I think the claim is more about people's consistency in their choice. "If you care so much, start to [insert any environmental friendly acivity] and then we can discuss about LLM environmental impact".

Which is stupid.

I think he's saying that eating beef in particular is a tremendous amount of CO2 emissions (comparable to driving). Eating other meats has a much lower impact. Not eating meat is even much lower.

So one question: No one probably benefits much from beef (vs, say, chicken). So if I were to recast the parent: If you're concerned about energy usage from LLMs, you'll have a larger impact if you stop eating beef (with little impact to your health).

Of course it doesn’t exactly equal it. Meat takes thousands of times more.