On The Brink with Castle Island Hass McCook on Bitcoin's energy use in context (EP.216)
Hass McCook is a civil engineer who has been delivering estimates of Bitcoin's energy use and CO2 emissions since 2014, as well as alternatives like gold or finance. In this episode:
- Hass's background in civil engineering and how it prepared him for the energy debate
- The conflation between energy generation and electricity generation
- Why you can't just generalize energy consumption to carbon emissions
- Hass breaks down the varying carbon intensities of different sources of generation
- How much energy goes to waste globally
- The difference between CO2 and CO2e / greenhouse gases
- Why today's US grid has lowered its carbon intensity over the last decade
- Why combusting methane is a net good from an emissions perspective
- Hass' level of optimism around flared gas mining
- Why the changing rate of ASIC innovation affects bitcoin's energy consumption
- The opportunity for stranded gas at landfills
- Hass' estimates of the gold and the financial system's energy footprints
- How gold mining actually works
- The ecological and human cost of gold mining
- Hass' thoughts on offsets
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