It has been a rough year for cryptocurrency mining. Just a year ago, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing addressing the environmental effects of cryptocurrency mining, with a particular focus on the process’s use of energy and resulting high rates of emissions (covered by ELM here), but with a noticeable bent of optimism and openness from the presiding representatives who ran the panel. Millennial U.S. Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York even went so far as to declare: “With a multi-billion-dollar market capitalization, crypto is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.” Since then, however, the crypto industry has suffered countless setbacks, from wipeouts in the financial markets, to criminal investigations undertaken by the U.S. Department of Justice, to more localized environmental regulatory obstacles, most notably in Torres’s New York State (extensively covered by ELM here and here). Recent legislative developments at the national level seem to indicate that the beleaguered industry’s luck is not changing any time soon.
Earlier this month, almost exactly a year following that House hearing, earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Jared Huffman announced the reintroduction of the Crypto-Asset Environmental Transparency Act. This legislation, which can be found here, and which the two legislators originally introduced during the last Congress in December of 2022, would require crypto mining companies to disclose emissions figures for mining operations that consume more than five megawatts of energy, and also requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct an interagency study of the industry’s energy usage, the environmental impacts resulting from crypto mining, and the industry’s compliance with the Clean Air Act. The study, for which $5 million has been budgeted, would be published within a year and a half of the bill’s passage.
A week after this announcement, Sen. Markey chaired the inaugural hearing on the environmental effects 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 Committee and the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety, hosted crypto industry experts and discussed with them crypto mining’s environmental consequences via emissions, potential crypto alternatives, and general industry claims. A significant portion of the hearing focused on the industry’s growth in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, New York’s recent legislative tussle with the industry, as well as senators’ admonishments that the industry make more of an effort to improve energy efficiency, especially given increasingly volatile effects of climate change. The experts often deflected by pointing to other industries that are heavily reliant on large data server banks that consume high amounts of energy.
Given the recent intense skepticism shown by senators – especially compared to the intrigued curiosity expressed by their legislative brethren in the House committee hearing last year – ever-increasing public relations nightmares (exemplified by the derisive “crypto bros” moniker regularly thrown around by social media users), and seemingly aloof industry leaders who still have no answer for legislators who have demanded to know how the industry will reduce its voracious energy consumption and emissions, crypto mining in the United States indeed does not seem to be “going anywhere,” as Rep. Torres predicted. Just in a very different way than he meant at the time.
