yes, but also, while the carbon footprint does shift blame on the consumer and some of that blame might be undeserved, most of it is. We in the Western World, in the USA and Europe, have a very intense consumer culture. Take for example, clothes. The clothing industry is responsible for 10 % of global CO2 emissions, in comparison all aviation is about 2 %. And the clothing industry is mostly situated in Asia, so not part of the graph above, but the incentive to produce fast fashion is purely driven by consumers, with new fashion trends all of the time, with fashion influencers and so on. And the craziest part, an awful lot of clothes are thrown away, a lot because it isn't even sold, but also a lot that is never worn by customers or only worn a few times. So it is not only a carbon footprint problem, but an overall waste problem and one that consumer habits helped create.
The same can be said for ai technology. People use it without thinking about the environmental impact. Since they don't have to pay for it (yet) and since they definitely don't have to pay for the environmental impact, people just use it, creating a demand for a technology, creating with their usage the statistics that those companies use to get more money to built more data center.
Will fast fashion or ai totally stop if consumers stop using it? Maybe not, but if it becomes economically not profitable to produce a product, because the demand is too low, then production will change. Of course that is only one part, we also need activism, to demand regulation, for example a tax on unsold clothes, so that companies get an incentive to stop overproduction, or regulations that data centers for ai need to be run on renewable energy and need to recycle their cooling water.
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