Six US lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have asked the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy to crack down on cryptomining.
In a letter also signed by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Edward Markey, and Jeffrey Merkley alongside Members of Congress Jared Huffman and Rashida Tlaib, the lawmakers requested that cryptomining companies in the U.S. report their energy usage and carbon emissions.
Cryptomining is the process of using power-intensive computers to solve increasingly difficult mathematical puzzles to earn new tokens for currencies such as Bitcoin. While the US is seeing an influx of cryptomining operations, the report makes clear that there is, "no national or state reporting requirement or compilation of the locations of cryptomining facilities in the United States, and no federal regulations specifically governing cryptomining."
Given the power needs of these companies, concerns have been raised about energy usage driving up costs for regular consumers, and environmental damage. Citing their own research, the lawmakers claimed that between seven companies investigated – which includes Greenidge, Riot, Bitdeer, Stronghold, Marathon, Bit Digital, and Bitfury – together they have almost utilized enough energy to power every residence in Houston, Texas, coming in at around 1,045 megawatts.
Additionally, despite a number of the companies claiming that their cryptomining was environmentally friendly – Greenidge says it used a "clean burning natural gas facility", for example – the company still reported 273,326 tons of CO2 equivalent emitted in the 12 months prior to November 2021, equivalent to 60,000 cars.
Bit Digital estimated 92,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2020, but projected 1.075 million metric tons in 2022, rising to 1.2 million in 2023, the annual equivalent of 260,000 cars. The lawmakers also said the amount of energy used "could be used for other priority end uses that contribute to our electrification and climate goals, such as replacing home furnaces with heat pumps".
Making all of this information fully available to the government, the letter said, would "enable valuable public policy activities, including better monitoring of energy use and trends, better evidence basis for policy making, improved data for national mitigation analyses, better abilities for evaluating technology policies for the sector, and better modelling of national and regional grid loads and transitions, among other purposes."
Warren has been vocal about a number of other tech industry issues, including the transition to universal chargers for smartphones and raising concern over Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Thumbnail Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.