not to an extent that really matters to a home user. let's say you actually let your cpu draw 250W 24/7. average US consumer electricity rate is ~$0.13/kWh. that would add ~$23 to your monthly electricity bill. certainly a lot for a single component, but not likely to matter to the sort of person who would buy a high end cpu in the first place. if you could get the same performance using 100W, you would only save about $14 each month. and of course most people don't max out their cpu 24/7, so the actual savings would be even less.

Household of three, my electric bill is $50-75mo. So… that seems like a huge jump as percentage.

Plus I don’t HAVE to be a hypocrite. If I say I care about climate, pollution, energy, I can chose to run a more efficient processor like a Ryzen or an M1.

Their estimate would require stress testing it every second of every day. Even if you game 4 hours every day (which would be a lot imo if you have a 9-5 job), you're looking at peak usage of 150-200W (most games won't utilize 20 threads), which using OPs costs numbers comes out to $3/month.

Fwiw I pay extra to get my electricity from wind and ride my bike ~25 miles round trip anytime I commute to work or the gym, which alone saves me over $3 and prevents ~20 lbs of CO2 per trip.

But it's not like what we do on an individual level really matters anyway. :/ The idea of a "carbon footprint" was BPs clever way of shifting climate responsibility from corporations to the consumers. I at least hope every little bit we do does help.