By reading this, you contributed to climate change!

Work emails from one sender always comes with this signature line: "Save a tree, don't print me."

Yep, the words are in green to convey the point in case it was not otherwise clear.

It sounds wonderful, doesn't it.

And then there is the reality: "our collective internet traffic contributes enormously to climate change."  Of course, this is not the first time I am blogging about our digital consumption and climate change.  We simply don't often think of our cyber-interactions as contributing to climate change.   For whatever reasons, it is beyond our imagination.

How huge is our collective impact?

Digital technologies have even surpassed the aerospace industry in terms of carbon emissions. While aviation's share of global CO2 emissions is estimated to be around 2.5%, and rising, nearly 4% of all CO2 emissions can now be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure

More than aviation!

The largest share of that growth is now video traffic: 80% of all data transferred online is video data, with nearly 60% of that being online video, meaning streaming videos stored on a server and viewed remotely, via sites like Netflix, YouTube or Vimeo.

Raise your hands if you are willing to give up using Netflix, YouTube, ...

I am sure it is only a matter of time before somebody comes up with Netflix-shaming, similar to "flight-shame"

[Greta] Thunberg is the most celebrated of a small but expanding tribe of environmentalists who eschew air travel: “non-flyers,” as some of them call themselves. Non-flyers are not typically afraid of flying—at least not in the usual sense. They do not fear that a plane will malfunction but that it will function exactly as intended. If Thunberg had flown from London to New York and back, her share of the flight’s CO2 emissions would have amounted to roughly a ton: more than the average annual per capita emissions in fifty-six of the world’s countries

So, does it mean that we need to give up flying?  And give up our digital devices and the internet?  No more Googling?

I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon from a few years ago in which two cave men talk about the clean air that they have.  I googled for it (ha!):

Source

Here's what I practice, and suggest:
1. Moderation (or, if you prefer, reducetarianism).
2. Vote.

I have a job for you ... but, don't ask about the pay!

Faculty working their ways from kindergarten through their doctorates and then continuing on with teaching, without having had meaningful employment in the real world, is not unusual at all.  Sure, they might have held summer jobs somewhere, but that's it.  

Such a model works well for research universities.  But, those are not the places where the majority of the youth go for higher education--it is teaching universities like mine that serve the vast numbers.  And most students at the teaching universities have questions about jobs after graduation.  Ok, not all but the responsible ones do.  It is an increasingly difficult challenge for me to give them rosy, optimistic answers, given my understanding of the situation now and what I understand will be the immediate future.

Though the argumentative Indian who lives in India disagrees with me, I don't buy into his optimism for the future and how labor is overpriced in the US, especially when I read pieces like this on employment and wages:

the labor force's 273,000 person decline was part of the reason the unemployment rate fell from 5.8 to 5.6 percent. The participation rate, which shows how many people have a job or are looking for one, ticked down to 62.7 percent, tying a 38-year low. That's not so good.
You know what else isn't good? Wages.

Yes, of course, I am continuing from where I left off yesterday.  Well, this thread is not anything new in this blog anyway!

it's a little surprising that wages have stayed stagnant despite declining unemployment. That's not supposed to happen, not when joblessness is under 6 percent. Indeed, unemployment is already near the semi-mythical "natural rate" of, the Fed guesses, 5.2 to 5.5 percent, where inflation is supposed to start accelerating. The idea is that workers have more bargaining power when there aren't as many people out of work—so they can demand higher wages, which turns into higher prices.
That this hasn't happened tells us that there's still a decent amount of slack in the labor market. And that's clear enough if you look at how, even now, millions of people can only find part-time jobs when they want full-time ones, or have been looking for work for six months or longer.

So, yes, there is employment.  But, employment that is not full-time work. And even that full-time being vast under-employment with low wages.

Generating jobs even as the economy shows robust growth is getting to be difficult:

The problem is that most industries formed since 2000—electronic auctions, Internet news publishers, social-networking sites, and video- and audio-streaming services, all of which appeared in official industry classifications for the first time in 2010—employ far fewer people than earlier computer-based industries. Whereas in 2013 IBM and Dell employed 431,212 and 108,800 workers, respectively, Facebook employed only 8,348 as of last September.

The bottom-line is:

the digitization of the economy may have far-reaching implications for the future of growth and employment.

So, what can be done?

there is much that governments can do to prevent stagnation. They can redistribute income to those with a higher propensity to spend. They can also support investment into industries that might foster more new jobs than digital technologies—jobs for solar photovoltaic installers, wind energy engineers, biofuels production managers and transportation planners.
Finally, while digital technologies may create fewer jobs than previous innovations, they also substantially reduce the amount of money it takes to start a new digital business—and that will make it possible for more people to become entrepreneurs. Indeed, self-employment might become the new normal. The challenge for economic policy is to create an environment that rewards and encourages more entrepreneurial risk taking. A basic guaranteed income, for instance, would help by capping the downside to entrepreneurial failure while boosting spending and combating inequality.

Wait, wait, wait--that laundry list requires a great deal of responsible discussions in the political space, especially at the federal level, in the House, in the Senate, and at the White House.  Which means ... yep, the youth are screwed!

So ... as a faculty at a teaching university, if I present such a view to students, then I will be turning students away from my classes.  Perhaps I should simply tell them that my job is to only teach a few courses and that their jobs is not my concern.  Nope, that ain't me.  Which means ... yep, I am screwed!