A single day of AI video generation from OpenAI's Sora, before it shut down in March 2026, undid the equivalent of roughly 420,000 tree-years of carbon absorption. The company spent about $15 million a day to run Sora, with the compute cost of a single 10-second clip at roughly $1.30, yielding around 11.5 million 10-second clips generated per day at its peak. MIT Technology Review's research puts a 5-second AI video clip at roughly 1,000 watt-hours, and using a conservative estimate for a 10-second clip, generation volume alone consumed north of 23 million kilowatt-hours a day. At the US grid's average carbon intensity, that lands around 9,200 tonnes of CO2 in a single day. A mature tree absorbs roughly 22 kilograms of CO2 a year, equating to about 800 hectares of forest wiped off the annual carbon ledger by one day of one app. In contrast, Google disclosed in 2025 that a median Gemini text query uses about 0.24 watt-hours, and OpenAI cited around 0.34 watt-hours per query. MIT Technology Review found Stable Diffusion 3 Medium takes about 1,141 joules of GPU energy per 1024×1024 image. A 2024 HotCarbon study found that a six-second clip consumes four times the energy of a three-second one, with 3 to 10 attempts per usable clip due to