BBC Newsnight: Newsnight's Science Editor Susan Watts reports on how our online lifestyle is being driven by giant computer servers massively boosting the world's carbon emissions.
Global warming by computer
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I think a good example of the petroleum, coal, and natural gas industries using the economy for consolidating their financial and economic power.
With all of the solar, wind, and ocean wave power available, a total quantity of potential power within Earth’s biosphere of 10,000 times greater than the output of human civilization, we could run our civilization on Earth for 5 billion more years without resorting to exotic technologies such as fusion.
Simply collecting the ambient real energy within our biosphere could could probably be used to support well over 10 billion humans on Earth.
The solar output of 4 x (10 EXP 26) watts is about 4 billion times the solar power that falls on Earth.
I work in the field of renewable energy and disaster and humanitarian relief technologies and have about 7 issued U.S. patents (5 design patents and 2 utility patents)and 4 issued patents abroad as well as numerous additional patents pending abroad for the simple basic technology we have developed, which in a nut shell, involves nothing more exotic than high school physics and simple ambient energy resource and materials collection.
Thus one can see the reason why I am enamored with the renewable energy ever present within our environment. With such a large total solar output, it seems a big shame not to go completely renewable.