Is there a research avenue that you could follow, now or in the future, related to sustainable electronics?

@henning--reinstateMonica I certainly could try (and I even work sustainability considerations into what I do already). But at least for the rest of my PhD I kind of have to keep on doing what I am doing.

I fear that it won't be enough to slow down climate change; we will have to figure out some way to reverse it and undo the damage. Which means scientific research, and a PhD is training in how to be a scientific researcher. In your shoes, I might keep my eye on long-term goals of making a positive difference, and think about what you can do to get there. Very best wishes

Just out of pure curiosity: what makes your institute's electricity consumption as high as a city of 25.000 people? (I really don't have a clue about research on microelectronics, so please excuse my ignorance - I guess I'm fantasizing a contradiction between the prefix "mirco" and high power consumption... ;-) )

I avoid flying (especially intercontinentally). The case for flying between continents seems eminently more justifiable than the case for flying within a continent, don't you think?

@JochenGlueck we have more than 80 labs (including several cleanrooms), with a lot of machinery that uses up a lot of energy, we do a lot of reliability testing including temperature cycling, we need a lot of cooling, heating, ... There are so many places where all the energy goes.

@Sursula: Thank you for your response, that's interesting to know! (And given that you have over 80 labs, I think I also misinterpreted the notion "institute".)

nit/off-topic, but "eat almost exclusively organic vegetarian food" usually conflicts with "sustainable as possible".

@academic We don't need new fancy tools to solve climate change. We could solve it right now by de-industrializing. We need new fancy tools to solve climate change while preserving industrial civilization.

@DanM. Specifically, the organic part.

25'000 people? it is a town, not a city! You are impacting the electricity consumption of millions of people (how many r&d centre like yours are existing in your country? scale it) by building new and/or more efficient machineries. Have a look at lowtechmagazine.com @DanM. I guess you are claiming that vegan&the likes are destroying the Amazon forest, right? you may consider how much soy is (would be) eaten by vegan vs how much is used to feed cows. There are some surprises there, even if everyone in this world would became vegan and would eat everyday soy...

@Strawberry A direct intercontinental flight will tend to use more energy per number of passengers per distance than a shorter-range flight, due to the need to be carrying the weight of a larger stockpile of fuel (and the tanks to hold that much fuel) at take-off and for much of the flight. Although I suppose one can't entirely rule out the risk that an airline planning a short-range flight chooses a model of aircraft with ridiculously large and heavy fuel tanks anyway. (Sorry for lack of citation, I don't currently have access to my notes from the seminar series where I heard this.)

@DanM. and Vaelus Are you sure about that? Artificial fertiliser production (both the Haber process for fixing nitrogen and the mining of potassium salts) consumes an awful lot of fossil fuel.

Isn't technology very wasteful in the R&D stage, and then after proof of concept, engineering serves to make it efficient, portable, & viable from a commercial stand point?

@EarlGrey no, I'm not claiming that. I'm not arguing for meat consumption in any way. DanielHatton "organic" agriculture still uses those fertilizers (albeit less) and fossil fuels. It's questionable whether "organic" in general is more energy efficient or not, but that's not for comments discussions. I'm sure there lots of conflicting studies on this and it could be a good topic for some other SE hub (if it doesn't exist already). Also, this is just one side of the issue. There are also land use/yield/labor/etc. (and also the nature of "organic" foods that are usually sold under that label).

@DanM. I get the impression that you live in a jurisdiction with much slacker regulations for what can be called "organic" than I do. You have my condolences on that. But you're right to mention land use and yield, because even with good regulation, organic agriculture does have the environmental drawback that its lower yields mean that, for a given rate of food production, it occupies more land that could otherwise be set aside for renewable energy generation.

@DanielHatton Organic food needs the same amount of fixed N etc, only they have it in a much less efficient way. Actually, you can feed only a small percent of (wealthy, privileged) population of the planet with organic food because of this smaller efficiency.

I am not sure what answer you hope for. If you think your personal believes and your research are conflicting, what are we supposed to tell you? If you think it is a moral conflict, you are the only person who can decide if you act according to your morals or not. That is a personal decision, no one can do it for you. If your question is your judgment (ie if global warming is worse off because of your research) it is primarily an engineering/environmental question, which might be better answered elsewhere (assuming you actually interested in expert opinion on the topic).

@DanM. land use is exactly the issue: how can you think that is thermodinamically more efficient to have three transformations (cultivating soy to feed bovines to feed humans) with respect to two (cultivating soy to feed humans)? If soy is not all that humans need, : let use the land to cultivate plants directly edible for the humans.

@DanM. If you can find an animal that beat the 2nd law of thermodynamics, I am ready not to listen, because it is the tip of the iceberg about the scale of current land use and its efficiency (do you really need >2000kcal per day?)