BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Maybe it’s presumptuous of me, but I’m guessing just about the last thing on your mind as you’re watching porn is the carbon footprint left behind by your viewing session.

I’ll further surmise this is the case whether you’re watching porn on your phone, PC or television, and regardless of whether the source of the video is streaming, a DVD, or (God help you) an ancient VHS tape you’ve probably just about worn out by now, you shameless Luddite.

Matt Kessler of The Atlantic thinks you should be thinking about your porn-generated carbon footprint though, even if nobody can reasonably tell you how big that footprint is.

“Is pornography in the digital era leaving a larger carbon footprint than it did during the days of magazines and videos?” wonders Kessler. “The internet could allow people to spend so much time looking at porn that it’s actually worse for the environment.”

While Kessler concedes that porn industry statistics are notoriously unreliable, calculating the energy consumed by humanity’s aggregate internet porn consumption is insanely complicated and there’s really no way to say with certainty internet porn is worse for the environment than was pre-internet porn, the question is still worth contemplating.

Relying on a formula previously published by Netflix and self-reported figures from Pornhub, Nathan Esmenger of Indiana University figures Pornhub “used 5.967 million kWh in 2016,” roughly the equivalent of the amount of energy “11,000 light bulbs would use if left on for a year.”

Kessler also compares the number of DVD copies Evil Angel used to sell in the first 30 days after release to the number of times new Evil Angel releases are streamed these days in the first 30 days after they’re released – without specifying the reduction in Evil Angel DVD sales between the 90s and now.

While Kessler’s article does begin by noting the ways in which streaming can reduce carbon dioxide emissions (“Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel”), it’s not clear whether his list of factors is comprehensive.

Fuel isn’t just consumed in the production and distribution of a DVD, for example; it’s also consumed by a purchaser or renter driving to a brick and mortar adult store to acquire the DVD. Servers, PCs and mobile devices consume electricity, but so do DVD players, television sets and (I’m talking to you again, Luddite) VHS players. Of course, there’s no way to know how much energy was consumed, or carbon dioxide was emitted, by those porn-consumption-related activities in the pre-internet era, either.

Such uncertainties are why Jon Koomey, another of the eggheads interviewed by Kessler, is hesitant to offer an opinion on internet porn’s carbon footprint as it relates to porn’s pre-internet carbon footprint, either way.

“I don’t even know what fraction of the internet is porn,” Koomey told Kessler. “And without data, it’s hard to say anything sensible.”

No problem Jon, because there are plenty of people who are happy to speculate on the subject, so long as it gives them a chance to criticize porn, regardless of whether they can “say anything sensible” in the process. One of these people, inevitably, is anti-porn crusader Gail Dines.

“(A)s an anti-pornography advocate, she views the potential environmental costs of such rabid online consumption as an important critique against the industry,” writes Kessler.

With all due respect to Kessler, Dines thinks every critique against the industry is important. Of course, she also thinks venture capitalists, banks and credit card companies are all in cahoots with the porn industry, which is “why you never see anti-porn stories.”

Uh, yeah — you never see anti-porn stories; just try a Google news search for the word “porn” and you’ll see how true this claim isn’t. For that matter, you can just look at the headline of the story I pulled the above Dines quote from: “Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like.” That sounds solidly, unequivocally pro-porn, right?

The question of porn’s pre- and post-internet era carbon footprint is interesting, I suppose, but it’s interesting in the same sense speculating about the answer to any unanswerable question is interesting. Barring the availability of solid, confirmable data, data which is very unlikely to ever become available, it’s just pondering the unknowable, in aid of nothing.

Smokestack photo © Nikita Golovanov