Essay by Eric Worrall
Welcome to our green future – in which you don’t get a say in whether you support wind turbines and solar panels.
All iPhones will be powered by renewable energy by 2030, Apple says
By Trevor Long • Technology Expert 9:12pm Aug 11, 2022
With a focus on the environment front-of-mind for many people, there’s never a shortage of environmental commitments from businesses small and large around the world.
But on Thursday, in Sydney, Apple’s vice president of environment Lisa Jackson marked the company’s 40th year in Australia with a significant green energy announcement.
Apple has made a commitment to purchase clean energy from a new Australian Wind Farm in Queensland, energy equivalent to that which would power 80,000 homes.
It’s all part of Apple’s drive to reach clean energy targets.
And those targets are lofty.
Having already achieved carbon neutrality for their corporate operations (Offices, Travel, Retail Stores) back in April of 2020, Apple now plans to reach a 2030 climate goal of being carbon neutral across the entire business, including supply chain and customer product.
That’s right, in 2030, your iPhone Mac or iPad will be powered by renewable energy.
…
Read more: https://www.9news.com.au/national/australian-wind-farm-queensland-power-apple-products-renewable-energy-2030/0dd99fd2-db42-4b51-849d-52b8ca6c6be4
The hubris is breathtaking. If people want to offset the carbon cost of recharging their phone, they can make their own decision to do so. But Apple doesn’t want to take the risk consumers might make a choice they disapprove, so they appear to have decided to deprive consumers of the freedom to choose, and loaded the cost of their green lunacy into the upfront purchase price of their product.
It will be interesting to see what impact this has on iPhone sales. While Google / Android are run by people every bit as green as any Apple exec, most of the actual Android handsets are manufactured by third parties, many of whom don’t care about the Western climate religion.
By gratuitously jacking up the price of handsets, Apple have provided the market yet another reason to buy Android – an additional stressor for a market which is already concerned about the cost of Apple handsets.
You do get a say. You can choose not to buy Apple products.
Which probably the best decision over all.
But the incoming 2023/2024 filibuster proof congress can tell you that you don’t have a say, and tax whatever cell phone you have accordingly.
Above-Freekin-Lootly…Don’t buy Apple…Don’t buy I-pad…Don’t buy I-pod…Don’t buy Mac.
Abso-Freakin-Lootly
Gotta love autocorrect
“Above-Freekin-Lootly”
Follow the loot…
We have a winner here. Why would anyone buy this crap from a woke company that uses slave labor to assemble their goods? Talk about “bizarro world”.
Did so long ago, same with Amazon.
If Apple wanted to be “greenish” they could commit to unified universal connectors and charging protocols. The colossal waste of resources supporting their proprietary connectors dwarfs any renewable electrons saved.
If they want to be part of the solution instead of merely no longer being part of the problem Apple could spearhead ultra-cheap high efficiency, auto sensing load chargers.
Someone needs to total Apple’s vampire electricity worldwide consumption as billions of iPhone and iPad etc. chargers are left plugged in 24/7.
What is the problem?
Devoting massive resources to supporting multiple protocols and voltages and pinouts to perform identical functions is inefficient.
This. 💯 👆
They could also support the right to repair. Literally nobody will replace a battery if you have a cracked screen.
Ron Long said it on a WUWT post the other day
”What is Virtue Signaling? A direct exhibitionist showing of not only being dysfunctional, but also really proud of it.”
Looking at the BoM radar maps there’s not much wind around Queensland today.
Would that mean Apple’s new phones would not be able to be charged today? 🤫
If Apple are so concerned about emissions caused by their products they could just stop making them 🙂
Yep. How much environmental damage results from these iPhones being manufactured in China? China is building coal fired power plants and contributing increased CO2 to not only build these devices, but to keep the lights on. This Apple executive salary is how much and she cannot discern this paradox? Good grief! This virtue sign is nauseating. If only there was somewhere else to leave too. Who is John Galt?
Lisa Jackson is the criminal former EPA administrator under Obama, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about her. Here’s a quick description of some of the crimes she committed while in government:
https://thenewamerican.com/epa-ex-boss-jackson-caught-breaking-law-scamming-us-taxpayers/
More importantly, where is John Galt?
Is this the new wind (subsidy) farm that required the devastation of a vast area of tropical rain-forest, in, or near to the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area?. Not much suitable wind up here anyway. We can only hope for a well-aimed cyclone to demolish the lot. Unlike places in temperate climates, it would not take too long for the trees to return – 10 years would do it. This mess has already turned off many wokers in the north.
