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Comment by cortic | Hacker News Reader

There really aren't any environmental concerns with crypto. Crypto (PoW), like any other industry, invests in energy infrastructure. The concern right now is that its sometimes cheaper to pollute than to use green energy. All our politicians have had plenty time to ensure this is not the case; We should be more than angry that they have failed.

If we establish, through regulations, subsidies and taxes, a situation where it is always cheaper to use green energy; Crypto would bring nothing but massive investment in green energy development.

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If we accept that energy is a limited resource, we have to think about how we allocate it. PoW Crypto takes up a lot - what does it give us to justify that expense?

Even if we get to a point where we can power crypto purely with green energy - that might still mean that not enough green energy is available to power other, potentially more important use cases.

I don't accept that energy is a limited resource, like all other resources it requires investment. Reduce investment and you get less of that resource. Increase investment and you get more of that resource at a cheaper rate (as mass production kicks in at different levels). Crypto, and any other popular industry; Invest in the cheapest energy available, growing that market while profiting from it. Its OUR job (democratically) to ensure that green energy is the cheapest energy available...

There is really no other way to fix this.

There's a limited amount of fossil fuels available.

There's limited amount of space for solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric power plants.

Even if we were to achieve fusion, we'd be limited by e = mc^2, where m is limited within a radius that is reachable without losing energy on transport.

You can't fix a physics problem with market ideology.

If the limit is unreachable except in our imagination, we can think of it as unlimited. At least for the purposes of policy right now.

And i think you are being unfair conflating the current energy shortage with a hard limit that the human race may never reach. The current energy shortage might have been averted if the investment from industries like crypto, was invested in renewables..

Energy is not a pie. Producers overproduce energy in order to meet peak demand. Most grid mining uses off peak energy, since the utility would rather sell it cheaper than not have anyone buy it at all.

Off grid mining finds stranded energy which stops methane being flared directly into the atmosphere and converts most of it to CO2, which is factually better than any amount of CH4 being released.

By making stranded energy viable PoW actually allows green energy production to be built where existing demand cannot make it economically viable.

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