Starlink - lemm.ee

link to toot [https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/111197599097090013] link to article [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2394949-starlink-carbon-footprint-up-to-30-times-size-of-land-based-internet/]

Spoiler: It’s 0.1 tonnes of CO2e per subscriber per year. This is not mentioned in the article.

This includes for example the emissions generated in the course of constructing the rockets that launch the satellites. So far it’s unclear to me whether, when comparing to terrestrial telecom, they include e.g. the emissions produced when manufacturing the trucks that deploy the infrastructure.

They almost certainly do not. Embodied energy is conveniently ignored 99% of the time because a) awareness of how much carbon goes into everything could result in consumers consuming less — couldn’t possibly do the almighty economy dirty like that — and b) it’s extremely difficult to calculate with any reasonable degree of accuracy.