A Breitbart article from Saturday attempts to make the case that both porn and Bitcoin are the world’s leading causes of global warming.
Yes – porn and Bitcoin, two completely digital industries. Is Breitbart trolling us? This time, not exactly. The writer, James Delingpole, cites pieces by The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Vox to make his point.
“According to this groundbreaking investigation in The Atlantic, pornography is causing even more danger to the planet that it did in the days when it simply involved cutting down forests to make glossy paper for dirty magazines.”
Delingpole cites a statistic claiming that people visited Pornhub 14.7 billion times last year. Remember, Pornhub is a website that people visit to watch porn. They aren’t having DVD’s shipped to them. Pornhub stores its collections on servers, which require electricity.
Nathan Ensmenger, a professor at Indiana University, estimates that Pornhub’s servers use about the same amount of electricity annually as 11,000 light bulbs if left on for one year. And that is if the website operates at the same level of efficiency as Netflix, which is unlikely to be the case.
The verdict: Delingpole’s argument may not be fake news, but porn, as opposed to, I don’t know – the oil and gas industry – is not the leading cause of global warming. In other words, he’s stretching the truth for the sake of an outrageous headline.
On to Bitcoin:
Bitcoin “mining” requires complex servers that use a lot of energy to continually generate the cryptocurrency. The amount of energy being used has raised real concerns. According to a University of Cambridge study cited by The Independent, Bitcoin’s network will use more electricity than the entire United States annually by 2019. By 2020, its servers will use more electricity than is used in the entire world.
But again – fossil fuel extraction and consumption is driving climate change, not the Bitcoin network. The world uses tons of electricity. If we produced that electricity from green sources, all would be well. In other words, Bitcoin is not the cause of global warming but fuels it by consuming massive amounts of electricity that are presumably not climate-friendly sources.
As the New Republic cites:
“Cheap power often means dirty power, and in China, miners draw on low-cost coal and hydroelectric generators.”
Delingpole notes that:
“…One mine in China is using as much energy as a Boeing 747 to try and generate more of the increasingly valuable cryptocurrency.”
The Bitcoin network has also, however, opted for the cheap energy in countries like Iceland, where thermal energy is abundant (and green). And so a solution presents itself: many people invested in Bitcoin are looking to make their currency environmentally friendly, as well. They have a responsibility to do so.
This issue at hand is not Bitcoin (or porn, for that matter), but the fact that the majority of the world still relies on energy produced from fossil fuels. Breitbart conveniently erases that point in order to justify statements like these:
“Definitely, though, if pornography causes global warming then liberals should be worried most. That’s because, at a conservative estimate, liberals consume approximately 150 x more pornography than young right-wing males do.”
“And also, of course, as we would put it in Britain, because liberals are a bunch of grade A, copper-bottomed, ocean-going wankers.”
Delingpole also notes that conservatives don’t even believe in global warming, anyway. It’s a hoax!
“Ergo, liberals have missed out completely on the crypto-currency goldrush. Ergo, they are feeling sore and will do anything to diss Bitcoin, even though actually they’ve picked quite the wrong kind of flaw to make conservatives give even a smidgen of a damn, because most conservatives don’t believe in man-made global warming, whether it’s caused by Bitcoin, pornography or anything else.”
Well, everyone, there you go. Beware of porn and Bitcoin, they’re destroying the planet for future generations. But mostly, keep fighting for a transition into green energy.
