Digital Verdure

“If the American people could see what I have seen... there would be a revolution in this country.” – Robert F. Kennedy

My iPhone is a pretty much constant presence in my life, from checking my email first thing in the morning to watching my nephews play with the DoodleBuddy app. But until last week, I never seriously considered its impact on the environment.

That changed when Apple published greenhouse gas emissions from its operations and products for the first time. The report, available at www.apple.com/environment, goes farther than other consumer tech companies have by accounting for product usage.

It turns out that my iPhone produces greenhouse gases equivalent to about 55kg of carbon dioxide over the full course of its lifecycle, from sourcing to recycling. My use of my iPhone produces about 27kg of carbon dioxide.

To put that in perspective, 55kg of CO2 is equivalent to burning 22 gallons of gasoline in a car or 8 propane cylinders on a backyard grill. If I planted 5 tree seedlings in my backyard tomorrow, it would take them 10 years to sequester the amount of carbon my iPhone produces.

OK, so what? Twenty-two gallons of gas and 10 trees ain’t such a bad trade given that the iPhone is... well... downright awesome.

Truly. The iPhone is one of the most successful consumer tech products in history. Apple has sold 21M iPhone units since Q3 2007, shattering sales records.

All those iPhones have produced a lot of carbon emissions, about 1.16b kg to be exact, or roughly the same amount as a coal-fired power plant in one year of operation.

So what? We can just plant more trees, right?

Well, it would take about 40% of the total land area of the US to offset just the iPhone’s emissions.

Not to mention the hundreds of other personal technology devices that are accelerating our electricity consumption.

Bottom line: there isn’t enough land enough in the world to offset America’s carbon emissions by planting trees.

But let’s set aside what would happen if we didn’t do something about all that carbon for a moment and look at what our electricity consumption has already done. Meet Donetta Blankenship.

Donetta Blankenship has lived in Rawl, West Virginia for about six years. Before she and her family moved to Rawl, they had no health problems. Since moving there, Donetta has been hospitalized for liver failure twice in the last year. Whenever anyone in the family showers, they get a headache from the rotten egg smell caused by nitrogen sulfate in the water.

 Donetta has two children, a thirteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy, and two stepchildren. Her stepdaughter, at the age of 19, had her gallbladder removed. Since they've moved to Rawl, both her children have developed asthma. Her daughter has stomach problems; her son has bumps all over his back and refuses to bathe in the contaminated water that makes it worse.

He also has trouble sleeping at night, worrying that the sludge impoundment above their home will give way.

Donetta stays because she can't afford to move her family elsewhere.

So what’s the connection between our nation's electricity consumption and Donetta Blankenship? Thanks to www.ilovemountains.org, we now know.

This map comes from a Google Earth layer produced with Appalachian Voices.

The red line cutting across the center shows how the electricity that recharges my iPhone comes to my house from power lines maintained by my local utility company, which plugs into the regional grid that services New England, which carries electricity generated by the Somerset Station power plant in Bristol County, Massachusetts, which purchases coal directly from the same patch of West Virginia that the Blakenships call home.

This is typical. Our nation’s power infrastructure is a horribly inefficient and complex web of technology, law, regulatory and private interests, but at the end of the line, there is very likely a little community in the rolling green hills of Appalachia that you too have had a hand in devastating through coal mining.

No, it’s not intentional. Few of us have the freedom today to go off the grid or elect to receive power from renewables like solar panels and wind farms… but our connection is real nonetheless. See for yourself by entering your zip code below.

When we recharge our iPhones, what are we doing to the Appalachian Mountains? Here is a pretty good example:

Imagine if this happened to a mountain that you know and love. For me, the thought of this happening in the White Mountains of New Hampshire or the Green Mountains or Vermont is painful.

And that’s just the view from a helicopter. The impact on the ground is equally devastating. Again, Donetta Blankenship.

Ten years ago, a blast powerful enough to shatter windows in a nearby church and homes resonated throughout the Rawl area. Shortly after, the water started to go bad, and residents believe the same blast that destroyed the foundations of dozens of homes may have cracked the barrier between the buried sludge and the aquifer that provides Rawl's city water. Currently, Donetta says, sometimes the water, "runs out of the pipe like tomato soup: thick with orange sediment."

According to Vanity Fair, Appalachia's mountains are being blasted at a rate of several ridgetops each week.

But the truth is that, for most of us, once we surf away from the activist sites, put down the magazine expose or, indeed, finish the outraged blog post, we return to our iPhones, check email and leave behind the story of Appalachia… or do we?

This is a picture of what Boston would like if the sea level rose just three meters.

My house would be in the center of that blue lake that used to be Cambridge, across what used to be the Charles River Basin. Experts expect the sea level to rise by four to twelve meters over the next century unless we cap carbon emissions.

The story of mountaintop coal removal does not end in Appalachia.

We may never experience the hands-on destruction of the mountains we love, our health and communities, but if we continue on our current course, we will not escape the second-hand impact of the coal industry.

There is nowhere to hide from climate change. We must act now by investing in energy efficiency and committing to carbon caps.

Otherwise, it will be my nephews, our children, who wake up in the middle of night, worrying when the levee will break.