This piece is such a mixture of ignorance and a clumsy kind of sophistry
that it's hard to know what to say about it. Let's take what appear to
be its main points one by one.
1. "Wireless devices are energy hogs."
Well, yes; all electrical devices are "energy hogs." That includes
wireless devices such as your radio and your TV, which use
substantially more energy than cell phones and internet routers.
2. "Wireless internet access requires far more energy than fiber optic
internet access. Fiber optic internet access to the premises is the
state-of-the-art gold standard in broadband. Used with hardwired
modems, it is the most energy efficient, highest speed, highest
capacity, and most reliable option for broadband. Furthermore, it is
safe and secure."
Direct fiber is also incredibly expensive -- way too expensive to
provide internet service to the general public. Requiring fiber to
every user would essentially deprive most people of internet access.
And of course you would have to get rid of the WiFi router that lets
you move around inside your house or office. Fixing an Ethernet
cable to every iPad and mobile phone is possible to do but hard to
take seriously as a scenario.
3. "Use of energy-wasting wireless devices, therefore, accelerates the
environmental damage caused by [etc.]"
This is true of any "energy-wasting device." In fact, it's true of
any energy-USING device. Interestingly, the article does not provide
comparisons between the energy used by cell phones and WiFi routers
and the energy used by clothes dryers, vacuum cleaners, heaters,
light bulbs, and all the other electrical devices in the average
household. I haven't done a detailed comparison, but I would be very
surprised to find that the wireless devices the article is concerned
with use more energy than the average laptop.
4. [Various alarmist assertions about a link between radio frequency
(RF) emissions and health problems, etc.]
The truth here is that no one knows for sure about the long-term
impact of RF on human health or anything else -- and we're not likely
ever to know, because everyone in industrialized countries has been
spending every minute of their lives immersed in a sea of RF energy
since the 1920s, and we have long lost the ability to set up a
control population large enough for a meaningful long-term
comparative study.
What we can do is try to keep a sense of perspective. Cell phone
transmitters operate at about 100 watts; in other words, they put out
about the same amount of RF energy as a 100 watt bulb (light is
high-frequency RF energy). "Fixed wireless" transmitters for local
internet distribution, like the ones Clarity Connect is constructing
in Dryden, operate at a maximum of 1 watt in the frequencies commonly
used. Cell phone handsets emit 0.125 to 1 watt. WiFi, which
surrounds us nowadays like the rest of the RF, is limited to 1 watt.
By comparison, commercial FM and TV stations (which operate in
roughly the same range of frequencies) emit up to 500,000 watts of
radiated power in the U.S. I have at various times in my life lived
not far from one or more of these babies, and if RF emissions at the
low levels used by "wireless devices" had anything like the effects
suggested by this article, I (and everyone else who's lived in a
major city) would glow in the dark and throw sparks like a Tesla
coil.
This is not to say that it's a good idea to hold a cell phone to your
head for hours on end or that swimming in RF (as all of us do,
everywhere in the world, all the time) isn't harmful. Maybe it's bad
for us; maybe it isn't. Maybe surrounding ourselves 24/7 with RF
radiation for the last 90 years is responsible for increasing rates
of some major diseases; who knows. But to obsess over exposure to
minuscule amounts of RF radiation when we spend our entire lives near
radio and TV stations putting out thousands or hundreds of thousands
of times as much RF in the same frequency range is just plain silly.
So to everyone out there losing sleep at night over this, I would
like to say: get a grip.
If I'm sounding a bit annoyed here, it's because this kind of codswallop
distracts from attention to a real energy issue: the internet itself.
Server farms like the ones that power Google, Facebook, and the Amazon
rent-a-cloud use astonishing amounts of electricity -- as much as small
cities in some cases. And this demand is rapidly increasing due not
only to increasing numbers of users and services but also to our
insatiable demand for bandwidth itself (the faster you make voltage
levels go up and down, the more energy it takes). This means that there
will very likely be a point where further increasing the number of users
may require us to fall back in speed of transmission. It takes a lot
less energy to send an email than it does to stream a movie, and if the
internet ever becomes subject to outages, email (which was designed for
such an environment) is pretty much all we'll have.
There are social justice aspects to consider here, too. The Tompkins
County Broadband Committee (of which I am a member) has identified
several thousand households in the county that do not have broadband
internet access. These people are put at a distinct economic and social
disadvantage by barriers extending from lack of business-level
connectivity to lack of access by children trying to do their homework
(teachers are increasingly operating on an assumption of internet
access). These issues aren't interesting to the organizations that
cooked up the piece (the EMR Policy Institute and Electrical Pollution
Solutions), but that's because they are just using a supposed concern
with the environment to sell their message. From the
energypollution.com site linked from the article:
People exposed to excessive "dirty" power may develop radio wave
sickness. Clean power enters the home at 60 Hz. Electrical pollution
is 60 Hz electricity polluted with high frequency signals or "dirty"
power flowing on the wires and through the earth.... Transmitting
Smart Meters Pose A Serious Threat To Public Health... Modern Wind
Turbines Generate Dangerously "Dirty" Electricity... Compact
fluorescent bulbs can be a significant source of exposure to high
frequencies both transmitted and "dirty" power....
Not to mention what they do to your precious bodily fluids...!
Jon
artcalight wrote:
If you're having trouble viewing this email, you may see it online
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Share This:
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*For Distribution: *
*April 10, 2012
*
*Earth Day: A day without wireless*
*/Wireless devices damage the environment in many different ways./*
Wireless devices are energy hogs. For instance, it takes three times as
much energy to make a simple phone call on a cellphone compared to a
landline (
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html#more
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738583/1401296/goto:http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html>).
