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A key difference: replacing gas-powered cars with electric takes a carbon-emitting engine off the road, opting instead to potentially emit carbon at a centrali

A key difference: replacing gas-powered cars with electric takes a carbon-emitting engine off the road, opting instead to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant (which is typically more efficient and emits less carbon per joule). Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere.

Taylor_OD 6y ago
Sure. But a centralized power plant could be surrounded by solar panels that offset the carbon costs.
sn_master 6y ago
The best way to reduce carbon emissions is to keep using existing cars, whether gas or electric for as long as they're drivable. Electric (and ICE, to a lesser extent) cars have a very significant carbon footprint when they're newly produced. Abandoning cars after a few years is far worse to the environment.
- titzer 6y ago
  It'd be best to just...not drive. Second best would be to actively pursue a mass-scale electric conversion so that we could reuse all those big metal chassis, tires, seats, etc in existing cars. It'd be far cheaper in terms of carbon footprint to replace a combustion engine with electric. Why aren't we doing that? Because retrofitting is hard and not very profitable. And yeah, we need a place to put the batteries too. Much better to just junk everything and build more stuff! (Yes I know, most of the materials of a car will be recycled. But it's just another expression of our throwaway/can't fix that culture).
  - sn_master 6y ago
    > It'd be best to just...not drive. I wish it was that easy of a choice. Pre-COVID, using public transit would have made my daily commute (one-way) between 1.5 and 2 hours, compared to 20-30 minutes by car. And where I live, we've been paying hundreds-thousands of dollars on each car registration renewal (% of the car's estimated value) for that new transit system, which might not even get used that much post-COVID because of the germophobia that inflicted society.
  - FooHentai 6y ago
    You missed a key reason - batteries are very heavy, and to achieve the kind of range that makes it practical for drivers to switch from ICE requires specifically-designed chassis layout and materials to accomodate battery weight in a suitable location to maintain acceptable weight distribution With a breakthrough in energy storage technology e.g. solid state, this issue might go away, but right now it compels the production of vehicles specifically designed to be EV and relegates retrofitting to a hobbyist discipline providing relatively disappointing results in range and/or handling.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      yup, most retrofitted cars get way less mileage than regular EVs (150 miles or less).
    - titzer 6y ago
      I get that, but cars have gas tanks, back seats, and trunks, too. Also, the actual electric engine is very small, leaving a lot of room in engine compartments themselves. The only reason we would need very large batteries is to have a very long range, which would not be necessary if we could have removable, modular batteries that are easy to replace at (what was formerly) a gas station.
      - FooHentai 6y ago
        EVa have back seats and trunks just like ICE, and they need to be usable by the vehicle owner just the same so I’m not sure I see the relevance. For retrofitting, locating some batteries in the engine bay is possible. This seems to be avoided by ev manufacturers in favour of locating a monolithic battery pack under the passenger compartment, for weight distribution, simplicity, and (I assume) safety reasons. Physically swappable battery packs isn’t feasible because of the sheer weight of the packs (a leaf 40k pack for example is 210kg). Plus each car manufacturer has different specs and shape packs. Fortunately we already have a completely fungible, extremely portable unit that can be hot-swapped into every EV at nearly any location just like petrol - a kWh of electricity. Today it takes a bit of time to fast charge, but again with visible-on-the-horizon breakthroughs in battery tech e.g. solid state, fast charge times could drop from ~30 minutes to 3.
  - alfl 6y ago
    I have back-of-the-napkin tried to scale mass conversion. The gotchas are (very) nice-to-have things like power steering that rely on engine pressure. Actual drivetrain is solved.
- jbarrs 6y ago
  According to a relative who's worked in the industry most of his life, the carbon footprint just from manufacturing and disposing of batteries for electric vehicles is not compensated by the decreased emissions. I think the lifetime is ~5 years shorter than the "carbon neutral time" of using a battery over conventional fuel. Much of the research now is to either reduce the carbon footprint of battery manufacture, or to increase the lifetime of the battery to compensate, but the batteries themselves are apparently worse for the environment than the engines they're replacing.
- npsimons 6y ago
  Going to need to see numbers to back these claims; what I've seen says otherwise, granted the breakeven point is different depending on where you live: https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM
  - sn_master 6y ago
    This video is comparing a new EV with a new ICE. I was talking about using an existing EV or ICE for longer time rather than buying an entirely new car. Of course it's easier to re-use ICE than most older EVs which don't have durable enough batteries.
    - npsimons 6y ago
