Of course you as a person don't use a vast amount of energy, but in aggregate all AI usage does. You have to look at the impact at the macro scale; talking about per-person usage in this instance is absurd.
Here's the hard truth.
Old economy: 20 white collar workers drive their SUVs 30-60 mins in traffic into an office building that needs to be heated and cooled 24/7, then drive home.
New AI economy: 1 guy works from home and agents in a data center do the work, using up 1/1000th the amount of energy.
If you actually cared about carbon emissions you'd be screaming that we should run toward the new AI-based economy.
Anyone saying otherwise is not a serious person. Now, of course you can complain about AI ruining in person socialization around the water cooler. That is real.
But energy (or water) usage as a complaint is not only wrong and counter-productive to the thing you claim to care about, but its also insincere virtue signaling to mask what is fundamentally just fear of a new technology.
I can assure you they won't be going on 1.5 hr long car rides everyday to nowhere.
Again, whether this is good or bad is certainly up for debate. But if the thing you claim to be worried about is "carbon emissions" then this is objectively a good thing for that particular concern.
However Jevons paradox will no doubt kick in, meaning as we get more efficient at consuming resources we will find ways to use more of it. So energy usage on a whole will continue to trend upwards because of technological advancements. So we need more power plants, ideally the clean kind
They're just lost in the sauce of the current DC fear campaign, which the media is happily tugging along for all those juicy ad views.
Not sure if you're aware, Zoom and Google meet are powered by data centers.
Whatever semantic bucket you want to place certain tech products under, it all runs on data centers, hence this doesn't negate the point.