Nonsense. I've run a complete GUI (XWindows and the Chromium browser) on a Raspberry Pi, which consumes only a few watts (way less than the monitor it was attached to). To run a browser today requires a very small and low-powered device.
Nonsense. There are some companies that seriously care about the energy consumption of their servers. Can you imagine how much power companies like Google or Amazon or Microsoft use? Huge amounts. Recently I heard a statistic that google is the world's largest user of renewable power (more than aluminum smelters and steel mills). These big computer companies worry a lot about energy usage, because electricity is probably one of their largest costs (probably even more than payroll). Yet, they use heavy software programming, and languages such as C++, Java and Python, which you consider to be inefficient.
If you explain what you really need a text-based browser for, we can give you tips. Personally, I've used lynx before. The problem today is that a large fraction of all web pages are so complex (javascript and so on, fortunately the flash-based stuff is mostly gone) that lynx can no longer render it.
The other good option is to use a library which is capable of parsing HTML. For example, Python has a pretty good DOM parser for HTML; with a little bit of scripting skill, you can use this to extract the text parts from known friendly web pages (it won't work in general, in particular not for pages designed for mobile).