As well as writing this column, I help out with The Resident’s podcast, featuring Natasha Donn and other writers on the…

As well as writing this column, I help out with The Resident’s podcast, featuring Natasha Donn and other writers on the news, plus interviews with Portugal-loving movers and shapers. It’s in uploading these to YouTube that the bombshell hit me.

Before I share it, I’ll say my journey began faking radio commentary into a hairbrush as a child. That gave way to a real microphone on pirate radio in 80’s Yorkshire, where I crafted my first breakfast show. Community radio in Totnes and Exeter followed, then The Barefoot Broadcast, paving the way for podcasting.

Eventually, in Portugal, I started Good Morning Portugal!, which became a YouTube livestream for the pandemic moment – taking me from the hairbrush to these days of YouTube, where anyone can be a radio-killing video star.

It’s this everyone-has-a-podcast or “I want to be YouTuber” phenomenon I want to talk about, shockingly, but from an environmental perspective. Recently, pausing my own livestream to build an internet radio station, I got thinking about the essence of ‘radio’. Then, last week, it hit me: more people are using YouTube to ‘listen’ without watching the ‘pictures’. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Video, mostly YouTube now, has not killed the radio star. It’s made millions more radio stars, all like me inflicting tastes and opinions on others, sometimes making a living from their bedroom. The Buggles were wrong. We’ve reached peak podcast, listeners spoilt for choice, now using video to deliver radio-style wares.

Think about it: are you one of the growing number who fire up YouTube just to listen to your favourite experts and commentators, while doing something else – working, driving, cooking? Convenience won again. There might well be Google engineers weeping at enthusiasts using their carefully-constructed marvel like a fancy ‘hairbrush’ connected to the whole internet!

Considering this, I’ve pondered the ecological absurdity it creates. With all the noise about how much energy AI and data centres eat, it may shock you how much ‘listening to YouTube’ costs the planet. The Carbon Trust puts an hour of video streaming at roughly 55 grams of CO2; a Texas data centre firm landed on 42 grams for an hour of Netflix or YouTube. Compare that with Spotify’s footprint, just over 1 gram of CO2 per hour.

Using YouTube for podcasting in the old-fashioned ‘radio’ sense is 40 to 50 times more carbon intensive, when what’s streamed as video doesn’t need to be video at all. Take Joe Rogan: roughly 11 million listeners per episode, for a two-and-a-half-hour show. A big chunk are on YouTube, mainly looking at two men talking, or not looking at all, phone face-down on the counter-top.

Say a third of those 11 million stream video instead of audio – roughly 3.7 million people, watching 2.65 hours, that’s about 9.7 million video-hours through data centres at video bitrates rather than audio. At 50 grams an hour, that’s around 480 metric tonnes of CO2 for one episode; the audio equivalent would be under 10 tonnes. Run that gap across three or four episodes a week for a decade, and it’s a genuine footprint – not because Rogan did anything wrong, but because the format defaulted to video for two people talking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against video. But let’s leave it to the visual artists who revel in what the eyes can see. Radio stars and sound designers don’t need an energy-wasting video wrapper around their work.

I maintain we have an enduring relationship with radio, because we all started life listening to Womb FM and our mothers’ heartbeats, long before our eyes opened and shiny things and quick edits captured our attention. And now, years later, watching YouTube – maybe because the speed of light is faster than sound – there’s often literally ‘nothing to see here’.

Video didn’t kill the radio star. It just created an expensive way of getting it to more people. If you’re lucky, you have two eyes, two ears AND two hands that the medium of radio will allow you to use positively, if you’re not hypnotised and chair-bound by unnecessary visuals.

With radio, you have nothing to lose but your chains (to a screen!).

Read Carl Munson’s previous article: Returning from Portugal? UK rules ban some popular food souvenirs