Crypto mining isn’t going anywhere – maybe just not the way you think | Goldberg Segalla
It has been a tough year for cryptocurrency mining. Just a year ago, the US House of Representatives held a hearing on the environmental effects of cryptocurrency mining, with a particular focus on the process’s use of energy and resulting high emission rates (covered by ELM here), but with a noticeable tendency towards optimism and openness from the House representatives who chaired the panel. Millennial US Congressman Ritchie Torres from New York even went so far as to declare: “With a multi-billion dollar market cap, crypto is here to stay. It’s going nowhere.” Since then, however, the crypto industry has suffered countless setbacks, from wipeouts in financial markets, to criminal investigations by the US Department of Justice, to more localized environmental regulatory hurdles, notably in Torres’ state of New York (which is extensively covered by ELM).here and here).Recent legislative developments at the national level seem to indicate that the fortunes of the beleaguered industry are not changing anytime soon.
Earlier this month, almost exactly one year after the hearing in the House of Representatives earlier this month, US Senator Ed Markey and Representative Jared Huffman announced the reintroduction of the Crypto-Asset Environmental Transparency Act. This legislation, which you can find here and which the two lawmakers originally introduced during the last Congress in December 2022, would require cryptomining companies to publish emissions figures for mining operations that use more than five megawatts of energy, and would also require the US Environmental Protection Agency to implement an interagency study of industry energy use, the environmental impacts of cryptomining, and industry compliance with the Clean Air Act. The study, for which 5 million dollars has been budgeted, will be published within a year and a half after the bill is passed.
A week after this announcement, Senator Markey chaired the first hearing on the environmental impacts of crypto-mining, “Air, Climate, and Environmental Impacts of Crypto-Asset Mining.” On March 10, senators on the panel of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate and Nuclear Safety hosted crypto industry experts and discussed with them the environmental impacts of crypto mining via emissions, potential crypto alternatives, and general industry requirements. A significant part of the hearing focused on the growth of the industry in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, New York’s recent legal battle with the industry, as well as the senators’ admonitions that the industry make more efforts to improve energy efficiency, especially given the increasingly volatile effects of climate change. The experts often demurred by pointing to other industries that rely heavily on large banks of data servers that consume large amounts of energy.
Given the recent intense skepticism shown by senators — especially compared to the fascinated curiosity expressed by their legislative brethren during the House committee hearing last year — ever-increasing PR nightmares (exemplified by the derisive “crypto bros” moniker regularly thrown around of social media users), and seemingly aloof industry leaders who still have no answer for lawmakers who have demanded to know how the industry will reduce its voracious energy consumption and emissions, cryptomining in the US does. not seems to “go anywhere”, as rep. Torres predicted. Only in a completely different way than he meant at the time.
