The miners are not "burning" electricity. They are using the electricity to perform mathematical calculations that prevent people from spending the same money twice. This is not unlike how banks power their computer systems to keep track of account holders' balances
Each full Bitcoin node keeps track of enough data to detect spending the same money twice. At the current transaction volume, that's a background job on a PC. That's all the compute power needed for accounting. All those racks of ASIC machines are doing no accounting whatsoever. Attached to an ASIC farm is some modest PC doing the block chain work.