Perhaps the author was quoting a statistic that includes electricity requirements of the datacenters and infrastructure to power the phone. Perhaps not, but that would be an interesting statistic.
Yes that must be what the statistic represents since it emphasises data heavy users.
It would be interesting to do some back if the envelope calculations based on energy usage of Google and Facebook datacenters, percentage of content consumed on phones and data consumed by average vs heavy users.
It would be interesting to do some back if the envelope calculations based on energy usage of Google and Facebook datacenters, percentage of content consumed on phones and data consumed by average vs heavy users.