Human beings can barely move a muscle without some kind of deleterious effect on the environment around us.
Our diets, our transport and our creature comforts have been scrutinised amid ongoing climate change – all multiplied by the sheer number of creatures that make up humanity. And recently, it’s our online activity that’s been under review.
The emergence of AI has shone a light on just how thirsty for energy and water digital technologies are.
A report released at the beginning of 2026 estimated that global AI use – and specifically the data centres that power AI – emits as much CO2 in a year as New York City.
Another estimate suggests that for every 5–50 queries, ChatGPT uses half a litre (around a 10th of a gallon) of water to cool its servers.
Advisors to the UK government in the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance have even warned that AI data centres could threaten global and national water security.
But how does using AI compare to other online activities, such as streaming movies or scrolling social media?
Firstly, it’s difficult to compare one technology with another, or even one platform with another, although some analysts have tried.
For example, Andy Masley, an AI and tech writer, calculated that an average ChatGPT query emits 0.28g of CO2. He says that’s the equivalent of streaming a video for 35 seconds, uploading nine photos to social media or using a laptop for one minute.
It’s also worth noting that calculating the full environmental impact of AI is complicated by the resources used to train each model, which are hard to quantify.
A simpler way to think about the environmental cost of online behaviour is the amount of data being used at a given time.
Reading text posts on LinkedIn has a lower impact than watching videos on TikTok. Likewise, a text query to an AI chatbot uses much less data than an AI text-to-video prompt.
Cloud-based gaming may be one of the worst online offenders, because games require the continuous operation of gaming servers.
However, a 2025 report by the carbon accounting firm Greenly suggested that physical video games are 100 times more carbon-intensive than online streaming, because you have to factor in the manufacture of the discs and packaging, product distribution and their sad but inevitable fate in landfill or incinerators.
That speaks to a broader truth: our offline lives tend to have a far greater environmental impact than our online lives.
Another Greenly analysis estimates that an annual subscription to Netflix, with average viewing times, produces around 17kg of CO2 emissions, which is roughly equivalent to a single 60-mile journey in a petrol-fuelled car.
A single flight from London to Berlin would emit 10 times that amount, per economy passenger. And eating just one sirloin steak uses more carbon (20–30kg, depending on the size) than a year’s worth of bingeing Bridgerton.
In other words, if you’re looking to lower your carbon footprint, consider your screen time, but what you buy, how you eat and where you travel have significantly bigger impacts.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Adaline Cliffe, Lisburn) 'What's the worst thing you can do for the planet online?'
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