[betterunix2]

Your citation is full of errors and fallacies. More efficient mining rigs is basically irrelevant, because Bitcoin miners have no incentive to reduce energy consumption while computing the same number of hashes; it is to compute more hashes using the same amount of energy. So as long as you know the lowest possible energy-per-hash of all available mining hardware you can compute a lower bound on Bitcoin's energy utilization.

Then comes the claim that we do not have data on the energy consumed by mainstream finance, but in some cases we do and it really drives home the point about Bitcoin. Visa emitted over 1000 times less carbon in 2020 than Bitcoin, and processes over 1000 times more transactions per second (7 for Bitcoin versus 1700 for Visa). So Visa is at least a million times more energy efficient than Bitcoin as a transaction processing system.

Then the "pushback" claiming that it's really OK because Bitcoin mining can be switched on when energy is abundant, which could, maybe, possibly, subsidize the cost of renewables. Except there are alternatives that also could be switched on only when there is an energy surplus -- beginning with any energy-storage technology, of which there are many at different stages of development. Every joule devoted to Bitcoin is a joule not charging an electric car, and every dollar spent on Bitcoin is a dollar not spent developing better storage. There are also industrial processes that could be selectively turned on during periods of abundant energy, like electric arc furnaces widely used in steel mills (the ability to turn the furnace on and off as needed is one of the big advantages of electric arc furnaces over blast furnaces).

The outright denial that there even is a problem to solve is a classic example of people becoming religious about a technology. Fortunately better responses have been offered from the blockchain crowd, like pointing to PoS as a technical solution to the problem.