Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong
It is a waste of energy either way which could have been used for actual useful purposes. So no, that is not a helpful solution.
That would actually not do anything.
So there’s this stupid thing called carbon capture right? It’s where instead of putting money into useful things there’s these companies that use a lot of resources on machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. The companies claim that they use “green” energy, but it doesn’t. As earmarked as that may be these machines still just use grid energy, which still uses fossil fuels. All it does is take some capacity to replace fossil fuels from green energy.
You mean “carbon offset”, not “carbon capture”. Carbon capture is where you extract carbon out of the air and make concrete or something else out of it. Capture isn’t widely done but likely will be soon.
Carbon offsets are very useful. They paid for a sizeable portion of the solar installation on my home for example. Which has cut my household power emissions by about two thirds and that’s with us selling about 80% of the generated power to the grid (where it reduces emissions for other households).
Too much
T - double O. It’s a different word.
I actually meant to say so instead of to, but it ended up working out
Although “so much” would probably be a better fit anyway
Green energy is still not free energy.
Every amout of green energy a crypto miner uses is less green energy for everything else. You take 3% (country consumption) of capacity from the green grid, you must up at least 3% the production in existing coal plants.
Or add 3% to the green grid
And spend it on calculating useless hashes instead of reducing coal mining?
Bankers are useless and a waste of resources. Replace them with computers
Tax the greenhouse effect from the energy production, UBI to give people the money to afford what they need.
Trying to moralize every action on the market is a losing game though. I mean is this, the fediverse, worth the energy, are games, streaming, plant lights for your indoor plants?
It’s better to leave that to be individuals choices but make sure that the cost of the consequences are on the individual making the choices.
I would say this is a dangerous slope to go down, since electricity is just electricity and IMO shouldn’t matter how it’s used as long as it’s payed for. It’s like the Net Neutrality situation where it shouldn’t matter how/what data is being transmitted through their network shouldn’t be discriminated for/against as long as it’s getting payed for.
Only proof of work crypto currencies require a ton of energy and the only way it’s profitable is by buying energy that would otherwise be wasted like methane flaring or excess renewable generation.
It could help a bit, but I think then there would just be less green energy available for the other applications.
First, you need to separate power hungry crypto from AI, one provides a real benefit while the other is a useless fiat that can be accomplished without dumping gigawatts down the drain. If you want to trade crypto that’s fine, just don’t use a vulgar amount of society’s power to do it.
Which is which ?
We really need to grow past this idea that just because you don’t personally use or like a thing that it is useless. Who are you to get to decide what has value and what doesn’t? If there wasn’t value, no-one would buy or use it. The unspoken part of this argument that gets repeated so often is that the reasons people are interested in the thing are reasons associated with groups you’ve been told very confidently don’t matter. Lack of control from the government? Only a nasty conservative/libertarian hick who “don’t like no GuBmint” would want something like that. Anonymity/privacy reasons (I know, only for for certain coins)? Only a scammer would want that, why care about privacy if you have nothing to hide?
None of this is even promoting or saying I’m pro crypto, just saying these are poor arguments.
As an example, as someone who doesn’t follow any sports whatsoever, I could argue the amount of resources and travel for this big football game coming up are vulgar. I mean come on, I don’t care about this game so why should anyone else be allowed to use resources on it?
Inevitably, you will come back and say but sports offers X, Y, and Z real benefits. If I were to continue the analogy of the inverted argument, the next argument is ALWAYS: “Yes, true, but it’s not the absolute best or most efficient at X, Y, or Z so therefore that doesn’t count”. It could very well be argued that any benefits coming from the super bowl could be done in cheaper, more environmentally friendly ways. Do we cancel this game then? Is anyone who is interested in it a POS?
This was an example, I actually realize there are tons of benefits to sports even though I don’t get much at all out of it personally. But it’s part of becoming a well adjusted person to realize people are going to have different values and I don’t get to decide what is important to them, or that because they are part of an out group their interests and values don’t matter.
To make one more example, if someone said they put their life savings in gold in their safe to prep for some doomsday scenario, I certainly wouldn’t agree at all that it was a good choice. A fairly objective case could be made that it is in fact the wrong/bad decision, however I still don’t get to decide their values don’t matter just because I don’t agree with them, or more importantly because Reddit/Lemmy folks told me confidently that those values only belong to preppers/conservatives/libertarians/etc etc and also that those are bad people.
Something topic-adjacent is going down in BC, Canada right now.
We had a large timber company that branched out into crypto mining, augmented with solar. They made an absolute killing with this pivot, and wanted to expand. But need a metric fuck-ton of electricity. The local utility company denied them, citing their own issues with keeping up with demand in the near future. The timber company sued them, and I think it settled to this:
Super interesting story - thanks for sharing. Helps getting perspective:
> the data centres proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million
> megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough to power and heat
> more than 570,000 apartments
They would get around that with green washing the way a lot of companies are these days.
It all depends on the details, but power is a local produced good and is not something that can be escaped with laws that want to stop carbon emissions.
You say that like the laws we have right now against carbon emissions are working. I get what you’re saying but the laws probably need a re-write.
The current laws most certainly do not work. The fact that they don’t work is a willing failure on the part of the lawmakers.
Problem is energy from the grid is just energy. You’d get crypto companies buying “green” energy leaving the dirty enegery for everyone else. It’d be meaningless.
Ultimately crypto mining is a pointless industry. It benefits the miners financially but doesn’t produce anything meaningful, while expending huge amounts of energy and polluting the world as a result. It’s also an extremely energy wasteful way to run the infrastructure needed to maintain crypto currencies.
It wouldn’t matter if we were in some Nuclear fusion powered utopia with an abundance of energy. But we’re not - we’re in the middle of a climate crisis and desperately trying to move over to green energy. Growing demands for energy for crypto is countering that.
The real solution is to tax crypto mining - for example tax then on every kWh they use. Regions that entice crypto operations in are chasing fools gold - the costs out weight any local economic benefits of new data centres being built.
There is no such thing as “green” energy, all energy has an environmental extraction/capture cost. Crypto has insane per user power usage, AI isn’t quite as bad but it’s still much higher than normal websearch. Both should be used sparingly in cases where they actually make sense.
Force this unnecessary tech bullshit to invest in becoming self-sufficient through green energy
