February 10 – Reuters (Anna Irrera and Tom Wilson):
“Tesla boss Elon Musk is a poster child of low-carbon technology.
Yet the electric carmaker’s backing of bitcoin this week could turbo-charge global use of a currency that’s estimated to cause more (CO2 emissions) ... than a small country every year.
Tesla Inc revealed on Monday it had bought $1.5 billion of bitcoin and would soon accept it as payment for cars, sending the price of the crypto-currency though the roof…
The digital currency is created when high-powered computers compete against other machines to solve complex mathematical puzzles, an energy-intensive process that currently often relies on fossil fuels, particularly coal, the dirtiest of them all.
At current rates, such bitcoin ‘mining’ devours about the same amount of energy annually as the Netherlands did in 2019…”