SLR (environmental consultants) did a study for AIMS, based at Cape Ferguson, on the viability of wind generation for their facility, which is the equivalent of a small village. This is situated on a large rock with unmitigated NE (trade, not coastal) winds, that blow at least 60% of the time. Federally owned, so no need to get permission from anyone local. Conclusion? Not viable.
Martin,
Do you mean SE winds as in what we were taught at school in the 1940s, the “South-East trade winds”.
Or have prevailing winds been altered by climate change? Geoff S
Big league virtue signaling. There’s no way for them to prove they met their goal. Kind of like AGW.
Why don’t we refer to cell phones as “electric phones”? They operate on batteries that must be charged and replaced the same as so called electric vehicles. Why the diference in nomenclature? One might think the term electric vehicle is trying to under play the need for recharging and replacement of batteries.
I have yet to see a phone powered by anything other than electricity, though if I could find an ICE powered phone I’d love to use it at an XR protest.
It’d have to have a pull start and definitely a Glass Pack muffler.
How about these?
You realize that the ICE runs the alternator which provides the electricity for your car to operate. EVs use batteries. Neither uses electricity provided directly from an outside source.
That would severely limit your EV distance to the length of the extension cord
I don’t give a damn about Apple.
They offset employee costs through labor arbitrage. They offset ecological costs through environmental arbitrage and unearned faith from carbon offset schemes.
And they put iron bars on the windows of their (Foxconn) factory so that the cheery, happy and well rewarded employees can’t ‘accidentally’ fall out, especially of the upper floors/levels.
Yes, Apple cares alright
about as much as Nike does
The claimed carbon neutrality of Apple’s corporate headquarters is imaginary. They moved some papers around on their desk.
Apple owners will pay gladly. Their customers already pay a lot more than other PC owners for their computers phones etc. Apple has somehow jibed being left wing with its lofty free enterprise ranking. You know every sinistral professor owns Apple and votes demograt.
They just dont know that there won’t be a ruinable source of power in the aging, collapsing fleet that peaked in 2017. So many power companies in the business went broke in even better times than today and now with what has been done to the world and its economy by the new evil (and stupid) eugenicists creeps guided by the WEF, money and investors in this nonproductive sector have largely disappeared.
The brilliant Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, wrote about about the seemingly out-of -the- blue happenings of Black Swan events that change the world. The imminent collapse of the whole climate shiteree isn’t one of those. It is the easiest prediction one can make. Yet it is amazing that the Clime Syndicate, and their fawning useful idiots (on the eve of becoming useless ordinary idiots) are totally blind to it.
I hope for her credibility the wind in Oz is a bit more consistent than it is in Blighty.
Here it is 08.20 Sunday morning and our entire wind turbine fleet with an installed capacity of over 25GW is producing 0.6GW it has been around these levels for the past week.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
We are paying for wishful thinking.
At 2.5% production levels being typical right now, who in their right mind would fund this level of inefficiency?
Second question is why?
We’ll, I’ve always had iPhones just because my first mobile was a work-provided one and I’ve been too lazy to change. If this article is true my next phone will be an android – doing my little bit for rational thinking and freedom of choice.
No, they won’t, that is a blatant lie.
What Apple is saying is they will offset the carbon “pollution” for every iPhone. There’s a big difference. CO2 emissions will be the same (as if that mattered).
If sheeple are that concerned about CO2, turn off all your electronic toys and stop heating/airconditioning your homes.
No? Thought not
For the rest of us, we can choose to buy an Apple product or not
(my old iPhone is still going strong. I have no intention of replacing it any time soon).
Sounds like bulldust to me. We have 2 Apple phones at home and 2kW worth of solar panels . The phones are also frequently charged while in either of our 2 non Electric vehicles. How the bloody hell will Apple know that our devices will be charged using “renewable energy” sources.
The idea has nothing what-so-ever to do with your phone or anyone else’s. The idea is to estimate the amount of electricity used in charging all the battery powered devices Apple sales (or maybe just for the phones they sale?) and then paying an indulgence to cover those sins. This will probably earn them a big tax break.
So pleased that I have just bought a new Samsung phone…
Meaningless, shameless, and useless corporate virtue signaling.
I agree with you. The level of corporate posturing to cater for the punters with limited intelligence, willing to absorb this Green nonsense has reached a new low. The fact it is being spouted by an executive of Apple Corp, who was also involved in defining CO2 as a pollutant while working for the EPA (under Obama) is just more nonsense, I guess.
