The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one.
Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.
Since we aren’t using those it is in fact a climate disaster currently and they know that.
Assuming you want to ground your argument in our reality.