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.
Thanks for doing the math. I’m not gonna check it, you seem trustworthy enough.
I checked them Adolf, the numbers are accurate.
o7 doing the lord’s work in the comments
I like to verify so I asked a LLM, it confirmed the math but also determined he is a sentient banana.
He shows his working though:
That would be 9kWx3hrsx30days=810kwh per month
That alone is enough evidence to prove it was a lie.
I prefer to think that this post is unrealistically optimistic. If you drive an electric car and live in Quebec, this could very well be true. For reference, Quebec’s electric grid is just about 100% hydroelectric power, so your driving emissions would be close to 0.
I only looked at power consumption, not emissions. If the electricity produced is emissions free than the emissions for both driving and streaming would be zero. So the original statement would be true, but meaningless. But lets compare the energy consumption with an EV. At 15kwh/100km(4.14mi/kWh) the EV would need 15kwh/100km*6,44km=0.966kwh for 4 miles. That still leaves us with a power draw of 1.932KW. That is closer to a realistic but I still don’t think the power consumption of streaming is that high.
“closer to realistic” - technically, but 1 kW is just so much power, I find it hard to imagine.
Say I was streaming from my own home server instead (about 20W, which could serve more then just one user), and over a gigabit Ethernet switch (also about 20W) which could serve a 4k streams to 50 users, but let’s say it’s just me). Then I would use 0.04 kW of electricity for streaming? Maybe I’m streaming from my gaming PC (0.1 kW idle) and have a large inefficient monitor (another 0.1kW). Then it sums up to 0.24 kW. We’re still not close to 1 kW and I’m out of ideas.
Granted, you’ll have many more switches because this is the internet. But those won’t serve just a single user so the power per user is much smaller too. And netflix servers will use more power, but they are also much better optimized for streaming than my home server, and not 90% idle, shared by many users.
And what would you do if you weren’t streaming? Would you turn off your gaming PC and monitor? If not, we can’t really fully count their consumption. Maybe… ah, I’ve got it! You’re boiling water for coffee at the same time. Yes, that would be 1kW. All the time, while streaming, one cup of water after the other non-stop.
Streaming also doesn’t emit microplastics all over the road via tyre wear. Streaming doesn’t emit brake dust. Streaming doesn’t require paving vast quantities of land in tarmac.
Heh, just did the same but with CO2 emissions. And even considering those, the numbers were wildly off - about 2 days of constant streaming (nearly 48 hours!) equates a standard gas car’s 4 mile drive in emissions.
Trying the close to best scenario I can think of for the tweet to be correct
4 miles is about 6.5 km (rounding up)
Ford fiesta takes uses 6 litres over 100 km (tiny car also rounded down)
0.39l of gasoline is about 3.5 kwh (rounded down)
Well the next step would be apply loved trick: Engine only pases around 1/5 of gasoline energy to useful energy, so that number can be used to make it more possible We get 0.7kwh
Half an hour would give us 0.35kwh
Beffy Gaming PC uses around 400w (my gaming pc uses less) when doing light tasks, so that gives around 0.2kwh
Since I love drinking tea, that leaves me 0.15kwh for a whole litre of tea to chug down every 30 minutes
So with my average binge session I would have consume around 12 litres of tea for the tweet to be viable
This person maths.
total mathhead
probably has a math lab
I can only assume they’re putting in layers. It’s not just Netflix, it’s also the cost of your internet, of running your TV, of your AC while at home, of your lights, etc… maybe even the footprint of your food. Maybe the cost of any AI upscaling or framerate generation, if Netflix does that.
They may have looked at everything you might use in that 30 min, then compared it to the rate at an arbitrary car’s fuel efficiency. Technically true statistics are very easy to deceive people with, especially if most people don’t know how to read them.
Assuming ofc, they didn’t just make the shit up, too.
Excellent calculations!
