When Elon Musk told me in 2012 that he planned to build a city on Mars, I thought he was just excited by the prospect of living in the vast, lifeless deserts of a planet rendered uninhabitable by climate change. But now he appears to have changed his mind: Tesla will no longer accept payment in Bitcoin, he tweeted last night, due to “rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels”. Musk said that Tesla will not be selling its Bitcoin holdings, from which it made a substantial paper profit earlier this year.
But Bitcoin’s status as an environmental Doomsday device hasn’t sprung up overnight. As anyone who checks the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index will tell you, Bitcoin’s hashrate indicates that it currently uses more than twice as much energy as Bangladesh (population: 163 million). I use Bangladesh as an example because its people are already being drowned and starved by climate change; Unicef says that the lives and futures of 19 million Bangladeshi children are threatened by climate change.
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