Even as our species destroys its only home, we assume that the solutions to climate change must lie in technology, without stopping to examine the role that this very attitude has played in the crisis.
This is so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that, when there is a new impressive technology, we assume that it must be here to solve one of our big problems. As the AI hype quickens the pace of our ecological devastation, we're so dazzled by the technology that there is actual debate in supposedly serious publications as to whether AI is going to save us from climate change, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.
150 TWh / year
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users
Banking system
Users
There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.
Total energy consumption
The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]
If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.
Energy consumption per user
348 TWh / year
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users
With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.
There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.
1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.