- Bitcoin is often portrayed by promoters as existing in a separate cyber universe, distinct from the biological world. This view is far from reality, say critics, who point to bitcoin’s serious and escalating environmental impacts, with its global spread also raising environmental justice concerns.
- Bitcoin mining demands huge amounts of computing power and is an energy hog. It monopolizes entire data centers that are currently multiplying globally. Most of the energy needed to mint bitcoin comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which produces significant carbon emissions, worsening climate destabilization.
- Bitcoin data centers need huge amounts of water for cooling. The semiconductors required for mining are made in a process using toxic PFAS (forever chemicals). Bitcoin equipment and processing chips at the end of life also add to global e-waste. Despite these harms, bitcoin is poised for explosive growth
- Prominent influencers, including U.S. President Donald Trump, cheerlead loudly for bitcoin. Trump has said that “America will become the world’s undisputed bitcoin mining powerhouse.” His son, Eric Trump, has debuted American Bitcoin, a bitcoin mining firm. Neither Trump has addressed bitcoin’s global environmental costs.
While much has been written about bitcoin, many people still find it a hard topic to comprehend, even as promoters like U.S. President Donald Trump rave about it being a revolutionary digital currency that will rapidly replace hard currency.
However, unlike money, there’s currently no bank or government to back up, insure and regulate bitcoin, or protect small holders. It’s an unregulated tool for speculators, not savers, according to critics.
Bitcoin today dominates the world of cryptocurrencies: digital “money” based on cryptography, a form of complex mathematics using secret codes that require decryption to achieve worth. Ultimately, bitcoin’s value comes down to something akin to fantasy or faith, it merely being a series of ones and zeros anonymously laced across the internet and “mined” by those few with the financial clout and tech capacity to do so.
As such, bitcoin flourishes in a speculative crypto marketplace, posing high risk of boom or bust. But, unlike Holland’s wildly speculative 17th century tulipmania market bubble, (which upon collapse at least left investors with a garden full of pretty flowers), a bitcoin bust leaves the holder with naught but ones and zeros.
Bitcoin does, however, possess an enduring real-world footprint: The greater the perceived value bitcoin achieves, the more environmentally destructive its mining becomes, as it demands ever escalating amounts of energy (with accompanying carbon emissions) to crack the increasingly complex crypto code.
Bitcoin: Designed to burn energy
Built into the original bitcoin formula is an exponential energy-costing element, so the amount of computing power required to crack the code increases yearly. While in 2010, for example, an investor could mine bitcoin with an ordinary desktop computer, by 2025 that investor needed massive supercomputers housed in a sizable data center.
Though industry transparency is largely lacking, a 2022 report found bitcoin mining activity “at more than 6,000 geographical [locations] across 139 countries and regions.” However, the biggest data centers with the greatest computing power possess a “spatial concentration and association with energy production locations.”
These big bitcoin data centers, heavily concentrated in the United States, crunch and decrypt endless strings of numbers in a type of bitcoin lotto. This lottery can be gamed if you throw enough processing power at it, so the more intensely you compute, the more chances you have of hitting a jackpot.
As such, mining today has become a game for the rich, say some analysts, a game sucking up huge sums of electricity for power and water for cooling, that quickly burns through computer chips that contain valuable rare metals as well as toxins — an ill-affordable game launched during a global energy and environmental crisis.
Critics warn that bitcoin is becoming a multitrillion-dollar marketplace built on greed, wild speculation and criminality. Whether this is the case or not is not the subject of this story. What is detailed here is bitcoin’s rapidly growing global environmental footprint.
Exponential environmental footprint
Why the focus on bitcoin? Because, while there are thousands of cryptocurrencies out there, “It’s safe to say that Bitcoin represents 95%+ of the environmental impact,” bitcoin expert Alex de Vries from Digiconomist told Mongabay. Digiconomist is an internet platform dedicated to reporting the unintended consequences of digital trends.
The 2025 global carbon footprint of bitcoin mining is estimated by Digiconomist at 98 million metric tons (MT) of CO2 — comparable to that of Qatar, the world’s most carbon-intensive nation. Bitcoin mining presently is estimated to consume as much electrical energy as Poland, with water use as large as Switzerland’s.
