May 24, 2021
Hass McCook is a civil engineer who has been delivering estimates of Bitcoin's energy use and CO2 emissions since 2014, as well as alternatives like gold or finance. In this episode:
- Hass's background in civil engineering and how it prepared him for the energy debate
- The conflation between energy generation and electricity generation
- Why you can't just generalize energy consumption to carbon emissions
- Hass breaks down the varying carbon intensities of different sources of generation
- How much energy goes to waste globally
- The difference between CO2 and CO2e / greenhouse gases
- Why today's US grid has lowered its carbon intensity over the last decade
- Why combusting methane is a net good from an emissions perspective
- Hass' level of optimism around flared gas mining
- Why the changing rate of ASIC innovation affects bitcoin's energy consumption
- The opportunity for stranded gas at landfills
- Hass' estimates of the gold and the financial system's energy footprints
- How gold mining actually works
- The ecological and human cost of gold mining
- Hass' thoughts on offsets
Sponsor notes:
Copper is transforming how institutional investors engage with digital assets by developing award-winning custody and next-gen trading infrastructure. Headquartered in London, the firm is scaling rapidly across Asia and North America to bring its suite of products to a wider pool of institutional investors. To learn more visit copper.co or reach out on Twitter, @CopperHQ
Aave is a decentralized, open source, and non-custodial protocol where users can deposits and borrow digital assets, and earn interest on those assets. Head over to aave.com to experience and learn more about DeFi.