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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.

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Shame about that other environmental nasty thing related to proof-of-work that renders the entire earth somewhere you'd prefer not to raise a kid.

I was just commenting on the aluminium smelter thing being very, very non-environmentally friendly at a local level.

Depends on what the miners are being powered with.

Geothermal energy has very few emissions.

If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.

I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.

CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.

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