this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin | Bitcoin mines cash in on electricity — by devouring it, selling it, even turning it off — and they cause immense pollution. (www.nytimes.com)
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[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

For your information, energy can be sold to the Bitcoin network for 0.05$ per kWh while it can also be sold to consumers/companies for between 0.10 to 0.30$ per kWh depending on the country. Energy producers sell to the highest offer, which is always consumers. Energy that goes into Bitcoin is energy that couldn't be sold to consumers because demand didn't meet offer. Energy cannot be stored in vast amounts so it would have been wasted otherwise. Yes a lot of energy goes into Bitcoin, but it's only because nothing else can be done with it

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If nothing else it could have been turned into hydrogen, and there are a vast amount of industrial uses for cheap electricity. Pumped hydro has also been growing a lot recently, and simply delaying hydro use definitely has spare capacity in large parts of the world.

Moreover, all of that at least has some utility, where as spending enough electricity to literally drive an electric SUV from california to florida for every single transaction of a purely speculative asset doesn’t.

[–] Mubelotix@jlai.lu 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah it could be but it's still quite challenging to implement so it takes time