      Battery longevity is getting better; I need to find sources, but last I heard is with new cooling technology, they are starting to put lifetime estimates at 500K miles. As for the tradeoff of new EV versus used ICE, the numbers in the video seemed to suggest to me that it's still in favor of EVs, just that the break even point is farther out. Other sources have run the numbers to show it's not the construction or EOL that is the largest factor in emissions, it's the actual use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 It's really clear that EV's are just the better option for the environment. The only thing that beats them is public/mass transit or human powered (walking, cycling) transportation.
- belltaco 6y ago
  Literally no one buying an EV is junking their car if its drivable. They trade it in where it offsets manufacturing another car.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    And then someone buys it on the other end and junks their own car vs driving it for another 2-3 years. The more new cars getting bought, the cheaper used cars become and more inclined people become to junk their 100k miles used cars vs using them until they hit 200k miles.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      You underestimate the size of the used car market. It's bigger than just one country.
m463 6y ago
What is the energy use to produce a dollar bill? It uses plant matter - paper and linen. Coin production uses refined metal (although is more durable). ;) [more seriously, I wonder what percentage of USD currency is physical vs an entry in a database]
- navls 6y ago
  Apparently, out of a 19.08 trillion M3 USD supply [1], 2.04 trillion is in notes [2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm M3 more info https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Production is only relevant if you divide by the number of transactions a bill or coin can be used in. Bitcoin miners must compute at least one new block before a group of transactions can be committed to the block chain. For physical money the energy spent per transaction is relatively low, basically the energy spent opening a cash register drawer or for a large transaction the energy spent by a counting machine. I suspect that paper money is far more efficient than Bitcoin, just given the amount of power Bitcoin consumes and the tiny number of transactions processed in a given time period by the Bitcoin system (tiny compared to the number paper money/coin that occur in a given day and basically irrelevant compared to the number of electronic payments made every day).
c22 6y ago
Don't bitcoin transactions offset from transactions within the classical banking network? How much electricity do banks use?
- jabberwcky 6y ago
  Nothing close to 120 gigawatt/sec (going by one estimate)
  - c22 6y ago
    This first-google-result analysis[0] from a couple years ago puts the global banking system at around 100 TWh a year which is pretty close to the currently estimated "121.36TWh" for bitcoin[1]. Incidentally, that 2nd article mentions that this is equivalent to the power used by inactive-but-on electronic devices in US households alone. I guess PC gaming was at 75TWh 5 years ago [2], so I'm not going to worry too much yet. [0] http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoin-vs-banking-system/ http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoi... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-big-surprise-in-home-energy-consumption-gaming-pcs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-...
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      Total power consumption is the wrong metric; we should talk about the average consumption per transaction. If the totals are close, it means Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient system, since it only processes a fraction of the number of transaction per year that the mainstream financial system processes.
      - c22 6y ago
        I agree, and I don't think bitcoin will ever be efficient. But I don't think any of us can stop it at this point and it still seems less frivolous than many of the things we spend energy on. Since energy consumption has historically always increased and since it drives all of human progress and innovation I'm not convinced that the demand side is where we should focus on solving our problems.
brentjanderson 6y ago
> Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere. Isn't that the same as a Tesla opting to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant? Bitcoin rigs don't burn gasoline directly, but rely on whatever source of power is available at their location. Bitcoin does waste a lot of energy, hopefully we can draw from cleaner sources in the long-run to operate it (and find ways to move Bitcoin off of proof-of-work). UPCO2 is a new token from Uphold.com, and BTC0 is Bitcoin backed by UPCO2 tokens to offset carbon emissions. Using these crypto assets is one way to offset carbon while still using Crypto.