(Edit2: I interpreted your use of "outrageous" to mean surprising or unbelievable. If instead you meant inciting to outrage, then I agree, it is.)

My opinion is that if you find this outrageous then you don't understand the core principles of Bitcoin. The difficulty of mining a block on the network goes up with the amount of mining being done to maintain a constant block mining rate.

There are massive bitcoin mining warehouses in China, and for each one that opens all of them are less effective at mining, but still consume the same amount of energy.

So, yeah, it's pretty much a tire fire.

Edit: to add to this, many industries can use technology to produce more value with less energy. Bitcoin is fundamentally unable to do this for the same reasons I mentioned above. When bitcoin specific mining hardware first came out, it briefly gave an advantage to the first people to have it, but then the advances were completely neglected when they became widespread.