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I'm saying that power-efficient appliances were an innovation that responded to high energy prices, and with the reduced rate of growth in energy demand has com

I'm saying that power-efficient appliances were an innovation that responded to high energy prices, and with the reduced rate of growth in energy demand has come reduced innovation, which has had the effect of enabling the economics of dirty and inefficient energy generation. Energy production plants aren't public infrastructure, they're productive capital that has been mismanaged as infrastructure for the last 100 years. When you build a geothermal plant to mine coins, you are making it economically viable at every price, and you can collect or divert surplus electricity to use it to power a city. Governments could even compel power generators mining coins to send a percentage of their electricity usage into the grid as a "tax." I'm suddenly optimistic about this.

md_ 5y ago
Right. I get what you're saying, and I think there's probably some validity to the idea that increasing demand drives innovation and (eventually) a reduced unit cost. Ultimately, though, the goal from a climate change perspective isn't "lower unit cost" or "energy innovation" per se; it's "reduced GHG emissions." If Bitcoin mining were, say, +50% net demand, I could buy the argument that it will lead to innovations in supply. But it's more like +0.5% demand, so it seems much more likely that it's just driving up prices a small amount, keeping some production sources alive which would otherwise not be. And in at least some cases, those sources are going to be high carbon impact.