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> Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. Sorry, but this is a ridiculous st
by spankalee 3y ago
> Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is.
Sorry, but this is a ridiculous statement.
Electricity is one of the most fungible things in existence, and renewables don't yet make up 100% of production, therefore any additional consumption _for the most part_ might as well be 100% generated from fossil fuels.
Even if a miner has a contract with a solar farm for all of their power, that's still electricity that someone else could be using instead of electricity from fossil fuels.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agoMost miners are capturing energy through government corruption or through means that are not otherwise usable such as waste gas in oil fields or remote mills.
- dannyobrien 3y agoI'm not sure this is true, but happy to be proven wrong: if there was a geothermal source, say, hundreds of miles from anywhere, the transmission losses might make it uneconomic to exploit, but it would be usable for proof-of-work or a similar project. (Not arguing for or against this application, and it may be that this is too rare a phenomenon to matter; just quibbling over the fungibility.)
- digging 3y ago> Even if a miner has a contract with a solar farm for all of their power, that's still electricity that someone else could be using instead of electricity from fossil fuels. Not if the infrastructure wouldn't have been built without the miners.