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  GP's point is about the tradeoff that switching to electric cars versus ICE provides, and BTC does not. Let's assume that switching to electric does not, itself, cause an increase in total cars on the road. Let's also assume that both ICE and electric vehicles require roughly equal amounts of energy to travel equivalent distances (this is probably not true, but helps in the analysis). The tradeoff between an ICE or electric vehicle, then, is which produces more carbon emissions for the same amount of energy: the gas/diesel combustion engine or the power plant? If the plant is more efficient, converting to electric vehicles will produce a net reduction globally, but a net increase locally (at the power plant) in carbon emissions. If it's equal, then we just shift the source of emissions to the power plants. If plant is less efficient, then there will be a global increase. This is the worst case, it's also not the likely case. This gets improved later with the ability to switch to cleaner energy production methods than burning oil, coal, or natural gas. This is not an option if we remain with ICE vehicles, we can't put a wind turbine on them or a nuclear reactor. BTC doesn't trade anything, it just increases energy consumption (and therefore production). In the near term, at least, BTC will increase carbon emissions because that's how most energy is produced. Not just exchange the location of emissions. BTC isn't replacing oil burning bank ledgers. It's just consuming orders of magnitude more energy to do a similar job.
willis936 6y ago
Centralized plants emit less carbon per joule of useable energy, but mechanical-electrical-mechanical conversions end up making the process overall less efficient. The real win is decoupling energy consumption from energy production.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  Do you mind explaining how this relates to Telsa? Is generating power in a power plant, getting it to a Tesla battery, then using it to move a car a "mechanical-electrical-mechanical" conversion?
  - willis936 6y ago
    Yes. Combustion vehicles never have to convert to electrical energy. Big steam plants are more efficient at turning fuel into torque than small combustion engines, but that increase is offset by having to spin generators. Edit: Well, at least that is what my impression was. DoE has a paper on this. The example numbers used in this paper seem typical from me taking a brief look at power plant and EV efficiency. I thought the extra energy conversion steps added up to more than 20% thermodynamic efficiency loss. I was wrong. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-14446.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-144...
camjohnson26 6y ago
Even worse, the Bitcoin hashrate goes up as energy costs come down. The amount of energy burned is an equilibrium. But you can’t compare the costs of banking or the costs of dollar bill production to the cost of Bitcoin transactions for one fundamental reason: Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, traditional transactions are not. Bitcoin is the only way to mark information in a decentralized ledger without a trusted 3rd party and we don’t know if there’s a way to get the same functionality with less energy use, since the energy use provides the security by making it extremely hard to fake a transaction.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, traditional transactions are not. What about paying someone with cash, or gold? You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin...
  - temp8964 6y ago
    > You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin... Are you sure? What's the energy use of sending $1000 cash in the mail from the US to France?
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      From another HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090317 > If you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction. France is further than 660 miles from the US, and airplanes use more energy than electric cars. However, letters are also shipped in bulk, dramatically cutting down on the energy use of an individual parcel. So, yes, even though I don't currently have the inclination to calculate the energy use of sending a letter to France, I am very confident it would be more efficient than sending Bitcoin.
firebird84 6y ago
I actually did the math on this once, believe it or not. Based on where I live (fairly high carbon emissions from our local utility, though they have deployed more solar recently), switching to an all-electric car would have roughly the same effect carbon-wise as moving to a 60mpg car. YMMV. My math may not be perfect, but it seems that while not a perfect solution, switching to electric cars DOES improve efficiency somewhat carbon-wise. I'm on the side of not letting perfect become the enemy of good.
- RussianCow 6y ago
  Does this factor in the emissions cost of producing a new car? Because a common counter-argument to switching to EVs is that the environmental cost of the new car far outweighs any gains from increased efficiency, at least for many years.
  - npsimons 6y ago
    Emissions from production are miniscule compared to emissions from use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
  - Weebs 6y ago
    If they're in an area with a higher number of renewables, then possibly yes. I live in an area that gets about half of its power from nuclear, and the other half from hydrocarbons. When I did my research I estimated over a lifespan of some ~150k miles, a Model 3's carbon production would be roughly equivalent to a 43mpg vehicle assuming the grid stays the same. As the grid introduces more renewables, that number continues to climb. I haven't checked on this in a while, but the most energy intensive portion of overall production seemed to be the treatment of batteries during their production. Development for an alternative to the current treatment process to use significantly less energy seemed promising
- npsimons 6y ago
  Your math is backed up by others' math: https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
api 6y ago
