I don't like the general dismissal of environmental concerns around LLM use as "doom-mongering". There was some miscalculation or misunderstanding around data center water usage once, and now this keeps being used as a supposed knock-out argument. Water consumption, however big of an issue it may or may not be, is just one of maybe a hundred ways in which LLM proliferation is amoral and anti-environmental.

The same bugs me about cars. Suddenly, driving cars is cool and modern and unproblematic again, because the market is switching to electric engines. As if fossil fuel consumption was the only thing environmentally problematic about building and driving cars! It's not, not by a long shot.

The environmental impact of LLM use also has to be considered in light of the wasteful ways in which they're being employed in general. Sharing and reusing has gone out of fashion. Millions and millions of LLM-assisted programmers, for instance, or now re-inventing and re-implementing the same things, in the most inefficient way, because that's more profitable to the oligarchs than actually collaborating and building on each other's work.