By A M Radhika:
A report from the Global Carbon Project published in Nature Geoscience states that the world carbon emissions fell by 1.3% in 2009, most likely due to global recession. Not quite a reason to be happy. We are still releasing gigatonnes of CO2 every year. Biofuels and social responsibility are jargons now. The round-table conference on ‘Decarbonizing Economy’ had the Greanpeace executive director highlighting a 2 % global emission on account of ICT sector. A heavy amount of this power is going waste. Many people do not even thing of shutting down their computers after using them and of course, power management tools are given a pass. Ashwini Kumar, president, Manufacturers Association for Information Technology (MAIT) mentioned in the conference that there are concerns within the government and industry to drastically reduce power consumption in devices. “Energy consumption on standby mode in PCs is costing the nation Rs 100 crore annually. We are working to bring down this stand-by power consumption down to 1 watt by using quality power supply,” said Kumar. [Ref: http://www.ciol.com/News/News/News-Reports/Going-green-in-a-tech-driven-world/143705/0/]
Coming right to the point, we need what I call ‘GreeHab’,  meaning GREEn reHABilitation, as a counter to the ‘Old habits die hard’ routine we all run here and complain about in spite of the knowledge that we are far from doing our part in it. We need a portion of the year extremely and voluntarily dedicated to, of course, eco-friendliness but keeping the major focus as complete abstinence from wastage of power because we all know there’s a dire need for some extra effort.
To be taken more as a lifestyle change than anything, GreeHab is say, a week/month off of social networks (yes, all social networks) & daylight power consumption, the use of only public transport, heavy participation in clean-drives and of course, our quintessential steps like using black wallpapers (or Blackle, the black Google) and other web pages to save lcd power or switching of mobile phones and all standby powered on devices. I myself have put to practice a lot of these steps. The idea is to start of with a day’s GreeHab, extend it to a week, a month and so on. Trust me when I say this is extremely doable, if you find cycling to work an exaggeration. Trust me when I say you must start right now. Usually one ends up with a lot of potentially productive time on the hands as well. Think about how less power you wasted/will waste today.
Image courtesy: http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html