In other words, stuff like auto racing is just a waste of energy if the rules only allow the use of outdated technology or otherwise prevents innovation. But if the rules instead encourage innovation, it wouldn't be as much of a waste anymore. Hence why I push for useful work altcoins like Curecoin and Foldingcoin - they use energy just like Bitcoin does, but the primary purpose of that energy use is solving real problems like cancer and even COVID-19.
Auto racing is a waste of energy, although we need to look at the scale of things here. If auto racing was so prevalent that it was consuming as much fuel as some entire nations then I would be all in favor of banning it. Likewise if cryptocurrency was a niche thing that consumed a bit of energy and entertained people then great, whatever. That isn't the case though, it is literally consuming as much energy as entire countries, it is already a huge problem, and the time to get that under control was years ago. Pushing for cyptocurrencies that do useful work is a good start, but it might be too late for that. Let's ban the ones that are the worst offenders first and then people can develop others that are more useful.
I suspect though that any that don't require vast amounts of energy will never be worth anything because they will be easy to mine. If there is one that I can mine effectively on a Raspberry Pi then surely I can mine a lot more of it a lot faster on a quad processor Xeon. If I can mine one that solves real world problems, then maybe I can hack out the real world problem solving portion and just mine the currency even faster, that's the problem I see.
And still the fundamental problem with all of these remains, they are extremely volatile, making them useless as currency, people are making all the money in the speculative investment of the currency itself. A good currency has a value that is as stable as possible, because the whole point of a currency is to carry value to facilitate transactions. I can sell something for $10 today and buy something roughly similar for that same $10 next month. If the value of that currency was fluctuating wildly it would just be gambling, if I wanted to gamble I'd go to the casino.