Individual bitcoin mining isn’t the only reason this cryptocurrency is a drain on the environment. It’s based on a technology known as blockchain, a slow database-processing system during which every bitcoin transaction is subjected to a complex and costly verification process by multiple computers across a broad network. Verification requires additional large quantities of energy, water and materials.
In 2025, a single bitcoin-based transaction released 712 kilograms of CO2, which is “equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,578,956 VISA transactions,” according to Digiconomist. Each transaction consumed enough electricity to power an average U.S. household for more than 44 days, and used enough water to fill a backyard swimming pool.
Still, bitcoin remains mostly useless for day-to-day activities, where ordinary people do ordinary things like paying for groceries or buying a coffee or a croissant. While it could theoretically be used, it rarely is, because of the high transaction fee. It continues being an insiders’ game, where criminals can trade secretly with other criminals, and speculators speculate with other speculators, while small holders risk heavy losses.
A brief history of bitcoin’s energy footprint
When the bitcoin network came on the scene on Jan. 3, 2009, bitcoin and blockchain was received with great fanfare by much of the tech industry. According to venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, “The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.” Tyler Winklevoss, a co-creator of Facebook, said: “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”
In the early years, China stood at the industry’s epicenter, accounting for about 70% of the global network. But in 2019 it banned cryptocurrency mines, because it saw mining as “unsafe, wasted resources, and harmed the environment.” Even though mining in China still goes on, under the radar, many bitcoin mining companies moved to the United States. According to a study published in Nature in 2025, the U.S. share of bitcoin mining operations grew rapidly, from 4.5% in 2020, to 37.8% by January 2022.
As a result, U.S. bitcoin mining by the early 2020s was causing “as much carbon pollution [annually] as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to America’s roads,” The New York Times reported.
According to the Nature study, “from mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 largest mines in the USA consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity — 33% more than Los Angeles — 85% of which came from fossil fuels.” The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumer Index (CBECI) calculated that bitcoin mining accounted for 0.6%-2.3% of U.S. electricity demand in 2023 — equivalent to the energy consumption of at least 3 million homes.
The noncircular economy
When bitcoin’s massive energy use is brought up with crypto advocates, they argue that this is temporary, and that new approaches are in the works to drastically reduce bitcoin’s electricity consumption.
Among these promised innovations is a move away from bitcoin’s traditional proof of work (PoW) — a consensus verification mechanism that requires lots of computing power to verify bitcoin transactions and add them to a blockchain. Replacing PoW would be a proof of stake (PoS) system using far less energy.
But many experts are skeptical this energy-saving approach will ever come into practice. “Bitcoin will never move to proof of stake,” Molly White, a leading crypto researcher and critic, told Mongabay. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that the necessary industry consensus for PoS will never be achieved.
Chris Bendiksen, a bitcoin researcher at CoinShares and one of the world’s leading experts on bitcoin mining, explains further: “I’d put the chance of Bitcoin ever moving to PoS at exactly 0%.” That’s because “There is no appetite among Bitcoiners to destroy the security of the protocol by making such a move.”
Another sustainability claim made by bitcoin enthusiasts is that the cryptocurrency will soon move to using renewable energy. Crypto companies even position themselves as “pioneering completely green Bitcoin mining facilities.”
Some leading advocates have gone so far as to claim that “Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever,” while others have touted their green credentials even as they signed coal deals. In the U.S., 85% of bitcoin energy still comes from fossil fuels.
Even if bitcoin mining did transform itself to use 100% renewable energy, it would still be environmentally destructive because of the sheer amount of electricity, water and materials it consumes. “Using renewables for bitcoin mining is primarily greenwashing,” says White.
Some advocates claim bitcoin facilitates a circular economy — a never-ending closed circle of renewal that eliminates waste and pollution, recirculates products and materials, and regenerates nature.
But critics say bitcoin wealth is produced via a linear and extractive supply chain leaving waste in its wake. Bitcoin’s chief energy source remains fossil fuels — with electricity generated by coal, natural gas and oil power plants that emit health-harming sulfate, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate pollution. Add in massive water consumption to cool bitcoin’s data centers, facilities often found in drought-prone U.S. states like Texas and Arizona. The semiconductors needed to create bitcoin wealth also require PFAS in their manufacture, toxic “forever chemicals” that take centuries to break down.
