Crypto is pretty much over. Its carbon emissions are not.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, the atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

At this point, to most of us, cryptocurrency seems like nothing more than a fad. After the FTX bankruptcy and broader crypto crash last year, basically all the celebrities promoting crypto have gone silent. “MiamiCoin,” hyped by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a new source of revenue for the city, is now worthless. The industry’s Wild West days may be over. Recently, the head of the SEC warned crypto firms to “do their work within the bounds of the law” or face enforcement action. Many people lost money in the crash, but from the planet’s perspective, the industry’s downfall is good news: The computing power that fueled the crypto boom was so significant that it caused significant greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet crypto’s greenhouse gas emissions are still shockingly high, according to an industry tracker run by the University of Cambridge. The tracker focuses on bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with by far the largest market share, and estimates that at the current rate of “mining” new coins, bitcoin will release approximately 62 megatons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” each year – about as much as the entire country of Serbia emitted in 2019. That’s up from about 43 megatons a year in December, and just below the all-time high of nearly 74 in May 2021. Many people who have invested in crypto tend to have a lot of sunk costs, whether digital wallets are bulging with different coins, tokens or expensive physical setups designed to make more. Even now, they have no reason to stop.

Mining bitcoin doesn’t involve actually digging anything out of the ground—unless you count the fossil fuels that often power it. The process involves using powerful computers to grind through trillions of calculations, solving equations to create virtual coins. The method is known as “proof of work.” Once upon a time, bitcoin mining was something people did if they had a couple of spare computers they wanted to get going. Over time, it has taken more and more computing power to unlock a single coin; now most mining is done in large-scale operations using purpose-built mining rigs.

And that is America’s problem now. After China cracked down on crypto mining in 2021, such computer work increased in the United States. Miners set up shop in communities with low energy prices. And owners of unprofitable power generation infrastructure, such as waste coal-burning power plants, opened up to crypto mining to create another revenue stream. These companies have put a lot of money into the hardware and their physical space, and they will continue mining until they are actively losing money. “There are miners who have been quoted as saying, ‘As long as the price is over $10,000 per coin, it can still generate money,'” Elizabeth Moran, a policy advocate at the green law firm Earthjustice, told me. And that’s a big reason why crypto continues to spew so many emissions even during the “crypto winter”: Bitcoin prices in particular have held up, in fact they just passed $28,000 per coin, still far below the peak of nearly $68,000 at the end of 2021, but represents a bit of a comeback from last fall’s sub-$16,000 prices.

So it is still very possible to make money from this game. Some companies bypass the energy grid entirely; depending on the price of gas and the price of bitcoin, turning natural gas into crypto can be twice as profitable as selling it to the wholesale gas market. Gas companies bring in a trailer or three full of generators, plug one end into the well and the other into “shipping containers full of bitcoin miners,” says Rob Altenburg, senior director of energy and climate at PennFuture, an environmental advocacy group. “We’ve heard of three different companies doing it. But we have thousands of fracked gas wells across the state and simply have no way of knowing where this is happening.” Gas drilling is heavily regulated, but crypto mining itself is not.

A recent federal investigation in Colorado found crypto mining fueled by gas wells on publicly leased land skimmed energy before it hit the grid and converted it to crypto without paying royalties. The report noted that because the generators and rigs are usually on trailers, the entire operation can be moved quickly, allowing miners to stay ahead of government oil and gas inspectors. Other “behind-the-meter” operations are physically located at power plants. The natural gas-fired Greenidge Generation Station, on the shores of Seneca Lake in upstate New York, opened a massive bitcoin mining operation plugged right into the facility, which by 2021 consumed most of the electricity it produced. Harnessing energy before it hits the grid is just one way bitcoin miners keep costs down; they will seek out and exploit any cheap source of energy.

Crypto doesn’t need to burn the planet. The second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, switched to a different method of creating its tokens in September 2022. The new approach, called “proof of stake”, uses significantly less computing power, so much so that the company’s total energy consumption after the switch dropped 99.95 percent. “It is impossible for bitcoin to switch to proof of stake because the bitcoin network is completely decentralized,” said Kyle Schneps, director of public policy at Foundry, a major mining financier. “There is no governing body that can make such a decision.”

Renewable energy can also power bitcoin mining, just like they power everything else. Perhaps as much as 38 percent of bitcoin mining is currently powered by renewable energy sources, according to the Cambridge tracking, though no one really knows. But it hasn’t gone up since the crypto winter. Schneps said bitcoin mining could help with the energy transition: Renewable energy companies can always sell their energy to bitcoin miners when demand is otherwise low, keeping them profitable enough to stay in business and grow. But it is not clear whether mining that only runs at certain times would be profitable.

For now, bitcoin will remain an albatross on the planet just as the energy transition accelerates. Cambridge predicts that its environmental impact in 2023 will be worse than it was in 2022. The Super Bowl ads and awkward celebrity endorsements may be gone, but crypto is not dead. Still embraced by true believers and international criminals, the hard drives grind on, in shipping containers and empty warehouses and back masses of power plants, endlessly calculating, spinning money out of carbon and faith.

Many other digital activities consume electricity and cause greenhouse gas emissions – searching with friends, hoarding years of work emails in the cloud, befriending a hallucinatory artificial intelligence. An analysis in 2019 suggested that our online lives were responsible for 3.7 percent of emissions on the entire planet; the number may have gone up since then. Schneps compared bitcoin’s global power consumption to “about the same as video games”. But even if that’s true, while two-thirds of Americans play video games, only 21 percent of Americans own crypto, let alone bitcoin in particular. The massive environmental impact of bitcoin is harder to swallow because it is part of an industry that is essentially “smoke and mirrors,” as crypto blogger James Block put it in an interview with Charlie Warzel. “There is nothing produced by these companies.”

Financial experts around the world largely agree with Block. In December, a director general of the European Central Bank, Ulrich Bindseil, called on serious financial institutions to stop legitimizing cryptocurrency, saying that bitcoin was “not suitable as an investment.” If the world is going to continue burning fossil fuels, it makes sense to do so for things that really contribute to people’s well-being, not for dodgy virtual tokens that are not connected to any truly valuable things in the world.