Flutterby™! : Movies per lb of coal

On Facebook, a friend (who lives in the boonies and has a net provider whose links are way oversaturated) wrote:

My ISP regularly rants to me that we're killing the world by streaming video on the internet. Claims each feature-length-film watched is roughly equivalent to a pound of coal and 10 gallons of water. WTF? Is he as crackpot as he sounds, or should I pay attention to that? How best to tell him to shut the hell up (stop bugging me) and convert HIS network equipment to solar? Dumbfounded.

I responded:

So this suggests that 200 watt hours per gigabyte for Japan to Switzerland (ie: as around the world as possible) is a pessimistic number: http://static.googleuserconten...2013/pdfs/DirectEnergyDemand.pdf

This says that we use roughly 1.09 lbs of coal per kilowatt hour: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=667&t=2

This suggests somewhere between 1 and 2 gigabytes per hour of streamed video: http://ask.metafilter.com/1773...the-average-movie-download-in-gb

So, pessimistically, a 2 hour movie streamed from the other side of the world (Torrented from Korea?) would use 4 gigabytes, or 400 watt hours, .4 kilowatt hours, or just under 7 ounces of coal. So... ya dig sixteen tons, wadda ya get? 73,394 movies and deeper in debt 800 watt hours, .8 kilwatt hours.

(These numbers are probably lower now, switching equipment has gotten more efficient in the 5 years since that .2kW/hr/gb calculation was done.)

You could presumably do a similar calculation about the cost it takes to bring you your mail, therefore DVDs by mail. And depending on who your provider is getting their data from there's a good chance that there's a Netflix cache within a hop or two of their gateway, which means the movie isn't coming all the way around the world, it's going a few tens of miles.

Edit: I forgot a multiply two paragraphs up...