How the World Works
Connecting the dots between Big Tobacco and DDT
The myth that Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Africa because her denunciations of DDT led to a "ban" on the use of the insecticide in developing countries has never held up under close scrutiny. Salon published a good piece on the topic last June.
But I did not know until reading John Quiggin and Tim Lambert's enlightening story in the British Prospect (thanks to The New Republic's Energy and Environment blog for the tip) how exactly the assault on Carson ever got started.
By 1990, it seemed that the public health issues surrounding DDT had been largely resolved. In developed countries, DDT had been replaced by less environmentally damaging alternatives. But soon the situation changed radically. The tobacco industry, faced with the prospect of bans on smoking in public places, sought to cast doubt on the science behind the mooted ban. But a campaign focused on tobacco alone was doomed to failure. So the industry tried a different tack, an across-the-board attack on what it called "junk science." Its primary vehicle was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a body set up by PR firm APCO in the early 1990s and secretly funded by Philip Morris.
TASSC, led by an activist named Steve Milloy, attacked the environmental movement on everything from food safety to the risks of asbestos. One of the issues Milloy took up with vigor was DDT, where he teamed up with the entomologist J. Gordon Edwards. With the aid of Milloy's advocacy, Edwards's attacks on Rachel Carson moved from the political fringes to become part of the orthodoxy of mainstream US Republicanism.
Our old friend Steve Milloy! Previously featured in HTWW in the enduringly popular posts, "Shareholder Imbecilism," "Tilting at Goldman-Sachs' Windmills," and "Silence in Junk-Science Land."
Steve Milloy -- the man deserves a statue, on which we could inscribe the words: "No one man labored harder or more successfully to propagate misinformation about global warming, tobacco's health effects, and DDT."
As for the "orthodoxy of mainstream U.S. Republicanism" -- judging by the recent Democratic pickups of purportedly "safe" Republican Congressional seats in three consecutive special elections, it seems to have fallen a bit out of favor with the mainstream U.S. general public. Could it be that the ill effects of embracing charlatans like Steve Milloy are finally taking their toll? Just as overuse of DDT for agricultural purposes led to the development of resistant mosquitos, overuse of Steve Milloy may be leading to resistant voters.
Wal-Mart's "Faded Glory"
A correspondent from Decatur, Ga., writes that he recently visited a new Wal-Mart in his neighborhood and noticed for the first time Wal-Mart's private label Faded Glory clothing and shoe line.
Faded Glory's tag line: "Fits the way America lives."
Faded Glory is not new. The brand has been around for decades, and though you can find numerous consumer complaints online about the fragile quality of the brand's jeans and underwear, the line has been financially successful.
But changing circumstances have a way of twisting the irony knife. There's always been some bitterness to be mined in the marketing paradox that clothing designed to trade off of images of Americana is overwhelmingly manufactured in places like Bangladesh and China. But that's old-school irony. I don't know what the original brand name was supposed to signify -- perhaps that iconic era where faded jeans epitomized the hardworking cowboy, herding cattle from Texas to the Chicago stockyards. But in 2008, when America's global reputation is at possibly its lowest ebb ever, and large swaths of American citizens feel left behind by the global economy and their own elected representatives, Faded Glory clothes -- cheaply made, so shoddy as to be practicably disposable, and yet commodified into the very spirit of how Americans currently live -- well, who says there ain't no truth in advertising?
A Strategic Petroleum Reserve flip-flop
On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted, 97-1, to authorize a halt to any further additions to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. President Bush plans to veto.
Last week, How the World Works confessed that it agreed with President Bush's assertion that halting purchases of oil for the SPR -- or going even further, and releasing part of the stockpile -- would have a minuscule impact on the global price of oil. Seventy thousand barrels of oil are added to the SPR every day -- not even a drop in the bucket when compared to the daily global consumption of 85 million barrels a day.
But today the Economist blog Free Exchange points to a post by energy expert and former oil trader Geoffrey Styles that adds considerable nuance to the discussion.
Styles' argument focuses on the fact that the futures price of a particular blend of light sweet crude, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange, is the current benchmark upon which a large proportion of global contracts for oil delivery is based. When we hear, as we did today, that the price of crude fell one dollar in trading on Wednesday, what is usually meant is that the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate to be delivered in June fell one dollar.
