Reports from Earthjustice/Sierra Club, Scientific Reports, and the University of Cambridge break down the environmental costs of the growing, energy-guzzling cryptocurrency mining industry

New York, NY —

In September, three major research organizations published new reports about the cryptocurrency mining industry, adding to the growing body of work proving just how detrimental the opaque and little-regulated industry is to the climate, local communities, and public health.

These new papers all reach the same conclusion as the recent groundbreaking report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy: cryptocurrency mining is incompatible with federal and local emissions reductions goals, impacts local communities negatively, and it cannot continue unabated.

Earthjustice and the Sierra Club released The Energy Bomb: How Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrency Mining Worsens the Climate Crisis and Harms Communities Now. The guidebook is a comprehensive report on the negative environmental impacts of cryptocurrency mining in the United States, including a mythbusting section that tackles the industry's greenwashing talking points to justify its massive energy use.

Highlights from the Guidebook

• Proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining has grown explosively in the United States since 2020. Today, an estimated 38% of Bitcoin is mined in the U.S, resulting in nearly 30 million tons of excess CO2 emissions in the last year alone.
• From mid 2021-2022, Bitcoin consumed 36 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity - as much as all of the electricity consumed in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island put together in that same time period.
• The massive energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining threatens to undermine decades of progress toward achieving climate goals and reducing local pollution. In addition, cryptocurrency mining practices raise costs and risks for utilities and their ratepayers, can stress electric grids, and flood communities with noise.
• The cryptocurrency mining industry already uses half the electricity of the entire global banking sector, and it will overtake the sector in two years if current trends continue. Meanwhile, the ratio of Bitcoin's energy consumption to humans who actually have Bitcoin is extremely high.
• Rather than investing in long-term energy infrastructure that benefits the grid, the cryptocurrency mining industry seeks the fastest energy that can serve its needs, and looks for minimal regulation and oversight. In practice, that translates to mining cryptocurrency at coal and gas plants, straining the electric grid in Texas, and tapping into power grids that are often fossil-fuel heavy.
• Most mining facilities draw their power from the grid. That means electricity is generated by whatever existing energy is in place in the region. No grid anywhere in the U.S. is 100% renewable yet.
• Proponents also claim that mining is spurring new renewable development and stabilizing the grid. But clean energy allocated to cryptocurrency mining doesn't actually do anything to decarbonize the grid, and there are few mining facilities that are building renewables to even power their own operations, let alone send to the grid.
• Cryptocurrency mining proponents claim that mining only uses "wasted" energy from solar or wind overproduction. But mining operations consume energy 24 hours a day, not just when there is excess solar or wind - meaning mining operations would fail to be profitable using only the hours when wasted energy is available.

Scientific Reports published Economic Estimation of Bitcoin Mining's Climate Damages Demonstrates Closer Resemblance to Digital Crude than Digital Gold. The paper provides economic estimates of the energy-related climate damages of Bitcoin mining, finding that from 2016-2021:

• Per coin climate damages from Bitcoin were increasing, rather than decreasing as the industry grew
• During certain time periods, Bitcoin climate damages exceed the price of each coin created
• On average,...

Read Full Story: https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2022/icymi-three-new-reports-paint-damnin...

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