[meowface]

Sorry, maybe I worded my comment poorly. I'm not trying to say "why are you talking about Ethereum and not Bitcoin instead?", or something like that.

Here, it's a tiny bit like trying to link NFTs to racism because there's a certain subset of cryptocurrency enthusiasts who are Nazis. (And some do say this.) Not the best analogy, I know, but in this case Ethereum is commonly thought of as environmentally unfriendly basically due to guilt by association with Bitcoin.

Ethereum does have an excessive environmental impact, because proof of work is fundamentally environmentally unfriendly. But the point is it isn't a very big impact right now and probably won't ever be an impact because before it can reach that point there'll probably be a shift to an algorithm that reduces the energy cost to that of any other ordinary software. And even if it did pose such an impact right now, NFTs pose no direct marginal energy cost (though they do so indirectly by encouraging more use of the network, which raises the incentive to mine).

In my opinion, there are so many other good arguments against (most/nearly all) NFTs that when you pull this one out, it instantly causes the opposition to flag you as someone not worth listening to. Especially when it's couched in dramatic language, like that NFTs are "burning so much coal, causing cancer, and destroying the environment", as the previous commenter wrote.

[hiptobecubic]

"It's bad but it's fine because I'm sure that everyone will do something about it before it becomes a problem," isn't very satisfying.