And that's where it gets interesting:
From Styles:
The typical structure of an oil deal now involves an agreed premium or discount to the prevailing WTI price over an agreed period, often related to the time that a cargo of oil is loaded, or a pipeline shipment delivered. So while the global oil market has expanded to some 85 million barrels per day (MBD), with US refineries consuming on average 16 MBD of that, the price for a surprisingly large proportion of those barrels is set by a domestic light sweet crude futures market that is backed by only a few million barrels per day of physical oil: the domestic oil production and suitable imports connected by pipeline to the Cushing, OK delivery point for WTI...
...What really counts is the Mid-continent light sweet crude system, consisting of pipelines going into and out of storage at Cushing, serving a number of inland refineries, including five sweet crude refineries in Oklahoma with a combined capacity of 0.5 MBD. Thus, while the volume of "paper barrels" traded on the "Merc" can mount into the hundreds of millions of barrels per day, the physical market underpinning them is orders of magnitude smaller.
And U.S. policy toward the SPR could conceivably affect that much smaller physical market. Styles says that 58 percent of the oil added daily to the SPR consists of various grades of sweet light crude. It may be a piddling amount compared to total global consumption, but it is significant compared to the total daily production of WTI. So halting the inflow would be a "lever with which to nudge the balance point of the physical WTI market," and possibly alter the "speculative logic" of global oil markets.
Not by all that much, Styles hastens to add, but perhaps by enough to make it worth doing, in the short term.
A new, improved bubble-popping Fed
Imagine this: Learning from experience, rather than ideology.
Dean Baker says that an article in the Financial Times reporting that the Federal Reserve "is reconsidering the way it deals with asset price bubbles in the wake of the housing and credit bust" is "huge."
Presumably this is because it would represent a rather stunning repudiation of Alan Greenspan's practice of sitting back and letting bubbles expand without restriction, or, even worse, feeding them with excessively low interest rates.
Two points are worth underlining from Krishna Guha's story.
The first is that Ben Bernanke has historically supported the Greenspan position that using monetary policy to combat bubbles was "likely to do more harm than good," but that he is now "willing to re-evaluate it in the light of recent events."
After nearly eight years of a presidential administration in which the facts on the ground almost never resulted in a change of policy, it is remarkably refreshing to hear that a Bush appointee may be acknowledging that sometimes, you know, you gotta go with the flow, and change your strategy according to the dictates of actual reality.
The second is that, according to Guha, the preferred technique for popping emerging bubbles doesn't have to be raising interest rates -- it could be a "regulatory" approach.
By contrast, there is widespread interest inside the Fed in using regulatory policy more aggressively to try to contain bubbles. Officials are intrigued by the extra possibility that could be opened up by proposed new powers set out in a Treasury blueprint for regulatory reform.
The Treasury recommends giving the Fed wide authority to require financial institutions to alter behaviour that it believes poses a threat to financial stability.
Yesterday, I noted that a Bloomberg profile of Ben Bernanke suggested that he might become the most powerful Fed chairman of all time. If, under his watch, the Fed adopts a new policy in which it directly reins in Wall Street when the high-finance boys start running amok, I think we'd have to concede the point.
How to stop illegal Canadian immigration
For Tom "border fence" Tancredo, it's not enough to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. There's also the 5,000-mile Canadian frontier, where hordes of terrorists are poised in the northern pine forests, waiting for their opportunity to spread mayhem.
Last week, reported the Austin American-Statesman, responding to the news that Canadian authorities had "lost track" of 41,000 people who were supposed to be deported, Tancredo said:
"Our open borders present a serious danger to our citizens and I am calling again on our government to build a fence along our northern border as well as our southern border."
We'll leave the analysis to a commenter who posted his feelings on the Austin American-Statesman Web site:
Sounds like a great plan. Hopefully it will keep morons like Tancredo out of Canada.
Ben "Iron Man" Bernanke
If, as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, told an investor conference on Monday, the credit crunch really is over, how long before Wall Street canonizes Saint Bernanke?
How the World Works started mulling this question while reading a detailed and generally laudatory Bloomberg article that is half-profile and half-report card on how Bernanke has led the Federal Reserve in tackling the financial crisis.
Opinions, naturally, vary. Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker believes he has overstepped his bounds, while Former Fed vice chairman Alan Blinder gives him an A+: "Paulson and President George W. Bush have done little to address the mortgage crisis ... The Fed has been extremely creative and is fighting this war almost exclusively by itself."
