Friday 5 September 2014

Green Party

From the BBC

Ms Bennett dismissed suggestions it was downplaying its core environmental message, saying the party was in the front line of opposition to fracking and confronting climate change.

She challenged David Cameron to personally attend the UN climate summit in New York at the end of the month. It has been reported that the leaders of China and India will both skip the event.


Surely "by video conference"? Or doesn't it count towards boiling Gaia if you go to a climate conference?

9 comments:

Ian Hills said...

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett is a complete nutter. See -

http://britain-today.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-nutters-are-in-town.html

Mark Wadsworth said...

No.

Flights can be split up into "essential" and "non-essential", whereby flights to a climate change conference are "essential" and all others are "non-essential".

A K Haart said...

The ultra low carbon approach to UN climate summits is to stay in bed.

Sackerson said...

Electronic information handling and transfer of all kinds now consumes 10% of global energy production - more than all the airline of the world. Should we all do our bit and log off?

Tim Almond said...

Sackerson,

First of all, what's your source for that 10%, because I know what it costs to run servers and PCs and tablets and it's miniscule compared to heating and washing.

Secondly, a lot of that information processing makes us more efficient. Kindle books use less resources than a real book. Are delivered with a tiny amount of power and don't require travelling to a bookshop to go and get them.

Sackerson said...

Stigler:

Second point accepted, my comment was tongue in cheek.

First point:

http://www.tech-pundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud_Begins_With_Coal.pdf?c761ac

... quoted in my piece, "Energy use and the Internet" here:

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/energy-use-and-internet.html

Tim Almond said...

Sackerson,

Sorry, but the numbers in one of those reports are pure bollocks. Streaming a movie use as much power as a fridge for 2 weeks? No, it really doesn't.

You can only get those numbers by working out what a fairly old PC can do at its most intensive (e.g. transcoding video from magnetic drive storage to magnetic drive storage). Playing video isn't that intensive and if you cache the data into memory (as you would with a large-scale movie service), you'll improve performance even more. And at Amazon's and Google's scale I'm damn sure they do that.

Every year, this stuff uses less video. I do transcoding of video and don't do it locally any more because it's cheaper to pass the job to Microsoft. And that keeps falling in price, and that's because Intel keep making more efficient chips. The new 14nm processors have reached a level of efficiency that they won't need a cooling fan any longer. The air inside a laptop can cool them, which again means less energy use.

Sackerson said...

I'm not in a position to say. But this article is also relevant:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/cell-networks-are-energy-hogs/274961/

Tim Almond said...

Sackerson,

Well, it depends on what your alternative is. My wife will sometimes call me on the way home asking me to grab something from the supermarket. That means I go and get something that's within a few feet of my journey instead of her making a journey for a tiny cost in telephone energy. I've been in Oxford and googled a supplier of something and then used my satnav to navigate me to that shop instead of driving around hopelessly to find it.