Fundamentally, consumers and producers are at odds with each other in certain ways. For instance, it's best for customers if every shop was open 24x7, but absolutely horrible for the employees needed to make that happen.
Walmart is the extreme end of satisfying consumers above all else. Customers get a single, climate-controlled location to take care of nearly all their shopping, with good prices; but it comes at the expense of the employees, local community, and factory workers. Unfortunately, most customers don't know or care about those downsides because the experience is catered so heavily for them, and it's hard to get people to sacrifice material comfort for benefits that appear so abstract.
I think the idea is to improve the sustainability of a city by reducing people's need to travel by car, which uses energy, and to improve its livability by ensuring easy access to most (or all) of life's amenities.
That doesn't mean it should be impossible to travel beyond the 15-minute limit. Other forms of long-form transit, like trains and cars, will always have a place, but not everyone thinks that they should be required to simply live.
True, but it's way easier to add centralization to a system that is decentralized by nature than it is to somehow decentralize something that is centralized by nature.
To what? What level of consumption will make all these problems disappear? Going back to pre-industruial lifestyles is arguably worse for the average person than climate change is.
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).
Walmart is the extreme end of satisfying consumers above all else. Customers get a single, climate-controlled location to take care of nearly all their shopping, with good prices; but it comes at the expense of the employees, local community, and factory workers. Unfortunately, most customers don't know or care about those downsides because the experience is catered so heavily for them, and it's hard to get people to sacrifice material comfort for benefits that appear so abstract.