You can’t choose the kind of energy Bitcoin gets made with. It’s produced worldwide and mining moves to wherever energy is cheapest, which ends in a race to the bottom.
> What you call energy waste others would call effort
This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.
Nobody has been able to come up with an equivalent alternative. The closest seems to be proof-of-stake instead of bitcoin's proof-of-work, but the security becomes weaker (which is basically the whole purpose of bitcoin), see https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/70807/how-does-p...
Is PoS strong enough to still be 99% as useful?, I don't know, these are all experiments
It's not wasting energy, it's consuming previously wasted energy. In fact it puts a floor under energy prices so that it rather than wasting energy that you can't get to consumers you can instead use it to mine bitcoin.
> What you call energy waste others would call effort
This is my whole issue with it - effort doesn’t have to be tied to wasting energy, but it is in Bitcoin. Why would people call wasting energy ‘effort’ in a system where wasting energy wasn’t intrinsic to the system itself.