Capitalism isn't the problem. Consumers are.
Yeah... fuck that.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Dimming your phone screen's brightness saves a ton more energy than cutting off wifi, especially the newer the phone is.
So, in a way, they're not wrong about "screen time" just wrong about almost everything else.
Out of all the lifestyle changes we can make, this is so unbelievably minor it is not worth mentioning, let alone make a campaign for.
Until the government and corporations take climate change seriously, making changes on an individual level won't make a meaningful difference. Doesn't mean we should do nothing.. but come on, this is just stupid.
I'm not damaging the climate. My country, China, and Coca-Cola are.
Same thing as personal carbon footprints. A meaningless change being pushed on individuals when their total contribution to the problem is a mere rounding error on the amount contributed by the big corporations
This is like recycling. Or like plastic straws. It's a way to blame individuals for systematic issues, and even if everyone bought into it and cut their use to zero, it would be a tiny, meaningless, drop in a very big bucket
Why do I feel like this sign eats more energy per day than my phone?
I object. Look at the CoVID-19 pandemic when most of us were at home staring at screens to talk to each other, receiving money from our governments not to work, gas prices were negative, we actually meaningfully paused the pollution of CO2 into our atmosphere for a very short time.
Not that everything was peachy then but we could use some of the ideas we learned there for the good of us all.
A wireless router consumes single digit watts of power. A tablet or mobile phone consumes 1/10 or less of that. Making a slice of toast and a cup of tea uses more power than both of those devices all day combined. This is another silly attempt to shift blame from corporations and billionaires down to consumers and everyday people. Don’t buy it.
Honestly the amount of energy needed to print and put this ad probably costed more than every amount they save.
There is some truth to it, in that the data centers that host a lot of digital content are environmental catastrophes. But like, again, that’s the fault of companies, not the consumers. Companies could choose to optimize their websites better, choose to streamline their systems and minimize the amount of data they’re collecting on users. Choose to use solar power and batteries and eat the upfront capital cost (it would even save them money over the lifetime of the facility.)
But they choose to ignore all that and just boil lakes and chug methane instead.
Even if I had my phone open 24/7, it would be nothing compared to the ecological damage done by private jets, fast fashion, golf courses, grocery stores throwing out perfectly good food, truckloads of trash dumped just about wherever, destroying ancient woodlands to make toilet shitty particle board furniture, using a shitton energy and water for ChatGPT to give someone dangerous health advice, make single-use plastic shit that'll get thrown into the ocean, chopping down a rainforest to raise cattle that fart all day so that people can eat tons of meat on every single meal, and whatever millions of things capitalism has given us. Not to mention the irony of this "WiFi doesn't grow on trees" message apparently being displayed on a screen and thus using energy. (although miniscule amounts, but still)
Pretty shameful that a university is doing this.
Kind of a weird message. The paltry amount of energy my screen time uses pales in comparison to the footprint left by massive careless corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and it would be far more effective at helping the environment to convince them to make even small adjustments.
Putting the onus on the average person just seems cruel. It leads to people like my wife desperate to do every little minor thing she can to adjust her footprint, making almost no difference in the grand scheme, while the real causes continue on unabated.
It also pales in comparison to the carbon cost of printing out the poster and lighting it.
Many small things are important too, like recycling, and voting for parties that enact green policy. "Screen time" is too vague to mean energy intensive.
An ad like this uses about 1920W constantly, your phone uses about 10W when active and in use. Lets say your city has 100k inhabitants and all use their phone right now than thats 1MW or about a 1/5 wind turbine. So you break even with 521 of these adverts. While I can only see how they run ~100 of these ads for a city that size, we can also roughly estimate that people "only" have a screen on time that matches this figure. So yeah, they are roughly using the same amount of energy to display the ads compared to the problem they are trying to solve.
In a sane world they would use all the effort to build a single wind turbine and then shut the fuck up.
While were doing maths I can see the eight florescent tube lights behind the sign art, even trying to overestimate the size of the poster and assuming it has 1.16m wide fluorescent tubes in it that are the brightest available that would be 8 * 36W = 288W.
So I think you're overestimating the power used by the sign by over septuple.
I don't agree with the campaign though, its just more framing consumers (of relatively modest usage) as a big part of the issue when they really are not. If everyone cut their phone use in half it might impact less than a percentage point of CO2. It distracts from the real problems, thereby assisting the big polluters.
I didnt specify it but this was my source: https://adfreecities.org.uk/2019/11/the-electricity-cost-of-digital-adverts/
That might be on the higher end but I guess they dont use the lowest brightness tubes as they need to shine through the poster and also it accounts for the double sided-ness (at least in my area they are always double sided).
My thoughts? Fuck the people spreading this message 🖕
It makes me wonder about the environmental cost of printing and lighting those posters.
yeah, definitely blame the individual people using wifi for damaging the climate and not the companies / billionaires whose decisions actually effect things at a substantial level. it’s 100% the homeless guy using wifi at the library who is going to cause the water wars in a few years. /s
I think the University of East London is a low tier educational institution, and so to attract attention it resorts to advertising like this.
It is interesting how much climate research is being done at frankly low quality universities. This is not to say the overall science is wrong, but rather it shows how the research economy works with low quality universities "jumping on the bandwagon" to get research money and try to build up their media reputation.
The University of East Anglia is another example of this. They like to play on how they are one of the "most cited" research centres in the world. But this is a bad metric as it just reflects the nature of the research economy. There is a massive volume of frankly shit "research" in all fields, and only a small percentage in any field is of any value. Also to be clear, this also not to say that all research from the UEA is crap or all the people working for them are poor. Rather, it is just an example of how lots of institutions operate in a bloated and overly commercialised research & university sector, and the newer or lower reputation places are aggressive in marketing themselves.
So yeah, a marketing poster from the University of East London is not worth contemplating too hard.
I guess it's the university form of ragebait.
Not really. Smartphones, tablets use virtually no power compared to other sources. This looks like BS.
Blaming average people for their habits affecting climate change is misplaced. The rich shape and control the systems that overwhelmingly cause the climate disaster. Then again the rich probably funded whatever hand-wringing research this is and the printing of this ad.
Background light for ads doesn't grow on trees.
My mom used to say that "money doesn't grow on trees" because we didn't have enough money to go around. Is this poster implying we may run out of WiFi if we don't limit our screen time? Did it become finite?
ETA: If WiFi doesn't grow on trees, then I don't really need trees for WiFi, so if I just want WiFi why do I care about the climate? /s
Blame users, not corporations. Yeah.
Phones are some of the best forms of entertainment with the lowest carbon footprint, right?
This is absolute bs. You want me to feel bad about my screen time when AI data centers are taking up all the water?
Im fairly certain wood-burning generators exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Group
The uk government keeps giving them renewable energy subsidies because trees can regrow but ignore the fact that they cut down trees the other side of the world to burn them here. It releases all the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere and then they capture a small percentage of it back and pretend to be the good guys.
Blame shifting by the British nazi government
It would be nice to be able to set some schedules on routers.
They were saying for a while that wireless signal pollution can affect wildlife, chief of which being bees, but I don't know if that is still substantiated, and that doesn't seem to be what they're getting at.