The conclusion of the article: "Yep, this whole piece was a long and ridiculously in depth way of marketing our new single. Elon Musk made electric cars sexy. I made you feel bad about not downloading our new song… whatever works!"
So, it was an earth-day themed advertisement for the band, without any indication from Rolling Stone about the "sponsored content."
It's pretty easy to gin up fluff like this, and it is common for earth day. You can guesstimate or just invent a carbon footprint for anything and then do some sanctimonious finger wagging about how people should do this or that differently. This is just clickbait. Agriculture, Industry, and Transportation dominate CO2 emissions. The entire 70,000 tons of CO2 emissions that Spotify attributes to its streaming of music is equivalent to the emissions of 11 people commuting by car to work each year.
So, an individual user of a streaming service could work from home for a day and easily save the supposed CO2 emissions from streaming.
