So what you’re saying is, that 'despite making up only 10% of the population, The richest are responsible for 49% of the CO2 emissions?
Do not fucking imply class consciousness is equivalent to racism, please and thank you.
Expropriate them now!
stop uttering communist blasphemy, else democracy will come pay you a visit
But how much are “lifestyle consumption emissions” compared to total emissions? I have never seen the term before, so I cannot put it in context.
What I imagine:
- if a poor person heats 30 square meters, and a rich person heats 3000 square meters, that is a lifestyle-related emission, and will differ considerably
- if a poor person drives a car, but a rich person drives a luxury car, emissions will differ, but not considerably (the poor person’s car is old, while the rich person’s car has engine volume like a truck), but if the poor person has no car, emissions will differ considerably
- however, if the rich person takes a plane ride every week, and the poor person twice per year or once per decade, that will differ considerably
- both persons will need to eat, but if the rich person eats fancy food, maybe the transport, packaging and other factors add up to make a considerable difference? or maybe not…
…etc. A breakdown of how would be nice to see.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but given what I know a small bit about planetary poverty, if you’re reading this from a place with hearing or air conditioning, on your own personal smart device or computer, you aren’t in that bottom 50%.
If I remember right, even with my problems I’m not even in the bottom 60%. Some places make in a month what I make in a day, when I have work.
Guaranteed if you own a house in the US you’re part of the world’s top 10% in terms of wealth.
That doesn’t translate directly to emissions, though, because the vast majority of emissions are industry and travel, so what you buy and how you live are much greater factors than heating and cooling. Go vegan and you instantly drop out of that “contribute to 50% of lifestyle emissions” zone.
Lookin’ at you Swift and Kelce!
makes me wonder when people are going to start caring about the power draw from PC’s and consoles.
I love gaming. Grew up gaming. Make my living working in the fringes of the game industry. And it makes me wonder when we’re going to discuss the clock cycles in the room…
I take comfort that the coal rollers and assholes who fly 40 miles for nachos far outweigh any contributions my aging PC generates but I do worry in the aggregate: we’re powering machines to generate heat to provide entertainment, and at some point that’s going to come under examination.
I imagine most computer related pollution would come from big tech companies like Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Since servers (Google Drive, Youtube, Onedrive, AWS, AI stuff) may require regular replacement of parts and a lot of electricity.
Electricity isn’t that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.
Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.
In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.
All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn’t because electricity is cheap).
I don’t have a console, but I’ve hooked up a Kill-A-Watt to my crazy gaming PC with a TDP > 600w. When working, browsing, listening to music, watching videos, etc, it only uses around 60w, or the same as a single incandescent light bulb. When playing a modern AAA game, it uses around 250w. Not great considering the power consumption of a Switch or Steam Deck, but orders of magnitude less than typical U.S. household heating and cooling. I’d guess AI and crypto BS uses more energy than all PCs combined. Though I guess we all indirectly use AI (or rather, get used by AI).
Even the top of the line gaming PC’s hardly draw 750w under full load, mine is pretty much the maxed out Gen4 and running stable diffusion will put it at 575w at absolute most, and that’s including my monitor and peripherals (speakers w/ subwoofer, USB etc). Normal gaming will vary, 2077 pushes it to the 450w range sometimes but not much. And even then, I’m gaming for maybe 3 hours at most?
If I were running Stable Diffusion over night, that’s one thing and it would definitely get my room to 90F. But a few hours gaming, even 8+ hours isn’t too much to account for, especially if it’s used to offset other costs - for example using an electric heater/radiator that draws 1500w and has no other use other than providing temporary heat.
I also think we have plenty of ways to game with low power if the mobile PC market is anything to go by. We don’t necessarily need 3080-4090’s drawing 500w for their full loads. Especially if we adopted other means of powering our grid, at that point it’s only an issue of the heat generation, which is sort of a necessity anyway so if we’re going this way then we may as well build homes with PC generated heating in mind! (\s but maybe lets do it?)
Global “lifestyle” emissions not total carbon emissions, that’s a pretty important difference.
If you’re reading this than you’re probably included in that 10%
Yeah, this is true.
From the actual report:
The richest 10% (around 630 million people) accounted for 46% of the total emissions growth – only marginally less than the 49% contributed by the middle 40%. The poorest 50% barely increased their consumption emissions at all.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-top-countries-by-wealth-per-person/
Adding up the top 10 countries’ populations doesn’t even reach 630 million.
People will probably use this to say that the top 10% need to pay for taxes and be held accountable, without realizing they’re probably in that 10%.
I’d actually like to see the 10% broken down even further.
