The music industry has a sudden interest in being very ESG. The public messaging on the “Music Climate Pact” seems to focus on all aspects of the music business EXCEPT streaming. Now why might that be? It may be because streaming is about the least ESG music and movie distribution method out there. Remember, ESG is a popular acronym that labels a company suitable for investing by people like BlackRock’s Larry Fink (who has been called out for investing heavily in the People’s Republic of China by none other than George Soros, which kind of says it all).

I thought this might be a good time to revisit the “data center lobbying” connection that we first posted about three years ago.

How much energy do Youtube videos use?

While they like the ESG label, they actually don’t look too hard at what they are applying the label to. A quick refresher–“E” stands for “Environment” which streaming fails for reasons we will discuss on the podcast and are discussed in the Minute Earth video above–especially true for YouTube and TikTok. “S” is for “Social” which company’s like Spotify fail miserably due to their exploitative royalty systems, multibillion dollar stock buybacks that only benefit insiders and income inequality. “G” is for “Governance”, and again companies like Spotify don’t get out of the gate on G because of their supervoting shares of stock that give Daniel Ek and his insider pal Martin Lorentzon 100% control over all Spotify governance decisions regardless of what Spotify’s replaceable board has to say or votes. And we haven’t even mentioned Tencent, the PRC surveillance company or Ek’s own investment in digital munitions.

So there’s that.

But–there’s also a connection in the US (and probably other countries) between the physical location of Big Tech data centers and political power. That’s called Senator Ron Wyden, who just happens to be on the wrong side of every copyright issue (including the unrealized capital gains tax that would crush songwriters and publishers who are selling their song catalogs).

It’s not just Ron Wyden–Senator Klobuchar has a data center connection, too, as does Senator Ben Sasse.

Be advised, then–when they start whinging about ESG, etc., for the music business, we should really be starting with streaming itself, and indeed, the entire Internet. And the political clout that goes with running that network of physical plant.

Greenpeace “Dirty Data” research. www.greenpeace.org/archive-interna…-greenpeace.pdf

Nature magazine sums it up (www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y):

“Upload your latest holiday photos to Facebook, and there’s a chance they’ll end up stored in Prineville, Oregon, a small town where the firm has built three giant data centres and is planning two more. [Hello, Senator Wyden.] Inside these vast factories, bigger than aircraft carriers, tens of thousands of circuit boards are racked row upon row, stretching down windowless halls so long that staff ride through the corridors on scooters.

These huge buildings are the treasuries of the new industrial kings: the information traders. The five biggest global companies by market capitalization this year are currently Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook, replacing titans such as Shell and ExxonMobil. Although information factories might not spew out black smoke or grind greasy cogs, they are not bereft of environmental impact. As demand for Internet and mobile-phone traffic skyrockets, the information industry could lead to an explosion in energy use.”

According to the National Resources Defense Council www.nrdc.org/resources/americas…ing-amounts-energy:

“Data centers are the backbone of the modern economy — from the server rooms that power small- to medium-sized organizations to the enterprise data centers that support American corporations and the server farms that run cloud computing services hosted by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others. However, the explosion of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffic is also making data centers one of the fastest-growing consumers of electricity in developed countries, and one of the key drivers in the construction of new power plants.

Google emits less than 8 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per day to serve an active Google user—defined as someone who performs 25 searches and watches 60 minutes of YouTube a day, has a Gmail account, and uses our other key services.”

In Google-speak “less than 8” usually means 7.9999999999. So let’s call it 8. As of 2016 there were 1 billion active gmail users. So rough justice, Google acknowledges that it emits about 8 billion grams of carbon dioxide daily, or 9,000 tons. And based on the characteristically tricky way Google framed the measurement, that doesn’t count the users who don’t have a gmail account, don’t use “our other key services” and may watch more than an hour a day of YouTube.