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Paying for Bitcoin with carbon is a climate disaster.

20210422ketanjoshi

All of the world's data centers, everything - the data center powering this Zoom call, the data center powering every Netflix stream, every single cloud storage - the entire data center industry, is about 200 terawatt-hours in the space of a year. And Bitcoin mining is somewhere between 80 and 400. The range of estimates is so huge. We know for sure that proportionately it's quite large, but how large it is is a mystery.

Writer and climate data analyst Ketan Joshi on the known unknowns of cryptocurrency mining and carbon emissions, Bitcoin as both a token of libertarian climate denialism and obstacle to fossil fuel use reduction, and his article Bitcoin is a mouth hungry for fossil fuels.

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Ketan Joshi

Ketan Joshi is a freelance writer specialising in climate and energy and author of the book Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil Free Future.

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