How does YouTube Consumption Affect the Environment?

First, it’s about time that the coal fired power plants are converted to natural gas. Natural gas can be consumed to almost 100% efficiency if planned for.
Every power plant has chimney’s where millions of Btu’s are going up these chimney’s every minute as HOT exhaust into the atmosphere. We cant do much about that with coal or oil fired power plants, but with natural gas power plant the technology of Condensing Flue Gas Heat Recovery can be applied. What this technology does is transfer the energy that is in these waste exhaust gases into water. Now these exhaust gases are COOL and the water is a whole lot warmer.
Now what to do with this heated water?
Here is a thought. How about building a few hundred acres of greenhouses next to the power plant, or in the area of. These greenhouses can be heated and cooled with this heated water.
What can’t be grown in a controlled greenhouse environment? The world needs food, right? Fruits and vegetables of any variety can be grown. It needs people to take care of and harvest these crops, so now we are also putting a lot of people to work. These crops are not grown in the ground like field crops. They are grown on beds or benches so there is minimal bending over. And it does not matter what the weather is like outside, inside the greenhouse it is tropical weather.
All this product going out the doors would be good for the local economy.
And then there is the WATER. During this condensing heat recovery process, water is being created. This recovered water can be treated and used to irrigate the plants in the greenhouse.
Now that the exhaust gases have been cooled off this CO2 can be blown through out these greenhouses as fertilizer. Plants through the process of photosynthesis converts this CO2 into O2. So going out of the doors with the produce that was grown there is oxygen. And we all need that to maintain our next breath.
This is how efficient a natural gas power plant could be operated.

I would like to hear a few other thoughts. It makes these data farms a lot more friendly.

Steve -

One of cool things about the internet is that a lot of the computing power is in one place, so companies like YouTube, Facebook and Google can have a tremendous impact on GHG emissions by reducing the power needs of their servers and data centers.

Yes, people need to use less energy to avert climate change–some say efficiency could save up to 60% of our energy use if implemented on a wide scale. But, the problem isn’t with energy per ce–clean energy could help people improve their quality of life without the associated carbon pollution. Indeed, a lot more people need to get energy so that they can adapt to climate change.

Take air conditioning, for example. With climate change, it’s going to get hotter. People in the developing world need to get access to air conditioning if they are going to survive heat waves. If that air conditioning is powered by dirty energy, they’re contributing to the problem of global warming. But, I don’t think they should be asked to sacrifice air conditioning because of global warming.

In the U.S., there’s certainly more of an argument that solving climate change is about sacrifice, but unless there are policy incentives that encourage that sacrifice, I don’t think personal action is going to get us the kind of changes we need.

Thanks for your comment.