You can run a model locally on your phone and it will answer most prompts without breaking a sweet, it's actually way less energy than googling and loading the content from a website that's hosted 24/7 just waiting for you to access the content.
Training a model is expensive, using it isn't.
So let me get this straight, instead of buying a $20k Chinese EV to meet a necessity of modern life, you should pay $60k for a worse car where all the money goes to shareholders and dealership markups so you can be on an even playing field?
We're not talking about buying the cheap throw away Chinese product instead of the built for life one, we're not talking about consumerism at all. We're talking about taking a 5+ year loan for something society forces you to own in most cities around the world, and making Elon rich isn't a better alternative than having $40k in your savings account.