Streaming a season of your favourite TV show on Netflix produces pollution

Aping your eco-hero Greta Thunberg, you’ve just had an exhausting but morally uplifting day out protesting to save the planet. 

Naturally, you’ve spent a lot of time on your phone, checking what other protesters have been doing and sharing photos on Instagram.

After all that chanting and placard-waving, you decide to put your feet up and reward yourself by watching a new drama series on Netflix.

Unfortunately, in doing so — for all those good intentions — you’ve just done far more damage to the Earth’s ozone layer than if you’d stayed at home reading a book.

For, if a new BBC documentary is to be believed, our obsessive and insatiable use of the internet — particularly streaming films and shows on it — is contributing to the destruction of the environment.

BBC3’s Dirty Streaming: The Internet’s Big Secret estimates that watching every episode of the drama Peaky Blinders generates the same amount of pollution as driving from Birmingham to Manchester.

Meanwhile, internet users streaming the music video for Despacito, the mega-hit pop song by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi, which has more than six billion views on YouTube, have already produced the same volume of carbon emissions as five African countries combined created in a year.

The reason why is that the films, TV shows and music videos, along with everything else we search, read and watch online, is sent to our phones and computers through underground cables from vast data service centres, often thousands of miles away, in an immensely energy-consuming process.

That energy is provided by electricity often created using fossil fuels, which produce carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

Those thousands of data centres are largely owned by technology giants such as Amazon and Google. 

Some so-called hyper-scale centres (of which there are now 500 and rising) are as big as a football pitch and house hundreds of thousands of computers.

Each of these needs to be running continually to keep the internet working, gobbling up electrical energy in the process. 

Indeed, they produce so much heat that many are housed in the Arctic to save on cooling costs.

With more than half of the world’s 7.7 billion people now using the internet, the infrastructure behind it has inevitably become colossal.

The information technology sector produces nearly 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions — almost twice that of the civil aviation industry. By 2040, it’s predicted to rise to 14 per cent. 

(Something to point out next time a technology-addicted teenager piously berates you for daring to fly off for a holiday in the sun.)

In a telling illustration of the obliviousness of millennials to the environmental damage caused by their internet addiction, Beth Webb, the young presenter of Dirty Streaming, seems shocked by her journey of discovery.

Travelling to northern Virginia, home to vast data centres that cover 13.5 million square feet and claim to store 70 per cent of the world’s digital data, she looks in horror at the local coal-fired power station that helps to fuel them, its chimneys spewing out carbon dioxide into a clear blue sky.

She returns home vowing to change her internet habits. But to have an impact, a lot more people are going to need to follow suit.

Online video streaming — of which a third is estimated to be pornography — reportedly accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s internet traffic, generating 300 million tons of carbon dioxide a year (three times as much as Belgium).

It should be pointed out that some experts dispute that figure — along with other startling claims about streaming’s environmental damage, such as that watching half an hour of a video has the same environmental impact as driving four miles in a car.

Indeed, a new study of the world’s data centres finds that, while their computing output rose sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption increased by only 6 per cent.

Why so little? Because of energy efficiency improvements, both in the data centres and the devices we use.

But this is only of limited reassurance to experts at carbon-monitoring organisations such as Greenpeace and the International Energy Agency in Paris.

It’s not only how much electrical energy the internet uses that’s important, they say, it’s how that power is generated.

For, despite moves to rely more on ‘renewable’ energy, such as wind and solar power, much of the electricity surging into data centres remains ‘dirty’, coming from carbon-spewing coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

In Loudoun County, Northern Virginia, for example, the area’s only power supplier generates just 5 per cent from renewable sources.

By far the biggest owner of data centres is Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services). Boasting clients such as streaming giants Netflix and Hulu, Expedia, the BBC and the Guardian newspaper, most of AWS — whose services include internet storage and website content delivery — is based in Loudoun County.

And, according to critics, Amazon — owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person — has also been by far the slowest to power its ‘cloud’ with renewable energy, while remaining the least transparent about how much energy it uses.

‘All of the internet giants, and especially Amazon, still have a long way to go to power their cloud with renewable energy,’ says Greenpeace expert Elizabeth Jardim. ‘Data centres may be more efficient now than they were ten years ago, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use a lot of energy. This doesn’t solve the problem in the long term.’

Indeed, it’s a problem that’s only going to get bigger.

Internet traffic tripled between 2015 and 2019. And with the consolidation of ‘computationally intensive’ new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, high-definition video and digital currencies, including Bitcoin, it’s forecast to double again by 2022.

Part of the problem is something of a catch-22; as internet efficiency improves, demand for new products increases and cancels out the original efficiency savings.

Subscriptions to Netflix, the world’s largest television streaming service, grew 20 per cent last year to 167 million, while subscribers’ electricity consumption soared by 84 per cent.

Meanwhile, even if some carbon watchdogs have slightly over-egged the internet’s environmental ‘dirtiness’, there’s no doubt it does have an effect.

Peter Garraghan, a computer science expert at Lancaster University, recently claimed watching a two-hour Netflix film in high definition has the carbon equivalent of boiling eight to ten kettles.

So what’s the solution? In today’s era of connectivity, where we rely on the internet 24/7, it just doesn’t seem feasible to go without it. But there are small ways we can reduce our internet energy consumption.

A study co-authored by Professor Mike Berners-Lee (brother of Sir Tim, who ‘invented’ the World Wide Web) found that if everyone in Britain sent only one fewer email a day, more than 16,433 tons of carbon would be saved every year — equivalent to 81,152 flights to Madrid.

He says we send more than 64 million ‘pointless’ emails a day, in the UK, many containing a single word, such as ‘received’.

Even shortening an email from ‘thank you’ to ‘ta’ would help, as shorter messages require less energy to send.

Other so-called ‘digital sobriety’ techniques include not listening to music by streaming a video (as this consumes more energy than simply streaming music), not watching videos in high definition, and, if you intend to watch something repeatedly, downloading content to your computer rather than streaming it each time.

Alternatively, you could use an eco-minded internet search engine such as Berlin-based Ecosia, which promises to plant a tree for every 45 searches it performs.

(Given that Google processes 3.5 billion searches a day, that could be a lot of trees.)

In the meantime, do watch the BBC’s Dirty Streaming programme — even if, ironically, the only way to see it is to stream it.

Dirty Streaming: The Internet’s Big Secret can be watched on BBC iPlayer.