Promote Awareness of Universal Broadband Opportunities in Climate Change Mitigation & Adaptation
The global transition to a networked knowledge-based universe offers profound opportunities to address the crisis of dangerous climate change. The underlying economic basis for these opportunities rests on the fact that information has zero mass, zero physical size and virtually zero travel time, with the net effect of a marginal cost that is effectively zero. Furthermore, to the extent that information/knowledge is the ...more »
The global transition to a networked knowledge-based universe offers profound opportunities to address the crisis of dangerous climate change. The underlying economic basis for these opportunities rests on the fact that information has zero mass, zero physical size and virtually zero travel time, with the net effect of a marginal cost that is effectively zero. Furthermore, to the extent that information/knowledge is the basis of wealth, these zero-based properties of information mean that access to, and dissemination of wealth is not constrained by the laws of conservation of mass and energy.
The provision of universal high-speed broadband offers countless opportunities for virtually carbon-free & almost effortless activity - i.e. keystrokes & mouse clicks - to replace the need for many goods & services that would otherwise require material & energy-consuming / carbon-emitting resources - e.g. taking a train or plane to a meeting. In addition, opportunities for collaborative work offer access to unprecedented forms of collaboration in addressing the complex crises of climate change, and a digital environment makes it possible to organize, present, and examine climate change-related data in ways that are physically impossible in a print-oriented medium; further, a fully-accessible digital environment offers unprecedented opportunities to provide information on the carbon-footprint of economic activity - e.g. through integration of footprint data with bar code / UPC information.
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