Natural gas is the reason you can tweet. Coal powers your Facebook stalking and snapchat streaks. Oil allows you to post outfits of the day and vacation updates on your Instagram. Bottom line, fossil fuels make possible the connections and conversations facilitated by social media. Without the utilization of fossil fuels, like many things in our modern world, social media would not be able to function.
In the modern technological age, we are too quick to forget that all energy used has a cost that must be paid. One such cost has come with the advent of social media and entertainment, which brought many different platforms and products. 5.07 billion people around the world currently use social media, meaning that approximately 65% of the global population uses apps and programs that require exorbitant amounts of energy.
Though it is dependent on what platform is being used and for how long, most apps range from an energy consumption of 8.58 milliamps per hour (mAh) to 15.81 mAh (making for average of 10.73 mAh). Apps like TikTok, Facebook, and Snapchat require the most energy, and that need is only growing. Though the hourly cost may not seem like that much, with billions of people using social media for hours every day, it adds up. Over a full year, the average use of social platforms (on a global scale) sits at 260 trillion minutes, or 4.3 trillion hours. Combined with the average usage of 10.73 mAh, that’s approximately 46,000,000,000,000 (46 trillion) mAh.
On an individual level, the energy used for your weekly doom scrolls could be used to power a portable charger or a battery. However, the energy used for the composite views of one music video could be equivalent to a year’s worth of energy consumption in four countries combined. No, really. The Despacito music video, which got 5 billion plays on YouTube, consumed as much energy as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic put together in a single year. It is not just your phone that requires energy to use social media; it is servers, networks, and hardware combined that raise the energy cost so high. Netflix, just one streaming platform, reported that its total energy consumption reached 451,000 megawatt hours per year. That is enough to power approximately 37,000 homes.
So where does all this energy come from? How is it that the average American, who is chronically online, can regularly access all these platforms? Well, if energy were currency, fossil fuels would be hundred-dollar bills. Coal, oil, and gas pay the energy costs for your Instagram memes and posting daily pictures on BeReal for your friends to see. Critics of fossil fuels will tweet their disdain for them all while using power generated by coal and gas. Every aspect of online life is fueled by the generation of energy from the regularly reliable sources of non-renewable energy.
Low-carbon energy sources certainly contribute to the total energy mix, but only account for about one-fifth’s worth of energy generation. With the increasing use of electricity for social media platforms, renewables can’t cut it. Many don’t have the patience to delay their tweets until the sun comes out. The most efficacious method for powering the digital demands of our century is by doing so via natural gas and oil. As the time spent on screens continues to increase, fossil fuel generation must increase along with it. The green and renewable agenda won’t help power your phone, but fossil fuels will.