A recent article in Blavity by Jeanne Yacoubou repeats and fails to critically analyze a set of already debunked misinformation. The article makes no effort to provide evidence for many of these claims and uses poor-quality and repeatedly refuted sources for the ones it does. The following rebuttal uses evidence from peer-reviewed studies, research, and articles to set the record straight on the points raised by Ms Yacoubou.
The article claims: “Recent research and investigations by governments, international organizations, nonprofits, and scholars are revealing the major environmental impacts of bitcoin mining.”
Unfortunately the article does not provide any evidence of these findings. In fact, the opposite is true. The overwhelming findings from recent peer reviewed research is that Bitcoin has clear positive environmental externalities. These include:
- Balancing electricity grids to reduce load variability and the reliance on high-emitting gas, oil and coal peaker plants (Carter, 2021; Mellerud, 2021).
- Incentivising and monetising the deployment of renewable electricity generation (Bastian-Pinto et al., 2021).
- Mitigating methane from landfills (Rudd et al., 2024).
- Reducing the vented flare gas (methane) from oil refining (Decker, 2021; Snytnikov & Potemkin, 2022; Vazquez & Crumbley, 2022).
- Enabling the transition from diesel-electric powered islanded microgrids to renewable generation (Hajiaghapour-Moghimi et al., 2024).
The article then goes on to discuss the “Carbon impacts of Bitcoin mining”. It invokes an NYT article that was roundly debunked by climate researcher Margot Paez. It claims that up to 96% of electricity for bitcoin mining is from high-emitting fossil fuels. However, we are well aware that this is immensely overstated. As of September 2024 the Bitcoin network uses 56.72% zero-emission renewable energy. The article adds that air pollution (as distinct from the climate impacts of greenhouse gas emissions) results in the deaths of 8.1 million people worldwide – a false equivalence and entirely out of context figure in this instance.
Bitcoin Sustainable Energy Consumption (Source woocharts.com)
Next, Yacoubou suggests that Bitcoin miners “manipulate” the power market by:
- Avoiding peak demand utility fees,
- Re-selling electricity at 100 times what they paid, and
- Getting paid to turn off while not doing so.
None of these are true. One assumes the author is discussing the participation of miners in demand response and ancillary grid services. Demand response programmes are not “manipulation of markets”, which would obviously be illegal. Instead demand response is a runaway success and a quiet revolution in the management of grids around the world. The Texas electricity grid is managed by ERCOT, which is emphatic that demand response is crucial to the way the grid is managed. Bitcoin miners don’t resell electricity, but sometimes they get paid back when they don’t use all the power they’ve bought. The claim that miners get paid to turn off but somehow don’t is also demonstrably false. Miners often reduce their consumption by up to 95%.
Margot Paez makes the point in her rebuttal to the NYT that new load often comes with a marginal increase in emissions. The demands of new technologies like heat pumps, electric cars and battery storage necessitate more natural gas generation, but over time marginal emissions reduce.
The claim that a gas-powered plant has been reopened to power a Bitcoin mining facility is also incorrect. The old coal power plant in question was converted to natural gas as a peaker plant for New York. It was crucial to supplying that state with the kind of demand-peak smoothing that electrification requires. However, to remain viable the plant mined Bitcoin outside demand peaks. Again, this is the kind of marginal emissions increase that electrification drives.
The next point is the claim that if Bitcoin was a country, it would be the 25th largest user of power in the world and 65th for emissions. We’ve already discussed that the emissions claimed in this article are wildly overstated. But it’s key to note here that Bitcoin isn’t a country, it's an industry. And industries use more electricity than countries because they extend across borders. For example, the chemical industry used 15 million gigawatt hours of electricity in 2022. That makes it the biggest user of energy in the world – well ahead of China. If Bitcoin were a country, it’s “GDP” (based on volume settled) would make it the 17th largest in the world. But since it is not a country, this comparison is not helpful or useful.
Next on the list of claims is water impacts. This claim by a particularly creative Bitcoin critic has been widely and fully debunked by this rebuttal’s author. This rebuttal can be read here. But to be clear, the claims made regarding water consumption do not themselves hold water. Furthermore, relying on the government of Iran’s statements on why their sanctioned and impoverished country is suffering blackouts would be something this author would suggest we should be especially careful about. Particularly when they make a claim that’s not technically possible – hydropower capacity doesn’t change – only the volume of water available to generate electricity.
The article also discusses land use, making the claim that Bitcoin miners worldwide use something like 1.4 times the space of Los Angeles. We are unsure whether this claim is suggesting that this is too much land to use, too little or just right. We also don’t know where these figures came from. We would argue that because Bitcoin mining is the densest type of datacenter per square meter that this is, like the other figures in the article, vastly overstated if it has been extrapolated from figures on traditional datacenters. It is fair to say, however, that Bitcoin mining usually does not take up prime beachfront real estate because it is incentivised to be close to low marginal cost (renewable) energy.
Ms Yacoubou's article goes on to discuss the impending climate crisis. Which again, appears to be an attempt to create a false equivalence with mining. Bitcoin is demonstrably not responsible for climate change. Trying to link the Chinese government’s statements regarding specific cryptocurrency miners who were bad actors to the climate crisis is an awfully long reach and aren’t even contextually related. Especially given the fact Bitcoin mining is useful in the deployment of new renewable capacity, a key driver for the mitigation of landfill gas, and is an ideal intermittent and flexible load for balancing electricity grids.
This article makes next to no truthful points about Bitcoin mining and fails to back any of them up with evidence. As such we can dismiss it as a particularly lazy piece of disinformation.
