So I work at a startup in sustainability/environmental finance, and lately I've been getting absolutely bombarded with questions about AI's carbon footprint. Like, every client meeting someone brings it up. Andy Masley's substack does a really good job of breaking it down, but I think this is a more-tech heavy audience. I ended up doing my own research which confirms Andy's findings, and then spent way too much time building a calculator that breaks down energy usage across different AI tasks with my client tasks specifically. Don't get me wrong - data centres absolutely use significant energy and water. That's real. But when you break it down per query or per user interaction, it's almost trivially small. My annual use is like running the oven for 4.2 hours and having a 5 minute shower. I think the issue is that "AI uses X amount of water/energy" sounds MASSIVE in headlines, but those headlines never contextualise on a personal usage basis. Anyway, I'm not saying there's zero impact or that we shouldn't push for greener data centres. Just that the personal guilt angle feels misplaced when there are way bigger levers to pull on climate. Are other AI people also getting questions about environmental impact? What's your answer?