environment

It's great to live in todays global economy. You can order almost anything from anywhere around the world. If only you are willing to pay for the shipping.

It costs a lot to get anything shipped here in Finland. At least outside Europe (and mostly from China as well), but that has an additional burden of import fees and taxes added.

Free open source software (FOSS) is running the world. The information society is build upon the work of volunteer coders that have permitted the usage of their code freely.

The philosophy behind the FOSS movement is that the usage shouldn't be restricted in any way based on the use case of the code. It's all good as long the openness, attribution and redistribution clauses are respected. It's nice and also part of why it has become so popular. Being able to build on top of others code can be a huge saving.

Finnish laws regulating donations and collecting money for charity make it hard for many modern ways of earning or making good nearly impossible.

Only non-profits can collect money without giving anything back. In the light of this law it is against the law to accept donations for example working on an open source project. The model that is highly popular among the open source community around the world. But here in Finland you would need to actually give something concrete back for those "donations". And obviously you'd be taxed appropriately. 

We produce a lot of plastic. It's everywhere. Despite increasing efforts to recycle it a lot of it ends up into the landfills. There it will remain for a very long time, maybe even millions of years..

Current lockdowns and recession has reduced carbon emission drastically around the world. In some areas the emissions have dropped by up to 25 percent due the heavy industry and transportation basically shutting down. 

If you want to find something positive from this pandemic this could be it. Unfortunately it's just temporary. As soon as it's safe to get back to normal operations emissions will be back up as well.

Internet is not green. Yes it is more environmentally friendly than some alternatives and digitalization of services does save the environment. But at the same time we consume more and more entertainment that consumes bandwidth, server resources and CPU cycles.

And we havent even reached the full global adoption of the internet. There are billions of people who are not here yet. And of those who are,  only a small fraction out of them that consume the most.

Yesterday I submitted my session "Green tech thinking" to the Drupalcon Amsterdam. I really hope it gets approved and I have a chance to talk about this important subject.

The response in social media after I posted my proposal has been inspiring. There is clear interest in the subject. Green values are a hot topic of today and I believe I have a pretty good chance to get accepted.

According to statistics, the internet accounted for around 6% to 10℅ of total global energy usage last year. And this number has been steadily growing and won't probably slow down any time soon. It surprising fact, something that is already notable when considering climate change.