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Reveal

Can Our Climate Survive Bitcoin?

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2022

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bitcoin is a novel form of currency that bypasses banks, credit card companies and governments. But as Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren reports, the process of creating bitcoin is extremely energy intensive, and it’s setting back efforts to address climate change. Already, bitcoin has used enough power to erase all the energy savings from electric cars, according to one study. Still, towns across the United States are scrambling to attract bitcoin-mining operations by selling them power at a deep discount.

Bitcoin’s demand for electricity is so great that it’s giving new life to the dirtiest type of power plants: ones that burn coal. In Hardin, Montana, the coal-fired power plant was on the verge of shutting down until bitcoin came to town. The coal that fuels the bitcoin operation is owned by the Crow Nation, so some of the tribe’s leaders support it. But in just one year, the amount of carbon dioxide the plant puts into the air jumped nearly tenfold.

Bitcoin’s huge carbon footprint has people asking whether cryptocurrency can go green. Bitcoin advocates say it can switch to renewable energy. Others are instead developing entirely new types of cryptocurrency that are less energy hungry. Guest host Shereen Marisol Meraji talks with Ludwig Siegele, technology editor at The Economist, who gives his assessment of the challenges of making cryptocurrency environmentally friendly.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal.

0:07.8

I'm Shireen Marisol Maragi, in for Al-Letzin.

0:11.0

And if my voice or name sound familiar, you may have heard me on the show I helped create

0:15.3

and co-hosted called Code Switch, which is all about race and identity.

0:19.2

But today, on Reveal, we're talking cryptocurrency

0:22.6

and the climate. Cryptocurrency has been in the news a lot lately. Most recently, because of the war

0:29.5

in Ukraine. Ukraine has used it to raise funds to fight Russia's invasion, and Russians are using

0:35.8

crypto to try and minimize the sting of sanctions.

0:39.3

But nearly 8,000 miles away and a few years ago, a bunch of grad students at the University

0:44.9

of Hawaii, fascinated by crypto's growing global influence, asked their professor, Camilo

0:50.9

Mora, if they could do a research project about Bitcoin.

0:55.1

I thought that that was a video game or maybe one of those Pokemon things, you know.

0:59.7

Camille is a professor of environment and his grad students talked him into studying Bitcoin's carbon footprint.

1:05.9

We started to investigate and then we get some calculations on the carbon footprint of this.

1:11.6

And I just couldn't believe. I just think this is crazy at me.

1:14.6

By now, nearly everybody's heard of Bitcoin and probably knows somebody trying to get rich off it.

1:20.6

Here's a simple breakdown.

1:22.6

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is basically digital money.

1:26.6

It allows people around the globe to buy and sell things without a bank, a credit card company,

1:32.2

or government in the middle.

1:34.1

What many people don't know is that Bitcoin requires enormous amounts of electricity.

1:40.8

Imagine this thing that is completely useless in my view having the same electricity demand than entire countries.

...

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