Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards

Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?