Saving humanity vs. saving the planet

I’ve downloaded a program for my work computer called Folding@Home. The idea behind it is that all the computing power I have (which goes unused while I create spreadsheets and so on) can be put to use in the name of science. The program runs in the background, analyzes proteins, and sends the results back to a central server at Stanford to help some researches learn more about bad diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and others.

Here's a screenshot of the protein analysis in action. Like, cool.

Running the program, even in the background, uses energy of course. A bunch. My battery drains at least twice as fast and the laptop's little fan has to run constantly (rather than intermittently). So in the process of contributing to science, I'm burning extra power. Of course progress has a cost, but where's the trade-off?