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 like to verify so I asked a LLM, it confirmed the math but also determined he is a sentient banana.
I’m not gonna check the numbers either. Because I have no idea how. And I don’t even understand them.
So obviously he’s right!
The numbers aren’t too difficult to verify.
I found this Canadian government web page that says it’s roughly 8.9 kWh, so that checks out.
Looking at the fuel efficiency table on that same website, it looks like OP used a reasonable average fuel efficiency of 30 mpg or slightly under 8L/100km: 4 miles / 30mpg = 0.13 gallons, or 0.492 liters, so their claim of half a liter of gas also checks out.
The cheapest commercial energy in the US appears to be in North Dakota at $0.0741/kWh, so using $0.05/kWh was very generous.
The average Netflix user watches about 2 hours per day, or 60 hours per month.
Just in an attempt to be a bit more accurate, let’s assume the individual user’s television and internet router use about 900W, so we’ll use a final number of 8kW for Netflix’s power use per user.
8 kW * 60 hours= 480 kWh
And the cost of all of those kWh at $0.05: 480 kWh * $0.05 = $24.00
Or, the cost in the least expensive state in the US: 480 kWh * $0.0741 = $35.57
National average is $0.14/kWh, so unless Netflix was serving everyone out of North Dakota and Texas, their average cost per user would be much closer to $70 per user.
OP’s numbers were definitely already accurate enough for the point. Basically, there’s no possible way Netflix needs that much electricity to serve their users.
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.
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.
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.
Wise fucking words. Aside from boycotting certain businesses we have almost no ability to control the environmental side of things.
Yeah but she’s the One Good Billionaire™️ for reasons nobody is able to articulate.
I thought that was Gabe Newell
Gabe actually does good, though. Valve has been a major contributor to several open source products
and at the same time makes bank from kids gambling with Counter Strike skins, so a bit of a mixed bag there
Taylor Swift also arguably contributes something of value–music that a lot of people really like. Doesn’t mean either of them should be able to amass that much wealth. The tax system in the US is broken. In the US in 1961, for example, stock buybacks were illegal (so stocks paid dividends, which are taxable income), and any income above $32,000/year was taxed at 50%, up to a marginal tax rate of 91% for any income above $400,000/year. In contrast, the highest marginal tax rate in the US in 2024 was 37% for any income above $731,200/year, and companies buy back stocks rather than issuing dividends most of the time. Further, most millionaires and billionaires amass wealth through stocks rather than income, using loans against stocks for cash, meaning they pay almost no taxes and continue to amass personal wealth.
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.
I just want to commend your dedication to using flared bases, even when speaking about people you don’t agree with.
After the spiel, believe it or not, I feel kind of guilty accepting that compliment given that I meant flared-end-first when suggesting they fuck themselves with the BR40’s…
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.
Even if it was a ridiculous amount, it makes no sense to blame the end users of the service instead of the service itself
Yup. I think it’s fair to say someone driving a gas guzzler SUV needs to make a little more effort to help with global warming… get an EV or better yet, take transit.
But with electrical stuff, there exists green power that’s cheaper than the alternatives, it’s the industry’s fault for not making effort on that. I’m not the fucking power company.
It’s gotta be a shared responsibility on this instead of finger pointing. I’m taking transit and fighting tooth and nail against my employer’s stupid RTO policies (while looking for a job elsewhere). I’m doing my part on the things I can control and I expect industry to do the same.
Remove encryption, let users download more files. Problem solved.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah this smacks of “but wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable”! So? It’s still better than what we were doing before.
wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable
I didn’t even know about that.
Wonder if they could crush them up and use them as concrete aggregate.
“made mainly of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and balsa wood” from some random source. Doesn’t sound like anything particularly toxic or difficult to source. I can’t imagine putting them in landfill is a serious problem. So my response is “so what”.
Why not?
Carbon fiber and fiberglass in concrete foundations would limit microplastics and add strength to the product. Throwing a never-decomposing product into a landfill is just taking up space for something that can decompose over a couple of hundred years. Reuse it at least once it there’s a viable solution.
Sure. I mean, you could. Probably there are better sources, like construction waste, that you’d want to exhaust first, but I obviously haven’t done a serious cost-benefit analysis, nor am I really qualified. My intuition is that you could do it but there are better uses of the time and money.
Relatively inert stuff in a landfill doesn’t seem like the highest-priority use of the time and money. The resources used to scrap and recycle a wind turbine blade could probably be much better used for more consequential purposes.
Close. We sharpen them to use against the Kaiju.
Say people flying private jets everywhere.
Nothing you do will ever come close to the devastation caused by commercial fishing industry.
There are several industries that can make that claim
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.