EVs can be better even if they're powered by coal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/?sh=4d8069412320 https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr... There are numerous reasons for this. One is that oil drilling, shipping, and refining is dirty and uses a ton of energy. Another is that large heat engines are often many times more efficient than small ones. A huge 100+ megawatt steam turbine at a coal plant is going to have 2-3X the thermal efficiency of a small ICE in a car, especially if it's a newer or recently upgraded supercritical steam system. I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now.
- qwytw 6y ago
  "I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now." No, that's not even close to being correct, the most efficient Prius model you can currently buy supposedly only emits 75g per km. Tesla Model 3 consumes 14.9 kWh per 100 km, coal plants in the US on average emit ~1kg of CO2 per kWh. The energy loss between the power plant and consumer seems to be between 8 and 15%. So using 8% it's 160g of CO2 per km. I'm not sure if the data reported by Tesla accounts for charger efficiency (which is at maximum 92% and might be as low as 70-80% if you're charging at home) if not that would at least another 8% making it 173g per km or more. Even a very efficient petrol car like for example WV Golf Rr 1.5 TSI is quite a bit lower than that at 116g per km. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 Switching to Natural gas would decrease CO2 per kWH more than twice, from 1kg to 0.41 kg per kWh would make Model 3 about even with the Prius (71 vs 75 g per km).
  - api 6y ago
    Does this count all the energy required to drill, ship, and refine oil? I’ve read that refineries use a ton of power usually in the form of gas, electricity, or burning part of the oil. Coal is mined too but it doesn’t require much processing.
npsimons 6y ago
Another big difference: I can fuel my EV at home with my solar panels. Can't do that with an ICE vehicle. I bicycle commute to and from work (before the quarantines, and now I'm moving to 100% WFH), as well to get groceries and other errands around town. The big vehicle is for weekend adventures.
- danielrpa 6y ago
  This. Removing the commute has a much higher impact on emissions than changing your car.
maxwell 6y ago
What's the carbon footprint of the conventional financial system?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Just the tech parts of it? Significantly less than cryptocurrency, and it handles more than a million concurrent transactions every second, with capacity to handle loads in the tens of millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions for second, and requires more electricity than a small country to do so.
  - maxwell 6y ago
    Thanks for the numbers. I mentioned the other day that "one of the bad things" about Bitcoin was that it consumed the energy equiv of Ireland. Then heard yesterday that it's up to Argentina. Sounded like order of mag change, and yep—🇮🇪 is about to again surpass 5M people, 🇦🇷 approaching 45M. Almost into top 30 countries.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  According to Visa's 2018 report, they consumed about 0.1TWh while processing an average of 4000 transactions per second [1]. Bitcoin consumes 121TWh per year to process 4-7 transactions per second [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibility/visa-2018-corporate-responsibility-report.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons
yellowapple 6y ago
> Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere. Does printing/minting physical money not have a carbon footprint? What about transporting it everywhere?
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  According to [0], a single bitcoin transaction has a CO2 footprint of 300 kg. Printing a $100 bill costs 20 cents according to [1]. I don't think there is a meaningful way to produce 300 kg of CO2 by spending 20 cents, even if that was all you were trying to do. And then consider that a bill sees on the order of 100 reuses (and coins live significantly longer). Transportation is far harder to estimate, but unless you're driving hundreds of miles for each (average) transaction, you're not going to get anywhere near 300 kg, as road vehicles are in the ballpark of 20 kg CO2 per 100 km. So no, CO2 impact of physical money is orders of magnitude below bitcoin. Bitcoin is not remotely offsetting anything there. [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm
- betterunix2 6y ago
  It does, but it is almost certainly less than Bitcoin on a per-transaction basis. If the energy cost of physical money were comparable to the average energy spent per Bitcoin transactions we would already have a cashless society; in fact, if the energy cost was so high, we may never have used cash/coins in the first place. To put this in perspective, Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as Argentina (a country with tens of millions of residents), about 121 TWh/year, but for all that energy the network only processes 4-7 transactions per second. Visa processes an average of 1700 transactions per second on its own, and is just one of many large payment processors in the mainstream financial system. Visa's 2018 report (first thing I found on Google) stated a consumption of about 720000GJ, which is 0.1TWh. That is a massive difference, so if cash was anything as energy-intensive as Bitcoin the banks would have figured it out by now and ditched it to save a ton of money (keeping in mind that banks account for the bulk of the overhead spent on cash and coins).

