It does, but it is almost certainly less than Bitcoin on a per-transaction basis. If the energy cost of physical money were comparable to the average energy sp

It does, but it is almost certainly less than Bitcoin on a per-transaction basis. If the energy cost of physical money were comparable to the average energy spent per Bitcoin transactions we would already have a cashless society; in fact, if the energy cost was so high, we may never have used cash/coins in the first place. To put this in perspective, Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as Argentina (a country with tens of millions of residents), about 121 TWh/year, but for all that energy the network only processes 4-7 transactions per second. Visa processes an average of 1700 transactions per second on its own, and is just one of many large payment processors in the mainstream financial system. Visa's 2018 report (first thing I found on Google) stated a consumption of about 720000GJ, which is 0.1TWh. That is a massive difference, so if cash was anything as energy-intensive as Bitcoin the banks would have figured it out by now and ditched it to save a ton of money (keeping in mind that banks account for the bulk of the overhead spent on cash and coins).