“Are you still watching?” So repeats the well-worn prompt when you neglect to touch the remote for a while. 

Indeed, many of us are still watching, and in fact sucked into streaming services like Netflix a little extra these days. Social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is now mandated across the US, forcing most of us to spend a lot more time at home. Yes, one could start writing a book or reorganizing a closet—but with anxiety and stress running high, it’s undeniably more comforting to stream a new show or rewatch a favorite movie. Thanks to ubiquitous streaming services like Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and more, we can mentally escape quarantine by engrossing ourselves in the cruel realities of divorce (Marriage Story), the disastrous relationships of awkward high schoolers (Sex Education), or a fictional future that’s been infiltrated by vengeful robots (Westworld)—you know, happier times.  

This staying-home business is greatly reducing the carbon emissions of traffic on the roads. But unfortunately, our streaming habits aren’t without environmental impact. Home entertainment services use massive data centers to power everything we stream, and those data centers use a lot of electricity, which often originates as fossil fuels. The good news is, streaming services are under increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints. 

Paris-based think tank the Shift Project released a report last year claiming that streaming a half-hour show generates about 1.6 kg of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of driving four miles. That report has since come under scrutiny, but not before receiving extensive media coverage from the likes of Vice, Mashable, and The Guardian. In response, Data Center Knowledge called the report “exaggerated and misleading.” Jonathan Koomey, coauthor of the Science article “Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates,” tweeted, “Almost certainly wrong. Electricity intensity of downloads drops every two years, and emissions intensity drops even faster because cloud providers are rapidly moving to zero emissions sources.”

A more recent study from UK-based consumer resource Save on Energy reports that viewers streamed the third season of Netflix original series Stranger Things a cool 64 million times, resulting in over 189 million kg of CO2. That’s the equivalent of driving 420 million miles. 

And back in 2017, environmental activist group Greenpeace released a report called “Who Is Winning the Race to Build a Green Internet?”; Netflix received a D, with only 17 percent of its energy coming from renewables, compared with 30 percent from coal. (Other streaming giants weren’t much better—Hulu got an F and HBO a D.)

The bad news is that streaming Tiger King or Homeland definitely does emit carbon on the way from a data center to your home. But how much exactly? The math is confusing and contested. But in sparking conversation around the carbon footprint of online activities, these reports have increased user awareness and put extra pressure on the IT industry to reduce its carbon emissions. 

As a result, recent years have seen improvements made on multiple fronts. Netflix now publishes an annual “Environmental Social Governance” report, the most recent of which reports that the company uses 100 percent renewable energy used for “internet media and services.” (This does not include its data centers, which fall under “indirect electricity use,” as they use outside services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. However, Netflix does offset direct and indirect emissions by supporting renewable energy projects around the world.) “We don’t control this energy footprint,” reads the report, “so we’re not able to address its efficiency directly ourselves. But we do account for the emissions by matching them with regional renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets.”

Netflix and HBO both use Amazon Web Services, which in 2019 announced the construction of three new wind farms as part of its goal toward 100 percent renewable energy. 

Hulu, too, made a big, sustainable move in 2018, announcing its partnership with Switch, a renewable-energy-powered data center provider. In that same report from Greenpeace that gave Hulu failing marks, Switch was the only data center to earn all A’s and to receive recognition as “one of the definitive industry leaders” for using 100 percent locally sourced renewable energy. 

If doing the math on the carbon emissions of your screen time sounds like the last thing you need right now, don’t stress. After all, a recent study from the National Academy of Sciences tells us that one of the most important things we can do to fight climate change is to talk about it—and streaming services provide plenty of “edutaining” material on these topics, making them increasingly accessible and inspiring important conversations in new circles. So if you’re streaming a documentary like Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution on HBO or Our Planet on Netflix, snippets of what you learn might very well slip into your next Zoom happy hour or group chat with family and friends. 

And if you want to stream something that's not about the climate right now? That’s OK too. Just turn the lights off while you watch.