What's usually missing from these conversations is that the moment clean energy becomes cheaper than fossils, bitcoin miners will instantly switch to it. So yeah it's bad right now, but the problem will likely resolve itself (unlike in many other industries where there is significantly higher friction in switching to clean energy).
Clean energy capacity consumed by Bitcoin is clean energy capacity that can’t be used to take fossil fuel plants offline.
No matter how you look at it, Bitcoin’s energy usage is additive.
And no, there isn’t much barrier for other industries to switch to clean energy. They use the same power grid as everyone else. In fact, it would be ridiculous if Bitcoin miners were using clean energy that was somehow divorced from the power grid in a way that made it unusable for anything other than Bitcoin.
Of course it's additive, but potential clean energy supply is not capped at current levels.
To clarify whit an example what I meant re other industries: In order for transportation (cars, trucks, ships, planes) to switch to clean energy, they have to replace their fossil-based vehicles. Bitcoin mining rigs run just fine on clean electricity, hence the lower friction to switch.
For miners it's economical to expand into any energy source cheaper than the average used in the network. (Simplified) That means instead of making clean energy and using in houses, miners are first in line for the extra load on the cheap sources and we have to keep burning fossil fuels too support the load which existed before. That's not a path to resolving anything.
There's higher friction in industries to switching to cheaper electricity?
But the question still stands: Is Argentina-levels of energy (now) whether "clean" or not, equal to not using something based around PoW and the inevitable burning of energy.
Its design is based in thermodynamics and math. It’s the best design out there, regardless of what amount mostly to invalid comparisons based on misunderstanding the potential utility of BTC.