Dont forget the energy used to extract and transport the fossil fuels. Its purposely never included in the consumer guilt propaganda from the fossil fuel lobby.
Sometimes it takes 20-50% of the energy contained in the fuel to get it to you.
Also you can drive four miles in less than ten minutes so the comparison doesn’t even make any sense.
I suppose you could also include a sliver of the cost of the show’s production.
Honestly, if jets left trails that looked like this then nobody would want to fly so much, and public outcry would be a lot louder.
I do find it funny they use an old 1950s smoky long range bomber as an example
If a B-52 is smoking like that it does NOT have a long range anymore
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.
2kg of CO2? Atomic weight of CO2 is about 44, of which carbon is 12, so 27% of CO2 is the carbon from the gasoline. I know that gasoline contains more than just hydrocarbon chains, and that the chains also contain hydrogen. But for the sake of this back of the envelope calculation I’ll disregard both.
27% of 2kg is 0.54kg, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline a liter of gasoline is 0.755kg. Aka 2kg of CO2 is the result of burning 0.72L of gasoline. Driving 4miles, or 6.44km on 0.72L is 9km/L, or 21.2mpg. 1.6kg of CO2 would be 0.57L and 11.3km/L or 26.6mpg.
Maybe I shouldn’t have disregarded the additives and the hydrogen, but unless they account for about 50% of the weight of the gasoline, then those 4 miles were driven in a something very uneconomic.
Well the average I found was for the US, and you guys do love your SUVs even in completely unreasonable areas/spaces. And SUVs do get around 15-20MPG when used properly.
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.
The IEA estimated that it would take around 45 hours of Netflix streaming to generate the carbon emissions of driving 4 miles.
Just a little 90x error, lol
And they call themselves BigThink… .They really ought to change their name, it does not suit them. As they clearly don’t think before they scream.
This is just flat out bullshit. Flat out.
Exactly! Oil isn’t dinosaur juice. They lube up with dead plants. Don’t make it seem glamorous.
Blue checkmarks fund Nazis
This screenshot is from before twitter was aquired.
Top account still has their blue checkmark… and bottom still hasn’t deleted their account.
Funding and participating with Nazis is still supporting them.
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.
Stamets, it’s cool, I know you’re putting this out there to illustrate some obviously bad takes.
<rant>
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.
It’s time to execute Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel may be the Antichrist and he’s just throwing around all this end-days mumbo jumbo to throw us off. The safe bet would be to execute Peter Thiel just to be safe. If we’re wrong, it’s not like we’re any worse off.
No, that was twenty years ago, but better late than never!
The best time to
plant a treeexecute Peter Thiel was 20 years ago… the second best time is todayStill time to catch happy hour after!
Nothing you do will ever come close to the devastation caused by commercial fishing industry.
There are several industries that can make that claim
I’m sure that’s true but I hate the commercial fishing industry the most 💜
The millennial industry causing the worst of the devastation.
And all of them need to at least have a little break while we figure out how to unfuck the process
Fucking true
Say people flying private jets everywhere.
“Let’s create a system that slowly destroys the planet but, and here me out, we blame it on the users of the system!”
The users vote for democracy and market economy. We need kings if somebody else should be responsible.
Pretty sure we’re working on it
That’s bullhonkey of the highest fucking order!
One hour of streaming video typically uses around 0.08 kWh, or 288000 Joules, while an electric car can drive a mile with more or less 0.346 kWh, or 1245600 joules, which is to say driving 4 miles is equivalent to 17.3 hours of Netflix!
Source for streaming Cost: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
Source for electric cars KWH per 100 Mile: https://ecocostsavings.com/electric-car-kwh-per-mile-list/
I haven’t heard “bullhonkey” since 1991 and am a big fan of what you’ve done here.
Remove encryption, let users download more files. Problem solved.
What problem?
Emissions concerns.
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.
Piracy is the green option
Kill an oil exec and then binge watch your fav series!
Real… I myself pirate everything… 🗿
