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Earth Science

Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium (newscientist.com) 169

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The transmission and viewing of online videos generates 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or nearly 1 per cent of global emissions. On-demand video services such as Netflix account for a third of this, with online pornographic videos generating another third. From a report: This means the watching of pornographic videos generates as much CO2 per year as is emitted by countries such as Belgium, Bangladesh and Nigeria. That's the conclusion of a French think tank called The Shift Project. Earlier this year, it estimated that digital technologies produce 4 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and that this figure could soar to 8 per cent by 2025. Now it has estimated the CO2 emissions due to online videos alone. The report's authors used 2018 reports by companies Cisco and Sandvine to work out global video internet traffic. They then estimated how much electricity was used to carry this video data and view it on different devices, from phones to TVs. Finally, they estimated the overall emissions using global average figures for carbon emissions from electricity generation. Online video accounted for 60 per cent of global data flows in 2018, the report states, or 1 zettabyte of data (one thousand billion billion bytes).
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Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium More

Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium

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  • Save the world. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Friday July 12, 2019 @01:55PM (#58915176)

    Download your porn.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I bet the emissions from all the tissues and toilet flushing is worse.

  • "Streaming online pornography," that is. It's nowhere near as socially unacceptable as saying "Belgium."

  • Hey hey let's not be hasty now. Streaming it is still way cheaper than printing and shipping it.

  • Do you think that printing out the porn as magazines, vhs tapes, etc will have less pollution?

  • If you build it... nah, too easy.

  • Online porn not only produces a lot of CO2, but also an unthinkable amount of secondary heated emissions to further warm the planet!

  • Better than making babies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:03PM (#58915248)

    Better masturbate to porn than to have real sex and risk making another baby.

    • You realize that neither of those precludes the other, right? I mean, it's not entirely uncommon for them to cum hand-in-hand.

  • shut down the internet. And while we are at it lets turn off all the power plants and petro vehicles too.
    But hey, porn is like generating what percentage of C02?

    Screw it, lets make porn streaming 99% of all C02 for what better way to die of global warming?

  • Do we spend more (electrical) energy streaming porn, or more (kinetic) energy actually doing it? Maybe we should be doing it on goobleboxes?

  • I'll cut back, damn, I really didn't mean to use as much electricity as a small country.
    BTW it wasn't ALL porn.....
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • That's a stupid way of calculating impact (Score:5, Insightful)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:15PM (#58915338) Homepage

    One would need to consider how much CO2 does not chasing women and not fathering children save? Without passing moral judgment on masturbation, those two things alone seem like they'd be very strongly carbon positive.

  • Now I have to choose between Porn and Waffles to save the planet?

  • If we Nuke Belgium, we can all view as much pornography as we want, since we've made up for it by nuking Belgium. It's a small price to pay for online porn!

  • We must at all costs, shut down Belgium.

    Also, how does this break down along funny animal video lines? I can't believe they omitted this source of CO2 as well.

    • We must at all costs, shut down Belgium.

      That's the first thing on Boris Johnson's TODO list when he becomes prime minister of England in a few weeks.

      . . . and remember . . . England has nukes.

      The Indian guy who runs the kiosk near me in scenic Germany told me that the whole Brexit thing is a plot by England to create another worldwide empire of colonies again.

      But he said that India is safe . . . because they have nukes now.

    • We must help increase Belgium's CO2 output so we can have more porn.

    • I think Belgium must make more CO2 than credited, for the same reason there's Brexit. All that hot air....
  • Since when are we using the Belgium and kilogram as unit? We should be using the s.i. unit of 1 switzerland so that we can compare porn to bitcoin.

    • Because this is not a matter of units. Pornography has always used exactly the same amount of energy as Belgium. Coincidence? I think not!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      I feel I might regret asking this, but what's wrong with kilogram?

  • It brings joy to the world.

  • ...just because because they watch a lot of porn there.

  • not. (Score:5, Informative)

    by therealkevinkretz ( 1585825 ) on Friday July 12, 2019 @02:27PM (#58915420)

    Since the article doesn't link to the study, here:

    https://theshiftproject.org/en... [theshiftproject.org]

    They seem to be a neo-Luddite group and they call for "digital sobriety" enforced by regulation on the uses of digital systems.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • They seem to be a neo-Luddite group and they call for "digital sobriety" enforced by regulation on the uses of digital systems.

