Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Our Gadgets Come with a Cost

The Kindle has students eager to save money and the environment but publishers on their heels as the $25 billion book market stands on the verge of a technological shake-up.

This quote from the previous post (re: UW-Milwaukee's experiment with Kindle) reminds me of an article I read on Sunday.

Link to September 19 New York Times article, "Plugged-In Age Feeds a Hunger for Electricity".
Excerpt: The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.

Not that I'm anyone to preach, but it does appear we need to move beyond a "saving trees" mentality.

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