This is a lot of words to pursue a false premise. There's nothing inherently more battery consuming about 4G. It's just the way the current phones chipsets are done.
This seems like an odd re-framing. You could make the same claim about any technical specification - e.g. there's nothing inherently more battery consuming about 10 petaFLOPS, it's just the way current hardware is done.
We can take it as given that any article talking about the weaknesses of a current technology is referring to its current hardware implementation.
