"We" in this case would be the broader collective society, but also more specifically the very leaders pushing the LLM industry forward.
Big tech companies have a long list of promises made over the last 5-10 years promising huge cuts in their environmental impact. Those same companies and their leaders largely abandoned those goals.
I didn't really have political leadership in mind when writing that comment, though they could be part of that "we" as well.
> The people driving AI investment will simply not be significantly affected by climate change. They don't care that hundreds of millions in the tropics will die, and that much of organised human activity will collapse, because up until the last possible moment they'll be insulated from the consequences.
We've spent 80 years globalizing economies in an effort to avoid another world war. We'll all be impacted by it if some of the climate predictions are accurate.
Edit: to add that many of the same leaders developing LLMs make claims that LLMs and AI (if we get there) may be our only hope for finding ways of reversing our environmental impact. Either they are making that up as a sales pitch or they do in fact fall into the "we" here of people that care deeply about our impact while simultaneously burning massive amounts of resources on the hope that LLMs may fix it for us.