People have found a new scapegoat for energy use so they can feel less guilty about their meat heavy diet and heavy carbon footprint.
“Bitcoin is an energy grabbing monster that’s killing our planet!!! (And not us we swear!)
“Bitcoin is an energy grabbing monster that’s killing our planet!!! (And not us we swear!)
It will be much more difficult to replace fossil fuels, which have a direct upside (keeping a big chunk of the world moving, chemical industry, etc), despite the eco-devastation. I'm yet to see which fundamental, irreplaceable need cryptocurrencies fill.
Also, as a note, fossil fuels and mass meat production started in a time where climate change was not a concern. They are deeply ingrained in the majority of societies, even though the trend since the end of the last century is to divest.
I see the exact opposite in cryptocurrencies. They started to become mainstream in a period were people should know better about these things and the trend is to grow even more.
They should know better about the climate but they also know better that you cannot trust the US financial system so its better to have a hedge in the form of crypto.
Corporations gaslight consumers all the time for anything inconvenient to them and their profits.
If you want to see a good case made for one example of it, plastics and plastic recycling, check out John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on plastics (you probably even believe a few of the lies they've been telling everyone about plastic recycling yourself right now. it even surprised me and I already knew plastic recycling was a little bit bullshit already).
Here's a whole 11 episode podcast put out by the BBC called "How They Made Us Doubt Everything" about big business using the same techniques to tell us lies about smoking causing cancer to make us doubt climate change. I just found out about this now but I do intend to give it a listen:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000l7q1
Here's an article that's an excerpt from a book called "The New Climate War" that Michael Mann wrote about this very topic:
"Then there’s the now iconic “Crying Indian” ad. Some readers may recall the commercial from the early 1970s. Featuring a tearful Indian named “Iron Eyes Cody,” it alerted viewers to the accumulating bottle and can waste littering our countryside. The ad, however, wasn’t quite what it appeared to be on the surface. A bit of sleuthing reveals that it was actually the centerpiece of a massive deflection campaign engineered by the beverage industry, which sought to point the finger at us, rather than corporations, emphasizing individual responsibility over collective action and governmental regulation."
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/michael-mann-climate-...
Not really in the mood to argue the crypto front. I'm actually in a bit of a quandary myself, as I was excited about bitcoin when it was first released, and didn't see how much energy it would eventually use, and I actually have some wealth (modest in these circles since a lot of you work in Silicon Valley and I don't) thanks to speculating on it and other cryptocurrencies.
I want to see crypto succeed, but I also want it to not use tons of energy. I'm aware of alternatives to "Proof of Work" (which is why Crypto has started using so much energy) such as "Proof of Stake", but it's not going to be easy to shift Bitcoin to that, and as far as I'm aware we don't yet have any coin that's proven that Proof of Stake will work at scale yet (although Ethereum is working towards that, so hopefully it will show that more environmentally-friendly alternatives can exist).
So long story short, I'm hoping that ultimately the environmental issues of bitcoin will eventually be significantly fixed, or people will shift to a coin that does fix it.
In the meantime, however, there's tons of other industries that are severely damaging our environment and are doing little to nothing to stop it, and blaming everyone else for the problem instead of us.
That being said, you're right in regards to other people who are definitely scapegoating it.
and yet he supports bailouts for reckless financial institutions by printing money created out of thin air.
If he concern about the “thin-air” aspect, someone has to tell him about the thin-air aspect of most financial things.