The Backlight is On, But Nobody's Home
By Nick Lockwood - reprinted with permission
Environmentalism
is turning the world mad. Obvious nonsense suddenly becomes gospel truth if it
is uttered in the course of "saving the world". Apparently even
Google is not safe from the ravages of the environmentalist movement. So where
will it all end?
I don't mind
admitting that I'm not a big fan of environmentalism. This confession is often
met with shock and outrage - "don't you care about the planet? Think of
your unborn grandchildren!", etc - but
believe me, I have nothing against the environment, nor any desire to see it
destroyed without good reason.
My hostility
towards environmentalism in fact has nothing to do with its central tenet of
protecting the environment - what I object to is the way that all logic, reason
and any semblance of scientific rigour go out the window as soon as environmentalism
is brought to the table.
Never was
this effect more aptly demonstrated than by Mark Ontkush at ecoIron.
Mark reasoned
that because displaying white pixels on a screen uses more energy than showing
black ones, and given that Google is one of the most popular sites on the
Internet, Google should change the background of its search page to black. He
estimated that this would save "around 3000 Megawatt-hours a year",
or $75,000 on energy bills. It was such a good idea that Heap Media actually went and
implemented it. The result was Blackle.
This is wrong
in so many ways that it's almost worth coining a new word for wrong to use in
cases as extreme as this one, because ordinary "wrong" doesn't seem
sufficient... "Ecoillogical" perhaps...
- Even
though Google is one of the most popular sites in the world, people hardly
spend any time on it, they mostly just type in a search query and go somewhere
else right away. Even for the people who have Google as their home page, the
only time when it is showing for an extended period is when they are away from
the computer, and most computers already have the power-saving feature of
turning the monitor off when not in use for an extended period, which is much
more energy-efficient than simply showing a black screen anyway. Besides which,
many of the millions of queries that Google receives each day are via 3rd party
tools or interfaces (such as the search fields in Firefox and IE7, or the
Google toolbar, or even Blackle itself) and would therefore be largely
unaffected by this change.
- Most
CRT-type monitors are now being phased out in homes and offices in favour of
LCD flat screens because of various, mostly environmental reasons such as the fact that flat screens use fewer
materials, take up less space and use considerably less power than a CRT
monitor does.
- Flat
screens do not illuminate pixels on the screen, like CRTs do, but instead the
screen is transparent, and a backlight is shone through the pixels. The
brightness of this light is uniform across the whole screen and is not affected
by the colour of the pixels. Colouring the screen black on an LCD display is
equivalent to putting a lampshade on a light bulb - it makes it appear darker
but it does not reduce the power consumption in any way.
- In
other words, for the ever-increasing majority of PC systems being sold now, (by
Mark's own estimates, 75% of PCs in active use are now using LCDs) running the
black version of Google will have zero reduction in their power consumption. But here's the real kicker...
- Although
the vast majority of power consumed by an LCD goes into powering the backlight,
a small amount is used to colour the pixels on the screen. The liquid crystals
used by these screens are naturally transparent, and only become opaque when a
current is applied. Varying the current varies the opacity. So a white pixel is
produced by turning the power off completely, and a black pixel is produced by
turning the power up to maximum.
- So
yes, that's right, turning the screen black on a modern display without dimming
the backlight means that the display is using the maximum possible power consumption.
- Going
on G4techTV's measurements for
Samsung LCD TV power consumption, a predominantly white screen on an LCD saves
around 1 watt over a black screen. So if 75% of screens are running LCDs, then
the power saving of running the white version of Google is 4/15 of Mark's
savings estimate for CRTs - 800 megawatts. You can subtract this from his
figures, which are dubiously high anyway.
As adoption
of LCD screens rises to 100% over the next few years, it is just barely
conceivable that widespread adoption of Blackle may actually produce a
measurable increase in power usage. Of
course that 1000-odd megawatt increase would be an absolute drop in the ocean
compared to the total power usage of computers, which one would expect to vary
much more due to other components such as CPU's etc, but the point remains that
the only possible effect of
widespread adoption of this policy would be the exact opposite of its intention.
Some have suggested
that by making the majority of the screen black you could then dim the display
without any significant impact on legibility - but this is not the case either.
If you can read white text on a black background with the display dimmed, then
you can usually read black text on a white background at the same brightness
level. In fact, Blackle's use of grey text on a black background is barely
legible on the screen I'm using now even with brightness turned up to maximum.
And you can't just dim the backlight behind the bits that are black either - at
least not with any screen technology currently on the market.
Basically
it's just a really moronic idea. It is so stupid that it beggars belief that
anybody actually went so far as to implement it (although when you consider
that every time someone uses Blackle to do a Google search, Google pays Heap
Media some money, it suddenly seems like a much better idea from their point of
view). The only reason I can think of why it got this far is the Reality
Distortion Field (RDF) surrounding all things environmental.
This is the
same effect that means self-confessedly ineffectual measures like the Kyoto
protocol are praised for "taking a step in the right direction", as
if wasting trillions of dollars on
doing something that is not even supposed to have any significant impact on global warming is somehow the "right
direction". Even its supporters admit that:
Even if the Protocol were implemented by all parties
to the Kyoto conference, it would result in a just a 5.2% reduction of
greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, reducing anthropogenic emissions
from around 7.2 billions[sic] tons per year to about 6.8 billion tons per year.
