Side question: does anyone have links on some power bounds for what the Bitcoin network is currently consuming?

Understand it would be a very rough estimate, but seems like it would be possible to arrive at some kind of number given electricity prices as a ceiling and state of the art efficiency as a floor.

Curious on what the magnitude is in relation to other things...

The power/monetary cost of 1 megahash is going to be different in Australia than it is in China.

That's why I said "bounds".