Energy Saving

You hear a lot of stuff about the environment these days. The polar ice caps are melting faster than anyone thought they would, millions of tons of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere as the Russian tundra melts and the plant mass decomposes, probably increasing the speed and effect of Global Warming. Some scientists have been warning us about this for a long time.

“It’s not our concern, when the shit hits the fan, we’ll be dead anyway.” This has been the general consensus. I have even heard parents with small children saying it and I found that somewhat surprising, to be honest. People in general have used the Ostrich approach and put their heads into the sand.

It didn’t work in South Park - so it won’t work in real life, morons.

You can do a lot of things on a personal level that will reduce the amount of manufactured energy you spend during the day, thus reducing the amount of green house gasses emitted into the atmosphere. One of those things is environmentally friendly browsing.

Some time ago, Hallvard sent me a link to Blackle. Blackle is a Google version dressed in black and dark colors. The brighter the colors on your CRT1 monitor, the more energy the monitor uses. White is the color that uses the most energy, black the color that uses the least energy. In short; the darker the color used is, the less energy the monitor will use to display it.

Last night I took the idea of Blackle and changed the color scheme of this site. Unless your browser has cached the old style sheet you should now be looking at the environmentally friendly version of www.vegard.net. Black is a good, energy saving color. The bad thing about it is that I found it very hard to balance the color scheme - the one used now has a lot to be desired - and photos look less appealing on a black background that on a white one. Also, studies have shown that people prefer to read dark text on a bright background, not vice versa.

But it’s saving energy!

Some people say it’s too late now, we have passed the point of no return and the effects of global warming will soon haunt us every day: Glacial retreats, rising sea levels, more flooding, draught and extreme weather events. But maybe it’s not too late, maybe it’s possible to slow down, halt or even reverse the effects of global warming?

Don’t be a dick, start saving energy today. You can even save some money in the process.


  1. Evidently, LCD monitors use less energy than CRT monitors and the difference in energy consumption when displaying a white pixel compared to a black pixel is small. ↩︎


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