Another noncircular dead end: bitcoin mining requires computers with customized, hardwired chips. The lifespan of such machines and especially their hard-working chips can be as little as 18 months, after which they’re disposed of, likely in landfills, because chips made of composite materials are almost impossible to recycle economically.
In 2021, bitcoin mining was already producing as much small IT electronic e-waste as the Netherlands, while each bitcoin transaction amounted to the equivalent of discarding two iPhones in e-waste.
Bitcoin and environmental justice
As is often the case with intensive resource extraction, bitcoin mining’s environmental and social impacts are frequently hidden in poor and Indigenous communities. Starting in 2018, for example, U.S. bitcoin data centers were set up on Navajo Nation reservations to exploit the cheap energy deals offered to Native American communities, even though many homes surrounding those bitcoin data centers still lacked electricity.
Diné Navajo Tyler Puenté told Vice that bitcoin mining is “financial colonialism … I think Bitcoin companies prey on communities like my own.”
Texas is a hub for bitcoin mines, with Texans paying nearly 5% extra on their electricity bills because of it. Moreover, bitcoin mines are noisy due to the high-speed cooling fans needed to prevent overheating. Residents “tell me they can’t sleep,” Nannette Samuelson, a Hood county commissioner told CBS News after the arrival of a bitcoin mine in her small North Texas community. “The noise is continuous, 24/7. [Residents] have vertigo. Their children are having cochlear implants placed because they’re now hard of hearing; [there are] all kinds of medical issues,” said Samuelson.
Bitcoin entrepreneurs have also been known to prey on poor communities in crisis. In 2017, for example, after Hurricane Maria devastated U.S.-controlled Puerto Rico, plans were drawn up to create Puertopia, a crypto island for rich investors.Critics quickly warned of exploitation. “Crypto-colonialism leverages existing neo-colonialist tools like economic policy,” Jillian Crandall, an architect and educator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Motherboard.
Key to Puerto Rico’s attraction for the “bitcoin bros” was its super-low tax rates. “So, no. No, I don’t want to pay taxes,” Reeve Collins, a 40-something bitcoiner who landed in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, told The New York Times. He added, “This is the first time in human history anyone other than kings or governments or gods can create their own money.” But that promise of riches did not include Puerto Rico’s poor.
Data expert Steven Gonzalez, who has family on the island, told Mongabay about how the bitcoiners operated there:
Many of them bought up property in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017 when residents who could not afford to repair their homes were forced to leave [for] the mainland. There remains a concerted effort to gentrify the north of Puerto Rico, privatize its beaches and create a white crypto tax utopia which is displacing Puerto Ricans and ruining the environment but also the culture. Many people are calling the movement crypto colonialism. I am 100% in accord here.
Promising a tech paradise, tech entrepreneurs swatted away such concerns, arguing that “crypto is a revolutionary equalizer for the unbanked.” But according to John Reed Stark writing in The New York Times, “I believe crypto is actually the opposite and just another example of what scholars have called ‘predatory inclusion,’” where marginalized groups are offered miniscule benefits, while other reap huge profits.
In Puerto Rico’s case, bitcoin elites saw crypto as a way to attract speculators, and perhaps as a means to depopulate parts of the island of the poor to create a “visitor” economy. “It’s an island, isolated, with a lot of nonvaluable people,” longtime Puerto Rico community organizer and environmentalist Juan E. Rosario told Naomi Klein and Lauren Feenedy writing for The Intercept. “Expendable people. For many years, we have been used as guinea pigs for U.S. experiments.”
Bitcoin as a ‘haven’
Bitcoin boosters claim the cryptocurrency is ideal for the little guy, is an equalizer, and that it “banks the unbanked.” It is decentralized and truly democratic, and perfect for small bitcoin holders who can now easily exchange dollars for bitcoin at ATMs increasingly and conveniently located the world over.
