TRIBUNE – Ecology and its corollary, sustainable development, are at the heart of the concerns of the media which distribute to us an abundance of various information, not always coherent, and recommendations which, most often, seem, on analysis, to pursue the aim of relieving our consciences rather than constituting solutions, even partial, to the problems of pollution or overconsumption of energy.
Are we attacking the real causes or are we put to sleep by a soothing discourse that distracts us from the real issues?
Imagine limiting our individual heaters or driving an electric vehicle, why not? But the “at the same time” prevails when we know that the Beijing Olympics took place on artificial snow or that the Football World Cup will take place in Qatar where the eight stadiums will be over-air-conditioned because they are located in the desert. Or when we know that the airline Lufthansa carried out 8,000 empty flights to preserve its airport slots. Or finally when the policy suggested by German environmentalists leads the country to put its coal-fired power stations back into operation.
Inconsistencies surely, but we can find even better by looking, for example, at our agricultural policy, but also at the ways in which our leaders plan to measure our so-called carbon footprint, or, finally, by looking at exponential development digital.
Relocation and food autonomy against unbridled globalization and the search for profit at all costs.
Let’s take the example of the kilo of Spanish tomatoes which travels more than 1,000 km to reach the shelves of our supermarkets. It is first produced in greenhouses under deplorable phytosanitary conditions and if it is cheaper to buy, this is only an appearance in terms of cost, because this price difference is mainly due to tax inconsistencies and social policies in force in the European Union.
From a more global point of view, the first common-sense reaction that would make it possible to protect our planet to a minimum should be to promote proximity, and not generalized globalization, a source of inflation and generator of profits captured by large multinationals without that the “runoff” does not really reach either the producers or the consumers.
Why bring our meat from distant countries when our breeders and farmers can no longer even make a living from their trades?
And the European Union, which nevertheless wants to track our carbon consumption soon, has just signed a free trade agreement with New Zealand for the import of vegetables, fruit and meat, while we grow or raise our own most of the products concerned. Let’s imagine for a moment the reality of the carbon footprint of these products that will have crossed the planet!
The Swedish Pilot Experience
The New World Order teams want to impose on us very quickly a monitoring of our individual carbon consumption. In Sweden, the company Doconomy “ wants to raise consumer awareness through a new kind of bank card: the idea is to integrate the notion of carbon footprint into one of the most used daily objects in our Western societies. How ? By marketing a credit card capable of calculating the CO2 emission rate generated by each purchase. »
The manufacturer of the product, whose data is then cross-referenced with that of the Åland Index, a technology used to estimate the average carbon footprint of manufacturers and their products (use of water, electricity, oil, etc.). Detailed results for each purchased product will be visible in the app.
The Åland Index calculates the assumed climate impact of your card transactions using an average carbon footprint for each industry. It therefore detects the place of purchase and measures its impact while forgetting to include the impact of the manufacture and transport of the specific product.
Because this tracking only concerns the food and not its production site, the number of kilometers traveled, nor the way it was grown: outdoors or in greenhouses. So, in fact, the tomato bought in Sweden will have the same carbon footprint whether it is made in the greenhouse next door or in Spain. It lacks other essential information such as the movement and the conditions of this movement (refrigerated truck or other depending on the products), but also information concerning the packaging of the product.
When you go to your fruit and vegetable merchant, your butcher or your cheesemonger, he wraps your purchases in paper or puts them directly in the bag you brought for this purpose. Again, the carbon consumption of a product pre-packaged in plastic is much higher than that of five tomatoes and two melons poured into your bag, or your chicken or cheese wrapped in paper. The place where you buy (supermarket or local store) will also modify this footprint significantly, not to mention the need to take your vehicle to go to the supermarket while your local store if you live in the center town is a few meters from your home.
“You get what you measure!” (You get what you measure), say the Anglo-Saxons. It is clear here that the priority consists above all in supervising individuals in their behavior, and not in seeking the sources of real ecological savings.
The inconsistency of digital
But there is another major inconsistency in this assessment: it is based on the use of digital tools, credit cards and their readers connected and connected to electricity (digital databases (data centers) and transport of these data, which are themselves energy sinkholes producing CO2 and greenhouse gases).
And this is where this initiative becomes even more incoherent.
Already, we are using digital money, a digital card reader, connected and plugged in, instead of using a note or a coin which, once produced, can be reused a good number of times, which produce no carbon emissions and which do not need any energy to operate.
In effect, “ the digital sector requires a lot of energy to operate, it is a major consumer of non-renewable natural resources. If the Internet were a country, it would be the world’s third largest consumer of electricity after China and the United States. »
And these datas centers are destined to multiply as a result of this type of control application and, by the way in which they are organized, they themselves consume an energy probably greater than that necessary to manufacture the measured products.
The digital consumption figures are even implausible: “ A data center of 10,000 m² consumes on average as much as a city of 50,000 inhabitants. And 40% of this electricity consumption is used only to cool them. »
« In 2025, 20% of global electricity consumption and 10% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to data centers “, reports FranceSoir in its recent article on the cooling of data centers cooking oil!
The digital passport and digital identification, like the digital money that they seek to impose on us by all means, are part of the projects of central banks as well as the 2030 agenda of Davos. Eventually, all the information concerning our private life will be consolidated: our travel and consumption habits, our spending habits, our assets, the state of our bank account. But it is an additional source of pollution that will lead to a worsening of our climatic conditions, by drastically increasing our energy expenditure and our carbon consumption.
Proximity, relocation, social ties, fiduciary money, identity cards and paper passports are first and foremost the best means of limiting this energy consumption which is imperative for the future of our planet. The following Grizzlead article is perfectly explicit on the subject as well as the diagram that accompanies it:
The pollution of connected objects (excerpt from the Grizzlead article)
« Connected objects alone generate 39% of greenhouse gas emissions in the digital field. They also contribute 76% to the depletion of the world’s non-renewable natural resources. 94% of French people have a smartphone but only 6% of them are recycled in the country. This figure drops to 5% when considering devices from around the world. It is estimated that 110 million the number of unused laptops by the French who sleep at the bottom of a drawer.
The emerging trend is not very optimistic, the planet will have 48 billion connected objects in 2025 with an environmental footprint 3 times greater than in 2010. »
It is clear that the major sources of carbon consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are not necessarily those we are told about. Without wanting to be outdated, we can wonder about the fact that the recent transformations of our lifestyles, promoted by our leaders, have an unfortunate tendency to significantly worsen the situation.
Do your shopping at local merchants, pay in cash or by check, keep the same shopping bag to carry your shopping, wrap the products in newspaper, consign glass bottles, exchange milk cans with the milkman who was doing his tour, all of this helped to limit our impact on pollution. Undoubtedly not a source of sustainable development, but perhaps a step forward in rethinking development on sounder bases, taking into account the real impact of developments on the general ecology. With a positive side effect which would be to restrict the inclinations of our leaders to administer our lives! There is no doubt, however, that the dominant ideology will not find its account there and will not let it go!