[dradtke]

One of the big points Bill Gates makes in his recent book on climate change is that once the genie is out of the bottle in terms of lifestyle, there's no going back. It's naive to expect people to willingly reduce their energy use enough to make an impact, and immoral when you consider all the people in poor villages that don't even have electricity yet.

The solution is, in a nutshell, to electrify everything, and push to make electricity clean and plentiful. Anything else is doomed to fail because we can't beat climate change by reducing our carbon footprint; we have to eliminate it entirely.

From that perspective, cloud energy usage is not a problem, since it's already electrified by nature. Now we just need to stop emitting carbon in order to make electricity (among other things).