Banks and capitalist businesses accelerate environmental damage despite overwhelming world public opinion being that scaling back and tackling climate change is really important, so no this isn’t a defense of banking and capital etc, I’m saying this is an especially terrible outgrowth of that. If you really think comparing banking and bitcoin’s energy use is possible, useful, or worth doing though, it’s not, because bitcoin money transaction stuff and all the money being pumped into it pushing up the total required computing exponentially is by the same freaks who take out trillions in naked shorts at the expense of actual material production or print most of the world’s fiat currency in the past two years so keep their shit afloat. Bitcoin is bad because it’s an extension of that terribleness and not an escape from it, even if it somehow wasn’t being used by speculative rich people it would just run into the same issues as real life capitalistic currencies and create a new different class based system.