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Sure. But a centralized power plant could be surrounded by solar panels that offset the carbon costs.

sn_master 6y ago

The best way to reduce carbon emissions is to keep using existing cars, whether gas or electric for as long as they're drivable. Electric (and ICE, to a lesser extent) cars have a very significant carbon footprint when they're newly produced. Abandoning cars after a few years is far worse to the environment.

titzer 6y ago
It'd be best to just...not drive. Second best would be to actively pursue a mass-scale electric conversion so that we could reuse all those big metal chassis, tires, seats, etc in existing cars. It'd be far cheaper in terms of carbon footprint to replace a combustion engine with electric. Why aren't we doing that? Because retrofitting is hard and not very profitable. And yeah, we need a place to put the batteries too. Much better to just junk everything and build more stuff! (Yes I know, most of the materials of a car will be recycled. But it's just another expression of our throwaway/can't fix that culture).
- sn_master 6y ago
  > It'd be best to just...not drive. I wish it was that easy of a choice. Pre-COVID, using public transit would have made my daily commute (one-way) between 1.5 and 2 hours, compared to 20-30 minutes by car. And where I live, we've been paying hundreds-thousands of dollars on each car registration renewal (% of the car's estimated value) for that new transit system, which might not even get used that much post-COVID because of the germophobia that inflicted society.
- FooHentai 6y ago
  You missed a key reason - batteries are very heavy, and to achieve the kind of range that makes it practical for drivers to switch from ICE requires specifically-designed chassis layout and materials to accomodate battery weight in a suitable location to maintain acceptable weight distribution With a breakthrough in energy storage technology e.g. solid state, this issue might go away, but right now it compels the production of vehicles specifically designed to be EV and relegates retrofitting to a hobbyist discipline providing relatively disappointing results in range and/or handling.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    yup, most retrofitted cars get way less mileage than regular EVs (150 miles or less).
  - titzer 6y ago
    I get that, but cars have gas tanks, back seats, and trunks, too. Also, the actual electric engine is very small, leaving a lot of room in engine compartments themselves. The only reason we would need very large batteries is to have a very long range, which would not be necessary if we could have removable, modular batteries that are easy to replace at (what was formerly) a gas station.
    - FooHentai 6y ago
      EVa have back seats and trunks just like ICE, and they need to be usable by the vehicle owner just the same so I’m not sure I see the relevance. For retrofitting, locating some batteries in the engine bay is possible. This seems to be avoided by ev manufacturers in favour of locating a monolithic battery pack under the passenger compartment, for weight distribution, simplicity, and (I assume) safety reasons. Physically swappable battery packs isn’t feasible because of the sheer weight of the packs (a leaf 40k pack for example is 210kg). Plus each car manufacturer has different specs and shape packs. Fortunately we already have a completely fungible, extremely portable unit that can be hot-swapped into every EV at nearly any location just like petrol - a kWh of electricity. Today it takes a bit of time to fast charge, but again with visible-on-the-horizon breakthroughs in battery tech e.g. solid state, fast charge times could drop from ~30 minutes to 3.
- alfl 6y ago
  I have back-of-the-napkin tried to scale mass conversion. The gotchas are (very) nice-to-have things like power steering that rely on engine pressure. Actual drivetrain is solved.
jbarrs 6y ago
According to a relative who's worked in the industry most of his life, the carbon footprint just from manufacturing and disposing of batteries for electric vehicles is not compensated by the decreased emissions. I think the lifetime is ~5 years shorter than the "carbon neutral time" of using a battery over conventional fuel. Much of the research now is to either reduce the carbon footprint of battery manufacture, or to increase the lifetime of the battery to compensate, but the batteries themselves are apparently worse for the environment than the engines they're replacing.
npsimons 6y ago
Going to need to see numbers to back these claims; what I've seen says otherwise, granted the breakeven point is different depending on where you live: https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM
- sn_master 6y ago
  This video is comparing a new EV with a new ICE. I was talking about using an existing EV or ICE for longer time rather than buying an entirely new car. Of course it's easier to re-use ICE than most older EVs which don't have durable enough batteries.
  - npsimons 6y ago
    Battery longevity is getting better; I need to find sources, but last I heard is with new cooling technology, they are starting to put lifetime estimates at 500K miles. As for the tradeoff of new EV versus used ICE, the numbers in the video seemed to suggest to me that it's still in favor of EVs, just that the break even point is farther out. Other sources have run the numbers to show it's not the construction or EOL that is the largest factor in emissions, it's the actual use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 It's really clear that EV's are just the better option for the environment. The only thing that beats them is public/mass transit or human powered (walking, cycling) transportation.
belltaco 6y ago
Literally no one buying an EV is junking their car if its drivable. They trade it in where it offsets manufacturing another car.
- sn_master 6y ago
  And then someone buys it on the other end and junks their own car vs driving it for another 2-3 years. The more new cars getting bought, the cheaper used cars become and more inclined people become to junk their 100k miles used cars vs using them until they hit 200k miles.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    You underestimate the size of the used car market. It's bigger than just one country.

