Bleeding edge research work should not be hindered by premature optimization concerns. Take quantization for example. Before people were able to train a model with the usual floating point precisions, nobody knew that INT8 or q4 quantization was feasible. (In fact, nobody would have a full precision model to compare performance with.)
Also, the idea that energy efficiency should be a top concern basically undermines the whole idea of developing new technology. It's obvious that if fancy things are to come out of the research, it's going to cost more energy to run than not running anything at all. That itself is an argument that if we don't want energy usage to keep ramping up, we should shut down ALL research that potentially give us new energy-depleting toys.
So, really, I'm personally not concerned with "one-off" resource usage if they advance human understanding of the state of the art. Since energy actually costs money, capitalist pressures will make people think of ways to save energy (and time). The moralistic arguments are just misguided in the big picture. IMHO it feels like luddites putting on the environmentalist hat here.
Instead of shaming machine learning researchers over their energy use, it's probably more effective from a energy use standpoint (for example) to ban "proof of work" schemes in cryptocurrency.