The view count for “Gangnam Style” crossed 2 billion in May 2014. I mean no offense to Psy, YouTube, or the year 2012 when I say this event has bothered me. It took me a while to understand why, but I think I’ve got it.

View counts, follower counts, Facebook likes, and so on suggest common interests between different groups and individuals, for better or for worse. Like most online activities, watching videos seems like a harmless thing to do, whether alone or with friends. However, discussions about any social activity change once the percentage of humanity involved reaches double digits. In the case of “Gangnam Style”, even if only 40 percent of its 2.035 billion views came from one-time users instead of repeats, that would mean about 12 percent of humanity has shared the experience. At this point, much can be written about the record without mentioning the video itself.

Due to the laws of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, no technology can exist or be used without creating risk. Therefore, records of mass Internet activities like view counts for videos, follower counts for celebrities on Twitter, and so on imply negative externalities that go mostly unacknowledged. Otherwise, simple actions like watching videos, clicking “Follow” or “Like”, checking email, or running keyword searches would be more difficult, either physically or morally. Somewhere along the chain of events required to make the Internet possible, the risks of using the technology are being shifted elsewhere.

The existence of the Internet creates risks that most of us never notice. Where do they go?

According to sociologist Ulrich Beck, risk refers to the distribution of bads among a group of people, which are invariably produced alongside goods. There are, of course, many types of bads that can be associated with Internet use, both real and imagined. Instead of social or psychological effects, I would like to address the physical risks of Internet use. In other words, if no technology is free, then the resources to maintain it must come from somewhere, and the resulting bads must be minimized or disposed. In a physical context, that place is our global, biophysical environment.

With all of this in mind, I created a spreadsheet to estimate the natural resources consumed during “Gangnam Style’s” 2.035 billion views. I should emphasize that the estimates in this article are nowhere near precise, and that there are portions of my methodology that could (and perhaps should) be improved. That said, I wanted to analyze to the best of my knowledge how natural resources made the reigning, most watched video of all time possible. My results are presented below.

There’s a lot to explain here, so I will summarize my methods. In addition, my calculations are available for anyone to download and use with other videos.

I wanted to determine the electricity required to create 2.035 billion views, with the goal of converting that to natural resources. Not all devices consume electricity at the same rate, so I calculated the average rates used by the most frequent devices and their shares of total use. I will concede that I used Google to identify many rates and statistics, and that the coincidence of my Internet use and the premise of this article was not lost on me.

A major issue was that I did not know how YouTube defined a view, so I was left to speculate on my own. It was, however, safe to assume that YouTube’s viewers do not watch every video to completion. Using details I gleaned from a YouTube help section, “View Reports”, I guessed that a view count could be divided equally into 40 percent watched, 70 percent, and 100 percent, with 70 percent being the mean to qualify as a view. From there, I multiplied the numbers to get the estimate of total kilowatt-hours (kWh) that all devices might have consumed while watching “Gangnam Style”.

I then found percentages for natural resources used for the global supply of electricity, as well as the amount of each needed to generate 1 kWh, and converted the total kWh into raw materials by percentage. For example, coal is used to generate about 41 percent of electricity worldwide, and requires a little over 1 lb. to generate 1 kWh. In the “Gangnam Style” infographic above, 1,850 tons of coal represents 41 percent of 17.6 gigawatt-hours (or 17.6 million kWh).

I also calculated the carbon dioxide produced while consuming these resources. To do so, I multiplied each resource by CO2 produced per kWh.

The electricity consumed by “Gangnam Style’s” 2.035 billion views created 5,000 tons of CO2, which have since dispersed into our biophysical environment.

While perusing YouTube’s website for information, I noticed that YouTube serves over 6 billion hours of video to its users each month. I utilized similar calculations below to reduce that number into resources spent.

Most of the methods for the “6 billion hours” infographic remained unchanged from the “Gangnam Style” infographic, except that I removed the calculations dividing views into 40, 70, and 100 percent watched. Those calculations were unnecessary in this instance, since YouTube provided a trustworthy statistic for time.

Multiplying the estimates in the “6 billion hours” infographic by 12 suggests that annual effects of YouTube views on our biophysical environment are even more daunting.

Assuming these estimates are at least somewhat valid, people burn about 3.4 terawatt-hours of electricity a year while watching YouTube videos.

To be clear, three TWh barely qualifies as a sliver of global electricity consumption per year, but it is indicative of larger risks. My estimates only consider large groups of people that watch YouTube videos, meaning that all computers and the Internet as a whole demand far more resources than are revealed here. In that vein, Pavel Somavat and Vinod Namboodiri have estimated that about 6 percent of global electricity consumption can be attributed to computers and the Internet. While 6 percent is a small share, they calculate that computer and Internet use are responsible for about 630 million tons of CO2 production each year, which is equivalent to about 10.3 million cars driving 10,000 miles on 21 miles per gallon of fuel.

Given all of this information, my curiosity over a silly online video revealed a narrative that I was not expecting. I have been on the Internet for half of my life, and I have taken the planet’s role in supporting the technology for granted. I also realize that the presence of the Internet conceals a series of risks that are inherent to our consumption of energy, namely the depletion of resources and the production of CO2, and that these risks will intensify unless significant innovations are made in our energy delivery systems. Until that happens, I suppose I will be grateful for the medium, and I will appreciate every dumb video that I click a little bit more.