LARRY L. ROSE  (TX)

Bitcoin: Its Carbon Footprint Exceeds Entire Nations’, encaustic infused digital art with archival inks, paper on cradled birch panel, 14.5 x 21.5 inches

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I conceived my Global Warming piece in March, prepared it, then decided it may be too obscure and did not submit the entry. Recent events changed my mind. 

Scientific journals describe cryptocurrency Bitcoin’s large and phenomenally surging carbon footprint. Financial journals cover the new world currency and wealthy investors’ multi-million dollar windfalls and disappointments. But mainstream media has given little space or time to the digital coin’s soaring CO2 contribution, even though its power consumption is hop-scotching entire countries’ total energy output. 

One of the world’s richest men, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who in February announced that buyers of Tesla cars could pay in Bitcoin, in May rescinded the offer. Bitcoin would no longer be accepted, he said, because of its damaging and soaring carbon footprint. 

Mainstream media picked up that story, not because of damage to the environment, but because Musk, after buying $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, and selling cars for Bitcoin, did a quick about-face. 

But it’s most concerning that much of the world’s energy-hogging Bitcoin computing is driven by coal-fired plants. 

China accounts for more than 75% of world Bitcoin “mining,” said academics from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Cornell University and the University of Surrey, in a published peer-reviewed article in the journal, “Nature.” Chinese power plants heavily use polluting lignite coal, and 69 percent of China’s power comes from those plants, according to FluoroConsultants. 

There are a few institutions watching Bitcoin’s environmental implications, such as Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. But there are not many stories on how to contain its rapidly expanding carbon footprint. 

The sheer level of energy required by so-called miners, who release new coins into circulation, moved Bitcoin’s annualized energy consumption in February, 2021, where its consumption was equal to that of Chile, number 40 power user in the world, past number 31 Netherlands by May, 2021. In three months, it shot past the total energy consumption in each of 10 countries, according to Didgiconomist’s Index. 

Bitcoin’s power usage is surging and with it, the fossil fuels it consumes, and the CO2 those fuels emit. 

“The more successful Bitcoin gets, the higher the price goes; the higher the price goes, the more competition for Bitcoin; and thus the more energy is expended to mine,” said Charles Hoskinson, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who co-founded Ethereum, the world’s second-most valuable digital coin. 

Some say the effect is overblown as the use of energy is not bad in itself. But Bitcoin is no ordinary energy user, it’s a huge lignite coal user. 

Andrew Hatton, head of IT at Greenpeace U.K., told CNBC that the issue at hand is that “we’re largely powering 21st-century technology with 19th-century energy sources.” 

“Bitcoin’s spiraling energy usage is largely down to the huge amount of data-crunching needed to create and maintain this cybercurrency,” he said. “But their fast-growing hunger for electricity is just an early symptom of a much bigger problem to come.” 

I submit: Bitcoin: Its Carbon Footprint Exceeds Entire Nations‘, showing Bitcoins engulfed in flames, as in so many wildfires in the American West. 

The image below offers a view of Bitcoin: Its Carbon Footprint Exceeds Entire Nations’ in situ to help to visualize this piece in a home setting.

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