Bitcoin's energy use can't balloon arbitrarily large. It's tightly constrained by the miner reward, which is getting cut in half every four years (the non fee part, which is currently less than 2% of the total reward).
Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.
reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.
You're right. The real constraint is the miner reward priced in the various currencies electricity producers want, which has gone up tremendously even with inflation rate halvings.
But bitcoin is currently about a $1 trillion asset class, and growth of it's price has been slowly logarithmically for years. Most bullish cases suggest an eventual value of $10 trillion (in line with gold) to $100 trillion (in line with global bond market). But it's likely going to take decades (with several halving cycles) to get there.
Unless you're suggesting that it's likely to balloon in value even more and/or fast than that, I don't see mining ever becoming the biggest problem we have to deal with. Especially since bitcoin holders don't see PoW mining as a liability, but as a mission critical feature of the system.
Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.