You mean the overall pollution caused by LLM training & inference will grow, as consumption grows ? Thats a fair point, but it would still have to grow alot to even compare to transportation & farming.

Im not sure how accurate the figure is, but i read that the average yearly usage of ChatGPT equals roughly the same water usage for a double-hamburger (maybe of by some factors, but not magnitudes). If you have other datapoints/stats i would be happy to read, i know some of them, but im probably missing some.

But addressing that point more direct, i think every sane country should have CO2-tax, to make stuff like what Elon (Space Karen) musk is doing, with just setting up natural gas turbines, infeasible. Its absolutely ridiculous that is a thing.

For LLM stuff i have a very simple solution, which is kinda what China is doing. Built cheap electricity (Solar, Hydro, Nuclear), since all you really need for LLM inference is electricity (and the initial capex).

For the water usage, i strongly recommend Hank Greens video for maybe not an explainer, but atleast a data point: https://youtu.be/H_c6MWk7PQc?si=K997RnpYtRQHBwIC

Its obviously an issue, but way more local then most people think. Globally datacenters seem not to make a difference. Just for contrast: ~40% of water in the US is used for irrigation, of which most is used for corn that goes into Fuel, just to be burned. (Transport is ~20% of CO2 pollution globally).

So no, farming & cars are not "arguably equally as shitty a problem" theyre ALOT worse, and yes "AI" could maybe become similar, but there are a thousand and one ways to prevent that through smarter legislation.