would love it if someone could make a webpage to visualize the current pace of carbon emissions by proof of work systems in terms of the number of acres of forest that would need to be burned to release the same amount of carbon. or even just know the calculation.
Back of the envelope: 250 TH/s of ETH Mining. The most recent Inno miners run at 1.5 watts per MH/s. So, we have 375MW sustained energy consumption globally.
From here, you need to figure out if most of the mining is done on, say, coal or, say hydro. My experience with large-scale mining is that it is often paired with hydro. This (probably biased) report at https://www.hydropower.org/greenhouse-gas-emissions claims 18g/kwh of CO2 from hydro.
So, the best-case lower bound would be 375MW1000 (to get to kwh) 24 (hours) * 365 * 18g = 59130000000 grams per year of CO2, or 59,130 tons of CO2 per year. Big emitters measure in kilotons, so 59kt. Note this does not cover other datacenter energy costs, but they are minimal compared to the mining.
For a rough comparison, Cruise ships (notoriously bad): Carnival in 2017 reported 10,539kt of CO2 emitted across their ships only.
The average US household produces 7.5tons of CO2 per year, so another way to look at it is that it is roughly 8,200 households of emissions.
Wikipedia estimates 90mm global users of Ethereum, so on average each user of Ethereum is emitting 0.00065555555 tons or 655 grams of CO2 per year for their Ethereum use.
Note that older miners won't be as power efficient. A reasonable rule of thumb is that 80% of mining power is with the most recent hardware. Also, there may well be 'dirty' miners out there, but most of the projects I'm aware of are looking for cheap energy, and in most places scalable cheap energy is hydro or possibly nuclear.
>> Wikipedia estimates 90mm global users of Ethereum
This is a gross oversimplification. How many of those 90M users would consider Ethereum to their primary medium of economic activity? What percentage of their economic activity is in ETH - 100%, 1%, 0.01%?
Not really possible cause we don't know how much carbon PoW generates. You could naively just assume they generates the average amount (which is what some analysts have done), but I doubt that would be accurate.
would love it if someone could make a webpage to visualize the current pace of carbon emissions by banking and credit card systems in terms of the number of acres of forest that would need to be burned to release the same amount of carbon. or even just know the calculation.
This is a pretty bad-faith "what-about-ism" response. The energy consumption downsides of proof-of-work systems are pretty well known. And those particular downsides don't apply to the systems you listed. Sure, running those systems still takes energy, and there's probably an interesting comment about what a ratio between the two might look like. But your comment as written is not that.
It is not a whataboutism. Complaints about energy usage are only meaningful in comparison to the alternatives.
>The energy consumption downsides of proof-of-work systems are pretty well known. And those particular downsides don't apply to the systems you listed.
What? I have no idea what you're talking about.
Proof of Work energy requirements are not necessarily proportional to usage of the chain, while almost every single complaint about it has made invalid extrapolations under that assumption. It can easily be incredibly more efficient than the existing financial system.
