The growing banning of PoW? Buddy, are you kidding me? That's the whole gist of PoW to remain! If lots of governments ban it, then it'll not be that wasteful anymore (if we assume that securing a network is called a “waste”), but it'll still be secure. Bitcoin will continue to produce block after block after block, no matter the ban. Phenomenally, you simply can't f*ck with Proof of Work.

As for those who refuse to accept it, we will ignore them. 

So, they change their mechanism from a requirement of computational power to proof that the user owns units, while the majority of ETH are premined.

Yep, they did it to tackle the energy waste problem.