Should we guess whether you've done any air travel in the past couple of years? (I have too, I'm a hypocrite as well.)

I have no idea the source of your number. I see half a percent here[1]. That is also possibly inaccurate, because at least one major internet company offsets all their carbon emissions with things like farm animal feces digestors and methane recapture covers for mines. Even if it is three percent, it's not clear that a given amount of bandwidth is responsible for the same fraction of emissions. Also, perhaps the more people watch movies, the less they drive around and do fun things outside the house. So it may be that for each % you increase internet emissions you decrease other emissions by %*2. Who knows?

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-f...

That's not really relevant, though. The point is not "Video produces significant emissions, therefore it is bad." The point is "Video produces significant emissions, therefore making it more efficient would be good." The fact that video is not as bad as something else has no bearing on whether video could be made even better. It's worth bringing up because in a decision between x% better image quality or x% lower emissions, the total amount of those emissions is the key piece of information.

Why don’t you go beat up on useless technology which provably pisses away energy (by design!) like the blockchain before you claiming consuming video content on the internet is killing the planet.

There's no need to get defensive over this. One can do both.

Useless to you does not mean useless to other people and unless you somehow are the person who has an ultimate mandate over valuing things throughout the universe, then it's just your opinion.

If you for some reason have that mandate, you might as well look at other "useless" industries such as christmas lights, mechanical watch production (very demanding and "useless", right? since quartz watches are much cheaper and more accurate anyway?), vinyl records (think of all that plastic!!!), road lighting during the night (most roads don't have any visitors for hours!), jewelry, public webcams (all that energy and data transfer!). How about heating in far up north? How much energy is "wasted" there, "why don't all those people just move"? Or expensive motherboards which have thousands of components, of which only a small part will realistically be used by the owner... Or gaming consoles which can in fact be used for other calculations, but damn uselessly stuck there to just produce some 3d simulations... Or gaming in general, how much does that "waste"?

Basically what I'm trying to say is that your line of reasoning is extremely selfish and short-sighted, and there are people who would very much like to have some blockchains working, and they will keep doing so, just like they will keep setting up and powering christmas lights and paying for their gaming rigs and buying expensive watches that take a fortune to manufacture.

It feels a bit irresponsible to through around unsourced numbers like that. Makes responding responsibly difficult.

Sending data through the internet contributes to 3% of worldwide CO2 emissions? Finding a 'sustainable way to watch videos online'? I think you have your numbers mixed up. Maybe you are confusing the amount of electricity all computers use with the internet and CO2 emissions.

For anyone interested in some more novel ways of reducing video bandwidth with neural networks using foveated rendering to 'recreate/generate' the high res frames client side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTUmmW4ispA

Computers use electricity. Find a way to generate electricity without CO2. If people can't watch videos of foreign places then they will have to travel to foreign countries which will cause more CO2.