If you take every long-refuted criticism of Bitcoin along with cherrypicked examples of cringe celebrities endorsing it, and you combine that with misinformed neo-Marxism and an unquestioning acceptance of government officials, you get this article.
> If this is true then the goal is to create a mining algorithm that focuses on being as wasteful as possible.
This wouldn't be profitable for miners, so the economics of the coin would collapse. Bitcoin is designed to balance these incentives.
> This is simply not true. There is no such thing as excess power, whatever is not used should be stored or sold to other countries.
You don't understand power grids. Electricity is diminished the further it travels over transmission lines. Only fossil fuels like oil can be "stored and sold to other countries", renewables don't work like this. Excess power generated by renewables, and even by some non-renewables, is frequently wasted because (at certain times) it's either not economically feasible to transport it to population centers, or the grid is at full capacity. You can't pump that excess power into the grid or you will break it.
> Excess energy production has always been a thing
Sure, but this is a new solution.
> and there are mitigation efforts in place much better than "lets put a server farm that wastes energy"
Why do you think current plans are better? Bitcoin mining gives a financial incentive to produce renewables as a direct result of the technical details of power grids. You're being awfully dismissive for someone who knows so little.