I guess you mean Lisa Jackson, aka Richard Windson.
I believe the EU is going to outlaw lightning connectors and standardise recharging systems, which will generate a huge market for Chinese rechargers.
Re: this statement made by Trevor Long—proclaimed by somebody, probably himself, to be a “Technology Expert”— is so obviously wrong:
“That’s right, in 2030, your iPhone Mac or iPad will be powered by renewable energy.”
Is Trevor so ill-educated that he does not understand that local and national electric grids are fed a mix of electrons that have been generated by sources that are both fossil-fuel based (e.g., coal, natural gas) and renewable energy based (e.g., hydro, wind, solar)?
There are no magical filters for grid-supplied electricity that one can install on a home or office electrical outlet (or build into the phone itself) that will only allow electrons originating from renewable sources to recharge a cell phone, Apple-brand or otherwise.
If Trevor means to imply that a large amount of fossil fuels will NOT be used to generate commercial-scale electricity by 2030, he is even less knowledgable than evidenced by the above.
Oh yes, but a magical filter is what they need; one that will only let them have green electrons and reject the fossil fuel ones. Wouldn’t that be fun.
Gordon this absolutely infuriates me. The ACT in Australia have claimed to have gone 100% renewable, as have the Northern Beaches council in Sydney. They even name the wind turbine projects that are supposedly supplying their energy. The average man on the street are mostly so gullible that they believe this without question.
The developers are snakeoil salesmen. We have been told so many different stories by them and all with a straight face. The 87MW solar works installed near us in 2019 was originally quoted as being 110MW. Makes it sound like more bang for you buck to quote DC. They sold 98% of their (predicted?) output to Kelloggs and to government light rail. Since the drought broke in Jan 2020 we’ve had so much cloudy weather that radiance levels have dropped on average 12%. May just gone was down 25% here on 2019 levels.
Obviously there’s been a whole lot of fossil fuels used to cover the renewables shortfalls, but who pays for that? I assume that the contracts signed give the energy to those who signed up for “renewables” at a set price. Is this why energy providers such as AGL have lost more than 2.5 billion dollars in wind turbine contracts? Ultimately of course the losses flow on to the electricity consumers.
This local commercial solar project is on to its third owner after being written down substantially. I don’t think it’s even on the stock exchange anymore, I’m not sure how many of them are. If they’re on the stock market they have to report warts and all. This one’s certainly been a toad. We’ve had more than twelve blackouts, brownouts or power surges and lost numerous electrical equipment in the past two and a half years. This solar works is of the thin film cadmium/tellurium variety, needs special recycling methods. No one knows who’s responsible for that down the track.
We’ve just had a 400MW solar project approved, a 500MW solar seeking approval and a 750MW solar in the pipeline. Not to mention the 60 wind turbines each at 280m high and 200m wide. Plus those we aren’t aware of yet. God help us.
And these virtue signalling idiots think they’re doing something good.
Maybe they could:
1. Make the battery field replaceable.
2. Make the screen field replaceable.
3. Manufacture them in the country where they are sold.
I’m sure the sky will be dark with pigs before any of these things happen.
Pat
I have a say. I only use Motorola phones, running Android and Firefox as the set browser.
If you use technology of any stripe, you cannot escape the hypocrisy.
Just think, there are about 2 billion active Apple products today. If they were all iPhones, stacked together, they would only cover a football (soccer) pitch in a pile 30 m deep. In the big scheme, that is practically nothing.
Around the house, only sustainability nut jobs worry about their cell phone charging load compared to heating, cooling, transportation fuel, etc.
So the point is this. Real life material and energy use (food, feed, fiber, shelter, transportation, durable goods, consumer products) overwhelms the piddling little technology world. Given their exorbitant profit margins (on the order of 20%), the tech industry can easily virtue signal. It is meaningless. I buy and use the devices I like and pay no attention to their foolishness.
I will say that Amazon’s virtue signaling commercials further cause me to avoid ordering anything through them if I can help it, not to mention all of the cheap scam knockoff Chinese products polluting their website.
They are, as always virtue signaling with our money. Just put that little bit of the cost into a higher price. I don’t see Apple saying that we will reduce our profit margin by 5% to be more environmentally friendly. Even if they did that, then investors and employees would end up being punished, not the people who decided upon it.
I don’t begrudge Apple any of their profits. To me, their products are easier to use than any competitors’. I wish they would just shut up about stuff and give the higher margins to the employees and shareholders where it will cycle through the economy and help everyone a very tiny bit instead of essentially burning it on projects that people worse off.