Ok, let’s look at your own words then:

I heard a large AI model is equivalent to the emissions from five cars over its lifetime.

Cool, I hear lots of things. Where’s the evidence?

So, absent of AI, it’s not like we’re up in arms about the waste and usage from other technologies. AI is being singled out—it’s the star of the show right now.

Who is we? I am not happy about any of it, but especially when it is something not especially useful (you could have used spelling and grammar checkers that have predated AI by many years but you decided to waste water).

And I don’t really care about the potential of an orphan-crushing machine as long as we let it keep crushing orphans.

I love this last part the best though:

Sure, it consumes energy and has costs

We can just forget about these because you didn’t want to use standard grammar and spellcheckers and they have the potential to do a bunch of things they can’t do. Awesome. Totally worth the end of civilization.