To argue with statements like this: "If we start taking all the energy used to mine a given cryptocurrency it aggregates to more than most countries per cryptocurrency." just sounds disingenuous, it seems like they haven't done any research whatsoever, they just woke up to this news and got outraged.

The energy consumption in clothes dryers, transportation, christmas lights etc. all will fall under "more than most countries" category. You are just constructing a narrative based attack.