Bitcoin and Clean Energy

There are three reasons I don’t invest in bitcoin. One is that I can’t afford it and the second is I don’t understand it. The third is the reason I usually give when anybody asks me about it in a social setting, and it’s more of a jokey excuse than a reason: the instant I invest in it is exactly the point at which it will crash, which is pretty much my life story.
One argument against it which I totally reject, and consider absurd, is the argument that it is ‘dirty.’ It is the same argument used against electric cars and massive desalination, which could give everybody on Earth clean drinking water, turn the deserts green and end poverty. Bitcoin requires energy (for computing) and energy comes from power plants, which mostly run on coal and gas, which are dirty.
There is nothing inherently dirty about energy. Lightning is not dirty, the wind and the sun are not dirty. If we switched to clean energy, e.g. wind, solar, tidal, kinetic, those hydrogen batteries I sometimes hear about that leave only clean water as a by-product, and maybe even nuclear with a bit more research and a lot of restrictions, we could have all the bitcoin we wanted, clean water, and an international public transportation system which is cheap, efficient, fast and luxurious. It all comes down to energy and the only thing standing between us and a beautiful, utopian world without pollution or poverty is the fact that coal and oil companies want to make sure we keep it dirty.
They really do.