On a different eon that might be true but nowadays compute power - electricity - global warming. Given that, “frivolous” work that just burns energy could be potentially postponed until we go fully renewable in our energy stack.
There seem to be many frivolous uses of power to complain about when you get to this level of power use.
GIMPS' ~1PetaFLOPS[1] uses no more than a megawatt [2].
That's about 10 Gigawatt-hours (GWh) over a year [3].
The average US house uses about 10 MWh in a year [4] so GIMPS = the electrical power use of ~1,000 households. Portland reduced their power consumption by 20 GWh by switching their street lights to LEDs[5].
The electrical consumption for Superbowl parties is an estimated 75 GWh [6]. (I think Superbowl parties are far more frivolous.)
