Climate activists - and anyone else who views porn online - are part of the problem, according to a new report.

A French think-tank, The Shift Project, reveals that adult material accounts for more than 4% of all carbon dioxide emissions linked to digital technologies, while porn constitutes 27% of all videos viewed online.

Talk about a carbon handprint...

"...viewing pornographic videos in the world in 2018 generated carbon emissions of the same magnitude as that of the residential sector in France ," reads the report.

The authors then shift to a moral argument against porn, suggesting that "one of the problems mentioned regarding the effects of consuming pornography at the societal level is the phenomenon of shifting norms: during the consumption of content by an individual, a trend towards increased violence in the content viewed, for example, has been observed, leading to harmful effects on the individual’s sexuality and their perceptions of physical relationships."

What's more, men can't seem to jerk off without porn.

Catherine Solano, a sexologist, has observed “for several years, that for a large proportion of men, masturbation is inseparable from pornography” (Solano, 2018). The use of pornography and thus the visualization of online pornographic videos are therefore now associated with a utilization governed by highly automatic cognitive mechanisms, which allows the efficient monetization of the products proposed. Today, the economic development of viewing online pornographic videos is therefore built on a cognitive amalgam resulting from the marketing practices of the sector: the association of using pornography with the physical act of sex (Roussilhe, 2019). Seeing a naked body activates an initial automatic reaction in the brain which arouses interest linked to the evolutive reflex of the possibility of procreation (Solano, 2018). Since we know that our cognitive mechanisms host a bias, called “trigger effect”, that induces inertia in our thought process30 (Marcinkowski, 2019), we can understand that the sexualization of content for the general public introduces pornographic uses within a wider mechanism of influence: exposed to sexualized contents for the general public (advertising, video clips, etc.).

So - men have a pavlovian response to naked women which results in eco-unfriendly masturbation - to increasingly violent content.