I hate Elon maybe even more than the next guy, but there are some major exaggerations here:

Starlink makes tons of maneuvers to avoid collisions: https://www.space.com/starlink-satellite-conjunction-increase-threatens-space-sustainability

Starlink is at an orbit that they are quickly returning to Earth and burning up on re-entry: https://cybernews.com/news/starlink-lost-200-satellites/

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.

It's like giving billionaires access to do reckless shit that can literally impact humanity's future may be problematic.

Wow

I'd like you all to consider that places where you'd use starlink are also significantly more than 30x farther away from civilization than the average land-based internet user.

So I don't really like the idea of defending anything related to Musk, but it's kind of poor form to compare emissions between Starlink and land-based internet imo. Although they are the same product, they are targeted at completely different users, from what I understand.

Starlink should always be a more expensive and slower technology just because of communication distance, so it shouldnt really be able to compete with land-based solutions (except where telecom is reeeeeally fucking people on price). Starlink is really meant more for edge-cases where telecorps refuse to build infrastructure.

Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it's competing with by providing service to the underserved. It's a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)

I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don't have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for

Okay then how come the internet isn't wired up globally. 2023 and there are still places without

Seems like we can't go a week between inaccurate posts complaining about Starlink getting traction

I'm actually surprised internet takes 3% the amount of energy it takes to get to space just to run some internet wires. I'd have thought it would be much much lower than that.

But also, starlink completes with geostationary satellite and home cellular connection more than internet over wires. Or even people who didn't have an option before.

It looks like the study they linked only addresses the CO2 produced by the satellites, and not the land based providers.

Another interesting thing is that OneWeb and Kuiper (competing satellite internet services) are estimated to have significantly more per-user emissions than Starlink (40-200% more emissions!) (keep in mind that Starlink is predicted to have the most users) while also being estimated to provide a worse service and be more expensive per user. (all taken from the charts on page 6)

They also mention that Starship will likely lower carbon emissions of later Starlink launches significantly.

I'm not quite sure how the much larger Starlink V2 design factors in to all of this, or if they even took it into account.

In order to do what Starlink does, it would take laying millions of miles of cable or hundreds of thousands of cell towers. People need Internet options with better than a couple of Mb of bandwidth, and without draconian usage caps of a few tens of gigabytes. Without space-based systems, it's economically unfeasible to service large areas with few customers. What do you think the carbon footprint of laying cable to a few remote islands is? Who is going to pay for that boondoggle? Starlink makes it economically possible.

You know, I would think a progressive community would want to expand internet access to all (which is what Starlink does), so I’m kinda surprised there’s resistance every time it’s brought up.

They just don't care. If they could earn a trillion knowing that the gain would destroy the planet in 10 years, they would. They're out of control, and the states on their knees to beg their money.