But in truth, in 2025, “The top 8 percent of crypto wallets own a little under 99 percent of all Bitcoin in circulation,” Joe Wilkins wrote for Futurism, making it one of the most centralized currencies on Earth.
An important alleged bitcoin benefit is that it is a haven for people in developing countries with weak currencies. Some analysts say bitcoin allows people to protect their savings in economically distressed nations. Cuba is a case in point, where much of the population operates within an underground economy because salaries are insufficient to live on. In rural Peru, where most people don’t have bank accounts, it’s claimed bitcoin offers a way for locals to save.
But a bitcoin haven can be a speculative trap for small holders. Its wild fluctuations in value mean bitcoin may be worth very little at precisely the moment a poor family in a developing country needs to cash it in for a medical emergency or other urgent need.
Writing in the Financial Times, Robert McCauley, a senior fellow at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, warned that impacts on small holders could be catastrophic, if and when bitcoin goes bust: “In a crash, the holders of bitcoin will collectively have lost what they have paid the miners for their bitcoin … bitcoin holders will have no one to pursue to recover this sum: it will simply have gone up in smoke, a social loss.”
In the developing world, such a scenario could not only bankrupt families, but entire communities, and if bitcoin is sufficiently widespread, even poor nations. In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to accept bitcoin as legal tender, though that experiment quickly ended in failure, as The Economist noted. The U.A.E., Switzerland, Singapore and Nigeria have all adopted policies to promote the use of bitcoin.
A 21st-century gold rush
So what good is it, this bitcoin thing? Certainly, speculators and influencers can see huge profits. These include President Donald Trump, who, days before his inauguration, announced the launch of $TRUMP, a meme coin that made him millions overnight, then crashed within days, causing heavy losses — not to Trump, who had pocketed his gains, but to hundreds of thousands of small investors.
Melania Trump launched her own meme coin, $MELANIA, just days after her husband’s token debuted. It “initially soared to $13.73 per token … Within weeks, the coin dropped nearly 90 percent to $1.50,” Newsweek reported. Once again, it wasn’t Melania Trump who bore the cost, but small investors. After $MELANIA lost 96% of its value, India’s Economic Times described it as “a case study in crypto red flags.”
Undaunted by such losses, Eric Trump, the president’s younger adult son, announced in March that he was joining with Hut 8, a crypto firm, to launch American Bitcoin, a bitcoin mining company. Of the new company, he noted, “We’re doing it in America with a government that’s dedicated to low-cost energy,” and that this “policy is only getting better.” Under President Trump, the energy policy of the United States has become “drill, baby, drill,” as his administration guts environmental regulations and rewards coal, nuclear, oil and gas production.
Many are angered by what they see, saying that crypto coins facilitate profiteering and little else. “We get NOTHING in return as a society,” Alberto Cottica, an economist and network scientist, told Mongabay. “We are suffering a harm (energy consumption, climate change, materials), to buy another harm (speculative financial assets, i.e. a casino [culture], plus money laundering and a business model for ransomware).”
Despite these concerns, some analysts say prohibiting cryptocurrencies is unlikely. A study published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) argues that bitcoin or something similar will continue to exist as “technological advancement cannot be neglected in the area of means of payment.” The IEEE authors write that banning bitcoin would be futile. Instead, “it is up to all of us to find the optimal solution not only in terms of economic efficiency, but also in terms of ensuring the necessary premises for a normal development of future generations.”
Proponents celebrate the rapid expansion of the industry, with billionaire entrepreneur Michael Saylor declaring: “We’re in a bitcoin goldrush.” That comparison could be apt, though not in the way bitcoiners mean it. Critics warn that bitcoin will one day crash. And without financial and environmental regulation, a post-crypto world could resemble the fabled 19th-century California Gold Rush, which left behind a legacy of dead-broke miners, abandoned boomtowns, played-out mines, polluted streams and blighted earth. The bitcoin bust, being global, could be worse.
Banner image: The Miami Bull, a robot-like statue of a bull, is meant to emulate Wall Street’s “Charging Bull,” and was unveiled to kick off the Bitcoin 2022 conference. Image by AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee.
Climate damage from Bitcoin mining grew more than 125 times worse in just five years
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