You know what else takes far less energy than training a single model? One query. Yet, you argue that it's the main contributor to the energy consumption. Why is that? It's because there's a very high volume of them, thus bringing up the total energy consumption. At the end of the day, it's this total energy consumption that matters, not the cost of doing it once. Look at the total energy expenditure of training, not just the cost of doing it once.

So, it's kind of weird t0 single AI energy use out here as some form of exceptional evil.

We're talking about AI here because that's the topic of this thread. I've never seen anyone say that it's the only problem worth addressing. Plus, if you want to compare energy usage of ads (or anything else) compared to AI, you would first need to know how much energy AI is actually using.