If Bitcoin Core decides this is true and alters the algo to save the chain, it too will lead to collapse as a Balkanization will occur across the mining pools. The most likely outcome is disintegration.
The price in US dollars for either block rewards or electricity can go up or down, but this comparison always stays the same.
I strongly believe they don’t, but I’d love to see the math and be proven wrong.
Bitcoin's entire market cap is right now at a less than 1/10th of US GDP. Hard to say what the payment volume is since by all accounts, most movement in BTC is speculative rather than transactional.
Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.
It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.
And I doubt they use that much power. Modern developers are incapable of efficiency, but there is not that much processing to do.
It's just as irrational as it was 10 years ago, there have always been more productive uses for energy, but it doesn't really matter, people will always chose their own short-term profit, expecting anything else is delusional
People will not always consider short term profit; thinking such is an irrational expectation.