Binging Less Netflix Isn’t Going to Stop Climate Change
Summary
As many headlines put it, climate scientists are coming for our binge-watching habits, thereby making everyday consumers of BoJack Horseman and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel feel guilty for their environmental transgressions. Whether you’re throwing out too much food, playing video games on the cloud, ordering something from Amazon, drinking coffee, streaming music, or wearing jeans, these stories suggest that you should be worried about how your individual actions are accelerating climate change. Data Center Knowledge, a news site covering the cloud computing industry, recently contested the Shift Project’s math and methodology, and found that the carbon footprint generated by a half hour stream is actually closer to driving 461 feet. “Given the demand for data center services, the industry is performing well to keep that trend line [of efficiency gains] near horizontal,” Bill Carter, chief technology officer with the Open Compute Project, an organization devoted to redesigning hardware in sustainable ways, told Motherboard. The real danger of these sidetrack discourses is that it becomes more difficult to properly understand the nuances of data centers and their environmental impact, and where that usage is situated within the wider ecosystem of climate damage.