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It's interesting to me the amount of energy people spend on convincing themselves that a technology (POW) that didn't even exist 12 years ago and ran on home PCs up until 7 years ago is somehow responsible for wildfires in California or deforestation in Brazil.I'm not sure why years of time matters. Rapid growth is extremely common in technology.
How much time did you need to spend convincing yourself that a microblogging website that didn't exist 12 years before 2016 and was constantly crashing 7 years before 2016 had become a major influence on world politics, up to the level of the US presidency? Hopefully not more than a few seconds.
How much time would it take to convince you that one BTC, which did not exist 12 years ago and was worth $300 7 years ago, hit more than 200 times that amount this year? Does it seem impossible?
The ecological argument against Bitcoin-style consensus is short and fairly obvious from Satoshi's paper. The innovation in that paper (compared to existing techniques like Merkle trees) was the ability to stop double-spend attacks by "mining" chains of transactions. This requires making sure that no single participant - not even the financially-meddling central banks that Bitcoin is supposed to provide an alternative too, and the might of their governments - can mine at a rate higher than the network. This immediately produces an incentive for both the network to make use of as much computational capacity as possible to keep itself safe, and for any attacker to amass enough computational capacity to mount an attack.
The incentive goes up as the block reward goes up, which it has been doing in terms of real value (e.g., number of Big Macs you can buy with a reward), even though the reward denominated in BTC goes down over time.
Therefore, Bitcoin-style consensus, if it works, is necessarily a major consumer of worldwide computational power, and as long as computers require energy, it is a major consumer of worldwide energy, which isn't really a thing we have an excess of.
That's the entire argument. It doesn't take you very much time - unless, of course, you're incentivized to keep trying to find counterarguments.