The giant tech companies with their power-hungry, football-field-size data centers are not the environmental villains they are sometimes portrayed to be on social media and elsewhere.
Shutting off your Zoom camera or throttling your Netflix service to lower-definition viewing does not yield a big saving in energy use, contrary to what some people have claimed.
Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers.
To continue reading this New York Times report, go to:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/technology/computer-energy-use-study.html
Also see:
Cryptocurrency Blockchains Don’t Need To Be Energy Intensive
Blockchain is a generic term for the way most cryptocurrencies record and share their transactions. It’s a type of distributed ledger that parcels up those transactions into chunks called “blocks” and then chains them together cryptographically in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to go back and edit older blocks. How often a new block is made and how much data it contains depends on the implementation. For Bitcoin, that time frame is 10 minutes; for some cryptocurrencies it’s less than a minute.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/cryptocurrency-blockchains-dont-need-to-be-energy-intensive