How much energy, resources, etc are required to sustain cash and credit card transactions? Think of all those banks, skyscrapers, ATMs, computers, money printing machines. All of those things exist to power the security of the modern financial industry.
If bitcoin powers the post-modern financial industry, the resource savings will be enormous.
And yet the actual functionality of Bitcoin - a simple ledger - could be implemented using much less resources than are used to maintain the Bitcoin network. It's curious, isn't it?
ASIC's consume very little power compared to a PC. One watt per gigahash is a rough value, although most promise quite a bit less. You'd need about 100 PC's, at 300W each, to produce a gigahash, using the assumptions in this article.
Ah but that's the unfortunate twist. If you can get a gigahash for 30000W with PCs, you would have no incentive to go down to consuming only 1W with an ASIC. You would consume 30000W with ASICs and get 30000 gigahashes.
[EDIT: Corrected the numbers to match what you wrote. It is irrelevant, though -- if you get a gigahash for X watts with PCs, you'll use X watts to get X gigahashes with a 1W/gigahash ASIC.]
All you are saying is that the transition to 30kW of ASICs will not happen overnight. If you stopped at 1W, you would quickly find that you are making less money than you were before -- your competitors will also switch to ASICs, and will consume more than 1W because they want to make more money.
To put it another way, not going to 30kW of ASICs is equivalent to taking 30kW of PC mining hardware and turning some of it off (in a pre-ASIC world where PCs are the most efficient mining hardware available).
