This makes no sense.
If people would stop eating meat there would be no demand so no more energy spent on growing livestock.
If cryptos would get banned across the world (and we consider an all out ban with prison terms) the value would drop back to the closure of SR levels and mining will not be profitable until 90% of them quit, resulting in a drop of energy consumption.
I don't know where you get your logic...change the supplier.
The issue with meat is, demand greatly surpasses supply by a considerable margin. If a considerable proportion of the population quit eating meat there would still be overwhelming demand. There are many people and families who would eat steak dinners every night if they could afford to. Meat is a luxury food item for many and that isn't likely to change anytime soon for the same reasons people aren't likely to give up sharkfin soup or other food items which threaten endangerment or extinction of animal species on the endangered list.
Electrical energy consumption is constantly rising.
Bitcoin doesn't change the world's energy needs increasing on an annual basis and its impact on this historical trend is negligible at best.
If those miners would not consume green energy, that energy would be consumed by others and coal generated energy would drop.
And California is importing energy , close to 33% of their entire demand.
Here's an interior picture of a bitcoin mining facility in china.
Exterior photo of the same mining facility(blue roof), it is powered by a small hydroelectric plant harnessing power from the river.
Hydroelectric power is slightly cheaper (and more environmentally friendly) than coal and so could represent a natural progression for bitcoin mining ops.
One issue with the media's claim of "bitcoin being bad for the environment" is there is zero effort to quantify how many bitcoin mining ops utilize hydroelectric or other forms of power. They simply assume "coal" which is the worst case scenario.
China has been credited with having 14 of the top 30 most polluted cities in the world long before bitcoin mining went mainstream. There is no objective breakdown of the biggest wasters of electricity, or largest contributors to climate change. Only assumptions being made about bitcoin's role in contributing to both.
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Here's a source for california paying neighboring arizona to take their excess electricity to avoid damaging their power grid from the excess power produced:
California invested heavily in solar power. Now there's so much that other states are sometimes paid to take itOn 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.
Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.
It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.
The number of days that California dumped its unused solar electricity would have been even higher if the state hadn’t ordered some solar plants to reduce production — even as natural gas power plants, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, continued generating electricity.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/ The article above seems to indicate that power generation is so high in some regions they might actually benefit from the higher energy consumption of bitcoin mining enterprises as it would reduce their need to outsource power to neighboring states.
