https://theshiftproject.org/wp-content/ ... 019-02.pdf
Excerpt:
So there it is. Every time you pleasure yourself with an internet video, a small part of the planet dies from global warming.A preliminary observation can be made following the intermediate results of this calculation: the contribution of terminals in terms of electricity consumption rapidly becomes negligible for video content. Indeed, video files concentrate large volumes of data in a proportionally short period of time. Since the consumption by terminals is proportional to their time of use, the decisive contribution is in fact that of the network infrastructures and the data centers involved (The Shift Project Materials, 2019b). The methodological approach described previously finally resulted in quantifying the emissions linked to world video traffic for 2018 and for each category of use (cf. Figure 2).
Online video viewing, which represents 60% of the world’s data traffic, generated more than 300 MtCO2e during 2018, i.e. a carbon footprint comparable to the annual emissions of Spain.
None of the different categories of uses is negligible in terms of traffic and thus in terms of impact. Therefore, viewing pornographic videos in the world in 2018 generated carbon emissions of the same magnitude as that of the residential sector in France, while recourse to the VOD services as Netflix or Amazon Prime generated the same volume of greenhouse gas emissions as the entire economy of the country hosting the COP25 in 2019, namely Chile.
