Bitcoin Miners Are Cashing in on the Cryptocurrency's All-Time Highs, but the Environmental Cost Is Rising

Surges in the bitcoin price create a rewards structure for bitcoin miners to use more resources to seek even more riches.

Bitcoin miners are facing pressure to use renewable energy as the cryptocurrency’s soaring price is leading to increased energy consumption.

A surge in the bitcoin price creates a rewards structure for bitcoin miners to use more resources to seek even more riches. They get paid in the currency, and higher demand makes each new find more valuable and enticing.

“Miners can make a lot of money because price is running much faster than miners’ ability to add capacity,” Fred Thiel, Thiel, CEO of bitcoin mining giant Mara Holdings, formerly Marathon Digital Holdings, told Marketplace. Even as the excitement tapers off, don’t expect mining to slow down. The crypto community is optimistic about the Trump administration’s desire to acquiesce to miners’ needs.

But bitcoin mining requires an enormous amount of computing power. In fact, it uses more energy than entire countries, including Poland and Egypt, per a University of Cambridge analysis.

As the world’s climate changes at an alarming pace, with this year seeing record-high global temperatures and devastating hurricanes making landfall, burning dirty energy and polluting Earth with gases such as planet-heating methane is only adding to the problem.

Bitcoin mining is not alone in using an enormous amount of energy for computing processes. Artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, is another energy hog and competes for the same energy at data centers. That development can be especially concerning when those energy demands lead to a renewed reliance on dirty energy.

“It’s taking … gas plants that have actually been shuttered and bringing them back online just for the purposes of cryptocurrency mining,” environmental policy advocate Liz Moran said.

For one thing, there is ample resistance to bitcoin mining throughout the world. Local residents can make their voices heard and advocate for bans outside of operations that rely solely on renewable energy, which has at least become more common among professional mining companies.

Bans can be counterproductive if bitcoin miners are tapping into clean energy sources and will then move to areas where coal or natural gas could sub in.

Thus, there are large efforts pushing bitcoin and AI companies to tap into cleaner energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro — especially if the last can be done through wave energy rather than creating new dams. In the case of AI, Microsoft took the drastic step of reopening a part of the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear power plant — which is cleaner in the sense of air pollution, though there is still nuclear waste byproduct to contend with. Japan, meanwhile, has taken the lead in using excess wind and solar energy to power mining.

Another solution is creating more accountability for miners, which the Energy Information Administration has pursued.