Key takeaways
- The carbon cost of everyday internet use is real, measurable, and largely invisible
- Generating one AI image uses as much energy as brushing your teeth with an electric toothbrush for over three months
- A single data centre can consume 3 to 5 million gallons of water every day, equal to up to 315,000 showers
- Streaming on the top three platforms in 2024 alone produced enough CO₂ for roughly 4.4 billion backyard BBQ sessions
- 150 billion WhatsApp messages are sent daily, generating an estimated 1.9 million tonnes of CO₂ a year
- One email with a large attachment produces the same carbon as boiling a full kettle
- Since July 2025, Shift's Carbon Meter has offset 1,214 tonnes of CO₂, the equivalent of around 115,000 beef burgers
People have started paying attention to the carbon cost of everyday activities. They track it when booking flights, debate it when eating beef, factor it in at the gas pump. Those conversations are normal now.
The carbon cost of being online isn't. And most of us are online more than we do any of those other things.
That gap exists for a reason. The environmental impact of technology doesn't announce itself. There's no dark exhaust fumes, no receipt, no number on a screen telling you what a search or scroll or generated image actually cost. It just happens, somewhere else in the world and out of sight for many of us. What’s especially real is the impact when put into numbers and here's what the numbers telling us.
The numbers most people haven't seen
Let’s start with AI, because the AI environmental impact statistics are genuinely surprising.
Generating a single AI image uses the same energy as brushing your teeth twice a day with an electric toothbrush for over three months (TechRadar, 2025). One image. Not a batch. Not a day of prompting. Just a single image and most people using AI image tools aren't generating just one at a time. The carbon footprint of AI as a category is growing fast, and image generation is near the top of the cost curve.
Now let’s zoom out to the infrastructure holding all of this up.
A typical data centre consumes 3 to 5 million gallons of water every day (University of Michigan / Media Industries Journal, 2025). That's 190,000 to 315,000 showers, every single day, from a single facility (US EPA WaterSense). To put this into perspective, as you’re reading this there are thousands of data centres running right now.
A few more figures worth sitting with:
- Streaming: The top three platforms in 2024 combined produced enough CO₂ to fuel approximately 4.4 billion backyard BBQ sessions. Roughly 14 cookouts for every person in the United States (Greenly, 2025; US EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator).
- Email: One email with a large attachment produces roughly the same carbon as boiling a full kettle of water (Clever Carbon; Carbon Literacy Project / Mike Berners-Lee).
- Messaging: 150 billion WhatsApp messages are sent every day, generating an estimated 1.9 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. That's 4.7 billion cups of coffee worth of emissions, from messaging alone (Infobip; Greenspector, 2024; Project Drawdown).
None of this is meant to produce guilt about sending a message to your mom or watching your favorite Netflix comedy on a Friday night. The onus should not be on you as the user to reduce your usage, it should be on the companies behind your next binge watch or AI generated greeting card to build tech tools with sustainability in mind.
Why this doesn't get talked about
The environmental impact of technology is pervasive. It happens in server farms you'll never visit, undersea cables, and electricity grids running behind every search. It doesn't show up at a pump or a checkout line.
When you fill up your car, the cost is immediate and visible. You see the dollars, gallons, and if you’re curious you can even look up what that means in carbon emissions. Digital emissions don’t work like that. You type, you click, you scroll, and the cost lands somewhere else entirely.
That's why the internet's carbon footprint doesn't come up the way aviation or beef production does. It's not that people don't care about the impact of technology on the environment. It's that the research and digital carbon footprint statistics that exist rarely surface in any context that makes them feel real, relatable, or relevant to the person doing the browsing.
What making it visible can do
Visibility doesn't instantly fix the problem. But as with anything in life, nothing gets fixed without first being seen and acknowledged.
Since launching in July 2025, the Shift community has collectively offset 1,214 tonnes of CO₂ through the Carbon Meter. To make that concrete: it's equivalent to around 115,000 beef burgers, enough to serve every fan at a sold-out NFL stadium (Poore and Nemecek, Science, 2018; Project Drawdown). Those offsets go toward two verified North American climate projects, including the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project in British Columbia.
We offset 615 tonnes in Q1 2026. Here's what that means.
Every quarter, we measure the CO₂ generated by browsing in Shift and offset it. In Q1 2026, that number was 615 tonnes. Here's what we did with it and why the work is just getting started.
Read MoreBut we know the Carbon Meter alone can't solve what the internet has become. The scale of the problem is bigger than that and part of what led us to launch the 2026 Shift Impact Grant.
The grant exists to fund early-stage founders building companies that are challenging innovation with environmental impact at the forefront. This year's theme is reimagining, and we're looking for teams that are rethinking how technology and sustainability coexist, whether that's at the infrastructure level, the product level, or somewhere most people haven't thought to look yet.
We can measure what browsing costs and offset it but the work that actually bends the curve, gets done by people building solutions we don't have yet. The grant is how we’re putting resources behind that.
If you're building something in this space, applications are open. Apply for the 2026 Shift Impact Grant.
The 2026 Shift Impact Grant: $25,000 for climate action
Shift launches the 2026 Impact Grant: $25,000 USD for a nonprofit, social venture, or early-stage startup reimagining what's possible at the intersection of technology and climate action. Applications are open now through July 2, 2026.
Read MoreSources: TechRadar, 2025 | University of Michigan / Media Industries Journal, 2025 | US EPA WaterSense | Greenly, 2025 | US EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator | Clever Carbon | Carbon Literacy Project | Infobip | Greenspector, 2024 | Project Drawdown | Poore and Nemecek, Science, 2018
