A little too disconnected from reality for my tastes. This frames the issue on consensus as being something only pertinent to the miners, donning roles similar to the "luddites", rather than the technical concerns surrounding the move and the skepticism behind power usage being an environmental problem.

POW is preferred for technical reasons concerning finality (which is put at risk and needs time to resolve if a majority of validators stay offline for too long), reorgs (which is cheap when you just need validator approval), and handling of chain splits.

Bitcoin mining does not have staggeringly high carbon emissions. It's all about framing. A common example used for comparison is the energy expenditure of Christmas lights. They surprisingly consume more energy than Bitcoin and yet no one goes up in arms.

Most carbon emission estimates are also way off as they don't take individual Bitcoin mines into account. Instead the data extrapolated is general, taking publicly available (regional and grid) averages and arbitrarily assigning Bitcoin miners located in these locations a proportional share of "dirty" energy.

I'm not against using public information for personal blogs and similar informal pieces, but when it's used improperly in academic journals it rubs me the wrong way. Specifically the "researcher", Christian Stoll, is responsible for most of the cited resources and I'm surprised he can still publish with such lazy reporting.

Not sure if you're a bitcoiner or not, but I thought you should have this information to better inform your story (if you care at all about realism). Also check out the relevant information for yourself and fact-check me. As we in the bitcoin community say, don't trust, verify.