I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to do something on a million client machines which could have been done once on the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge waste of cycles.
Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype contributed to my viewpoint).
I'm going to agree, but sometimes it's a tough question what action is more environmentally conscious. While you could cache some value on a server to reduce the energy consumption of compute, requests to the server for the cached data will drive up the energy consumption of the network.
