Liberty Alone

An office of my acquaintance had a bit of a problem this morning. Nobody could log in to their computers.

The cause, it turned out was some idiot who taken with great zeal to save the planet switched everything off, including many things which they didn’t know what they were. This included the server rack.

So, for the sakes of saving a few kWh, the entire office was unable to do any work for two hours.

I think the benefit of the energy saved might be well overshadowed by the expense of those 40 odd lost man hours.

Energy saving is often a good thing, but there are other costs involved, just as there are in all actions. Sometimes environmental benefit may be sufficient to justify action (switching off a desktop PC for example has little effect on work time), others are not so clear cut (electric vehicles or more efficient petrol only?) and others are down right ridiculous (food rationing, mandatory organic production, and this case).

One of the big problems of much of the environmental movement is they fail to take into account costs and benefits - anything ‘good’ for the environment is deemed to be a good thing no matter what the costs. Of course, its not all environmentalists who take this view*, but it seems to prevail in the media and on the ground.

* advocates of an at-cost carbon tax or cap-and-trade are taking benefits and costs into account.

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