I wonder why the environmentalists never weigh in. Probably too technical for them (as a group) to understand, or maybe there's political implications WRT who to support and who to trash talk. I've been in RF for quite a while and at 10 to 500 KW output for each station, broadcast TV and radio electrical demand adds up pretty quickly, for frankly fewer users every year.

The killer is you usually see stats like 500 KW for a UHF transmitter (which is not entirely unusual, I know there's a 800 KW in Ireland where birds flying nearby must fall out of the sky cooked well done). So 500 KW for a coverage area of 4 million residents where I live is only an eighth of a watt per person per each transmitter 24x7. However ... only 1% of the population might watch that individual station at any given time... and only 10% or so still get the station OTA instead of cable or satellite or uverse or internet or whatever ... so suddenly thats 125 watts of transmitted RF per viewer, or perhaps 250 watts input power to the TX per viewer. Yikes.

Its interesting that the power budget for watching TV OTA is now roughly, insanely, 50:50 where roughly one watt of transmitter power is required for each watt of TV power. This ratio is going to get even worse over time. "Soon" there will come a time when you need to transmit a KW per viewer and that's not really economically sustainable, aside from being a really bad environmental idea.