“Earth Day” is a global event that aims to raise awareness of the importance of environmental protection. Every year, millions of people around the world gather on April 22nd to celebrate Earth Day and the environmental movement.
The day was established in 1970 by Gaylord Nelson, US senator and environmentalist, as well as Denis Hayes, was created by a Harvard University graduate student. Both became increasingly concerned about environmental damage in the United States, such as the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California.
Earth Day was created to engage the public and put green issues on the national agenda. On the first Earth Day, 20 million people took to the streets in the United States. According to the organizers, it became a global event in 1990, and today more than one billion people of all ages participate in it in nearly 200 countries.
“Celebrating Earth Day is often the first environmental action for many people,”
says Kathleen Rogerspresident of Earthday.org.
What’s happening on Earth Day 2024?
The 2024 theme “Planet Against Plastics” aims to draw attention to the harmful effects of plastic pollution on human and planetary health. Past events have addressed a range of environmental issues, from climate change and clean energy to species conservation and the benefits of tree planting. This year’s events take place ahead of the historic UN treaty on plastics, which is expected to be agreed upon by the end of 2024. More than 50 countries have called for an end to plastic pollution by 2040.
[Forrás: Gróf József]However, the organizers of Earth Day want to go even further and call for a 60 percent reduction in the production of all plastics by 2040. Organizers suggested that people could volunteer at a cleanup event or learn more about the damage caused by plastic pollution.
What did Earth Day accomplish?
Recent events include planting hundreds of millions of trees, supporting farmers using sustainable agricultural practices, and launching climate literacy projects around the world.
Some observers highlight the significance of Earth Day in that environmental issues have once again been put on the national and international agenda.
“As environmental challenges are pushed further down society’s priority list due to many issues, events like Earth Day remind us of the long-term costs of short-term thinking”.
says Yvo de Boerformer UN climate change chief.
In 2016, Earth Day was symbolically celebrated at the end of 2015, a milestone Paris Climate Change Agreement was chosen as his official signature. It was the first time that the countries of the world jointly agreed on goals to limit global warming.
What are critics saying about Earth Day?
Some critics warn that these results create a false sense of progress. Many environmental indicators, from global temperature to species extinction, are changing rapidly due to human activities. Efforts to date have fallen far short of halting or reversing these trends.
Some individuals and companies have also been accused of using Earth Day to misrepresent their commitment to the environment without making the real changes that are needed. This is called “greenwashing”.
Greta Thunberg campaigner, for example, tweeted in 2022 that Earth Day “has become an opportunity for those in power to proclaim their ‘love’ for the planet while destroying it at top speed”.
What can we do? For example, we can green the environment by planting trees, grow crops, compost, and use public transport. Avoid plastics, switch to environmentally friendly products – the editor.
Power-hungry informatics
Very different estimates have been published about how much electricity is consumed by the operation of the world’s information communication infrastructure, data centers, and networks. Various sources place the share of the ICT sector at between 5 and 9 percent of total global consumption – this includes electricity consumed by end-user devices in addition to data centers and infrastructure.
However, the sources agree that this consumption will increase, even if individual devices become more and more energy efficient. According to one estimate, energy use could increase by 50 percent between 2015 and 2030; and another calculation believes that in 2030, infocommunications may take up to 10-20 percent of the world’s electricity consumption. Artificial intelligence in particular confuses the picture: both training large models and using them consumes a lot of energy (and other resources, such as water).
Sustainable IT solutions
“Sustainable IT” is an umbrella term that describes environmentally focused approaches that are taken into account when designing, using and disposing of hardware and software computing solutions and services. The concept also covers activities such as responsible mining of rare metals used in hardware, water conservation and the use of circular economy principles throughout the life cycle of technology.
Currently, the linear economy is dominant in our world: we make products from the Earth’s raw materials, use them up, and then throw them away as garbage. The circular economy tries to prevent the production of waste and to reuse it. The products are designed in such a way that they can be used as easily as possible at the end of the product’s life cycle. When this is achieved, instead of throwing the product away, we recycle it – from the original to the destination. In the circular economy, care is also taken to ensure that raw materials can be easily extracted at the end of their life cycle, so that they can be reprocessed to produce the same or a completely different product. And we can repeat this process several times – this is circularity.
- Chip manufacturers have made efforts to increase sustainability. For example, TSMC has committed to reducing water use per die by 30 percent, adopting cleaner production systems, switching to renewable energy, and working to phase out powerful greenhouse gases used in manufacturing.
- By outsourcing the operation of the infrastructure to more energy-efficient centers, companies can significantly reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing their resource use. Electricity demand can be reduced if the existing on-premise server infrastructure is relocated to the data center.
- And thanks to the expansion of cloud-based services, the electricity consumption of businesses is reduced, since they have to use fewer servers or do not have to deploy such servers at all, that is, they do not have to take care of the appropriate environmental conditions either. It is true that, in return, the size and capacity of the data centers is growing to an astonishing extent, but in this area too, a serious shift towards a green approach can be seen. The Apple for example, its data centers have been operating entirely using renewable energy since 2014, according to the company. This was partly achieved with their own solar parks, and partly with electricity purchased from the market but coming from a renewable source.
- The programming and control of agricultural robots is thus easier than ever before by connecting the real and digital worlds and opens the way to a wide range of application possibilities. In addition to intelligent, automatic harvesting of vegetables and fruits, robots can also be used to grow other crops, even ornamental plants and flowers, as they are capable of very fine movements and high precision.
- Climate protection efforts are manifested in quite surprising areas. In the public mind, Bitcoin mining lives as an activity that requires enormous energy. However, in the analysis of the Stylers information technology company group, it was pointed out that those involved in this are also trying to keep up with the times, and around 57 percent of their energy consumption is already covered by renewable sources, and this is likely to increase in the future due to favorable synergies (for example, the periodic overproduction of wind and wind power plants). it only escalates.
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