m463 6y ago

What is the energy use to produce a dollar bill? It uses plant matter - paper and linen. Coin production uses refined metal (although is more durable). ;) [more seriously, I wonder what percentage of USD currency is physical vs an entry in a database]

navls 6y ago
Apparently, out of a 19.08 trillion M3 USD supply [1], 2.04 trillion is in notes [2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm M3 more info https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp
betterunix2 6y ago
Production is only relevant if you divide by the number of transactions a bill or coin can be used in. Bitcoin miners must compute at least one new block before a group of transactions can be committed to the block chain. For physical money the energy spent per transaction is relatively low, basically the energy spent opening a cash register drawer or for a large transaction the energy spent by a counting machine. I suspect that paper money is far more efficient than Bitcoin, just given the amount of power Bitcoin consumes and the tiny number of transactions processed in a given time period by the Bitcoin system (tiny compared to the number paper money/coin that occur in a given day and basically irrelevant compared to the number of electronic payments made every day).

c22 6y ago

Don't bitcoin transactions offset from transactions within the classical banking network? How much electricity do banks use?

jabberwcky 6y ago
Nothing close to 120 gigawatt/sec (going by one estimate)
- c22 6y ago
  This first-google-result analysis[0] from a couple years ago puts the global banking system at around 100 TWh a year which is pretty close to the currently estimated "121.36TWh" for bitcoin[1]. Incidentally, that 2nd article mentions that this is equivalent to the power used by inactive-but-on electronic devices in US households alone. I guess PC gaming was at 75TWh 5 years ago [2], so I'm not going to worry too much yet. [0] http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoin-vs-banking-system/ http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoi... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-big-surprise-in-home-energy-consumption-gaming-pcs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-...
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    Total power consumption is the wrong metric; we should talk about the average consumption per transaction. If the totals are close, it means Bitcoin is an extremely inefficient system, since it only processes a fraction of the number of transaction per year that the mainstream financial system processes.
    - c22 6y ago
      I agree, and I don't think bitcoin will ever be efficient. But I don't think any of us can stop it at this point and it still seems less frivolous than many of the things we spend energy on. Since energy consumption has historically always increased and since it drives all of human progress and innovation I'm not convinced that the demand side is where we should focus on solving our problems.

brentjanderson 6y ago

> Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere. Isn't that the same as a Tesla opting to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant? Bitcoin rigs don't burn gasoline directly, but rely on whatever source of power is available at their location. Bitcoin does waste a lot of energy, hopefully we can draw from cleaner sources in the long-run to operate it (and find ways to move Bitcoin off of proof-of-work). UPCO2 is a new token from Uphold.com, and BTC0 is Bitcoin backed by UPCO2 tokens to offset carbon emissions. Using these crypto assets is one way to offset carbon while still using Crypto.