Alan Meltzer, author of a history of the Fed, provides the most damning critique: "We can't have a system that continues to work well if the bankers make the profits and the public, the taxpayers, take the losses ... That is not a viable system."
Future events will further steer the narrative. If inflation spikes while the real economy tanks, Bernanke's aggressive rate cuts and extensions of credit to Wall Street financial firms won't look so good, in retrospect. Likewise, if it turns out that the credit crunch is not over, as some, more gloomy observers are suggesting, the vultures won't be slow in convening to pick over the Fed chair's body. And given that arguments over Greenspan's legacy (best Fed chairman of all time, or bubble-inducing precipitator of the current troubles?), are likely to continue for some time to come, it may be premature to judge Bernanke's performance.
But what we do know is that a crisis occurred and Bernanke took dramatic action; and in the process his public persona went through a remarkable evolution. The same quiet, unassuming economics professor who was widely criticized as naive and bumbling when his dinner-party remarks to CNBC anchorwoman Maria Bartiromo sent stock prices tumbling is now being assessed as the facilitator of the greatest expansion of Federal Reserve authority since the Great Depression. Bloomberg even calls him "now well on his way to becoming the most powerful Fed chairman ever."
That's quite the transformation, and I defy anyone to come up with a Fed-watcher who might have predicted it when Ben Bernanke was chosen by George Bush to succeed Greenspan.
China's earthquake and the Mandate of Heaven
The devastating earthquake in the Sichuan province of China -- 12,000 dead and counting -- is spawning the usual blogospheric chatter about the "Mandate of Heaven." As in, has the Chinese Communist Party lost it?
Ever since the Zhou Dynasty replaced the Shang some 3000 years ago, natural disasters have been interpreted in China as a sign of heaven's disfavor with whomever is currently in charge. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976, which killed hundreds of thousands, provided the most famous recent demonstration of this theory. A few months later, Chairman Mao died, setting the stage for the eventual ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping and a radically different approach to Chinese economic development.
2008 has had its shares of disasters, starting with the destructive snow storms in January, and punctuated by the Sichuan earthquake -- the worst earthquake in China since Tangshan. Coming so close to the border of Tibet, the scene of destructive riots just a month ago, you could easily make the case that Heaven is unhappy, especially if you're already predisposed against the CCP.
But there's one problem with the formulation: Where's that new dynasty waiting in the wings, ready to seize power from the discredited rulers who have failed to keep mankind in harmony with heaven and earth?
From the days of the Zhou, the theory of the Mandate of Heaven has been closely associated with the problem of establishing the legitimacy of the new government. New dynastic rulers arrive, point out the floods, famine, earthquakes and general distress that characterized the last years of the previous dynasty, and announce that obviously, the previous rulers had lost the Mandate of Heaven, as witnessed by all the destruction.
Even without an imminent shakeup in power, natural disasters provided an opportunity for in-house critics of the regime to voice dissent.
The great China scholar Burton Watson wrote:
Like the Greeks and Romans, the early Chinese firmly believed in the portentous significance of unusual or freakish occurences in the natural world. This belief formed the basis for the Han theory that evil actions or misgovernment in high places invites dislocations in the natural order, causing the appearance of comets, eclipses, drought, locusts, weird animals, etc... However interpreted, this theory of portents and omens had a tremendous influence upon Han political thought, for it gave the bureaucracy a method of indirectly censuring the throne when direct criticism was impolitic.
Right now, media accounts of the earthquake are focusing on collapsed buildings in Sichuan and wondering whether they were built to code, speculating that building contractors cut corners while local officials looked the other way. In China's pell mell economy, such practices seem likely to have been widespread. But for that kind of mismanagement to open up cracks in the perceived legitimacy of the CCP to govern China requires that there be some kind of countervailing force ready to take China in a different direction. A Deng Xiaoping to eclipse a Mao Zedong, or a Qing to sweep out the Ming.
Even with all the environmental consquences of China's recent economic growth, longstanding grievances of workers and peasants against corruption, and intellectual discontent with the Party's control over political discourse, the current dislocations don't seem comparable at all to the upheavals that Mao perpetrated in the 1960s, or the vast incompetence that characterized the failing years of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Quite the contrary -- as long as China's economy continues to boom, the CCP will keep its mandate -- especially with no credible opposition in the wings. Because China's history demonstrates that mandates aren't just lost. They're taken.
