Wired

Just over one hundred years ago, there was no electricity at St. Olaf. Electric lights first illuminated Old Main in 1905. This last year, we used about 18 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When the lights went on in November of 1905, Oles celebrated. When the lights go on now, we don’t even think about it. Times have changed.

In 2000, 75 percent of Minnesota’s electricity came from burning coal. So when we boot up the computer, we’re probably consuming coal. But we never think of it. If we had to shovel coal into a chute on top of the computer, we’d be more conscious of our consumption. If we had to burn coal in our rooms to check our e-mail, we might be more conscientious about conserving energy. And if we had to remove the clinkers and ashes before we could boot up the computer again, we’d be more knowledgeable about the environmental impacts of computing. But we don’t do any of these things, and so we don’t usually think about the real costs of computing.

Electricity isn’t the only thing that’s produced at power plants. They produce jobs and profits too, and pollution and greenhouse gases and acid rain. When our electricity comes from coal, we’re involved in water pollution (in mining) and air pollution (in burning), and additional water pollution (dead lakes because of acid rain) and habitat loss (acid rain, as pollution precipitates defoliation in trees), as well as global warming. Sometimes, we’re also involved in disease; the rise in childhood asthma seems to be related to emissions from America’s power plants. On the college campus, in our dorm rooms and apartments and offices, electricity seems clean. But in the earth’s household, it’s not. So our electrical choices have global implications. Keeping a beverage cool in a dorm refrigerator is a complex act, affecting the world by remote control.