For Facebook/Instagram/Youtube, the incentive is to lower the power use. Google pays directly for the power used by their servers which host Youtube, so lowering their power usage immediately benefits Google. They also have indirect incentives to lower the power consumption on the client for their video/audio codecs.
For Bitcoin, however, the incentive is to use as much power as possible. If a more efficient miner is manufactured, the incentive is to use more miners. The only ceiling to the amount of power used by Bitcoin miners is when the price paid for the power gets above the expected average block reward.
It’s like saying that actors are wasting food and energy by doing what they do. Facebook YouTube and others are here for our entertainment, meanwhile bitcoin right now is mostly used by people with a final goal of selling it and making money. Most of the miners I know don’t ever use it to purchase something or send money to someone. That’s the problem in my opinion
Much like you did when you said:
> to serve fake images and shitty news
?
I'm a bit skeptical of this argument though. If we go down this path we have to answer what percentage of bitcoin mining is from renewable sources too. As I understood it (correct me if I'm wrong) a very large amount of Bitcoin mining is located around hydro sources to get cheap hydro electricity. That would mean the same argument that Youtube is green would apply equally to Bitcoin. But then I suspect someone would say something like "well they're using power from a hydro dam in china but look at all of China's coal plants, now other chinese people have to buy from those coal plants" to which we'd probably have to then say "yeah, kind of like when Microsoft buys Columbia river power cuz it's cheap and green or Facebook buys solar and wind power because its green that means that someone else in America can't buy that green power and is "using" power from one of our coal plants too". It's all one grid at the end of the day.
If we really care about the environment we wouldn't be playing this game of trying to say one kind of environment destroying energy consumption is okay but another isn't. We would instead argue to directly solve the root problem, which is dirty energy polluting our environment, by making sure energy pricing covers that cost. That way the market can tell us if Logan Paul videos are more valuable to people than say Bitcoin, and we would actually do something to fix the environment rather than simply making it cheaper for one energy consumer (Youtube) to pollute at the expense of outlawing another (Bitcoin).