In Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells notes Bitcoin's huge energy footprint ("more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined") and asserts that
a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that Bitcoin footprint entirely
Is this true? My understanding of Bitcoin mining is that it must, of necessity, be extremely computationally expensive, and therefore also extremely energetically expensive.
Is there, in fact a change ("simple" or otherwise) that could dramatically reduce Bitcoin's energy footprint, while still preserving its essential computational complexity?