The Infrastructure Argument That AI's Critics Keep Missing

The AI environmental argument has two sides that are not actually arguing about the same thing. Critics anchor their claims to data center footprints — water, land, power draw — while defenders anchor theirs to per-query energy use, which is genuinely small. One Bluesky user captured the structure of the impasse: 'Feeling guilty over a 0.3 Wh query is about as useful as holding your breath to fight climate change' — a point the honest climate case for AI develops at length by distinguishing individual use from aggregate demand growth.…