Last March, our VP of Engineering asked me a deceptively simple question during our quarterly review: "How much CO2 does our AI platform emit?" I had no idea. We'd been obsessing over token costs — tracking every cent spent on OpenAI and Anthropic — but we'd never connected those tokens to their environmental impact.We were processing 42 million tokens daily. The finance team knew exactly what that cost in dollars: $127K monthly. But carbon? Nobody had asked.