Earlier quoted context omitted.
« a single Bitcoin transaction consumes 165kWh » This needs to be repeated in every HN thread about Bitcoin: no, transactions don't consume energy. The proof-of-work is completely independent of the number of transactions. A block could have 1 or 1000 transactions, but the energy consumption would be the same. People have this wrong idea that more transactions imply more energy consumption. That's just not true.
> The proof-of-work is completely independent of the number of transactions. A block could have 1 or 1000 transactions, but the energy consumption would be the same. There's a block limit, though, right? It doesn't scale up infinitely -- you might have 1000 transactions in a block, but not a million. Therefore, it is accurate to attribute the energy per block to securing the transactions within.
It can be safely increased over time as bandwidth, storage and processing costs go down.
For now there's still a lot of viable efficiency enhancements to be implemented/adopted so increasing the limit isn't strictly necessary.