It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for an environmental story.  YAY!  Do you ever feel guilty because you leave your computer on all the time?  Do you try to turn off your home computer when you aren’t using it because you feel like it’s such a waste if you don’t?  Do you leave your work computer on all the time because it’s their problem, not yours?  If you answered yes to those questions, then you are like everybody else.  Well, this guy figured out what leaving our computers on really costs us per year.

He cites the following statistics:

• there are 660 million computers worldwide
• the majority (probably around 95%) run some form of Windows
• Microsoft says it costs a business $55-$70 a year per idle computer left on
• that means it costs us between $5 and $7 billion per year

Now to the disturbing part: using a sample of 100 million computers, he figured out that we could reduce our annual CO2 output by 45.2 million tons if those computers went to “sleep” mode instead of just sitting idle.  He uses some fancy calculations that you can check out, but the numbers used all come from strong sources, so they aren’t just made up.

The idea that Microsoft would send out an update forcing computers to go to sleep mode might be a big task, but nonetheless it’s definitely a very valid suggestion.  As the article mentions, personal computer use will continue to grow and thus the cost to the environment will grow as well.  I’ve thought about what a waste it is to leave some computers on, but a lot of us don’t do it to blatantly thumb our noses at conservation - we just forget or it’s not convenient.  But when you think about it in terms of the big picture, a few extra seconds to turn it off or put it in sleep mode is a small price to pay.

Microsoft could save 45 million tons of CO2 emissions with a few lines of computer code [Foreign Policy]