Both sides of this arguments are oversimplifications to the point of being meaningless.
Specifically: L2 like lightning, settlements on sidechains, and other things I won't go into here.
The long and short of it is that it's incredibly hard to quantify and compare and I am yet to see an attempt that gives any meaningful insight.
If Bitcoins proof-of-work and the consequences it has becomes a net loss or net win in terms of climate is a very open question. I would love to see more analysis of it but it's really not obvious either way.
It is an online scheme for resisting sybil attacks in a P2P network where nodes have cryptographic identities which works by periodically forcing all users to do proof of work within a limited time window. Peers that don't respond fast enough are banned from the system (have to create a new identity to join, which is computationally expensive).
The idea is that this get some of the benefits of POW for sybil resistance without spending as much energy.
It doesn't, however, produce a large amount of cumulative work building up over a history. So it's not the sort of thing you'd want to use to protect the history of a ledger directly.
Specifically: L2 like lightning, settlements on sidechains, and other things I won't go into here.
The long and short of it is that it's incredibly hard to quantify and compare and I am yet to see an attempt that gives any meaningful insight.
If Bitcoins proof-of-work and the consequences it has becomes a net loss or net win in terms of climate is a very open question. I would love to see more analysis of it but it's really not obvious either way.