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Comment by knuthsat | Hacker News Reader

Our biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it. Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight.

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Legitimizing Bitcoin has nothing to do with the environment in the large scale of things.

It's like saying that you need to optimize fast functions instead of slow ones.

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It's like many environmental pushes in the US. They tackle the low hanging fruit that aren't actually going to fix the problem.

Electric cars and low flow showers / toilets are some of the environmental steps this country takes to make themselves feel good.

For water, domestic use tends to be a small part of the US overall use, around 7% I believe. I haven't dug further into that, but I'd imagine lawns are a big part. https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

For air pollution, about 14% of worldwide pollution is from transportation. Even if we go full electric the number won't go to zero because electricity is not free. Depending on how electricity is produced and factoring it the initial energy cost of producing batteries, we make that number smaller (maybe 7%, I'm not sure we really know). I do have worries about the amount of rare minerals that you need for batteries and how their life spans aren't all that long. And given their higher cost to produce, they are not as economically accessible.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

If people honestly wanted to fix our environmental impact, we'd have to drastically change our habits like covid made us do. Or we just have to have fewer people on this planet.

I honestly look forward to the environmental studies that come out from how big of an impact Covid had on pollution. I think it will definitely feed our models in an interesting way.

That's a terrible analogy! Bitcoin is a runaway feedback loop where scarcity drives rising price, which drives increasing energy usage. The equilibrium it maintains is the natural profit equilibrium where it makes sense to spend enough energy (money) to "mine" a bitcoin for anything less than the current price. But due to the built in supply decreases, that price rises, so the energy use continually increases, because there's always someone willing to spend $9 to make $10.

It doesn't have a stopping point, or brakes, and at each point, it is in the interest of the frog to raise the temperature of its water by one more degree.

If I was a hostile AI and wanted universe-scale civilization destruction at near zero-cost, I'd send each civilization the bitcoin "thought-bomb." All the AI has to do is share the bitcoin discovery, perhaps anonymously. Once that is done, it puts it in the short term interest of the metaphorical frogs to boil themselves, and speed along the inevitable natural tragedy of the commons outcome.

Right now, bitcoin is like a program with bad big O math, and we are looking at it while x=2 and concluding everything is great.

> having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight.

That's true (-ish).

Here are the numbers:

Modern pure-ICE cars don't got below 100g/km of CO2. Round trip NYC-LHR yields 1 ton of CO2. So the above comment is true-ish for cars that do less than 10k km annually.

Is that flight footprint averaged over the number of passengers?

Yessir. I remembered the number from the past, and before writing this post I found this https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...

> Our biggest environmental footprints as individuals are heating and cooling. Having an electric car is nothing compared to it.

Isn't Tesla aiming to electrify everything and then use clean energy as the source of the electricity? At the moment running heating or cooling should be clean as long as the energy is coming from a renewable source, right?

> Take one intercontinental flight and again, having a fossil fuel car for a year does not exceed the emissions of that flight.

For the entire flight, right? I would be curious how much driving one seat on a flight equates to. I presume flying is at least better than driving on a per-mile basis?

Adjusted for your own seat, assuming a full plane. You can read about the calculation in the linked book.

http://www.withouthotair.com/c5/page_35.shtml

> For the entire flight, right? I would be curious how much driving one seat on a flight equates to. I presume flying is at least better than driving on a per-mile basis?

You can’t compare the two so cleanly as to conclude with a simple this is better than that. There’s different effects of different types of pollutions at different altitudes, some unknown. Brake dust, the knock on effects of needing more road due to more miles driven, the infrastructure required to operate an airport, etc.

> It's like saying that you need to optimize fast functions instead of slow ones.

I really like this analogy

Are you basically saying that going from fossil to electric vehicles won’t make a big difference?

Absolutely. In the large scale of things optimizing already efficient fossil fuel machines does not bring much savings compared to optimizing heating and cooling and buildings that are using that.

Not to mention the enormous amounts of energy used in manufacturing/heavy industry. China's Top 5 emitting industries have nothing to do with transportation of individuals or farming for food, unlike some parts of the world.

There is more to the switch from ICE to electric than pure CO2 output, air quality in population centers is a big part of it too. Particulates from vehicles are a health epidemic, and whilst not all of it comes from the tailpipe it's certainly a not insignificant amount.

I don't disagree that heavy industry is going to be the more important problem to solve, but unfortunately I have few levers at my disposal to influence that. It's going to take treaties, taxes, regulation and sanctions to figure that mess out. Because I have zero faith in that actually occurring, I think the real solution is going to be in remediation technologies. Consumerism isn't going away, especially with fresh faces entering the developed world, eager to take up any slack the west gives.

It will make a noticeable difference but “big” is a ultimately a value judgement. Cars are small potatoes compared to industrial polluters. Huge companies that are actually meaningfully responsible for waste have been trying to put the blame on individuals for decades. Like in a tiny sense they have a point because they’re delivering products and services to individuals but they’re also pushing all the externalities of their waste onto individuals who have very little power to make systematic change while making sure that we can’t act collectively through government.

Non-energy example: trash. Jesus lord I am swimming in trash. Not because I consume in excess but because the everyday things I need come with stupid amounts of packaging that I can’t give back to them and isn’t recyclable or reusable.

Light duty vehicles make up about a bit over half of the transportation sector's 28% contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

So if every personal vehicle on the planet was an EV charged by a renewable energy source, we would cut GHGs by ~17%

That's US where everyone drives everywhere. Now we do the same for Europe or China and the effect on the whole world ends up much less.

Bitcoin is economically set up such that its energy consumption will follow its price. With the price at the level it is now, the energy consumption is that of a medium-sized country.

An entire country's worth of energy is getting burned to run a network capable of a whooping TWO transactions a second.

Now that Tesla has bought these coins, they have so far driven the price up by another 10%. This will eventually be matched by an increase in carbon emissions of 10% of a medium-sized country.

This will most likely completely obliterate all of the carbon reductions that Tesla has managed to achieve so far.

Bitcoin, as it exists today, is a massive ongoing ecological disaster and probably a crime against humanity. And Tesla is now making it worse.

The amount of environmental destruction and pollution done by the farming industry or similarly land invasive industries is incomparable to bitcoin. It has an effect on so much of the ecosystem that it's just silly to put Bitcoin in any kind of calculation with regards to environment.

Water pollution, shit pollution, river pollution, ocean pollution, air pollution, probably only the last one somewhat related to bitcoin.

You're not comparing bitcoin to the right thing. You're comparing bitcoin's energy usage to the usage of a country. Bitcoin is competing against much bigger players than small countries it's attempting to compete with Fiat currencies. The best comparison would be to compare it to the energy required to sustain the USD as the de facto fiat currency. It's hard to get exact numbers on the DoD's full energy usage but as some points of reference they use about 4.6 billion gallons of fuel a year, 10% of the US's aviation gas usage, etc. To put the DoD's usage into perspective, "The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) consumes more energy than any other federal agency—77% of the entire federal government’s energy consumption."(https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45832.pdf)

I suspect it's the air conditioning and equipment cooling of datacenters that's the OP was referring to in regards to bitcoin's footprint, so not entirely unrelated.

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