Would this be a good way to fight Global Warming at the grassroots level?
Specifically, sending an email to Steven Jobs informing him that you won’t buy any more iPods until he makes a solar powered version available.
Discussion: One of the two obstacles that solar energy has in replacing fossil fuel on a large scale is the high cost and inefficiency of solar PV cells, the devices that convert sunlight (or any light) directly into electricity. It’s going to take somebody with some vision, imagination and most importantly money to make PV cells cheap enough for evey Joe and Mary Sixpack to mount them on their roof and totally disconnect their homes from the fossil fuel power grid. Congress has the money, but since it is essentially split 50-50 these days, any Federal money is going to be spent where the most readily harvestable votes are, namely in farming states where the ethanol boom is already underway.
Its true that iPods only consume a negligible amount of energy, but that would actually make it easier to reach the goal of producing a 99.99% "green" iPod that doesn’t require recharging from an inefficient recharger on the wall thats being energized by a fossil fuel power plant somewhere. Buyers of next generation iPods would be a perfect market for such a device, and once its successful, Microsoft will of course want to play "me too" and compete with Apple in the same market, pushing along the drive to reduce manufacturing costs and increase PV cell performance.
So here’s a chance for the current Disposable Income generation to be at the forefront of the Global Warming fight and with little sacrifice on their part.
Apples web site is profuse with politically correct hyperbole about how much they care about the environment, but I couldn’t find one single reference to solar energy. I think yours is a good idea because it would result in either a badly needed jump start for the solar industry or unmask Jobs as yet another double talking baby boomer billionaire.
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