The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
You’d have to prompt ChatGPT 3,600 times to release as much CO₂ as running a clothes dryer for an hour.
You’d have to prompt Google Gemini 1,500,000 times to consume as much water as a single hamburger.
In a recent op-ed, Gabby Styris ’28 argues against the call by Jorge Reyes ’28 for the University to provide a free ChatGPT Plus subscription to all students. Even as a Plus subscriber, I agree with Styris: this would not be a great use of University money, given recent budget cuts. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs only $80 per semester. My University financial aid calculations assume I’m spending $4,050 a year on “Books, Course Materials, Supplies, & Equipment.” Unless you’re spending more than $3,890 a year on coursebooks, existing financial aid is generous enough to factor in ChatGPT.
But Styris’ claim that “elevating [ChatGPT’s] role on campus is incredibly environmentally irresponsible” is wildly inaccurate.
Styris links to an article that claims ChatGPT uses 39.98 million kWh of electricity per day, and 39.16 million gallons of water per day. These sound like huge numbers, but compared to other consumer goods, they are actually pretty tame.
Take streaming video. Multiply the hours per day spent on YouTube by the kWh per hour electricity usage of streaming video, and you find that YouTube uses 120 million kWh per day — more than three times the current energy consumption of ChatGPT. A similar calculation using Netflix’s hours per day shows ChatGPT is roughly comparable to Netflix. If you don’t have a problem with your friends bingeing “Love is Blind,” you shouldn’t have a problem with them using ChatGPT.
Water usage tells an even more dramatic story. American golf courses use ~2,000 million gallons per day, about 50 times more than ChatGPT. Livestock uses ~200,000 million gallons/day, about five thousand times more than ChatGPT. If you don’t have a problem with your friends eating meat or playing golf, you shouldn’t have a problem with them using ChatGPT.
Even this one-to-one comparison to consumption goods might be unfair to ChatGPT, which is obviously a much more useful tool for research and education than Netflix and golf. Even for those in the humanities and social sciences, the advanced GPT-5 thinking modes available with a ChatGPT Plus subscription can fact-check citations and claims with great speed and detail — even autonomously catching an overlooked error about grant sources in Styris’ original article, which The Daily Princetonian has since corrected.
Short-term environmental costs need to be weighed against their long-term benefits. If AI tools can help accelerate Princeton’s educational and research missions, which include programs in climate science and policy, it is not out of the question that ChatGPT usage at Princeton could have a net positive impact on the environment.
Some environmentalists may argue that the numbers don’t really matter. Clearly ChatGPT is using water and energy, and climate change is really bad, so doesn’t advocating against ChatGPT help the environmental movement anyways?
No: In fact, it harms environmentalism. Every thinkpiece fretting over chatbot prompts is a distraction from the coal and meat industries. Persuading a single friend to eat one fewer hamburger will do orders of magnitude more good than eliminating all their college AI use. Scientifically illiterate complaining makes one into a “boy who cried wolf,” damaging the credibility of the movement and letting the real culprits get off scot-free.
It is because of the reality of climate change, not in spite of it, that we have a duty to the facts. And the fact of the matter is that ChatGPT isn’t nearly the environmental catastrophe that some make it out to be.
Jack Thompson ’27 is a computer science major from East Montpelier, Vt. He researches digital sentience and can be reached at jackthompson[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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