Article · February 2022 doi: 10. 1016/j joule

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Revisiting Bitcoin's carbon footprint
Article
· February 2022
DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2022.02.005
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Alex de Vries
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
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Ulrich Gallersdörfer
Technische Universität München
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Lena Klaaßen
Technische Universität München
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Christian Stoll
Technische Universität München
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Commentary:
Revisiting Bitcoin’s Carbon Footprint
Alex De Vries,
1,2,*
Ulrich Gallersdörfer,
3,4
Lena Klaaßen,
4,5
Christian Stoll,
4,6,7
Joule Volume 6, Issue 13, P, March 16, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2022.02.005
Abstract
In the Spring of 2021, the mining crackdown in China shook up global Bitcoin mining activity. We show that this crackdown may have reduced the use of renewable electricity sources for Bitcoin mining, resulting in increased carbon intensity of mining activities. We estimate that Bitcoin mining maybe responsible for 65.4 MtCO2 annually, which is comparable to country-level emissions in Greece. School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Founder of Digiconomist, Almere, The Netherlands TUM Software Engineering for Business Information Systems, Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Germany
4
CCRI Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Dingolfing, Germany Climate Finance and Policy Group, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich, Germany
*
Correspondence: alex@digiconomist.net

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