Could video streaming be as bad for the climate as driving a car? Calculating the Internet’s hidden carbon footprint

Subject: Climate Change

Context-

International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report- “Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks”

As per the report-

The estimate is based on quantitative information — the electrical energy and the amount of data used.
Driving a small car to the movie theatre may have lower carbon emissions than streaming the same movie alone at home. A two-hour film pollutes as much as a 45-minute car drive.
In 2002, global Internet usage was just 156 GB. Twenty years later, traffic is approximately 150,000 GB per second, nearly a thousand-fold increase.
The annual energy consumption of information and communication technology infrastructure is constantly at least 2,000 TWh, 5 per cent of the global electricity use.
Projections suggest that we will reach 10 per cent by 2030.

Suggestions provided are-

Turn off the camera when not needed in a video call.
Decrease the video resolution when possible, particularly on small screens.
Watch movies when they are broadcast rather than using on-demand services, which require dedicated computational power and data for each viewer.
Finally, let’s start thinking in kWh about everything we do, and do our part to help the implementation of such a standard. In this way, we will talk with the same energy currency, as we do with money.
Set up individual “energy wallets” and decide how to spend what we have in a sustainable way.