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by tsimionescu 1835 days ago
Any construction project generates significant greenhouse gas - concrete and its production are major GHG generators, and disturbing the soil, displacing living plants also tends to generate emissions.

Building a new power plant in addition to all your existing ones will never reduce GHG emissions, regardless of how clean the new one is. We need to start tearing down old power plants and reducing consumption overall, not finding new things to spend countries' worth of energy on.

1 comments

Fair enough but I can't see that as more harmful than any other energy production. El Salvador still does not generate enough power to serve all it's citizens, so they will be building more power plants regardless. Hopefully they can balance bitcoin mining in the off-peak hours, and not create new plants solely to support bitcoin mining.

But I fail to see how geothermal's environmental impact is problematic.

The point is Bitcoin in an imaginary ideal scenario is at best neutral, not positive.

Bootstrapping energy production in remote places could have a few nice side effects sure, it just doesn't help its environmental impact.