Rough analogy to "safer systems over safer processes": if an intern presses a big red button that brings down google, the problem isn't that they pressed that button, it's that there's a button any intern can just press to bring down google.
The fact that the market allows trades that are net negative is a bug. Bitcoin just happens to be the intern that pressed the button.
BUT, if we're in a state where we can't get rid of the big red button, it seems reasonable to get people to stop pressing it in the interim.
There are baby steps in some places, and there is massive progress in some countries towards renewables and carbon-zero energy. But in the current state, huge increases in energy consumption are a bad thing.
So I think we're in a state where we could potentially get rid of the big red button but a lot of people don't really want to and the realistic chances of doing so are basically zero. And in that situation, yes, we call out the button pressers.
YES.
> anything that causes people to severely increase their energy usage is especially bad
YES.
This is not hard. The earth's climate is being affected by the emissions from our energy demands. Most nations are trying to control emissions and one major way of doing that is energy efficiency. Bitcoin comes along and is anti-efficient, incentivises using as much power as is still (just about) profitable in mining, and creates nothing but a speculative financial instrument on the back of it. It looks like the worst kind of insult to anyone that gives a crap about climate change.