This is completely irrelevant to the article, where they use hydroelectric power to mine bitcoins. But even if they used nonrenewable soures, the negative impact on the environment shouldn't be faulted to bitcoin. It's the energy sector's fault for prioritizing harmful energy to renewable energy.
And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.
Electricity is not perfectly fungible because of infrastructure costs and transmission losses.
The nature of mining as a competition for the cheapest electricity means that miners will naturally move towards areas where the electricity is not in demand.
They are using electricity to do computation. Even if, hypothetically, the electricity could not be transported elsewhere (and that's not realistic), if hypothetically manufacturing could not be set up there (and that's exactly what normally happens), the electricity could be used to do computation which is _actually useful_, which is why companies set up datacenters in the middle of nowhere with cheap electricity.
And even so, using energy to mine bitcoins isn't wasting the energy, it's turning the energy to real value. Just because it's not physical currency doesn't mean it isn't real - it has advantages (and disadvantages) to physical money. The electricity/algorithms cost create these features. And when countries ban cryptocurrencies, they would only do so on the guise of global warming, but more accurate and unspoken reasons would be that it gives too much power (anonymity) to the people.