>One thing that I find interesting in the electricity debates is that if we took the gaming example and looked at the collective consumption of all people playing video games around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers of power usage and emissions.

Okay, this is the second time I've seen an argument of the form: If you're not okay with the energy consumption of PoW cryptocurrencies, you can't be okay with X.

The first time I called it out, was someone pointing at the energy consumption of making, transporting, and storing ice cream. You are bringing up gaming.

You are advocating for making our children's/descendants lives worse, our lives worse, and trying to throw a valuable industrial subsidizer of the state of the art in many sub-fields of computer science...

...to defend the least efficient, wasteful,least empowering form of computation we've ever discovered. You're taking and making hostages of something that has objectively wrought joy and innovation to millions of lives.

If you find yourself on one side of an argument, and ice cream/video games on the other... I'd recommend having a long hard think about how you managed to get there.