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by labster 1615 days ago
If you care about climate, get cryptocurrency banned. Air travel has all sorts of bad consequences, but also has economic and social benefits. Crypto on the other hand is an endless black hole of energy that even when used for its intended purpose creates economic and social harm.

Talking about taking away things that people like, like airplanes and red meat and gas stoves just get people up in arms. Start with the low-hanging fruit: crypto has no value except to speculators and criminals and tax evaders. Concrete is like 10% of our energy use, and we use way too much of it for temporary structures. No one likes leaf blowers, just ban the gas-powered ones.
2 comments
wolverine876 1615 days ago
> Talking about taking away things that people like, like airplanes and red meat and gas stoves just get people up in arms.

Certain people will get up in arms regardless, partly due to certain people making up threats like 'someone is going to take away your ...!' But nobody here said that.

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lmm 1615 days ago
> Talking about taking away things that people like, like airplanes and red meat and gas stoves just get people up in arms. Start with the low-hanging fruit: crypto has no value except to speculators and criminals and tax evaders.

What distinction are you drawing here? Both flying and crypto have a handful of rabid fans who use them a lot (and seem to enjoy it) while most regular people barely think about them at all, except to get vaguely irritated when they hear them passing by.

(I'm in favour of punitively high taxes on both, FWIW)

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labster 1615 days ago
The main distinction is that airlines generate economic activity via tourism, shipping, and cultural exchange. Cryptocoins generate mostly black market activity; corruption is generally considered bad. If airlines disappeared today, people would still travel, with more time but only one order of magnitude more energy efficiency. If BTC disappeared tomorrow, people would would make most of the same transactions with more time efficiency, and six orders of magnitude less energy.

5-10% of people take a flight every year. For the US and Australia, it’s roughly half of all people. [1] is from a climate interest group.

Supposedly 3.9% of people worldwide own cryptocoins. Thought that stays would support my argument more but I suspect lots of hodling and not much trading.

[1]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d30896202a18c0001b49...

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