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Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint somewhat

I'm more interested in the variety of "energy recovery" startups out there - eg https://www.crusoeenergy.com/ - that are harvesting wasted energy to mine cryptocurrencies

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> Lightning and similar are making steady progress which would reduce the carbon footprint

They might bring down transaction fees, but most of the money in mining is from block rewards, which depends on the market price of Bitcoin rather than transaction volume.

At the moment this is true, however it is conceivable that tx fees could pay for the network in the future. At current prices, each tx would cost about 50 dollars to produce 125,000 dollars each block, as the block reward does today. This is not unreasonable if the market cap of Bitcoin continues to increase and it is used as a settlement layer with smaller transactions taking place on second layers like lightning or Ethereum.

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