The environmental impact of watching one hour of video on Netflix is approximately 36 grams of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a car for 150 metres, in a figure substantially smaller than the popular framing has claimed and one that demonstrates that the actual environmental burden of streaming comes not from the data centres people imagine but from the screens they watch on

The popular framing of streaming’s environmental cost has, for much of the past five years, treated digital entertainment as a quiet ecological catastrophe. Articles in the New York Post, the CBC, Yahoo, Deutsche Welle, Gizmodo, the BBC, and dozens of other outlets have repeated a version of the same claim, that watching 30 minutes of [...] The post The environmental impact of watching one hour of video on Netflix is approximately 36 grams of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a car f