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so there's a lot that's been made about bitcoin's energy consumption which isn't

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surprising considering the general advice is for home miners to not even

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try to mine it as the energy cost needed to run gpus means you'd probably never

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even make a profit but nonetheless large-scale mining continues and bitcoin

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transactions are processed every day which sucks down a lot of power much of

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which is coming from polluting sources like coal plants so is bitcoin actually

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going to be some kind of monetary messiah or is it really

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just killing our planet at first glance the numbers are a little alarming if you

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just look at the energy consumption of the bitcoin network alone in late april

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2021 it was around 134 terawatt hours

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per year that's more than the entire country of sweden or just under half of

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the united kingdom and consumption will probably keep rising this might not be

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that big of a deal if the energy were coming from clean sources but it's

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estimated that 61 percent of bitcoin's energy consumption is from non-renewable

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sources at this time which obviously pump lots of carbon into the atmosphere

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then you have the fact that a huge proportion of bitcoin mining is done in

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china which remains heavily dependent on coal earlier this year a failure of one

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coal plant in china cut out the processing power of the entire bitcoin

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network by over a third all this carbon had one group of researchers projecting

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that bitcoin alone could affect the atmosphere enough to warm the planet by

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2 degrees celsius before the year 2050 a

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huge amount when talking about global climate so does that mean that we should

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be pumping the brakes on bitcoin mining well hold on a second the study we just

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mentioned had plenty of detractors who pointed out it made a ton of assumptions

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about the actual volume of mining that would take place over the next few

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decades and the assumptions about how that mining is done and the resources of

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it and everything that may have been wrong but outside of that there's also

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an argument to be made that bitcoin mining could actually accelerate the

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growth of the renewable energy sector the idea is that miners are seeking the

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cheapest forms of electricity available in order to maximize profits remember

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how we mentioned that most bitcoin mining utilizes non-renewables well

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there's actually a notable major exception during the rainy months in

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sichuan china mining activity spikes due to an abundance of cheap hydroelectric

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power growing to 50 percent of world bitcoin mining powered almost entirely

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by renewables in this vein energy companies might have an incentive to

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keep building out renewable infrastructure in rural areas where solar wind and hydropower are usually

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more abundant in response to demand from miners large-scale mining operations

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often move to rural areas for the low energy costs already making this one way

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that bitcoin could help accelerate the transition to cleaner energy

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and of course we should think about the carbon footprint of the traditional

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banking and financial sectors manufacturing plastic credit cards

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processing multiple step interactions printing paper money keeping the lights

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on in offices with all those employees how about the branches how about atms

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how about the carbon footprint of the the trucks the protected vehicles that

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move all have an environmental impact not just in terms of actual materials and

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energy used but also the fact that simply having the us dollar as the

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world's reserve currency has an environmental cost as part of the reason

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it has so much clout globally is that oil prices are given in u.s dollars

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thanks to an agreement made with saudi arabia back in the 1970s many of the u.s

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dollars saudi arabia received in exchange for oil were reinvested in

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american companies who provide equipment for extracting oil as well as stocks and

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other large american firms outside the oil industry and while today there are

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many other reasons the us dollar is the world's reserve currency oil did help

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propel it to that status we're not trying to either praise or condemn any

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nation's behavior the point is that the bones of the world economy are already

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heavily linked to fossil fuels even without crypto but this doesn't

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mean that we should just be ignoring the impact of energy-intensive mining it's

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still an issue serious enough that elon musk who is trying to convince the u.s

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environmental protection agency to let tesla sell renewable energy credits to

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polluting power companies decided that tesla would no longer accept payments in

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bitcoin as environmental regulators are currently frowning upon crypto so what's

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the answer to the question then well bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptos

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like ethereum 1.0 probably aren't destroying the planet but

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the issues they currently pose are something we'll have to reckon with but

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until then maybe we should start putting those little calculator style solar

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panels on graphics cards i think we can make a dent

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