Actually, Apple's pretty good at publishing
environmental impact analyses of their products online. The lifetime emissions estimate for an iPad Air, for example, is about 210kg CO2e (for scale, that's about what goes in to making roughly 30 paperback novels, or 1-2 tanks of petrol). Using a tablet is probably the "greenest" current way of being online.
And the "warmists probably drive gas-guzzlers and live in air-conditioned McMansions" line is not only a horribly lazy argument, it's also irrelevant to whether or not AGW is a reality, and factually wrong on average. Many surveys have shown that people concerned about global warming are prepared to go substantially out of pocket to reduce their footprint, and are also more pro-active about taking opportunities that both reduce their footprint and save them money. Moreover, personal habits are relatively small potatoes anyway - to make a serious impact, changes have to happen at the industrial and national scale.
Personally, I:
- drive a hybrid, which is not only incredibly comfortable but incredibly cheap in terms of fuel use;
- live less than 10km from work to cut down on travel;
- live in a very comfortable 4-br, 6-person household which, thanks to judicious use of insulation, solar hot water and high efficiency (and surprisingly cheap, when bought online) LED lighting, uses less than 12kWh/day on average, most of which is covered by the 2.5kW solar PV array on the roof;
- do the majority of web browsing on my iPhone rather than firing up the desktop (even though that's a relatively low-impact iMac that recently replaced my old 2006-era beast).
- do have an old 42-inch LED TV - but honestly that tends to get turned on less than once a week these days.
It's actually really easy to reduce your footprint massively below what was normal even 10 years ago, without any real impact on quality of life, and a net positive to the hip pocket. More people are realising that all the time, which is the primary reason Australian power usage is currently going down.
