Majority of bitcoin mining is done with renewables[1]. In fact, it won't be long, only mining with renewables may be profitable.
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
1. https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-...
It seems like the effort to turn energy production towards renewables (that is, replace carbon emitting means with renewables) is undone by increased energy demand. So instead of replacing the one with the other, we have to keep the old methods around just to meet demand.
This is only partially true. One watt of hydro electricity might equal to another watt of coal electricity, but it's also locked to a particular region (because there's no global electricity grid) and a particular point in time (because you can't "store" electricity cheaply like oil).
Long-term causality is pro-bitcoin. Just like with network bandwidth usage, "whales" (heavy users) drive and finance the build-out and the R&D.
How about we try to deal with facts rather than google search proofs
A huge amount of mining is located around Sichuan province, China or Pacific NW United States, all of it hydro-powered and excess electricity. Others players in the field are chasing wasted flaring from oil/gas fields and using that to power shipping containers full of ASIC's.
This argument gets tiring because at this point if there a large amount of wasted energy anywhere on Earth someone will eventually realise they could mine crypto with it instead. Heat, gas, you name it, everything is on the table.
Meanwhile we all lament not being able to take international flights for a year.
The opening statement is in a completely different tense than yours, AND hypothetical.
I don't try to say it is true or false. I give an alternative point of view.
These kinds of takes don't help Bitcoin, or cryptocurrency in general. Bitcoin has an energy problem. Trying to hide that fact by demanding comparisons against the entire financial industry instead of just whatever you're trying to compete against for end-users (be it settlement or end-user financial transactions) isn't going to help, because that's even more scale that Bitcoin would have to struggle even harder to reach. And it raises the question of what value you actually get from avoiding the infrastructure (and the resulting economies of scale) that everyone else uses.
[1] Admittedly, that is a bit unfair, since the aircraft carriers aren't mentioned until the very last paragraph. But the article does repeatedly push for comparing against larger and larger segments of the financial system, giving the distinct impression that the author would complain about unfair comparisons should Bitcoin be found to use more energy than anything being compared.
But the second important point of the article is that the sources who say that "Bitcoin has an energy problem" usually come to that conclusion by taking average electricity price and multiplying it by total Bitcoin network hashrate. They (intentionally?) omit the fact that Bitcoin mining is by design just barely profitable. The difficulty rebalances itself according to the Bitcoin price, energy price and number of miners. That means that for the miner mining bitcoin was probably the better alternative use for that energy in that particular situation. If it wasn't, other people would have used the energy for something else (more needed/more profitable/..) and the miner would be priced out of the market - and that would be totally ok for the Bitcoin network, that's the design.
Yet another point is that currently the mining is still subsidized by the issuance of new Bitcoins, which is still higher than the transaction fees. But that will soon stop being the case, quite likely within the next 4 years. When miners are motivated primarily by fees, then the economic pressure will force them to reject small-fee transactions and that will move Bitcoin on-chain transactions to similar position as the international fiat settlements. Coffee will be paid with lightning, on-chain will settle big blocks of transactions worth millions of dollars, where a $100 fee is no problem, and the overall energy use of the whole network won't rise any more - exactly as designed.