If a young person watches three hours of Internet films every day, this causes more CO2 emissions per year than a car ride from Frankfurt to Hamburg. According to a DAK study, three hours is the average value that German young people spend with Internet films, and CO2 emissions are based on a self-disclosure by Netflix. Of course, the teenager uses the Internet for other things, and his mobile phone is not the only device in the family. In this way, the CO2 emissions from the Internet add up in every family.*

Justus Bender

Editor in the politics department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Airplanes are particularly offensive to climate activists. All air traffic on the planet accounts for 3.5 percent of all greenhouse gases. However, the Internet accounts for four percent. In 2025, it could even be eight percent. If the Internet were a country, it would already be in sixth place among the largest emitters. The videos that are played on the Internet alone generate as many greenhouse gases as the whole of Spain. Major streaming providers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have the same emissions as Chile.

Every Google search, every email, every banner ad, and every Tiktok video is occupying data centers around the world. They are as big as shopping centers and consume several megawatts of electricity. And because the processors convert every watt into heat, it takes even more power to cool them to room temperature with fans. Depending on where the electricity comes from, this causes greenhouse gases. In Germany, due to the nuclear phase-out and the gas crisis, a particularly large amount of lignite is currently being used to generate electricity, and Frankfurt is the world's largest Internet hub. So every selfie on Instagram makes the planet a little warmer.

In climate policy, there is often talk of austerity and renunciation. Anyone who goes on a cruise, flies short distances and drives an off-road vehicle through city centers is considered a sinner. It's different on the Internet. There is a great deal of carefree attitude there. The son watches Netflix videos in HD quality and chats on Whatsapp on the side, the daughter uploads holiday photos to the cloud, mom is in a video conference, and dad streams football. In addition to such data streams, which are intentional, there is a lot of garbage and dubious things.

The mood is similar to the eighties

Half of all e-mails are spam, i.e. unwanted, sometimes criminal advertising. That's 175 million spam emails a day, causing an estimated 600,000 tons of CO2 per year. 27 percent of all online videos are films, which causes as many emissions as all French households in one year. On many websites, videos start playing as soon as you open them.

When a video is over, it automatically jumps to the next one. Some people never take just one photo with their phone, but five to eight, which are then automatically uploaded to a cloud. Others stream movies to their TV via a stick. If they don't feel like it anymore, they just turn off the TV, the stick continues to suck data for hours. It doesn't cost the customers anything, but the processors in the data centers are glowing.

The mood is similar to the eighties, when you left the tap running while brushing your teeth, the lights were on all over the house and the car was sometimes parked with the engine running during errands in winter to keep it nice and warm. The chairwoman of the Association of Data Centers, Anna Klaft, says: "Ordinary people don't think about what this means. It is the end user who causes this. You have to make it clear to people that 20,000 Whatsapp messages are also a consumption."