The numbers are are also clearly fictive. Driving a car for 4 miles uses about half a liter of fuel. A liter of gasoline contains about 9kwh of energy meaning, that you would use about 4.5 kwh per half hour of streaming. So the servers would have to draw about 9 KW to serve a single person? That would be like 10 gaming PCs running at full power to serve one person. Are they animating the shows in real time? No compression algorithm is that inefficient and no hard drive uses that much energy.

edit: also they could never be profitable like that. Let's say you watch three hours per day. That would be 9kWx3hrsx30days=810kwh per month. Even if they only pay 5 cents a kWh that would still be over $40 per month just in electricity cost for one user.

Also, that number is utter bullshit.

Netflix, like all major streaming platforms, has an incredibly optimised system for providing the media. A 4 mile drive emits ~1.6-2kg of CO2, whereas one hour of streaming from Netflix emits up to 100g per hour as per Netflix themselves (and even that study is being questioned now, with newer ones putting this value around 30-40g). Meaning you'd need to stream for well over two days to even get near the emissions of a 4 mile drive.

The original tweet's claim is false.

TLDR: It referenced an oral interview from a French think tank called The Shift Project. They have since acknowledged it as an error after a fact check from the International Energy Agency. BigThink originally tweeted this in 2019 along with a corresponding article. They have since issued a correction on the article and deleted the tweet. The IEA estimated that it would take around 45 hours of Netflix streaming to generate the carbon emissions of driving 4 miles.

This is just flat out bullshit. Flat out.

Real talk, Big Think can cram this bullshit up their asses.

I'm so sick and tired of having to humour these asinine Malthusian-rooted arguments against simply being alive in society, as if everyday people doing anything more than pulling air into their faces were an unwelcome imposition on the Earth - this, especially, given the scale of unchecked industrial/commercial pollution while industries continuously resist and derail efforts to regulate and sanction it.

Granted, this kind of talk doesn't crop up every single day IRL, but it's starting to feel that way in online communities. Why the fuck are people allowing these hacks to make them feel guilty just for going about their lives, as though having a coffee or driving to see their family 500 miles away were equivalent to festooning themselves with skinned baby seals or crushing endangered leopard cubs underfoot? If global resources hadn't been so willfully, purposely mismanaged for 200+ years, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with. Now media talking heads want me to feel guilty for watching TV? They can fuck themselves with BR40 light bulbs.

Not to say that netfix isn't horrible, but how much did Netflix save in CO2 buy gutting the movie theater and video rental industry? Surely it's better to stream than it is to drive to a physical location, pick up a crystalized block of oil, drive it home and shove it into our VCR.

Hell, when they were doing disc delivery, it was coming through the mail who was already driving through the hood in most places.

Hell, I wonder how much co2 it cost to make the DVD/VHS tapes in the first place.

Stamets, it's cool, I know you're putting this out there to illustrate some obviously bad takes.

Personally, I've kind of had it with these think-tank, astro-turfing, menaces to social media and society writ-large. I think it's high time that we all start getting a little louder about who's behind these things when we spot them here, and elsewhere. Lex (in the post) has the right take, but it's probably even better to get the word out about the source of this blame-shifting crap.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/big-think/

The Big Think is privately owned through Freethink Media. Some of the initial investors in the project were Peter Thiel from PayPal, Tom Scott of Nantucket Nectars, television producer Gary David Goldberg, lead investor and venture capitalist David Frankel, and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers. Revenue is generated through advertising, sponsored content, and subscriptions to the website’s E-learning platform.

If that isn't enough to get really fucking mad about this slow-creeping horseshit, I don't know what is.

Say people flying private jets everywhere.

No it’s cool. Just cancel your Netflix and pirate your media. Thanks Big Think!

Now try saying this about AI

"Let's create a system that slowly destroys the planet but, and here me out, we blame it on the users of the system!"

Here’s a Big Think. I used to drive 4 miles to blockbuster then pick out a plastic coated VHS, then play it on my plastic coated VCR on my TV that was at least 10x the width of current TVs.

Then, 3 days later, drive like a mad racer with no brakes to get back to the Blockbuster 2 minutes before they closed.

And that’s just like the other 80% of America who don’t have trains, buses or decent bike lanes. So kindly FO on guilt tripping us for our streaming habits, TYVM.

Remove encryption, let users download more files. Problem solved.

Piracy is the green option

Kill an oil exec and then binge watch your fav series!

Ok, I'll binge watch videos on some other streaming platform instead. I'm helping!

Wise fucking words. Aside from boycotting certain businesses we have almost no ability to control the environmental side of things.

This reminds me of that article someone shared here (I think) about your Spotify streaming's carbon footprint. It was a very odd article. I think it was likely factually correct, but it even said something like "streaming all year produces as much CO2 as (incredibly small task)". It seemed AI generated, like the dumped in data and told it the conclusion it should come to. Because I don't think anyone reasonable would've read it and thought that streaming music for a while year was in any way comparable to the other thing. Again, something minor, like driving a few miles. Something a huge amount of people do every day.

Well ackshuallllyyyy they're not burning it if they're just wanking 🤓

.../s

watching Netflix is a skill issue anyway. learn to use xdcc or i2p torrents or something

Using Shitter to post this probably does way more to negatively affect the environment more than anything.

lol good thinking, take away the one thing that keeps people sedated and watch the world burn