• qevlarr@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    You can’t guilt consumers into submission, it just doesn’t work. I’m not saying lifestyle choices can’t make a difference, because they can, but people can’t be forced into it. Environmentally friendly choices need to become more competitive

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      43 minutes ago

      But doesn’t the message also mean, stop buying screen-y stuff?
      Of course, the sponsors probably want users to use their screens less per day, enabling them to make worse screens that would still manage to work until the end of the warranty period due to less usage. But anyone thinking for more than 10 seconds about it would realise that creating the screen would also cause a climate impact, meaning, buy less, use for longer.

    • MBech@feddit.dk
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      2 hours ago

      I agree that guilting people into submission won’t work, but you can absolutely force people into living more environmentally friendly lifestyles. Taxes for one, to make products like beef too expensive compared to more environmentally friendly alternatives. Problem with that method though is that it mostly hits the working class instead of everybody, so I prefer laws to make environmentally friendly choices the only option instead. As an example, construction projects in Denmark has to calculate the total emissions of the project, and can’t exceed certain thresholds. The same principle could be made for stuff like food production, car production, any type of production really. That way every single company is forced to be environmentally friendly, and will stay competitive.

      Just hoping that the envronmentally friendly choices will become competitive by themselves will take too long though, if it will even happen at all, because the established products don’t have the same expenses as something new and unproven.

  • dax@feddit.org
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    5 hours ago

    Out of all the lifestyle changes we can make, this is so unbelievably minor it is not worth mentioning, let alone make a campaign for.

    Until the government and corporations take climate change seriously, making changes on an individual level won’t make a meaningful difference. Doesn’t mean we should do nothing… but come on, this is just stupid.

  • squinky@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    Same thing as personal carbon footprints. A meaningless change being pushed on individuals when their total contribution to the problem is a mere rounding error on the amount contributed by the big corporations

  • theneverfox@pawb.social
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    10 hours ago

    This is like recycling. Or like plastic straws. It’s a way to blame individuals for systematic issues, and even if everyone bought into it and cut their use to zero, it would be a tiny, meaningless, drop in a very big bucket

  • Jayjader@jlai.lu
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    4 hours ago

    Dimming your phone screen’s brightness saves a ton more energy than cutting off wifi, especially the newer the phone is.

    So, in a way, they’re not wrong about “screen time” just wrong about almost everything else.

    • Gladaed@feddit.org
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      1 hour ago

      Your phone barely uses any power anyway. Trying to save power by reducing phone usage is saving a penny while burning a dime.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    16 hours ago

    I object. Look at the CoVID-19 pandemic when most of us were at home staring at screens to talk to each other, receiving money from our governments not to work, gas prices were negative, we actually meaningfully paused the pollution of CO2 into our atmosphere for a very short time.

    Not that everything was peachy then but we could use some of the ideas we learned there for the good of us all.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      39 minutes ago

      Yeah, my computer would definitely be wasting less energy than running a car for equivalent useful work.

  • nbailey@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    A wireless router consumes single digit watts of power. A tablet or mobile phone consumes 1/10 or less of that. Making a slice of toast and a cup of tea uses more power than both of those devices all day combined. This is another silly attempt to shift blame from corporations and billionaires down to consumers and everyday people. Don’t buy it.

    • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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      3 hours ago

      Kind of like how a 1000 LLM prompts equate to a microwave running for a second.

      The real consumers of power are corporations.

      Like, if millions of homes all had a 55" 4K TV running 24/7, and decided to turn it off at the same time, that still only equates to 300MW/h.

      Which is the same as ONE large factory.

      We don’t have energy shortages, we have distribution problems.

    • DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Honestly the amount of energy needed to print and put this ad probably costed more than every amount they save.

    • megopie@beehaw.org
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      21 hours ago

      There is some truth to it, in that the data centers that host a lot of digital content are environmental catastrophes. But like, again, that’s the fault of companies, not the consumers. Companies could choose to optimize their websites better, choose to streamline their systems and minimize the amount of data they’re collecting on users. Choose to use solar power and batteries and eat the upfront capital cost (it would even save them money over the lifetime of the facility.)

      But they choose to ignore all that and just boil lakes and chug methane instead.

  • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    18 hours ago

    Even if I had my phone open 24/7, it would be nothing compared to the ecological damage done by private jets, fast fashion, golf courses, grocery stores throwing out perfectly good food, truckloads of trash dumped just about wherever, destroying ancient woodlands to make toilet shitty particle board furniture, using a shitton energy and water for ChatGPT to give someone dangerous health advice, make single-use plastic shit that’ll get thrown into the ocean, chopping down a rainforest to raise cattle that fart all day so that people can eat tons of meat on every single meal, and whatever millions of things capitalism has given us. Not to mention the irony of this “WiFi doesn’t grow on trees” message apparently being displayed on a screen and thus using energy. (although miniscule amounts, but still)

  • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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    21 hours ago

    Kind of a weird message. The paltry amount of energy my screen time uses pales in comparison to the footprint left by massive careless corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and it would be far more effective at helping the environment to convince them to make even small adjustments.

    Putting the onus on the average person just seems cruel. It leads to people like my wife desperate to do every little minor thing she can to adjust her footprint, making almost no difference in the grand scheme, while the real causes continue on unabated.

    • positiveWHAT@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Many small things are important too, like recycling, and voting for parties that enact green policy. “Screen time” is too vague to mean energy intensive.