I don't have a horse in the race (there are other worse things that use more power that we should be focusing our concentrated effort on in my opinion) as I don't own any crypto but I do think there's some powerful PR being used and I'd like to see from where it originates.

There's things that use much more power than crypto. The regular banking system apparently uses twice as much as bitcoin, but it actually does something. It's actually useful. We can try to trim power from other things for sure, and we should, but you tell me what other system we could focus on that uses so much power for such little value.

Of course, if you don't see the value in cryptocurrency, it will feel as though any electricity it uses is wasteful.

Hence the call to point out things that are either better on the blockchain, or of value and that can be only made on the blockchain.

Then it's a case of discussing wether the power consumption is worth it.

So far in this thread all that anyone's come up with is "because I might want to send money to someone that my government has banned money transfers to".

I have previously asked elsewhere and got a load of answers which fall into the "technically can be made on the blockchain, but can be done far more efficiently and effectively using exisint tech", eg. carbon credit trading, and (rather surprisingly) "publishing a website".

Oh. Well the banks are basically the worst so that seems to favour crypto.

No, the banks use twice as much power for orders of magnitude more transactions per second.