A recent study reported that cryptocurrency has a greater impact on the climate than gold mining, equivalent to natural gas extraction or raising animals for meat.
According to US researchers, Bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, causes more damage to the climate than cattle production and almost as much damage to crude oil.
The results of the new analysis, led by researchers from the University of New Mexico, show that Bitcoin is potentially unsustainable and could have disastrous future social and environmental implications, according to the research paper published in Scientific Reports.
From 2016 to 2021, the CO2 equivalent greenhouse gas emissions from Bitcoin production increased from one ton (metric ton) to 113 tons.
Each bitcoin mined in 2021 has the potential to cause $11,315 in climate damage, with a total cost of around $3.7 billion for this year alone.
To put this into perspective, researchers compared cryptocurrency mining to other energy-intensive activities.
Bitcoin is a multi-billion dollar industry, and over its five-year run, the study found that climate damage averaged 35% of its market value. This means that if you buy one US dollar of bitcoin, about 35 cents of that dollar has climate damage in it.
Bitcoin’s climate damage against the dollar is slightly lower than natural gas (46 cents to the dollar) and fuel from crude oil (41 cents to the dollar).
But it is more than beef production (33 cents) and more than gold mining (4 cents). None of these activities are currently considered sustainable.
“Bitcoin advocates regularly portray it as digital gold in terms of climate damage, while cryptocurrency behaves more like digital crude oil,” Benjamin Jones, environmental economist at the University of New Mexico, and colleagues write on their paper.
For Bitcoin to be truly sustainable, its climate damage must diminish over time as the technology matures and becomes more efficient. But these new accounts show that’s not the case.
Bitcoin mining itself depends on the exponential growth of computing power, which requires more electricity.
For example, mining bitcoin in 2020 requires more energy than Austria or Portugal used in the same year.
Bitcoin, like many other cryptocurrencies, relies on “Proof of Work” (PoW) mining, which is an energy-intensive method of providing cryptographic verification of balance sheet funds.
And for more than 20 days in the period studied by the researchers, the damage to the climate from “bitcoin mining” exceeded the value of the coins produced, mainly due to the consumption of electricity.
Some have argued that renewable energies can meet this need, but researchers write that climate damage per value created is 10 times worse for bitcoin than wind and solar generation; sustainable sector.”
And another study this week on bitcoin’s climate impact found that the fossil fuel production rate used is higher than its proponents claim.
Cambridge University’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index has long tracked estimated energy use for Bitcoin network purposes, but an update launched this month adds a new dataset called a “mining map” to the estimates. This expression shows the geographic distribution of bitcoin miners.
By combining this data with previous studies of regional differences in electricity generation, the researchers were able to estimate the percentage of renewable generation.
Alexander Neumüller of Cambridge wrote: “The results show that fossil fuels represent approximately two-thirds (62.4%) of the total electricity mix, and 37.6% of sustainable energy sources (of which 26.3% are renewable and 11.3% is nuclear).) shows that it is created. , the results vary widely The industry estimates the share of sustainable energy sources in Bitcoin’s electricity mix at 59.5%.
However, while the manufacturing mix remains carbon-intensive, overall Bitcoin emissions have decreased over the past 12 months due to the cryptocurrency’s sharp decline in value.
Researchers estimate that bitcoin prices, and thus expected payments for mining, have fallen by two-thirds, causing some to be unemployed and others to reduce their activities, in a process that reduced emissions by approximately 14% compared to 2021.
The Cambridge team says these emissions are comparable to those from countries like Nepal or the Central African Republic.
Source: Science Alert
Source: Arabic RT
