One lump of coal: 25 grams
(Per https://books.google.com/books?id=HLFJAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA5-PA20&l... )
Annual internet traffic: 122,088,000,000,000 MB in 2008, 1,152,648,000,000,000 MB in 2016
(petabytes per month to megabytes per year: multiply by 1.2 * 10^10)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
There are 40,000 coal lumps of 25 grams per tonne of coal.
That would put moving-information-across-the-net energy consumption at 3 billion tonnes (3.4 billion short tons) of coal in 2008. That's about 44% of world coal production in 2008.
If it took 1 lump of coal per MB in 2016, that would be about 29 billion tonnes of coal (32 billion short tons), or about 360% of world coal production in 2013 (latest date available).
https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=coal&graph=consum...
> “It takes the energy in one lump of coal to move 1 MB of information across the net.”
I wonder if it's still true today, 10 years later.