If you will dig some of the old news, you'll see how many of those articles were tackling how mining is costly affecting the environment. They only look to that perspective but they never understand what they're saying about bitcoin/cryptocurrency mining.
In between the mining process was highly power consuming, but with continuous development the mining equipments with low power consumption and higher hash output have been developed. As in a quote compared to the environmental pollution from the mega industries what the banking and cryptocurrency network produce is very low. These days most of the mining farms were located on naturally cool regions to lower the power consumption and avoid separate power generation for the cooling purpose.
Maybe a survey or polling among the forum members helps in identifying how true is the possibilism theory associates with the cryptocurrencies.
Yeah a lot of them want to cut the cost of electricity and that's why many of them have invested to and dealt with the use of renewable energy. Those reports about bitcoin mining is affecting the environment only sees it wrong.
But look at the other industrial and manufacturing businesses, they're commited to more energy consumption and they're affecting more the environment.