Climate change is real! While the world is trying to fight against climate change by implementing dainty changes into their lifestyle, issues pertaining to the same keep surging. With children starting to address these issues, certain adults have also seemed to have joined the bandwagon. The New York State Department of Financial Services is the latest to point out the risks associated with climate change.
Brad Garlinghouse Calls Out Bitcoin
In a recent tweet, Linda Lacewell, the Superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services [NYDFS] urged financial institutions similar to the NYDFS to address the financial risks pertaining to climate change. Lacewell included the crypto industry on the list as well. Aiding NYDFS’s latest initiative, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse retweeted Lacewell’s tweet and revealed his concerns with regard to Bitcoin’s energy consumption along with its carbon footprint.
Garlinghouse’s tweet read,
HUGE, pivotal step from @NYDFS. Let’s all be part of the solution for the global climate crisis NOT exacerbate the problem. As more companies (Square, RH, MicroStrategy, PayPal) hold/provide services for BTC, critical to mitigate carbon impact AND use more energy efficient assets https://t.co/mz45B0iUHT
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) October 30, 2020
Lacewell also suggested that crypto mining platforms were required to practice transparency and give out information regarding the location as well as the equipment they employ.
Bitcoin has been time again called out for its mining process that consumes a lot of electricity. Reports even suggested that Bitcoin used electricity about 0.21% of the world’s total supply. The total energy consumed by Bitcoin reportedly averaged to that of Switzerland.
However, it seemed like Bitcoin had more supporters than Ripple. Several including Ryan Selkis, the founder of Messari Crypto pointed out that running Ripple nodes could have been a much worse problem to the already frightening climate change issue. He stated,
“Climate change would actually be much worse if we all had to run Ripple nodes because you need an institutional server farm to audit the XRP blockchain that only Ripple can afford to run.”
Kraken’s Pierre Rochard also shared his thoughts on the carbon impact of cryptocurrencies. The strategist pointed out that Bitcoin mining as well as consumption of electricity has no carbon impact. However, the production of electricity has a carbon impact.