Environment

FUD. Notice how these articles never give numbers in context? How much energy do remittance services like Western Union or Fedwire use? Most of Bitcoin's energy comes from renewables since miners chase the cheapest power and that tends to be over-provisioned electricity. Bitcoin can be a part of the green revolution by insuring for grid operators that there will always be a buyer for over-provisioned grids based on renewables. They must be over-provisioned to meet the demand curves. People want energy at specific times, nature doesn't generate energy according to that schedule. If your grid is 100% renewables, most of the time most of that generation has no demand waiting for it. If there's nobody to buy the energy, customers have to make up the cost difference during the time periods they do buy electricity, making renewables more expensive for end customers. Miners solve this.

Another thing to understand about Bitcoin's energy use is that it doesn't scale the way you think. You can't just take a number like "total number of transactions" which is pretty fuzzy to begin with for many reasons and divide it over total energy usage for mining. Bitcoin scales in layers. What you are seeing is energy use for the base chain. A single transaction on the base chain can open a lightning channel which can process billions of transactions. Those additional transactions don't go on chain, they don't require additional mining. Many of them also don't show up in that fuzzy number above. The energy use for those can be as low as two raspberry pis or as high as an entire network of computers depending on where the transactions are going to and from. Routing lightning network transactions is about as energy intensive as e-mail. Those second and third-order scaling solutions are just now becoming commonplace.

For more information about Bitcoin's energy use, https://endthefud.org/ has some great info