I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that a system of CA certificate encryption has been around forever, and Bitcoin is burning electricity for literally no reason?
If you could solve that problem well without burning the electricity Bitcoin does, you'd revolutionize industries.
I'd argue it's for a good reason the same way we burn gasoline at a traffic light instead of just going when it's red.
Safety costs money, and Bitcoin burning electricity protects the network.
Burning gas at a traffic light isn't for a “good reason”, except insofar as the dominance of environmentally hostile technology through the de facto subsidy of externalized costs is a “good reason”.
But I don’t disagree that the analogy being drawn between that pollution and bitcoin is apt.
Okay, how about the pollution from SSL on the web? Every device has to have dedicated crypto hardware and we spend CPU cycles on it... because we want secure transactions.