If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference
Nobody made that claim
> 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go
It's a quarter of one's fair share per the philosophy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society
If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference