The energy is spent to secure the network regardless of how many transactions are processed (in practice, transaction volume is pretty much fixed in terms of "bytes of transactions")
Just trying to get your position straight here.
> Just trying to get your position straight here.
What else might we think you were doing?
Can you be more specific about the existing regulated activities you're talking about? I don't get your point but I might just be missing something here. AFAIK, the reasons for existing regulations on "activities or devices" are not related to electrical usage..
When generating energy (either with fossil fuels or renewables) energy is often wasted because there is no immediate consumer or way to store it.
What you say _can_ be true, for example additional consumers of energy on the national grid, during times of high demand, will likely result in more energy production. It is not true as a rule though.
Bitcoin (and all other Proof-of-Work cryptos, which is basically all the major ones) only consume tons of power because the incentive to mine creates an arms race where whoever has the most hashing power makes the most money.
Bitcoin could be run on a single computer mining on a 10 year old CPU, but then it would be highly centralized, and decentralization is touted as one of the greatest features of Bitcoin. But with the incentive to run your own miner(s), and make it/them as powerful as you can to get the largest piece of the block reward pie, it ends up being a massive energy sink.
That's why people are pushing for the change to Proof-of-Stake in Ethereum. By taking away the incentive to waste tons of power on mining, it drastically reduces the carbon footprint of it.
> You just traded one tgreat model for another, and boy it is a doozy.
What? I'm not sure what models you're referring to