> These same regulators would love to steer policy and public opinion by calling something that reduces their influence bad for the climate, even if such a thing is run on clean energy, solar, etc. That seems suspicious.

This is textbook conspiracy theory here. Don't forget that even if bitcoin was running 100% on renewable energy (which it definitely is not), the added load on the grid definitely causes coal/gas plants to fire up and make the grid CO2 emissions of the country where people mine bitcoin to get worse.

I don't buy the decentralised argument either, more than 51% of the hashrate is in China and the government can decide to shut all of this down the day they want to reduce their unproductive CO2 emissions.