A group of Democratic legislators led by US senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding details from six of the world’sabout their electricity consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, a warning shot that comes amid growing concern over the cryptocurrency industry’s environmental impact.
The letters raise the stakes in Senator Warren’s campaign to crack down on wasteful Bitcoin operations after she sent a similar request in December to Greenidge Generation Holdings, which powers its upstate New York facility with a natural gas plant. “What is your projected electricity consumption for cryptomining across all of your US facilities combined over the next five years? What are your projected associated carbon emissions for that mining?” the legislators wrote.Mr Brooks defended the industry’s energy consumption before a US House subcommittee hearing this month.
“The extraordinarily high energy usage and carbon emissions associated with Bitcoin mining could undermine our hard work to tackle the climate crisis – not to mention the harmful impacts cryptomining has on local environments and electricity prices,” Senator Warren said in an emailed statement.
This could be a devastating blow to investors in cryptocurrency.