IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Notes to Pages 10–11 229
warming during the past two decades. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change says that if we carry on burning fossil fuels at present rates, the concentration
of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase by 50 percent within fifteen
years—risking catastrophic climate shifts.
2. A team of international climatologists, led by Paul Grutzen, whose work on the
ozone hole won him the 1995 Nobel Prize for Science, identified the cloud. At the
time of my visit, the monsoon in many parts of India and Southeast Asia either had
not arrived or had been particularly severe. This terrifying story only made page 2
of the local media and disappeared completely after a couple of days. Hong Kong
shrugged and went about its business.
3. Sarah Graham, ‘‘Making Microchips Takes Mountain of Materials,’’ Scientific American,
November 6, 2002, available at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=
sa003&articleID=0000E57E-E47B-1DC6-AF71809EC588EEDF.
4. Producing a single chip—the tiny wafer used for memory in personal computers—requires
at least 3.7 pounds of fossil fuel and chemical inputs. Each chip
requires 3.5 pounds of fossil fuels, 0.16 pounds of chemicals, 70.5 pounds of water,
and 1.5 pounds of elemental gases (mainly nitrogen). These estimates were reported
in Environmental Science and Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American
Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. Eric Williams, Robert U.
Ayres, and Miriam Heller, ‘‘The 1.7 Kg Microchip: Energy and Material Use in the
Production of Semiconductor Devices,’’ Environmental Science and Technology 36, no.
24 (December 15, 2002), 5504–5510.
5. IDC, a research firm based in Washington, D.C., publishes regular forecasts about
future microprocessor production. An overview of the topics, including microprocessors,
on which the firm has conducted research is available on its website at http://
www.idc.com/research/.
In September 2003, a network to connect many of the millions of radio frequency
identification tags that are already in the world (and the billions more on their
way) was launched. Their aim was to replace the global barcode with a universal system
that can provide a unique number for every object in the world. Sean Dodson,
‘‘The Internet of Things,’’ Guardian (U.K.), October 9, 2003, available at http://
www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1058506,00.html.
6. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (London:
Earthscan, 1999).
7. ‘‘Accelerated Life, Computers, and the Environment,’’ NETFUTURE: Technology
and Human Responsibility, no. 54 ( July 30, 1997), available at www.praxagora.com/
stevet/netfuture/1997/Jul3097_54.html. See also Wolfgang Sachs, ‘‘Post-Fossil Development
Patterns in the North’’ (paper presented at the IPCC Expert Meeting on Development,
Equity and Sustainability, Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 27–29, 1999).