More rice than ever before
The world's rice farmers will produce more rice than ever before in 2008, according to a new report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The FAO is predicting a rice harvest of 666 million tons, a 2.3 percent increase over 2007.
The increase in production won't be enough to significantly dent high prices, however, and may be slightly tamped down by the devastation wrought by Cyclone Nargis on Burma's rice bowl.
Why? Simply put, people are eating more rice.
According to the FAO, "Average world rice consumption per person is set to increase by 0.5 percent to 57.3 kilo per year, up from 57 kilo in 2007."
Whether that means going from one meal a day to two or three, or a Western-style epidemic of ballooning portion-sizes, the FAO doesn't say. But it should give some pause to those who would blame the spread of biofuels for everything that is suddenly awry in grain markets. While it is true that competition from other crops (corn, soy) is depressing rice production in the United States, almost everywhere else in the world, rice harvests are booming -- including Africa, where the FAO reports that "large expansions" are "anticipated in Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Nigeria."
The peak oil culture wars
Sky-high oil prices are not primarily the fault of evil hedge fund speculators, writes Paul Krugman in his Monday New York Times column. If they were, then at some point oil stockpiles would have to rise in order to support prices that are not justified by demand. But that's not happening.
Fair enough. But then Krugman goes on to say that normally, it is critics from the left, outraged at capitalist manipulation, who inveigh against speculation. But this time around, he says, it's the right that's yelping the most. Krugman explains that this is because conservatives don't like taking the bus.
... The odds are that we're looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly important, in which many people may even -- gasp -- take public transit to work.
I don't find that vision particularly abhorrent, but a lot of people, especially on the right, do. And so they want to believe that if only Goldman Sachs would stop having such a negative attitude, we'd quickly return to the good old days of abundant oil.
Some conservatives may indeed look down their noses at rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi on buses and subway trains. But the antipathy expressed by the right toward the peak oil camp (which is where Krugman is positioning himself, even if he doesn't utter the magic words), goes much, much deeper than a mere distaste for energy conservation.
Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter -- as a result of our own activities -- threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.
Given that many on the left also see peak oil and climate change as cultural battlefields, as weapons with which to assault enemies whose values they politically and aesthetically oppose (see James Kunstler), it's no wonder that some conservatives are fighting back like caged rats, or that they want to blame speculators for oil prices, or biased scientists for climate change.
Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Sensible people could agree that well-regulated markets incorporating the appropriate prices for environmental pollution and energy consumption will provide powerful incentives to allow humanity to avoid devastating energy shocks and the complete despoliation of the planet. We don't have to consign ourselves to totalitarian dichotomies in which vegan organic gardeners stand on one side, threatening to employ the power of the state to deny everyone else their right to eat bloody porterhouse steaks; while across the trenches stand ranks of right-to-keep-and-bear-arms, give-me-my-SUV-and-suburban-gated-community-or-give-me-death Ayn-Rand disciples, draped in the furs of newly extinct mammal species, for whom a lifetime in hell would be infinitely preferable to a government-mandated solar power water heater.
But you know how it is -- first you agree to a cap-and-trade carbon-dioxide emissions limiting system, and before you can say "Kyoto Protocol" the New World Order Government is telling you which cartoons your kids are allowed to watch. Or, god forbid, that you have to take the bus.
Tough times for pawnshop operators
A counterintuitive story in Monday's Wall Street Journal suggests that the bloom is off the rose for publicly traded pawnshop companies. Normally you would expect pawnshops to rake in the family heirlooms when the economy goes south, but today's pawnshop chains are part of sprawling corporations that tend also to do a lot of business in the payday loan sector. And when times get tougher, payday loan customers tend to default on their loans. Adding insult to injury, a growing number of states are cracking down on the proliferation of predatory loan operators.
But in a rare moment of Wall Street Journal bloglike snark, Leslie Eaton's article closes with a kicker that has just a whiff of class warfare:
If pawn brokers post big losses on payday loans, they may really understand how their cash-strapped customers feel.
Really? Will slumping share prices send the CEOs of Cash America International and EZCorp Inc. down to the local pawnshop, gold watch in hand? One suspects they would be more likely to sell off their vacation homes, or cancel the next $50,000 worth of interior redecoration, before they find themselves standing in line at the payday loan center.
