I’ve spent the last five years writing and researching my new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology, which will be published on February 2, in celebration of Brigid’s Day, named for an ancient wise Irish witch. Unlike in the genocidal continent of Europe and much of the UK (except for Celtic Highlands Scotland), witches… Read More »
It is always a sign of danger when there is an obsession with one metric. It is always a sign that, behind the scenes, something nefarious is going on. Our environment is immensely complex and interconnected. We must always seek to calculate the true and total costs of our actions. For many years, the data… Read More »
In the poorer parts of Kern County, California, they may have to turn the streetlights off because of soaring electricity prices. “Californians pay the second-highest electricity rates in the USA,” according to the LA Times, while, ironically, California is the number one state in the USA for solar installations. What’s happening? “A growing body of… Read More »
“Nickel is a ‘critical mineral,’ needed for clean energy technology like batteries,” Leah Borts-Kuperman writes for The Narwhal about Canada’s drive to be a lead supplier of metals and minerals for the Green Transition. “It falls under the federal government’s controversial critical minerals strategy … It does this in part by fast-tracking environmental assessments and,… Read More »
Computing generates heat. The more computing, the more heat. The more heat, the less computing, because hot computers lose efficiency and ultimately fry and die. You must remove the heat. That’s why when you’re doing some heavy processing on your computer you will usually hear the little fan kick in. That’s why it’s advised to… Read More »
Another approach common to informal recycling is to wash and dip the e-waste—often using bare hands—in acids such as “nitrates, sulfates, hydrogen fluoride, etc., to create slurry,” Andy Farnell explained. Gold is extracted by mixing sodium cyanide to run off gold cyanide. Lots of toxic wastewater results from this process. The remaining slurry is dried… Read More »
Because of the material and design complexity of electronics, recycling them is much more complicated, energy intense and polluting than recycling for most other goods—and it gets more complicated every year. The silicon chip is a good example. It is very small and made of a complex mix of plastics, metals and alloys, all coated… Read More »
Electronics recycling is a greenwashing con. A scam. There’s little or no money in e-waste recycling. It’s designed that way. For most people, old electronics are not even worth the bother of bringing to the recycling center. Huge quantities of e-waste lie abandoned in drawers and cupboards: cables, phones, connectors, USB sticks, laptops, iPods, headphones,… Read More »
With the advent of Bitcoin and AI, data center waste grows even faster. Bitcoin computers have ultra-short lives. They are highly customized and cannot be used for anything else. “AI training is a temporary or one-off process,” Christopher Tozzi wrote for Data Center Knowledge. “Once an AI model has completed its training, it doesn’t need… Read More »
Every year, electronics become more wasteful, more designed for the dump. And to hide the problem, we in the Global North have found a classic way of behaving that so expresses the sheer hollowness of our civilization. We dump our toxic crap among the poor in the Global South, while advertising that we are helping… Read More »