It's still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it's pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
Or I could just ignore crypto, and not contribute to the heat death of the planet.
Sure, so you will have people turning on useless heaters outside
Big picture, you're encouraging people to use this fake money by taking part in it. And it usually uses a lot of energy to do it.
Yeah, I'm sure you use exclusively gold and silver coins to pay your groceries. Of course you wouldn't use fake money. As a reminder, this post is about excess energy
So which crypto do you use at the grocery store?
If nobody wanted to use crypto, energy usage (excess or otherwise) wouldn't be an issue.
I use bank euros, which are fake euros, which are fake gold. Bitcoin's energy consumption has never been an issue. It is only worth mining Bitcoin when demand on your local grid is low
Bitcoin alone accounts about half a percent of the world's electricity usage. Even if "demand on your local grid is low", that doesn't mean supply of renewables alone is necessarily high, especially if that happens overnight when solar output is low and a fossil plant is keeping things running. In that case we could have just as easily, you know... Not feed a ponzi scheme.
PS: if you think an arbitrary metal would have solved the world's economic problems if only we stuck with it, I've got bad news for ya.