Is going paperless actually going green?

I heard that as much as 54% of our electricity comes from coal plants. While a year ago, small light low wattage computers and servers where the rage. This season we're back to monster boxes, that make your toaster look like an amateur. Look, if your over 20 years old, you have no need for speed. Spreadsheets and single user databases don't take gigahertz, and neither does Quickbooks. But that's where all the profit is at for the big box retailers, not in being leaner and greener!

What about laptops? What are they good for? Every time I turn around, people are plugging in external mouse, keyboard, and screen. So what are they good for? If your running a business, your biggest security leak is your employee's laptop, and unsupervised operations! One good drop, and 18 months of data is GONE! The batteries are time bombs, and nearly as expensive as the CPU inside, what are they good for? They are good for bigger profits for the big box retailer, and that's about it. And now you have to have special disposal of everything, because of mercury and alike.

Data that needs to be shared, is data that needs to be networked. Data that is networked, might as well run on your browser, and be on a cloud system, so everything from your Mac to PC to Phone can access and use it. But we're back to electron guzzling high speed servers again.

Downloading and printing it yourself. There is the next question. A color laser printer takes about 1000 watts to warm up, and 400 watts to bake your page, which is nearly as slow as the slowest inkjet. The inkjet cost more than the real estate under it, because of the $1000 per gallon price of ink, but there's nothing wrong here? Move along! So I don't know which is worse, the coal burnt for a laser diode to do it's thing, or the astronomical price of fluid ink? Meanwhile your paper is made more from sand dust than wood fibers, and the less sand in the paper these days to closer you are Zigzag rolling papers, so it takes a lot of energy to make paper that white. (I'm talking about titanium for those of you who are a little slow). Yeah, that box is so heavy, because it's mostly rock! But basically, it just shifts to costs to the consumer, rather than banks. Making it even easier than before, to engineer overdrafts, for extra fees.

Every time I see a 2ghz CPU with a 600 watt power supply, in a mini tower case, I realize we are loosing the war. You pop the monster box open and there's three sets of fans inside. Your TV went from 300 watts CRT to being a 1000 watt big screen jelly fish, and we wonder what wrong? Your house is now sucking down more power than an aerospace plant of the 70's, is what's wrong. And it's all good for the bottom line of Wallmart and Best Buy, not you!

So, you can go out and put $14,000 worth of solar panels on your roof, which power the next door neighbors big screen to watch Fox News all day, while your at work paying for it. Which will run out umph about a month before pay back comes. However, how much energy did it take to make that solar panel that helping the neighborhood more than you, is one of my questions?

So is going paperless actually greener? I doubt it! Green is more a gimmick than anything else, I'm afraid. And disappointed to point out.