Economics 101: Obama vs. McCain
In Oregon on Friday, Barack Obama delivered a short speech on the economy. His remarks were notable not because he debuted any fresh proposals (he didn't) but for the explicit pains the Senator from Illinois took to distinguish his economic platform from John McCain's -- as opposed to that other candidate still running for President, whose name escapes my memory, possibly because Obama did not mention it a single time during his speech.
John McCain wants to continue George Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; I want to give a tax cut to working people. I admired Senator McCain when he said he could not "in good conscience" support the Bush tax cuts. But now, as the Republican nominee, he's fully embraced them. He wants to give a permanent tax cut to the wealthiest Americans who don't need them and didn't ask for them while working people are struggling. And for all his talk about fiscal responsibility, he's proposed $400 billion in tax cuts without any word about how he'll pay for him. That's exactly the kind of attitude that has shifted the burden on to the middle class, and mortgaged our children's future on a mountain of debt.
Obama also slagged McCain's gas tax holiday proposal, health care position, and support of the war in Iraq -- noting he would use the money saved from ending the war to invest "in our roads and bridges and ports. And I want to invest in millions of green jobs, so that we finally develop renewable energy, end our addiction to oil, bring those gas prices down, and save our planet in the bargain."
Good luck on getting those gas prices, down, Senator, because, if we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times -- if we want to save the planet, we need higher gas prices, not lower.
Whatever. Again, there wasn't much new to see here, except that, when he concluded with the observation, "there will be real differences on the ballot in November," you could almost feel a fresh breeze wafting through the campaign. After a long winter and spring of mostly imaginary differences blown up into all-consuming conflagrations, the battle-decks appear to finally be clearing, in preparation for a struggle in which it really won't be that hard to choose sides, however bitter you might be about who is emerging as the most likely person to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America.
The sacrificial mosquito fish of Contra Costa County
One year ago, almost to the day, How the World Works noted a story in the Sacramento Bee warning of the dangers of a virulent West Nile season -- because mosquitoes were flourishing in the abandoned pools of foreclosed homes.
Today, the Wall Street Journal is featuring a terrific Page One story by Michael Corkery (should be accessible to non-subscribers) on how Northern California government agencies are employing mosquito fish as an abatement technique. The fish are dumped in abandoned swimming pools, and then proliferate like crazy as they scoop up larvae.
There is much to enjoy in Corkery's story, but no shortage of pathos, either. Once they've eradicated the local mosquito population, or a home is successfully sold to new ownership, the fish usually die as the pools are drained or made habitable for humans. "They are sacrificial," says Chris Miller, a biologist at the Contra Costa mosquito and vector control district.
But my favorite part was this:
Not everybody likes turning swimming pools into giant aquariums. "First you have fish, then you have birds that eat them" and then bird droppings, says Arnie Shal, a retired accountant, who lives next to several foreclosed houses with pools in Clearwater, Fla. "It's not really a healthy situation."
Ah, the cycle of life. It's just not healthy.
The indie-rock fall and rise of R.E.M.
On my way to pick up my daughter from her karate dojo tonight I heard a song on the local college radio station that sounded familiar. It recalled early R.E.M., and my own youth, and a stab of nostalgia sliced through me, sweet and tangy and old-school indie-rock jangly. Then I blinked -- there could be no doubt: that was R.E.M. I had to laugh: R.E.M? On KALX? How the worm does turn. Back in the day -- when R.E.M. was minting platinum albums -- college radio dropped R.E.M. like a hot sell-out rock.
I guessed I was hearing a tune from the new R.E.M. album, "Accelerate." I only even know there is a new R.E.M. album because econoblogger Barry Ritholtz recently referenced a Wall Street Journal article about how the band's record sales have precipitously declined over the last decade and a half. 1991's "Out of Time" sold 4.5 million copies in the U.S. The band's 2004 release, "Around the Sun," has sold only 234,000 to date..
No need to feel sorry for Michael Stipe et al. I'm sure that even in these days of rampant music piracy, the royalties on R.E.M.'s back catalog will keep the band and all their descendants in high style for generations to come. But to hear Stipe's voice on KALX was to hear a life-cycle metaphor. The band is back where it started -- no longer a staple of hit radio, no longer in high rotation on MTV, no longer selling out stadiums. Nope, back to blessed obscurity, back to college radio, back to singing unintelligibly about... Houston?