Jtsummers 6y ago
GP's point is about the tradeoff that switching to electric cars versus ICE provides, and BTC does not. Let's assume that switching to electric does not, itself, cause an increase in total cars on the road. Let's also assume that both ICE and electric vehicles require roughly equal amounts of energy to travel equivalent distances (this is probably not true, but helps in the analysis). The tradeoff between an ICE or electric vehicle, then, is which produces more carbon emissions for the same amount of energy: the gas/diesel combustion engine or the power plant? If the plant is more efficient, converting to electric vehicles will produce a net reduction globally, but a net increase locally (at the power plant) in carbon emissions. If it's equal, then we just shift the source of emissions to the power plants. If plant is less efficient, then there will be a global increase. This is the worst case, it's also not the likely case. This gets improved later with the ability to switch to cleaner energy production methods than burning oil, coal, or natural gas. This is not an option if we remain with ICE vehicles, we can't put a wind turbine on them or a nuclear reactor. BTC doesn't trade anything, it just increases energy consumption (and therefore production). In the near term, at least, BTC will increase carbon emissions because that's how most energy is produced. Not just exchange the location of emissions. BTC isn't replacing oil burning bank ledgers. It's just consuming orders of magnitude more energy to do a similar job.

willis936 6y ago

Centralized plants emit less carbon per joule of useable energy, but mechanical-electrical-mechanical conversions end up making the process overall less efficient. The real win is decoupling energy consumption from energy production.

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
Do you mind explaining how this relates to Telsa? Is generating power in a power plant, getting it to a Tesla battery, then using it to move a car a "mechanical-electrical-mechanical" conversion?
- willis936 6y ago
  Yes. Combustion vehicles never have to convert to electrical energy. Big steam plants are more efficient at turning fuel into torque than small combustion engines, but that increase is offset by having to spin generators. Edit: Well, at least that is what my impression was. DoE has a paper on this. The example numbers used in this paper seem typical from me taking a brief look at power plant and EV efficiency. I thought the extra energy conversion steps added up to more than 20% thermodynamic efficiency loss. I was wrong. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-14446.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-144...

camjohnson26 6y ago

Even worse, the Bitcoin hashrate goes up as energy costs come down. The amount of energy burned is an equilibrium. But you can’t compare the costs of banking or the costs of dollar bill production to the cost of Bitcoin transactions for one fundamental reason: Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, traditional transactions are not. Bitcoin is the only way to mark information in a decentralized ledger without a trusted 3rd party and we don’t know if there’s a way to get the same functionality with less energy use, since the energy use provides the security by making it extremely hard to fake a transaction.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, traditional transactions are not. What about paying someone with cash, or gold? You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin...
- temp8964 6y ago
  > You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin... Are you sure? What's the energy use of sending $1000 cash in the mail from the US to France?
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    From another HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26090317 > If you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction. France is further than 660 miles from the US, and airplanes use more energy than electric cars. However, letters are also shipped in bulk, dramatically cutting down on the energy use of an individual parcel. So, yes, even though I don't currently have the inclination to calculate the energy use of sending a letter to France, I am very confident it would be more efficient than sending Bitcoin.

firebird84 6y ago

I actually did the math on this once, believe it or not. Based on where I live (fairly high carbon emissions from our local utility, though they have deployed more solar recently), switching to an all-electric car would have roughly the same effect carbon-wise as moving to a 60mpg car. YMMV. My math may not be perfect, but it seems that while not a perfect solution, switching to electric cars DOES improve efficiency somewhat carbon-wise. I'm on the side of not letting perfect become the enemy of good.

RussianCow 6y ago
Does this factor in the emissions cost of producing a new car? Because a common counter-argument to switching to EVs is that the environmental cost of the new car far outweighs any gains from increased efficiency, at least for many years.
- npsimons 6y ago
  Emissions from production are miniscule compared to emissions from use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
- Weebs 6y ago
  If they're in an area with a higher number of renewables, then possibly yes. I live in an area that gets about half of its power from nuclear, and the other half from hydrocarbons. When I did my research I estimated over a lifespan of some ~150k miles, a Model 3's carbon production would be roughly equivalent to a 43mpg vehicle assuming the grid stays the same. As the grid introduces more renewables, that number continues to climb. I haven't checked on this in a while, but the most energy intensive portion of overall production seemed to be the treatment of batteries during their production. Development for an alternative to the current treatment process to use significantly less energy seemed promising
npsimons 6y ago
Your math is backed up by others' math: https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/6RhtiPefVzM https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8

api 6y ago

EVs can be better even if they're powered by coal: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electric-cars-are-cleaner-even-when-the-power-comes-from-coal/?sh=4d8069412320 https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr... There are numerous reasons for this. One is that oil drilling, shipping, and refining is dirty and uses a ton of energy. Another is that large heat engines are often many times more efficient than small ones. A huge 100+ megawatt steam turbine at a coal plant is going to have 2-3X the thermal efficiency of a small ICE in a car, especially if it's a newer or recently upgraded supercritical steam system. I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now.

