[zozin]

You could have made the same argument about the Internet itself 20 years ago (i.e., a speculative new technology that provides little evident utility while costing a lot in terms of energy usage). What about Amazon's 2-hr delivery? Do you really need a gas-guzzling vans delivering at all hours when the USPS will come to your door daily anyway? What about ride share? How many millions of people opted to ride alone in a gas-guzzling car vs taking a bus or the train?

Energy usage is highly correlated with economic development, trying to curtail energy usage is akin to economic suicide. What you should be advocating for is clean energy production, not consumption. You're headed down a precarious slope if you start policing how and on what people can use energy.

[sudosysgen]

Amazon is a net positive for energy in car dependent places. It's more energy efficient to drop something off than for someone to drive to the store to buy it. You can get significant economies of scale and those apply to energy usage.

Beyond that, we can and will eventually force Amazon to use EVs if they don't by themselves to save money, which is possible.

I'm all for strongly inducing people to use trains, buses, ebikes, and the like.

We can advocate for clean energy, and we should. But advocating against zero-sum energy usage is perfectly fine and completely consistent with good economic policy.

The internet never used all that much energy. The computers were there anyways, and when it was in its speculative stage it was piggy-backing off the telephone network for most of the actual transmission. It was never even close to a power hog until it became very evident how useful it was.