A student wastes valuable time and energy in the Newspaper class. Photo courtesy of freshman Nico Aebischer.
Students at San Luis Obispo High School use electronics everyday for both school and personal purposes. These daily interactions with electronics, while individually quite harmless, can add up and greatly affect the climate, adding to already severe global warming.
Each interaction requires energy to function, and the energy use it takes to run electronics is bigger than one might imagine. This is why students, and people in general, should cut down on their electronic use.
It is estimated that 1.4 to 5.9 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by digital devices of some kind, with a third of those devices being things like smartphones, laptops, and other household electronics.
Even though electronic usage doesn’t account for a huge percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, people should still try to cut down on this number by getting rid of unnecessary data and electronic usage.
“I have enough emails in my inbox to destroy the environment, and I could probably delete all of them,” said freshman Henry Knight.
In 2019, the world emitted approximately 33,621 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, meaning that cutting down on even one percent of these emissions would save 336 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
Even something as simple as deleting excess emails and cutting down on screen time can have a good impact on the climate.
Sources: usgs.gov, sciencedirect.com