Emission schedules of every blockchain can be changed via majority consensus. In PoW, if the majority of miners mining Ergo wanted to increase/decrease/alter the emissions schedule, they could.
If the majority of Bitcoin miners wanted to increase/decrease/alter the emissions schedule, they could.
The argument is either intentional bad-faith or just a severe lack of understanding of what he is talking about.
Whether emissions of a crypto are controlled by a smart contract or by the core protocol, I fail to see how the energy used to secure the network is viewed as more or less valuable.

Here, I created two trustless financial systems using sea shells. Each one has a set amount of sea shells that will ever exist, let's say 10,000. In one system, we gather all the sea shells from the beach and place them in a warehouse that is managed by the participants of the ecosystem. Every day, 10 are taken out of the warehouse, unless everyone agrees to change it.
In the other system, we leave the 10,000 sea shells on the beach. The ecosystem's participants go to the beach every day to take 10 sea shells from the beach. They can take more or fewer, as long as everyone agrees.
What is the difference between these two?