Cryptocurrency and the climate crisis
Cryptocurrency mining requires a lot of energy and is moving us away from our climate goals. Some crypto companies are offsetting their emissions but haven’t yet transitioned away from fossil fuels.
Read a round-up of the headlines below:
“Bitcoin is less “digital gold” and more “digital beef”, according to a study that suggests the cryptocurrency has a climate impact greater than that of gold mining and on the level of natural gas extraction or rearing cattle for meat.
The research from the University of New Mexico, published in the journal Scientific Reports, assessed the climate cost of various commodities as a portion of their overall market cap.”
The Guardian, Bitcoin climate impact greater than gold mining, study shows
“The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Thursday warned that cryptocurrency mining operations could hinder the country’s ability to mitigate climate change. It also said federal agencies should consider information from crypto miners and local utilities “in a privacy-preserving manner” to help understand and mitigate the problem.
Crypto operations in the U.S. now consume as much energy as all home computers or all residential lighting, the White House said in a report. The findings come amid mounting criticism over the amount of electricity that crypto mining operations produce.”
CNBC, Crypto mining could hinder U.S. ability to battle climate change, White House says
“At this point, for most of us, cryptocurrency seems like nothing more than a fad. After the FTX bankruptcy and broader crypto crash last year, basically all of the celebrities who were promoting crypto have gone silent. “MiamiCoin,” hyped by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a new source of income for the city, is now worthless. The Wild West days of the industry may be over. Recently, the head of the SEC warned crypto firms to “do their work within the bounds of the law” or face enforcement actions. Lots of people lost money in the crash, but from the planet’s perspective, the industry’s downfall is good news: The computing power fueling the crypto boom was so substantial that it was causing substantial greenhouse-gas emissions.
And yet crypto’s greenhouse-gas emissions are still shockingly high, according to an industry tracker run by the University of Cambridge. The tracker focuses on bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with by far the largest market share, and estimates that at its current rate of “mining” new coins, bitcoin will release about 62 megatons of “carbon-dioxide equivalent” each year—about as much as the entire country of Serbia emitted in 2019. That’s up from about 43 megatons a year in December, and just slightly below the all-time peak of nearly 74 in May 2021. Many people who’ve invested in crypto tend to have a lot of sunk costs, whether digital wallets bulging with various coins, tokens, or expensive physical setups designed to make more. Even now that the boom times are over, they have no reason to stop.”
The Atlantic, Crypto Is Mostly Over. Its Carbon Emissions Are Not.