[paulgb]

It’s not just that it’s new, but that it is wasteful by design. If you were to create a miner with 2x efficiency and make it generally available, the mining market would not have an incentive to halve their energy use, they would just double the hashrate.

In other industries carbon emissions are an issue too, but at least there are people trying to bring energy use down with technology. Bitcoin’s difficulty mechanism nullifies any such attempts.

[TeMPOraL]

Exactly. Bitcoin advocates like to point at the fiat economy and ask, "but what about the banks and the offices and the ATMs and the security vans, ...?". Yes, added up, they use more energy than Bitcoin (looking at the trends, probably not for long). But the core difference is that for fiat economy, energy use is upkeep. It's the cost they want to minimize, because it eats into margins. They have every incentive to make all operations as energy efficient as possible. Bitcoin, on the other hand, structurally relies on ever growing energy waste.