Wireless internet access requires far more energy than fiber optic
internet access. Fiber optic internet access to the premises is the
state-of-the-art gold standard in broadband. Used with hardwired
modems, it is the most energy efficient, highest speed, highest
capacity, and most reliable option for broadband. Furthermore, it is
safe and secure.
Use of energy-wasting wireless devices, therefore, accelerates the
environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal coal mining (
http://ilovemountains.org
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738584/1401296/goto:http://ilovemountains.org/>/),
tar sands oil extraction (
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738585/1401296/goto:http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text>),
and fracking ( http://www.gaslandthemovie.com
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738586/1401296/goto:http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/>/)
because of their higher demand for electricity production.
As if this were not bad enough, the pulsed modulated microwave radiation
utilized by wireless devices to communicate interferes with the
navigational abilities of bees, birds, bats, and a variety of other
creatures (
http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/issues/nature.php?id=bees
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738587/1401296/goto:http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/issues/nature.php?id=bees>).
One study linked nest proximity to cell phone antennas to significantly
poorer reproductive success for white storks, including incomplete nest
construction, absence of chicks, and increased chick death (
http://www.livingplanet.be/Balmori_EBM_2005.pdf
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738588/1401296/goto:http://www.livingplanet.be/Balmori_EBM_2005.pdf>).
Laboratory studies show it causes various developmental abnormalities
and decreases fertility, suggesting other species likely experience
decreased reproductive success (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19264463
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738589/1401296/goto:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19264463>).
Microwave radiation from wireless devices has been implicated in the
disappearance of house sparrows (
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/study-indicates-big-decline-in-house-sparrow-numbers-in-urban-areas-669631.html
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738590/1401296/goto:http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/study-indicates-big-decline-in-house-sparrow-numbers-in-urban-areas-669631.html>)
and bees (
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/if-cell-phones-are-behind-the-bee-decline-what-are-they-doing-to-humans/58994/
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738591/1401296/goto:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/if-cell-phones-are-behind-the-bee-decline-what-are-they-doing-to-humans/58994/>).
The pulsed modulated microwave radiation from wireless transmitting
antennas (base stations) is defoliating and killing trees (
http://www.revistaecosistemas.net/index_frame.asp?pagina=http%3A/www.revistaecosistemas.net/articulo.asp%3FId%3D%2029%26Id%20Categoria%3D1%26tipo%3Dotros%20contenidos
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738592/1401296/goto:http://www.revistaecosistemas.net/index_frame.asp?pagina=http%3A/www.revistaecosistemas.net/articulo.asp%3FId%3D%2029%26Id%20Categoria%3D1%26tipo%3Dotros%20contenidos>).
It’s not just the rest of the planet that regrets the human love affair
with wireless. Many humans are experiencing health problems from
exposure to the pulsed modulated microwave radiation utilized by
cellphones, WiFi, baby monitors, and utility smart meters (a.k.a. AMR or
transmitting meters) etc.
Many humans experience dizziness, heart arrhythmias, headaches, poor
sleep, low energy, inability to concentrate, short-term memory problems,
facial flushing and skin rash when exposed to radiation from wireless
devices ( http://www.magdahavas.com/?s=bradycardia
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738593/1401296/goto:http://www.magdahavas.com/?s=bradycardia>)
. These are just a few of the symptoms of radiofrequency sickness (
http://www.electricalpollution.com
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738594/1401296/goto:http://www.electricalpollution.com/>).
Radiofrequency sickness develops when people are over-exposed to
radiofrequency radiation, which includes the pulsed modulated microwave
radiation inherent in wireless devices.
Exposure to radiofrequency radiation has also been linked to an
increased risk for cancer, including lymphoma, leukemia, brain tumor
(cellphones), melanoma, parotid gland tumors, and breast cancer (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20693976
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738595/1401296/goto:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20693976>).
In fact, in spite of incredible industry pressure, the International
Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization
(WHO) recently classified radiofrequency radiation as a class 2B
possible human carcinogen (
http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738596/1401296/goto:http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf>).
Had the IARC panel been allowed to consider all the evidence, Dr. Franz
Adlkofer, former executive director of the VERUM Foundation for Behavior
and Environment stated that, “the classification likely would have
changed from ‘possibly’ carcinogenic to ‘probably.’”, in an October 2011
presentation at the Harvard Law School (
http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2011/11/18_safra-center-cellphone-radiation-corruption.html
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738597/1401296/goto:http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2011/11/18_safra-center-cellphone-radiation-corruption.html>).
The use of wireless devices has increased markedly in recent years and
so have the resultant radiation exposures. The pulsed modulated
microwave signal utilized by wireless devices is extremely biologically
active, intrinsically unnatural, and not regulated to prevent biological
effects (
http://www.emrpolicy.org/litigation/case_law/docs/noi_epa_response.pdf
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738598/1401296/goto:http://www.emrpolicy.org/litigation/case_law/docs/noi_epa_response.pdf>)
These ubiquitous consumer devices have never been safety tested for
animals or humans and no post-market surveillance is in place.
*Show respect for the Earth. Take Earth Day to turn off your wireless
devices to save energy and out of consideration for animals, plants,
and fellow humans.*
*Additional information at:*
http://www.emrpolicy.org/science/forum/index.htm
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738599/1401296/goto:http://www.emrpolicy.org/science/forum/index.htm>
www.electricalpollution.com
<http://e2ma.net/go/11009423581/208874094/232738600/1401296/goto:http://www.electricalpollution.com/>
P.O. Box 117 | Marshfield, VT 05658 US
--
Cecile
<http://guymcpherson.com/2011/09/couchsurfing-with-my-soapbox/>
For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please
visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/
If you have questions about this list please contact the list manager, Tom
Shelley, at [email protected].
