I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:

1. I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
2. A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.

So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.

The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.

This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.

These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.

That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.

The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.

You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.

The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.