I am deeply pleased. For a generation of alt-rock hipsters, R.E.M. posed a litmus test that can't be passed: How do you stay cool once you've cashed in? We all understand: underground cachet is the most fragile of commodities -- as soon as everybody else likes what you like, where's the fun? R.E.M. gave it their best shot, but the more they saturated the air-waves the less interested I became. It was way more fun to turn a friend on to "Murmur" or "Reckoning" than to see "Losing My Religion" for the umpteenth billionth time. And of course, the guardians of college radio, whose standards were and are far more censorious than mine, shied away from the putrid corpse of international mass popularity super-stardom as if merely cracking open a jewel-case would transmit some horrible indie-cred-killing plague.
I tried telling all this to my daughter as we drove home. I stumbled a bit as I explained how it was kind of neat that I had just heard a song by a band that she knew nothing of, that I once liked that got really popular but was no longer commercially relevant in the here-and-now, on a radio station that wouldn't have dared to play their music a decade ago but was now letting them back into the fold. She nodded, and said: "They completed the circle."
Would that we all be so lucky.
Here comes the polysilicon sun
Global production of photovoltaic (PV) or solar cells -- which convert the sun's light directly to electricity -- increased 51 percent in 2007, to 3,733 megawatts. According to early estimates, more than 2,935 megawatts of solar modules were installed that year, bringing cumulative global installations of PVs since 1996 to more than 9,740 megawatts -- enough to meet the annual electricity demand of more than 3 million homes in Europe. Over the past five years, annual global production of PV cells has increased nearly sevenfold, and cumulative installations have grown more than fivefold.
51 percent annual growth is heady stuff. But the most significant aspect of that number is that the surge in production occurred during a period when production growth was supposed to be constrained by dire shortages of a key ingredient in photovoltaic cells -- polysilicon. As recently as two years ago, analysts were suggesting that the high price of polysilicon would force solar power growth rates to plummet.
Polysilicon prices are still high, by any historical standard, but new production facilities are coming online with such speed that one Chinese solar power manufacturer canceled plans for its own billion dollar polysilicon foundry earlier this year, after deciding it would be able to purchase all the polysilicon it needed on the open market at reasonable prices. Which means that the cost of manufacturing photovoltaic cells will likely fall dramatically, setting up even higher solar power growth rates in years to come.
Are laptop PCs the environmentally correct choice?
If you go a-googling for information on the relative environmental footprints of laptop vs. desktop computers, by far the most common opinion is that laptops are the superior choice. This is based primarily on the indisputable fact that they consume considerably less power than desktop computers, and a little less convincingly on the premise that since they are smaller, they must be better.
On the latter point, a typical summary:
Purchasing a laptop is a smart environmental decision when compared with purchasing a desktop PC. The main reason being that a notebook is smaller than a desktop so there is less of an environmental impact at the time of disposal. The slim size of the flat laptop means that there are smaller and less hazardous parts to be disposed of, such as hard drives, CD/DVD drives, flash card readers, USB ports, etc. The manufacturing of smaller and smaller laptop computers also has an indirect effect, in that the processing plants produce less harmful emissions into the environment.
I am unconvinced, if only on an anecdotal basis. In the last five years, I have gone through three laptops at work, while staying with the same basic desktop at home (although I must confess that my home machine is on its last legs). Laptops are hard to fix, hard to upgrade, and fragile. In comparison to desktops, they are disposable computers, and frequent disposability is not necessarily a sustainable attribute.
Eco PC Review offers some reasons why laptops might not be the environmentally more friendly computing choice.
- Laptops are smaller and lighter... but most of the cost is in manufacturing and most of the manufacturing cost is in the chips and these are similar for laptops and desktops so there may not be much difference.
- Laptops have shorter lives (more fragile, parts more costly and harder to find, uneconomic to replace batteries, impractical to upgrade).
- Laptops have batteries (particularly toxic, waste energy in charge/discharge cycle, waste energy when degraded).
- Laptop components are hard to re-use at end of computer life
- Wherever possible we can buy for longer life and lower power to encourage the industry to change. That's more of an option when buying desktops and desktop components than when buying laptops.
Laptops appear to be well on their way to displacing desktops as the platform of choice for most computer users, so the comparison may well be moot. And perhaps the power savings conferred by laptops outweigh all other considerations. Even so, until laptops are designed so they are easier to fix and easier to reconfigure into new and more powerful machines, that archaic lumbering desktop dinosaur might still boast some environmental selling points.