Speak for yourself!

Actually just as likely the world will come to its senses and realize we can’t continue to pump greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. At this point what do you think will happen tone Exxon stock?

If you are invested in Apple, which fools often are.

Apple is a consumer stock, people buy it because they understand the products, and are mesmerized by their culture. Apple is a feel good stock to own, like AOL and Pets.com and all the other dot-com-busts were before them.

Exxon is a portfolio stock, people buy it because they are educated financial managers, and unlike others, they are buying for financial reasons. Exxon isn’t a stock you brag about, because you own it for the profits.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, what does the world need more, iPods or Gas?

The fact is Apple is disposable. It could cease to exist, with all its products and services, and people would get by just fine. Cell phones work for iPods, PC’s for Macs. Apple is just one bad product away from failure. Look at all the fallen tech giants of the past like HP, Compaq, Dell and others who seemed to own the market, but only for a moment before fading.

ExxonMobile is vital to the world economy, including the US Army. Nobody is going to come and drop another oil platform on an Exxon field. The world’s need for gasoline isn’t going away any time soon. The oil market has huge barriers to entry, the consumer electronics market does not.

To consider this some kind of “win” for Climate Hawks is absurd. Does Apple use windmill power in its sweatshop factories in China with all the suicides? Do people charge their iPods at home on bio-mass power? Does Apple buy carbon credits to offset the massive electricity usage needed to create its lithium hungry components? Of course it does none of these things.

If carbon is crack, Exxon is the dealer and Apple is the junkie. There are no saints here.

6. Chris Mooney Says:
August 10th, 2011 at 8:03 am
Still, you gotta love the “Apple pollutes as much as ExxonMobil” argument…..
If these guys were a movie they would be “Say Anything”

Who exactly has made this argument here?

What I said is that the IT business is unsustainable, just as the extraction business are. Being sustainable is not at all the same as not polluting. You seem to only care about pollution, which is not my fault, but rather your problem because you’re missing the point completely.

The fact is that high tech industries rely on non-renewable resources, are themselves quite energy-intensive when you account for all inputs that go into the final product, have adopted planned obsolescence more universally than any other sector, while their products are not particularly recycling-friendly; and finally, all the Internet infrastructure uses an awful lot of energy. That’s not sustainable

“Can you find a reference for the relative pollution of oil Vs electronics?”

Actually that is an interesting question. Especially if you make the comparison by volume. While both are getting better, neither one has had a stellar record.

Lets also throw in the human factor and look at wages, safety, working conditions, and child labor.

Let’s not forget that “recycling” can also be re-use in the computing world. The amount of product that simply ages into obsolescence for businesses and enthusiasts dwarfs the amount of product that breaks and needs to be thrown away or recycled. Most of these obsolete products are still very viable for people who don’t need to do large quantities of real processing (which is the overwhelming majority of the world.) Let’s face it – my mom does not need a quad core i7 to check her e-mail.

There are a proliferation of computing re-use programs coming into play; my country’s government makes use of a Computers for Schools program that takes old computers that have been retired due to age and provides them for free to schools across the country.

So while there is a ton of recyclable waste, careful management and re-use programs can provide an excellent alternative to the dump for most of it.

If these guys were a movie they would be “Say Anything”

That’s not to say that the problem of e-waste is negligible. Computers and phones have fairly short lives for such expensive products and they’re very difficult to recycle, although they may be getting better now that it’s become a design consideration.

Adoption of high technology has increased both productivity and energy efficiency. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but from an environmental perspective it’s done more good than harm so far and promises greater good in the future.