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Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong

Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it's a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Problem is energy from the grid is just energy. You'd get crypto companies buying "green" energy leaving the dirty enegery for everyone else. It'd be meaningless.

Ultimately crypto mining is a pointless industry. It benefits the miners financially but doesn't produce anything meaningful, while expending huge amounts of energy and polluting the world as a result. It's also an extremely energy wasteful way to run the infrastructure needed to maintain crypto currencies.

It wouldn't matter if we were in some Nuclear fusion powered utopia with an abundance of energy. But we're not - we're in the middle of a climate crisis and desperately trying to move over to green energy. Growing demands for energy for crypto is countering that.

The real solution is to tax crypto mining - for example tax then on every kWh they use. Regions that entice crypto operations in are chasing fools gold - the costs out weight any local economic benefits of new data centres being built.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

While being right about crypto being meaningless for some people (I guess there are people valuing hope in decentralized monetary system, even if it is misplaced.), you failed to mention that most of other industries are equally meaningless and good part of them are even harmful: fashion, fast food, industrial food, banking - in a way we have it, cars in current form(no need for this huge tanks)...

In comparation crypto is just wasteful and isn't harming anyone.