Youtube serves about 750 billion video's per year.
About 3000 billion minutes of video.
VP8 videocodec is less efficient than h.264.
Let's put the energy cost up for that say 0.05 Wh for the extra transport cost per minute of video and an extra 0.1 Wh for playing the video per minute*.
That would just mean that a descision for Google to move all of youtbue to WebM with the VP8 codec would cost a staggering 450 billion Wh extra energy compared to using the h.264 codec.
Not a very green choice by Google.
* actually I measured more than a 6W increase for playing a quality WeBM trough html5 in Firefox compared to playing the same video h.264 trough IE9. h.264 is much less demanding if a computer supports hardware decoding.
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