You have it all backwards. The PoW is useful work because it helps secure my hard-earned savings against very high inflation my country is dealing with (I store my savings in Bitcoin). While many other (non-PoW) energy uses you have in mind are useless for me.

there's plenty of other assets that can be used as an inflation hedge (e.g. precious metals, inflation linked bonds, etc)

none of which require burning hundreds of barrels of oil a day calculating quadrillions of sha1 hashes to keep their value from collapsing

and if you don't want to physically hold them then there's ETFs for that

What about when clean energy is negatively priced would you be ok using bitcoin miners to make it more economical then?

No.

Bitcoin would still compete for other things which are much more critical toost people on our planet.

Things like a storage battery. Or melting aluminum or other ors.

Things like a storage battery - we already have a battery shortage with not enough to power electric car manufacturing.

Or melting aluminum or other ors - this doesn't work because the load is extremely fickle. You have to be able to turn on/off easily and frequently.

other things can certainly come along and compete for the power. Its not like bitcoin mining isn't price bound. It always seeks the cheapest energy regardless of location

I only brought examples.

We are in such a bad place from a co2 point of view, if my examples don't work, we need to incentive to find better things.

Bitcoin is not better. It probably still consumes more wasted than just keep burning it.

After all the mining itself needs cooling (ac), Asics miners and local infrastructure (a gas engine)