The abstract of the first paper says "Remarkably, the choice of DNN, datacenter, and processor can reduce the carbon footprint up to ~100-1000X." If your aim is

The abstract of the first paper says "Remarkably, the choice of DNN, datacenter, and processor can reduce the carbon footprint up to ~100-1000X." If your aim is to optimize CO2 emissions you have a lot of variable at your disposal and the architecture of the network is just one of them. If the paper from the post indeed tried to evaluate and compare various kinds of optimization, then citing the CO2 emissions would be valid. But since it only discusses the improvements in the model itself, then it would be much more productive to just point to the reductions in the required memory, GPU/TPU-time etc. The readers can do the carbon math themselves depending on how carbon-neutral is their datacenter.