Ah, okay, this is more a flaw in the article than anything else. The article obviously wants to use peterson's clout as click bait or to pump crypto. (Do we need to even have the discussion that journalism is dead?)

The way the podcast ran was that peterson would ask questions. Then based on the guests' answers, peterson would pose an hypothesis based on what the guests had said. Then he'd ask the guest to critique his hypothesis. THIS (the quotation you cite) was one of his hypotheses. The article makes it sound like he was making that claim as fact. Nope. Just an hypothesis for further discussion.

The underlying idea was that the current banking and financial systems consume far more energy than crypto. Crypto adoption would streamline all systems across the globe so much that the energy required to maintain crypto would end up being less than the current system, especially as the community moves toward PoS and alternative block chains. Again, just a topic for discussion, not a firm statement of belief or fact.