      This is one of those times when being able to punch someone in the face over the Internet would be so helpful.

      I guess ignoring them works too. But it's not as satisfying.

  • My brother works for a cable company and he says that places like Utah and the Deep South are the highest consumers of this stuff.

    Which means they probably won't do anything about it.

  • Seems like the usual crap from ideology groups that are opposed to pornography for whatever reason. Youtube, Facebook and other non-porn video streaming services in total cause a larger share of bandwidth and CO2 utilization. So if you want to ban something, ban music and cat videos, first. And stop making babies, as they are the biggest environmental polluters.

    • Even if you take away that cats, you'll still have cute music and cat videos.

      Proof comes from Korea, not surprisingly. Korea does cute way better than Belgium.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (5,408,712 views)

      And for the record, I agree with all the comments on that video saying it is the best thing on the internet.

  • The real message is that all our computers are using up a humongous amount of energy and we can start thinking about reduction. I'd like some numbers about what background processes consume, all these things which use up cpu cycles where aren't needed anyway. Antivirus, antimalware, all these windows updating mechanisms. They're all acting as if it's free but it isn't.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Does this make Porn better or worse than Switzerland? https://www.theverge.com/2019/... [theverge.com]
  • Did their estimate include CO2 produced by the porn viewers?

  • Streetwalkers sweet talk you out of your spare change
    And your sweet madame makes it seem just like Belgium

          Elton John

  • Way to go Belgium!

  • I coulda told you that.

  • ... produced by the extrra heavy breathing?
  • Well, if push comes to shove and we have to choose between the two, I guess Belgium goes away.

  • ... sorry about that.

  • ... we've got tropical storm Barry headed our way and the weather man said it's gonna be porn down rain.

  • ... as long as that human activity requires power or or objects manufactured using power, and that power is generated by burning fossil fuels.

    - Watching porn burns CO2!
    - Watching TV burns CO2!
    - Reading books burns CO2!
    - Producing food burns CO2!
    - Playing softball burns CO2!
    - Brushing your teeth burns CO2!
    - etc, etc etc ... but the reasonable response is not to investigate or avoid every human activity, but rather to move the power-production infrastructure over to non-CO2-generating technologies as quickly

  • Countries are preparing for reaching 100% renewable energy in short time because of global warming. Electric cars are a strategy for this reason, and they would add 25% to total electric power consumption. Porn much less than that. Satellite TV is more efficient than on-demand streaming, but this still is a non-issue for global warming because we will stop burning fossil fuels and use sunlight and wind for power generation very soon. Cheap green energy by the way!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Yea linar broadcast is more eficient than unicast ip, but for there to be the same ammoubt of choice you would probably need several 100 linar channels, an as all locations are unable to recive the same geo stationary sat at once (well at all realy) you would have to replicate this mega pacage several times overeating valuble rf spectrom as well as releasing extra CO2. I know you might acuse me of moveing the goal posts a bit, yea guilty, bot when comparing 2 systems onluy looking at one factor might not pr

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        ok replying to myself is bead form but, I have cevaral times noted theat my somewhat horrid spelling promts concern about wether I'm having a stroke, I can ashore you I'm not my spelling is just shit, and for some reasion I don't notice misstakes until it's to late to fix (/. where is the bldy edit function almost everyone else has?) anyway Have a nice day

  • the solution is obviously to remove belgium from the face of the earth!

  • hmm I wonder if porn releases more energy/minute of video steramed than any other steramed video. It might (by a tiny fraction) as i doubt pornhub et-all have local cashes at major isps so the packets might need to trevel farther and cross more equipment burning a bit of extra energy. But yea a lot of born is watched so the agregate becomes hudge, I wionder how meny MWh/day is usesd by all other video streaming, that would be an interresting number, but i get it - its easy for the media/reserchers to take s

  • Specifically, porn is worth more than Belgium.

    To everyone.

    Even Belgians.

  • You know you have gone too far when you start measuring the CO2 output of streaming porn.

    I am guessing the previous article about streaming movies didn't get enough eyeballs so they changed the target to porn rather than streaming in general.

    Nobody fucking cares. The infrastructure was built, the specifics of how it is used is irrelevant. Either take down the Internet or shut the fuck up about its CO2.

    Is the Internet worth the CO2 output that it requires? If the answer is yes, then shut the fuck about how i

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