Is pornography in the digital era leaving a larger carbon footprint than it did during the days of magazines and videos? Obtaining raw numbers will always be a sticking point, because the stigmatized industry has never kept track of sales like the music and film industries, and has no significant archives. But if pornography experts’ estimates are accurate, they suggest a rare scenario where digitization might have increased the overall consumption of porn so much that the principal of dematerialization gets flipped on its head. The internet could allow people to spend so much time looking at porn that it’s actually worse for the environment.

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Using a formula that Netflix published on its blog in 2015, Nathan Ensmenger, a professor at Indiana University who is writing a book about the environmental history of the computer, calculates that if Pornhub streams video as efficiently as Netflix (0.0013 kWh per streaming hour), it used 5.967 million kWh in 2016. For comparison, that’s about the same amount of energy 11,000 light bulbs would use if left on for a year. And operating with Netflix’s efficiency would be a best-case scenario for the porn site, Ensmenger believes.

Grayson says he has witnessed this explosion of growth firsthand at Evil Angel. He estimates that the site’s viewership has increased by 7,000 percent since the time of DVDs. In the late 1990s, he says, a new Evil Angel DVD would sell approximately 7,500 copies in the first 30 days. Now, he says, Evil Angel videos are streamed 30,000 times in the first 30 days—and that only represents the 5 percent of its web traffic comprised of paying customers. Each week, 2 million free previews are watched. “There’s no way, 15 years ago, at the peak of physical media, that many people were touching our brand,” he says.

Still, it’s impossible to access any data for the porn industry as a whole. Trade magazines like Variety or Billboard don’t exist, and sales records have never been archived. For Jon Koomey, a data scientist who studies the environmental impact of the internet, this lack of information hamstrings any serious inquiry. Although the estimates sound reasonable to him, and he believes pornography very well could provide an exception to the rule of dematerialization, he warns against speculative comparisons. “I don’t even know what fraction of the internet is porn,” he says. “And without data, it’s hard to say anything sensible.”

Koomey warns that there are simply too many variables to be considered. For instance, the growth of porn consumption since the turn of the century would have to be compared to the growth of all internet data during the same time period. The energy and emissions for manufacturing, marketing, transporting, and using porn DVDs would have to be compared to the electricity required to make a search-engine query, the electricity used by the device making the search, and the operational cost of the website’s server, network, and specific data center.