The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside).
It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.
This doesn't sound right, it's very doubtful that all storage tech has royalty (unit-based) license terms.
Instead of electricity consumption the limiting factor will be raw materials to manufacture storage. Likely even worse for the environment given the energy and raw material cost to manufacture storage devices.
I was more thinking of the waste involved in manufacturing. If there's suddenly a much more direct profit motive to buying drives it's going to push more manufacturing, which is not the same as ongoing burning of energy for PoW, sure, but it's not going to be without side effects.
The main cost of hard drives is intellectual property (ie. Paying for the R&D, patents and licenses for all the tech inside).
It isn't clear that "wasting" intellectual property is in any way bad for the wider economy. In fact, it probably just subsidies storage for the rest of us in the long term.