Imagine someone getting all upset about car manufacturers requiring energy to cut and bend metal, power the machines in the factories and everything else.
Additionally to the (for some rather vague) argument that 'the energy is not wasted; it is stored in the coins' value' or 'the energy is converted into BTC which have value because of what we can do with them', there is this more tangible argument that the energy doesn't just poof away, but gets money into the miners' pockets.

Just how in lots of other jobs, you buy some energy to run some machines and try to get more money back out. Nobody ever complains about that. But in case of Bitcoin, they demand that the machines run without energy...
These people are used to everything being so abstracted away from them that they might not even realize that the internet is not a 'magic cloud', but power-hungry datacenters, as well.

Sounds good to me!