Sure, but that goal in itself is dubious at best. And, PoW is using the maximum possible amount of energy to achieve such a goal.

It's basically like heating your home by adding CPUs in your walls and having them compute the digits of Pi instead of running current through a resistor, because you don't want to have to trust Big Resistor.

The bitcoin network is far more centralized than traditional payment systems, many orders of magnitude slower, and it uses as much electrical energy as entire countries to achieve this.