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Comment by nanidin | Hacker News Reader

> Not eating a single steak would offset my entire life of using the internet.

This appears to be hyperbole - from what I could find, one steak has a carbon footprint of 15.5kg [0] and one Google search has a carbon footprint of 7g [1]. That makes one steak equal to 2214 Google searches. Over a lifetime, 2214 searches seems low. In my browser history, I found evidence of 776 searches in the last 3 months.

Moving away from searches, apparently 1GB of data transfer produces 3kg of CO2 [2]. That makes one steak equal to 5.16GB of data transfer over the internet - or less than one hour of 4K content streamed from Netflix [3].

[0] https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-one-Go...

[2] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irres....

[3] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/87

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Those numbers don't make sense to me. I just watched this video[1] in 4K 60fps on Youtube. I think it's ~5GB. I watched it at double speed so it took 15 minutes to watch. Your second link says it takes 5.12 kWh to transfer 1GB, so it took 25 kWH to watch that video. That's about $5 at California power prices. Did it really cost $5 to watch that free Youtube video?

My ISP caps me at 1.2TB/month. That would be $1200/month, but I don't pay anywhere near that.

25kWh in 15 minutes is 100kW. That's 150x the max amount of power my overpowered desktop uses.

On HN people claim AWS overcharges on egress pricing. They charge between $0.05/GB and $0.09/GB[2]. Their "overcharging" price is much lower (5% - 11%) than the cost of electricity if your numbers are correct, which doesn't make sense. Their ingress price is free, so they're not making up for lost money there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gidJopKtcnc

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

The source for power per GB links to a paper published in 2012 [0] that describes how they arrived at 5.12kWh per GB. Maybe things have gotten more efficient in the last decade?

Note that the power figure includes all of the networking equipment between your desktop and the server, and the infrastructure required to run it like cooling equipment. Also note that watching a video at 2x speed may result in the server sending less data than watching a video at 1x speed.

[0] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02...

I wouldn't put too much weight into that number. Studies of energy usage for data transfer vary by over 5 orders of magnitude depending on their assumptions. This paper [1], which is an analysis of 14 different studies, came up with 0.06 kWh/GB in 2015, with energy usage halving every 2 years. Assuming the trend continued, that would put it at less than 0.01 kWh/GB today.

The claim about CO2 emissions for a Google search was also contested at the time and later retracted by the original source [2][3]. Unfortunately, once on the internet, these things just keep getting repeated.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12630

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/12/revealed-the-times-made-up...

[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-sear...

> The source for power per GB links to a paper published in 2012 [0] that describes how they arrived at 5.12kWh per GB

Even for 2012, that number seems utterly implausible.

They are just dividing total consumption of data by total consumption of energy. While I would imagine both have risen substantially, I would imagine that consumption of data has risen by some multiple of consumption of energy.

>Also note that watching a video at 2x speed may result in the server sending less data than watching a video at 1x speed.

That's an interesting point, but I don't think that's the case for Youtube.

So I bought Borderlands 3 the other day. It's about 130GB in size. At 5.12kWh per GB and UK energy prices of £0.28/KWh (keeping in mind the gas shortage), that implies downloading the game costs 5.121300.28 = £186. Per download. For a game that cost like £10 on sale.

I'm not sure that adds up.

From skimming the paper[1] they pulled that number from it seems... not the best metric. It looks like they are estimating the power consumption of the internet, then dividing that power usage by the amount of data transferred and claiming that is the cost per gigabyte.

But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data etc

[1] https://www.emergeinteractive.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02...

> But that's including a _lot_ energy cost that isn't related to _transferring_ the data, but storing/generating/running services to send that data etc

Well, doesn't that make it an even more accurate measurement of how much our data really impacts the environment? Data doesn't just exist at the moment its being transferred...

Transit providers accept traffic for delivery anywhere in the world at a tiny fraction of that figure, suggesting that the fully allocated cost per GB is not quite as high as they represent. I trust transit service is not in a venture capital funded bubble subject to collapse any day now.

The same analysis goes for storage and processing. The economic marginal cost of storing and generating data as such is quite low, probably lower than the transit cost, especially since most data stored is either soon discarded or transmitted a large number of times.

Both are among the most successful economies of scale ever invented, pretty much the opposite of what the article alleges. Measure this out as a percentage of GDP or transit/storage cost per hour of work or entertainment - it is certainly worth more than one airline industry in economic terms, advances we could hardly live without unless the plan is to roll back living standards to the 1970s or earlier.

Given that just recompressing images on the homepage of some sites I’ve worked on has cut page load size down by megabytes it sounds like it makes a difference.

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