Phones use very little energy, and if it causes a person to move around less, then it would greatly help reduce worldwide energy consumption.

Energy = mass * acceleration * distance

Oh bullshit. What are people supposed to do? More importantly, what COULD people do that would be 10% as effective as proper, top-down regulation on emissions and environmentally destructive industry? It's been bluntly obviously demonstrated at this point that this problem is above consumer activism's ability to solve. Maybe the market could be persuaded at one time to buy more electric cars and eat less meat, but we're reaching a point where politely asking is no longer sufficient if we want the planet to continue supporting us. Now we need to DEMAND it.

> Now we need to DEMAND it.

Demanding it is part of what "we'd do better if we put down our phones".

I understand how it can feel very daunting to figure out the right step, but there are tons of useful things to work on in this space. There is a huge amount of technological work going on, from academic research labs to commercial deployment. And there are also lots of people working on the policy and politics, which work is not actually primarily about doom-posting on social media.

But it still is hard, I get it, it's either time consuming on top of a "normal" job, or likely to be less lucrative as a career than most things the HN audience can do.

But it's not true that there's nothing people can do, if they want to.