[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.