Discover how online activities—from streaming to AI queries—impact the environment. Learn CO₂ emissions per activity and ways to reduce your digital carbon footprint.

The majority of people in industrialized nations emit roughly 10 tons of CO₂ annually, with the use of digital technology accounting for an increasing portion of this emissions. TRG Datacenters recently conducted a study that examined the amount of CO₂ Emissions and electricity generated by common online activities and AI tools.

The energy consumption of each activity was measured in kilowatt-hours and then converted to CO₂. Along with AI duties like chatbot queries, image creation, and text-to-video tools, it includes everyday activities like streaming, emailing, video conversations, and web searches.

CO2 Emission From Calls, Emails, and Streaming

According to the findings, streaming on YouTube and Netflix has the most carbon footprint. Because streaming requires continuous data transport for the entire hour, watching one hour of HD video produces 42 grams of CO₂.

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This consumes 0.12 kWh, more than any other item on the list. Over 30 kg of CO₂ can be produced annually from two hours of watching per day.

Text-to-video generation comes next, producing 17.5 grams of CO₂ for a brief 6–10 second clip. To convert text to video, these programs need powerful processors that consume 0.05 kWh for a few seconds of output.

Since video calls require constant sending and receiving of video, an hour-long Zoom session generates roughly 17 grams of CO₂. A daily one-hour conversation can produce about 6 kg of CO₂ over the course of a year.

A brief email sent with no attachments uses 0.0133 kWh and produces 4.7 grams of CO₂. Sending 50 emails a day can result in 85 kilograms of CO₂ in a year, even if one email might not seem like much.

How Much CO₂ Is Produced by AI Queries?

Each AI image generates one gram of CO₂ and consumes 0.003 kWh.

Because AI voice assistants can do simpler jobs, each query generates 0.175 grams of CO₂.

Both AI chatbot prompts and Google searches utilize 0.0003 kWh and produce 0.105 grams of CO₂ each use. One hour of streaming would require about 1,000 searches.

With two prompts weighing 0.084 grams and consuming 0.00024 kWh, Gemini text prompts have the lightest footprint.