[cosarara97]

Bitcoin's energy use will tend to raise to match the mining profits. As long as both BTC's price and transaction fees keep raising, the energy miners spend will continue to raise. BTC's price is going up due to speculation, and transaction fees due to blocks being full.

[spiznnx]

Even at current levels, BTC's built in block rewards dominate tx fees (12.50BTC built in + 1.38 tx fees). The 12.5 built in reward is essentially a subsidy for mining.

[westurner]

The block reward is an incentive for redundant distributed replica nodes.