The billionaires is once again claims that technology will save us. In a maintenance Published Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expects by the end of this decade that we will all have access to virtual reality glasses that enables us to feel transported and hung out to other people’s homes. This in turn can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions through travel.
‘There will of course continue to be cars and planes, and all that. “But the more we can move around, we not only eliminate commuters and other things that are separate from us, but I think it’s better for society and for the planet in general, ” Zuckerberg told the Associated Press.
Globally, the transport sector is one of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis, and in the US pollution from the transit sector is the largest share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. There is no doubt that this needs to change.
But will glasses with virtual reality help us reduce carbon emissions? Can be. Studies on the greenhouse gas output of VR technology are limited, but it is true that the carbon emissions associated with an individual appeal to Zuckerberg’s prospective smart glasses, for example, may be lower than those associated with a plane trip through the country. At the moment, however, we do not have enough information to know for sure.
Video conferencing already [reduces travel-related carbon emissions] to a limited extent, but I do not think anyone can say in advance whether VR will be cool enough to abandon people. Jonathan Koomey, an energy and climate researcher who runs a sustainable IT consulting firm, writes in an email, but he adds that ‘there are so many unknowns about this that it is a substitute for business travel and meetings. hard to say anything definitive. ”
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VR is also not a substitute for personal work that requires personal interaction and work, from construction to food service. The millions of people working in the industry will continue to commute. To make a big dive into business travel, VR technology is likely to have to be used quite widely in other sectors. And when it comes to traveling for fun, Koomey does not think much of it.
“I doubt people will choose to use VR instead of going on a tropical vacation,” he said.
Of course, not everyone in the world goes on tropical vacations. In reality, a recent study found that only 11% of the people worldwide traveled by plane, and no more than 4% of the world population undertook international flights. But the global elite, according to the study, is flying without giving up. Only 1% of the world population was responsible for half of the world’s commercial flight emissions in that year.
If it is bad to fly with airplanes, it is much worse to take private jets. A single PJ flight across the country could yield almost double the annual production of greenhouse gases for an average American. Still, Facebook has covered almost $ 3 million in private plane cost for Zuckerberg according to federal disclosures in 2019. In addition to flying for business, Zuckerberg also has a $ 100 million mansion in Hawaii. It’s hard to imagine him leaving travel there to rather stay at home on the VR headset.
In a sense, though, it’s not entirely Zuckerberg’s fault. We can not expect people with his extreme wealth to simply act in good faith and make personal decisions that are better for our collective future on earth! In other words, we can not just depend on people buying new, sophisticated technologies to solve the climate crisis. The world’s leading climate scientists say we need high levels of government regulation to pollution of aviation, cruises, motors, and other polluting sectors.
Zuckerberg, however, remained strong anti-regulation. But then of course he has to – his job is to make money on Facebook. Making VR glasses the next big thing can be great for Zuckerberg’s quest to enrich Facebook and himself the company’s interest in technology. And marking the glasses as green can help him do just that.
In every other sense, however, there is little evidence that VR glasses will really do that much. So if Mark Zuckerberg really cared about reducing global warming emissions, he might start with a more robust solution to combat climate denial, and the possibility of deniers to advertise lies, and in general do not finance them or their events in the first place.