Bitcoin shows the scale of change needed to stop the climate crisis

Bitcoin is burning a hole in our future. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 a year as a million transatlantic flights. What’s more, that number is set to grow by design. Bitcoin is essentially a computational race among a peer-to-peer network to crack increasingly complex algorithms without any intrinsic meaning or utility, calculations that demand ever more processing power to complete, devouring energy overwhelmingly sourced from fossil fuels.

In an era of accelerating climate crisis, driven primarily by carbon emissions, it is a technological innovation of violence towards current and future generations. The scaling of Bitcoin and the proliferation of similar technologies and practices would all but lock in deep and violent climatic instability, from extreme weather events and collapsing food and water security to rising sea levels and biodiversity loss in the decades ahead. Driven by techno-libertarians deeply opposed to collective institutions and public…