Dear Greenpeace
Together we’ve fought the logging of our native forests, stood together to protest the oil exploration of our deep sea, and collaborated in activism to persuade an errant multinational to change. I’ve supported your work morally, spiritually & financially across 4 decades
Today you are breaking my heart and going down a path I cannot follow.
Saying “Bitcoin is OK, we just want you to stop using proof of work” is like telling an opera singer, “Singing is fine, I just want you to stop opening your mouth.”
You’ve attacked the heart of a grassroots movement that’s bringing a fairer financial system to the people. You’ve singled out an industry that’s decarbonizing itself faster than almost any. You’ve even used climate change denier tactics by quoting widely discredited research
Your mandate is to give the fragile earth a voice. But you’ve given central bankers a voice. You’ve attacked hope for the many living in regimes that could seize their assets on a whim. You’ve attacked the world’s workers whose governments debase their spending power through Quantitative Easing.
Many years ago, a friend advised me to put my savings into gold. A year later, I watched a documentary on the environmental damage done by the gold industry. I was shocked. I sold the gold I was holding the very next day.
Years later, the same friend said I should put it into Bitcoin. I did. I then came across a lot of information from Bitcoin opponents who said that it’s bad for the environment. I read through it – but I did not take the same action I did when I saw the documentary on Gold. Why?
My instincts told me that I was not reading the impartial science of concerned environmentalists, but the spin of vested interests. I followed the money. My suspicions were confirmed. The pseudo-science I read was the propagation of a Central Banking system that wanted to keep financial control in its hands, not give it to a peer-to-peer network.
So it was with a heavy heart that I learnt Greenpeace had joined forces with the CEO or Ripple to propagate a series of claims that are bad science, misleading or outright false. The rebuttal of Climate Scientist @jyn_urso debunks the falsities line by line. For example
“Bitcoin alone could help warm the planet more than 2 degrees.” This comes from a well-refuted study published in Nature Climate Change. In the same journal, three other publications challenged the original’s dubious methodology. One group provided a clear warning
“the Mora et al scenarios are fundamentally flawed and should not be taken seriously by researchers, policymakers, or the public.” (Masanet, et al, 2019).
Jyn Urso asks “Why is Greenpeace promoting this refuted study?”
So here is what’s really going on with Bitcoin
1. BTC mining drives the adoption & viability of renewables e.g. Solar produces energy by day when there’s often low demand. Mining companies use that would-be-wasted energy. This stabilizes demand, provides extra $ & means more solar ventures get started that would’ve been marginal
2. BTC mining is used to reduce GHGs. Scientists estimate 1% of all GHGs are from natural gas from an oil field that’s uneconomic to use & gets flared/vented. When miners use that to mine BTC they reduce GHGs by 63% (no unburned methane that’s 64x more climate-changing than CO2)
3. Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is less than the world’s tumble dryers & 1/3 of the gold industry. Unlike gold, it doesn’t require soil poisoning & deforestation. Why do we seldom hear the ESG narrative about gold? Simple: why would central bankers attack their own instruments?
4. Bitcoin is the only financial system in the world that creates money which cannot be seized, is easy to store and transport, and cannot be devalued by inflation. This protects peaceful protesters from asset freezing, workers from inflation, and war refugees from bankruptcy
Bitcoin has fixed supply. That means it can’t be devalued or seized by Govt. As 1000s of working Russians & Ukrainians discovered, ATMs can stop giving you $ overnight. Heartfelt stories from war refugees who’d have had nothing – had they not had Bitcoin now resound across the world.
Bitcoin would have come in handy Greenpeace, when Banks recently froze the accounts of your members involved in an action in India, would it not? Please wake up and smell the irony. I hope that you will rediscover your true calling as an NGO.
Dear Greenpeace. I hold hope that you will return to the roots that promoted good science and made you an organisation by the people for the people. At this point, I will happily restart my support of the much-needed work that you had been doing so well until now on our behalf.
Original Twitter Post: 30 Mar 2020
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— Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) March 30, 2022
An Open letter to Greenpeace about #BTC and #proofofwork
Dear @greenpeace …