💾 Archived View for mediocregopher.com › posts › bitcoin-co2.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 22:10:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I try to keep from only talking about crypto, but some recent journalism has me annoyed.
Some quick maths:
CO2 Emissions Per Year Per American Car: 4.6 metric tons
Bitcoin's Total CO2 Emissions Per Year: 70 million metric tons
Americans Who Own Bitcoin: 50m
(The "Americans Who Own Bitcoin" number is not explicitly stated in that article, but I made a conservative extrapolation based on census data. Other sources put it in that ballbark as well.)
This gives us 1.4 Metric Tons of CO2 per American Bitcoin Holder per year, more than 3 times less than that emitted by American cars every year.
If you own a car, you're doing 3x the damage that I am by owning Bitcoin, so watch out where you throw those stones. That second link up there from Cambridge contains many other useful comparisons between Bitcoin and other industries. Here are the top polluters they list:
- Tourism
- Livestock & Manure
- Fashion
- Air Conditioning
- Deforestation
All of those have emissions which are _two orders of magnitude_ higher than Bitcoin's. And I don't even see "Military required to keep control of global crude oil market" listed.
This is the same shit as when we're told we should be recycling and turning off lights in order to save the world. It's just a distraction from the real culprits.
I'll go a bit further and say that, in the long run, I'm pretty confident Bitcoin mining will never play any significant role in greenhouse emissions. The reason is that mining is completely agnostic to the source of its energy, whereas cars are not. Cars _need_ to emit greenhouse gases, whereas for Bitcoin it's only convenient at the moment. There will come a point where the dwindling supply of non-renewables induces enough demand that Bitcoin miners are simply priced out. At that point the mining difficulty will adjust, and Bitcoin will stop burning old dinosaurs.
The same can't be said for your gas-powered car.
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Published 2023-04-12 by mediocregopher
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