Crypto: The Currency of the (Uninhabitable) Future

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

But of course, it tracks with his general shifts in ideology and mission since the COVID era. Scientific nerdery gave way to virus conspiracies; climate change took a back seat to his longtime A.I. fears as his former nonprofit, OpenAI, achieved staggering successes; Tesla’s dangerous self-driving cars and dubious robotics earned priority over the electrification of transport. Musk has been happy to re-embrace Bitcoin because incorporating the currency into Tesla’s assets and accounting has allowed him to artificially boost the company’s profit reports and keep investors happy. The Earth is one thing, but revenue is another.

The core issue can be boiled down to the fact that Bitcoin mining is—to put it lightly—really, really, really bad for the environment. This is primarily due to a system it relies on called “proof of work.” Take the computer servers with access to online blockchain protocols, set them up with high-efficiency chips (like those highly coveted GPUs) that can transmit more computing power at a faster rate, and run those servers 24/7 to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to unlock new Bitcoins. To replicate this operation at scale requires whole data centers’ worth of GPUs, which produce audible noise and require a lot of water to keep cool. A 2024 paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability found that the water usage of US Bitcoin miners alone is as much as the average yearly water consumption of 300,000 US households. On top of that, a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

Much of the power used to keep these things running is sourced from fossil fuels, with all the attendant emissions. It’s been estimated that worldwide Bitcoin mining and transactions have consumed more power than countries like Finland each year. It’s worrying enough that even Republican lawmakers in crypto-friendly red states, like Arkansas, have passed bills to regulate the digital-asset industry’s noise and air pollution. (Those efforts might be undercut should Trump carry through with an ill-advised campaign promise to ensure all Bitcoin is mined within US borders only. Ironically, however, his trade war with China has prevented American Bitcoin miners from securing needed equipment.)

The techno-centric vision for Trump 2.0 was laid out in various written screeds from Musk’s Silicon Valley friends at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital hydra (and crypto funder) whose namesake founders became enthusiastic Trump converts and staffers this election cycle. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” insisted upon building out energy “abundance” instead of cutting back on any fossil-fuel use; Ben Horowitz’s “Politics and the Future” blog announcement pledged his support for any political candidate who believed, like he did, that crypto “will create a fairer, more inclusive economy”; the duo’s co-written “Little Tech Agenda” all but declared war against the regulatory state in the wake of Biden administration attempts to impose tighter crypto regulations.

With Andreessen himself having joined Musk in keenly advising Trump throughout the presidential transition, the new administration has gotten to work implementing all facets of the Andreessen Horowitz blueprint—and yes, the crypto and energy policies are not incidental, because top-down climate denial is hardly irrelevant to their goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, now a far more crypto-friendly agency under Trump, has also scrapped a Biden-era requirement for large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in depth. The president has once again withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, with no objection from Musk this round. In fact, his already-infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency has been targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for data purges, grant freezes, and mass firings. It’s not a coincidence that Musk is doing this under the aegis of a fake “department” that’s named for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and was staffed with Marc Andreessen’s help.

(Also not a coincidence: that the primary zero-carbon energy source the new Department of Energy is interested in expanding is nuclear power, a fixation of both Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s. Why is that? Well, it’s a good way to thumb their noses at misguided environmentalists who protested fission plants after the Three Mile Island meltdown. Also, they want more data and mining centers to be powered by nuclear power specifically.)

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been especially useful markers for independent researchers surveying and tracking how America utilizes its electricity, both dirty and clean. There’s Digiconomist, the much-cited project from Dutch economist Alex de Vries, that keeps a public monitor of Bitcoin mining’s environmental and emissions impacts. There’s also the fact that this data affects the pricing and regulation of agricultural commodities—and since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered commodities like gold and silver, it will be the agriculture-focused members of Congress who lead legislative oversight. What could go wrong?

Digital-asset evangelists are especially sensitive to the climate critiques, which popped up time and again during the pandemic-era crypto bubble as myriad celebrities—even the nominally environmentalist ones—got in on the grift. Some crypto ventures, like the alternative currency and blockchain Ethereum, shifted to coin-mining methods that were far less energy-intensive.

But Bitcoin truthers and like-minded users are dedicated to their all-systems-go, all-the-time approach. Why should the government make it easier for anyone to scrutinize and call out their electricity needs? And why should banks and other firms express any skepticism over cryptocurrency’s actual value, or take the time to meet their climate and environmental goals, when they could just be forced to mine this stuff instead? Trump himself has been cozying up to the stuff in increasingly concerning ways, from a disastrous meme currency to a coin-hoarding private venture to the establishment of a crypto arm for his Truth Social network, dedicated data centers, and all. No better way to ensure regulatory capture than to grant the president his own funny money.
To that end, why should the government do anything to oppose the “financial innovation” tech in which some powerful VCs just so happen to have staked millions of dollars? If the consequence happens to be a hotter, less-inhabitable Earth, so be it. At least the crypto mavens will have their digital riches to isolate them from the real-world consequences of these decisions.

True believers in crypto have often championed it as the answer to so many of our financial, political, and even cultural woes. It’s decentralized, giving money and power back to the people without having to rely on evil banks or governments. It allows anyone to keep their money safe from inflation and the finicky, unpredictable economy. So what if it takes a few million gallons of water and untold amounts of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year?

This is the currency of the future. It’s just too bad that there might not be a habitable future to spend it in.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

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