This analysis is kinda flawed, IMO. I'm not saying Proof of Work isn't horrible for the environment (it definitely is), but there are two major points that undercut the argument being made here, in my view:
The ETH network will continue running regardless of how many transactions actually occur on it, so long as the price of ETH is sufficient to make mining profitable. So blaming the emissions specifically on these art transactions seems somewhat unfair, even if you are adjusting for the portion of maximum throughput that they're using.
The ETH network is currently in the process of shifting from PoW to Proof of Stake, which, while not without its flaws (only the rich get to "mine" and earn money, basically), is computationally trivial and will therefore cut the total energy consumption to virtually nothing. (Now, I seem to recall that this shift has been ongoing for some time now--I'm not terribly up-to-date on crypto stuff because I mostly lost interest in it years ago--but the plan has always been to move away from PoW.) There are also existing crypto networks that already operate on proof of stake (as well as at least one other non-compute-intensive strategy), so this concept could be implemented on another network and thus avoid this level of ecological impact.
This analysis is kinda flawed, IMO. I'm not saying Proof of Work isn't horrible for the environment (it definitely is), but there are two major points that undercut the argument being made here, in my view:
The ETH network will continue running regardless of how many transactions actually occur on it, so long as the price of ETH is sufficient to make mining profitable. So blaming the emissions specifically on these art transactions seems somewhat unfair, even if you are adjusting for the portion of maximum throughput that they're using.
The ETH network is currently in the process of shifting from PoW to Proof of Stake, which, while not without its flaws (only the rich get to "mine" and earn money, basically), is computationally trivial and will therefore cut the total energy consumption to virtually nothing. (Now, I seem to recall that this shift has been ongoing for some time now--I'm not terribly up-to-date on crypto stuff because I mostly lost interest in it years ago--but the plan has always been to move away from PoW.) There are also existing crypto networks that already operate on proof of stake (as well as at least one other non-compute-intensive strategy), so this concept could be implemented on another network and thus avoid this level of ecological impact.