I contend that squandering the work and infrastructure involved in converting natural resources into electricity is the main problem with modern consumer software development. Any user's (lack of) perception of waste is irrelevant. The scope of the problem is not any individual literally paying a couple dollars more on their electric bill, but rather it's that gigawatt hours are literally being burned away because software developers who know their code will be running on machines the world over can't be assed to spend a little more time learning to practice their craft correctly.

There is no broader point than converting natural resources into societal infrastructure. Be a responsible member of society. Don't obstinately ship wasteful code. I understand if you legitimately don't know any better, but if you're part of the community that's constantly writing blog posts about computers being so fast that its OK to burn the end users' CPU and storage just so you don't have to spend a couple more minutes thinking about what you're doing, you're adding harm to the world.