"If a single bitcoin transaction uses enough energy to power 5 households for a day, that certainly makes me not want to do any bitcoin transactions anymore."

This is another point where BECI is misleading... the author managed to screw up so many things on his site :-(

Feel free to transact more. This will NOT consume more energy, as explained by many other commenters. The energy per transaction decreases as more transactions are processed, see argument #5: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/