I can do things at least 10 times as fast as coding myself now. I'm pretty sure the environmental impact is, frankly, a reduction. My home computer (and feeding myself) for 10 times the time is more than I'm burning in a data center using an LLM.
I often see comments on the ethics and water/energy consumption of AI, but very few for non-vegan* developers boiling water for their coffees in air conditioned offices that require a commute, which I assume is a common default.
*blue-water usage of a burger patty is worth looking up, I was astonished
I don't know about the US but in France (or Europe) the environmental impact of air conditioning, car driving and meat consumption is well understood by most educated people.
Also, the environmental impact might be small if we run a small number of inference queries every day, but that impact will grow linearly with the number of queries and agents we run.