qwytw 6y ago
"I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now." No, that's not even close to being correct, the most efficient Prius model you can currently buy supposedly only emits 75g per km. Tesla Model 3 consumes 14.9 kWh per 100 km, coal plants in the US on average emit ~1kg of CO2 per kWh. The energy loss between the power plant and consumer seems to be between 8 and 15%. So using 8% it's 160g of CO2 per km. I'm not sure if the data reported by Tesla accounts for charger efficiency (which is at maximum 92% and might be as low as 70-80% if you're charging at home) if not that would at least another 8% making it 173g per km or more. Even a very efficient petrol car like for example WV Golf Rr 1.5 TSI is quite a bit lower than that at 116g per km. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 Switching to Natural gas would decrease CO2 per kWH more than twice, from 1kg to 0.41 kg per kWh would make Model 3 about even with the Prius (71 vs 75 g per km).
- api 6y ago
  Does this count all the energy required to drill, ship, and refine oil? I’ve read that refineries use a ton of power usually in the form of gas, electricity, or burning part of the oil. Coal is mined too but it doesn’t require much processing.

npsimons 6y ago

Another big difference: I can fuel my EV at home with my solar panels. Can't do that with an ICE vehicle. I bicycle commute to and from work (before the quarantines, and now I'm moving to 100% WFH), as well to get groceries and other errands around town. The big vehicle is for weekend adventures.

danielrpa 6y ago
This. Removing the commute has a much higher impact on emissions than changing your car.

maxwell 6y ago

What's the carbon footprint of the conventional financial system?

gamblor956 6y ago
Just the tech parts of it? Significantly less than cryptocurrency, and it handles more than a million concurrent transactions every second, with capacity to handle loads in the tens of millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions for second, and requires more electricity than a small country to do so.
- maxwell 6y ago
  Thanks for the numbers. I mentioned the other day that "one of the bad things" about Bitcoin was that it consumed the energy equiv of Ireland. Then heard yesterday that it's up to Argentina. Sounded like order of mag change, and yep—🇮🇪 is about to again surpass 5M people, 🇦🇷 approaching 45M. Almost into top 30 countries.
betterunix2 6y ago
According to Visa's 2018 report, they consumed about 0.1TWh while processing an average of 4000 transactions per second [1]. Bitcoin consumes 121TWh per year to process 4-7 transactions per second [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibility/visa-2018-corporate-responsibility-report.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons

yellowapple 6y ago

> Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere. Does printing/minting physical money not have a carbon footprint? What about transporting it everywhere?

MauranKilom 6y ago
According to [0], a single bitcoin transaction has a CO2 footprint of 300 kg. Printing a $100 bill costs 20 cents according to [1]. I don't think there is a meaningful way to produce 300 kg of CO2 by spending 20 cents, even if that was all you were trying to do. And then consider that a bill sees on the order of 100 reuses (and coins live significantly longer). Transportation is far harder to estimate, but unless you're driving hundreds of miles for each (average) transaction, you're not going to get anywhere near 300 kg, as road vehicles are in the ballpark of 20 kg CO2 per 100 km. So no, CO2 impact of physical money is orders of magnitude below bitcoin. Bitcoin is not remotely offsetting anything there. [0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm
betterunix2 6y ago
It does, but it is almost certainly less than Bitcoin on a per-transaction basis. If the energy cost of physical money were comparable to the average energy spent per Bitcoin transactions we would already have a cashless society; in fact, if the energy cost was so high, we may never have used cash/coins in the first place. To put this in perspective, Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as Argentina (a country with tens of millions of residents), about 121 TWh/year, but for all that energy the network only processes 4-7 transactions per second. Visa processes an average of 1700 transactions per second on its own, and is just one of many large payment processors in the mainstream financial system. Visa's 2018 report (first thing I found on Google) stated a consumption of about 720000GJ, which is 0.1TWh. That is a massive difference, so if cash was anything as energy-intensive as Bitcoin the banks would have figured it out by now and ditched it to save a ton of money (keeping in mind that banks account for the bulk of the overhead spent on cash and coins).