Is it environmentally responsible to have lights in your house?  Enjoy a movie in a theater? Drive your fancy new electric car?  Use any device which requires flowing electrons to operate it?  (Which is pretty much every device on earth.)

It's how one makes electrons flow that counts.  Bitcoin miners run on electricity, not coal, so if you then go make your electricity with coal, then I'd recommend you stop.

And lets not forget that the banking / finance sector uses mind boggling amounts of electricity for it to operate and keep all it's branches open, so let's keep it all in perspective now.  Why aren't we complaining here that Bank of America should set the air-conditioners in all of it's buildings 1 degree warmer?  Or upgrade 2 year old servers with new more efficient ones to reduce data center electric bills?  Or or or....  Any one of a thousand small savings could probably run all of the bitcoin miners on earth several several times over.  

Lastly, I've said elsewhere but bitcoin does spur efficiency since running costs come directly from mining profit unlike traditional banking which can dictate the amount of profit it wants to have from year to year.

So we can enjoy the cool breeze from our HVAC (or warmth from our mining rigs) and focus on smarter ways to power things.  As this isn't a green power forum we can just let the matter rest because as far as bitcoin is concerned i think the original article that spawned this discussion was FUD.