There are less energy intensive cryptocurrency scaling techniques.
true, but they'll never be as efficient as a centralised system, because intrinsic to the trustless design is a proof of work or proof of stake, which is to say the investment of resources to drive up the cost for any given actor, to make owning the system impossible. There is no way around this by design.
The benefit of decentralisation is redundancy and fault tolerance, not the ability to scale.