even as half the population of the most energy-intensive country in the world lap up the slime oozing from the lips of the avatar of the hoax that "Climate change is a hoax," rally 'round their fat, fatuous Furor, and the delegates of COPout27 pack their bags in readiness to burn vast quantities of jet fuel to junket to yet another in a series of failed conferences, the year 2022 is starting to look like the year when the paradigm in the world's weather regime is shifting in much the same way as that of our communication systems and our energy procurement. So much so as to make it an impossibility (for anyone but the addled followers of their Jim Jones Furor) to not realize that whatever they thought their future was going to be, and whatever all those advertisers on those "smart-alec phone"'s are trying to sell them as to our viability in that future, are all based on factors that have intractably changed.
Just as landlines are gone forever, and crude oil has been replaced with light-tight oil costing exponentially more to explore for, excavate, and deliver, the weather regime that we have geo-engineered is no longer conducive to mono-cropping, while our shorelines will never again be secure from flooding, and our summers can no longer be looked forward to as a time to for recreation and vacation. Instead, crop failures and pest infestations will increasingly plague farmers; rolling blackouts, that have already become part of the necessary power arrangements in even two of the top five oil-producing states (Texas and California) in America, one of the three Petro States in the world, such that the country that produces more than ten percent of the world's oil supply can now no longer keep the lights on (yet no provision has been made to prepare Utilities' users for the changed future they are facing); and summers are already looked to with trepidation all over the world as people wonder who's next to have their lives destroyed, or their homes burnt to the ground while they watch their vehicles being swept away by yet another flash flood.
While Apple displays their logo proudly, no one in this Moral Majority-ruled nation, seems to have considered what the consequences of taking their own bytes from the Apple might be. Somehow the Loss of Paradise has figured nowhere in their estimation.
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| Paradise Lost, by John Milton Friedman. |
