[pcthrowaway]

Until last year, the Ethereum network used about as much energy as the Philippines (#33 on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...)

Through the coordination of hundreds software engineers over the course of roughly 7 years, they made fundamental changes to the consensus protocol, such that it now falls somewhere at the very end of that list.

Now of course, software engineers also caused the problem in the first place, so make of that what you will