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I'm going to come right out and say it here, charming lede be damned: we've got too much stuff running on outlet juice these days. Some people call it electricity. I call it outlet juice. And I'm not excepting myself from being part of the problem—right now, I'm writing on a laptop while my iPod is running through a stereo. Not exactly green: I happen to know most of my power comes from a coal burning plant in New Jersey.
Every gadget I run, in essence is responsible for more burnt coal, and more carbon emissions.
There. I just turned the stereo off. Unplugged it, too—vampire power, you know. Laptop stays on though, for the obvious reasons. Just please try not let the shadow of hypocrisy fall over the rest of this post.
Point is, we're at a point where it's tempting to have everything on, all the time, all at once. It's just too much. I recently encountered an article that exemplifies this principle (yes, I was idly surfing the inter-webs whilst this occurred. Sorry). It was about how you can hook up your laptop to a TV so you can watch a movie you've got downloaded (illegally from a bit torrent or something, I assume) on the big screen.
These are the cases that I'm going to make a stand against—I'm not going to advocate we all give up computers for good and permanently forsake our televisions. That's just unrealistic. But do we need to have our laptop running full steam alongside the TV, wasting double the energy? The answer, it seems to me, is no. Can't we rent the DVD and watch it that way, or simply watch the movie on the laptop?
But it's so damn tempting to just turn everything on—we have so much access, and we don't want to deny ourselves any of it. Of course, our electricity bills end up taking the hit, but that just starts seeming inevitable to a lot of people. It doesn't have to be—we can make an effort to minimize our electronics and gadgetry use, and resist tech temptation. And for the good lord's sake, let's turn our crap off when we're done with it, and unplug the stuff we're not using.
Let's save money, emissions, and our waking conscious selves by not submitting to the allure of technology. We have to.
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