From an environmental standpoint, this agreement falls woefully short of
measures needed to head off the warming of the earth.
...and yet
somehow this doesn't seem to bother them. Even though Kyoto will simply serve
to squander money that might be spent on real, effective environmental
measures, they are happy to do it anyway.
It's not
uncommon when times get desperate for people to want to try to do something, anything, to try and prevent disaster. And when nobody has
any good ideas that might actually work, people resort to things that won't.
This is presumably how the idea of the rain dance, or the human sacrifice came
about.
When
scientists started telling us that the Earth might be screwed, nobody wanted to
hear that they had no practical solutions for how to prevent it, so the
respectable scientists took a step back and we called for the shamans of
climate control to do their rain dances and perform their sacrifices in the hope
that it might help us.
"Bring
forth your garbage and let us read its entrails!" they cried "We must
separate the plastic from the paper and the aluminium, for mixing of our waste
products angers the gods!"
"You
must forsake your earthly trappings, sacrifice your holidays to the Bahamas so
that the gods of carbon may be appeased. Give up your four-by-fours and embrace
the holy hybrid-electric chariot. May the fumes from your biodiesel appease the
mighty ones".
And so we go
through this ridiculous rigmarole of separating and subdividing our waste into
new categories and abandon luxuries such as patio heaters, sports utility
vehicles and recreational air travel. We go to pop concerts where tiresome
manufactured bands blare out songs about how we've destroyed the Earth and then
spend the money on planting trees to absorb the CO2 generated by
flying them to the concert arena. And at no point do we even pretend that any
of this might actually have more than a trivial impact on the environment. We do it not because it is the right thing, but because it is important that we be seen
to be doing something.
But no matter
how desperate the situation gets (and the assertion that the situation is
desperate, or even existent, is hardly uncontroversial at this
point), it is never so desperate that it
becomes a good idea to do the wrong thing. The wrong solution is, by definition, wrong. It may seem that taking small ineffectual measures
is a step in the right direction, but in fact all it does is squander time,
effort and resources that are now no longer available to devote to finding a
solution that might actually work.
Environmentalists
are trying to tell us that the only way to save the planet is to take a
technological step backwards. The logical conclusion of their arguments is that
we must revert back to a pre-industrial society to curb the byproducts of
modern living. They are telling us this because they are too ignorant and
short-sighted to realise that the best way to solve a problem is by actually
solving the problem rather than second
guessing all previous solutions to all previous problems, in case they somehow
brought about the current one.
The
industrial revolution was not just an
example of western greed - it was how we dug ourselves out of the feudal
gutter. It was how we set ourselves on the path to curing disease, eliminating
poverty and generally giving the citizens of our society a chance to aspire to
something better than tending cattle or digging ditches all their lives. The
industrial revolution was the solution to a vast number of really horrible
problems that faced humanity, many of which had a much more pronounced impact
on our lives than the ice caps melting would do now. But one solution often
introduces new problems, which must themselves be solved. This isn't some big
disaster, it's what life is all about.
We encounter
a problem. We solve it. We move on.
The really
crazy thing about environmentalist thinking is that it somehow blinds us to
actual plausible solutions in favour of ridiculous ones. Somehow vast,
impractical, expensive, long-term plans become favoured over simpler ones that
might actually work. For the cost of Kyoto we could equip tens of millions of
houses with solar panels for example, or construct a giant orbital mirror to
deflect radiation from the Sun. These ideas sound far-fetched and too expensive
to be practical - and indeed they probably are - but I for one would rather
waste a trillion dollars on an impractical solution that would probably work than waste the same amount or more on one which we already
know for a fact won't.
And of course
the final appeal of the environmentalists is to our guilt. They tell us that it
is the third world that will be worst
affected by climate change. Yes, those poor starving kids in Africa that we all
feel so bad about are the ones who are going to be the first to get flooded
when the ice caps melt because we refused to stop taking foreign holidays.
This is of
course the very worst hypocrisy of the environmental movement, because it is
partly our refusal to help the third world to develop the gas-guzzling,
coal-burning technologies of our own industrial revolution that is preventing
them from becoming "first world" societies in the first place. Our
treatment of the third world is like some kind of twisted Munchausen's
Syndrome by Proxy, where we keep them poor and starving
so that we may forever be in charge of looking after them and coddling them so
people can see how selfless we all are.
So enough of
this nonsense. By all means spend time and effort trying to save the planet,
but please stop trying to ram half-baked ideas like Blackle or oppressive and
pointless measures like Kyoto down our throats. A stupid idea does not
automatically become good just because its inventor was worrying about the
environment when he had it. An ineffective solution is not worth implementing
anyway just because its inventors are well-meaning.
The time to
buy electric cars is when they become a practical and affordable alternative to
petrol cars. If we really are running out of oil then that will happen soon -
if it doesn't then it suggests that something is wrong with the theory of why
we need them in the first place.
And the time
to start worrying about which colours on your screen are most energy efficient
is about the same time that you want to check yourself into an institution and
ask for a jacket with really long sleeves.
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