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At this point, for most of us, cryptocurrency seems like nothing more than a fad. After the FTX bankruptcy and broader crypto crash last year, basically all of the celebrities who were promoting crypto have gone silent. “MiamiCoin,” hyped by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as a new source of income for the city, is now worthless. The Wild West days of the industry may be over. Recently, the head of the SEC warned crypto firms to “do their work within the bounds of the law” or face enforcement actions. Lots of people lost money in the crash, but from the planet’s perspective, the industry’s downfall is good news: The computing power fueling the crypto boom was so substantial that it was causing substantial greenhouse-gas emissions.

And yet crypto’s greenhouse-gas emissions are still shockingly high, according to an industry tracker run by the University of Cambridge. The tracker focuses on bitcoin, the cryptocurrency with by far the largest market share, and estimates that at its current rate of “mining” new coins, bitcoin will release about 62 megatons of “carbon-dioxide equivalent” each year—about as much as the entire country of Serbia emitted in 2019. That’s up from about 43 megatons a year in December, and just slightly below the all-time peak of nearly 74 in May 2021. Many people who’ve invested in crypto tend to have a lot of sunk costs, whether digital wallets bulging with various coins, tokens, or expensive physical setups designed to make more. Even now that the boom times are over, they have no reason to stop.

Mining bitcoin does not involve actually digging anything out of the ground—unless you count the fossil fuel that often powers it. The process involves using heavy-duty computers to grind through trillions of calculations, solving equations to create virtual coins. The method is known as “proof of work.” Once upon a time, bitcoin mining was something that people did if they had a couple of spare computers they wanted to put to work. Over time, it’s taken more and more computing power to unlock a single coin; now most mining is done in large-scale operations using purpose-built mining rigs.

And it is America’s problem now. After China clamped down on crypto mining in 2021, such computing work increased in the United States. Miners set up shop in communities with low energy prices. And owners of unprofitable power-generation infrastructure, such as waste-coal-burning power plants, opened up crypto-mining operations to create another revenue stream. These companies have put a lot of money into their hardware and their physical space, and they will continue mining until they are actively losing money. “There are miners that have been quoted saying, ‘As long as the price is over $10,000 per coin, it still can generate money,’” Elizabeth Moran, a policy advocate at the green law firm Earthjustice, told me. And that is a big reason crypto keeps spewing out so many emissions even during the “crypto winter”: Bitcoin prices in particular have held up, in fact they just passed $28,000 a coin. That’s still far below their peak of almost $68,000 in late 2021, but represents a bit of a comeback from the sub-$16,000 prices of last fall.

So it is still very possible to make money at this game. Some companies bypass the energy grid entirely; depending on the price of gas and the price of bitcoin, turning natural gas into crypto might be twice as profitable as selling it to the wholesale gas market. Gas companies bring in a trailer or three jam-packed with generators, plugging one end into the well and the other into “shipping containers full of bitcoin miners,” says Rob Altenburg, the senior director for energy and climate at PennFuture, an environmental nonprofit. “We’ve heard of three different companies doing it. But we’ve got thousands of fracked gas wells across the state and just simply have no way of knowing where this is happening.” Gas drilling is heavily regulated, but crypto mining itself is not.

A recent federal investigation in Colorado found crypto mining powered by gas wells on public-lease lands, creaming energy off before it hit the grid and converting it to crypto without paying any royalties. The report noted that because the generators and rigs are usually on trailers, the entire operation can be moved quickly, so miners can stay ahead of government oil and gas inspectors. Other “behind-the-meter” operations are physically located at power plants. The natural-gas-fired Greenidge Generation Station, on the shores of Seneca Lake in upstate New York, opened a massive bitcoin-mining operation plugged right into the plant, which in 2021 consumed the bulk of the electricity it produced. Tapping into energy before it hits the grid is just one way bitcoin miners keep costs down; they’ll seek out and exploit any cheap source of energy.

Crypto doesn’t have to torch the planet. The second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, switched to a different method of creating its tokens in September 2022. The new approach, called “proof of stake,” uses significantly less computing power, so much so that after the switch, the company’s total energy consumption dropped 99.95 percent. “It is impossible for bitcoin to switch to proof of stake, because the bitcoin network is completely decentralized,” Kyle Schneps, the director of public policy at Foundry, a major mining financier, told me. “There is no governing body that could make such a decision.”

Renewables could also power bitcoin mining, just like they power anything else. Maybe as much as 38 percent of bitcoin mining is currently powered by renewables, according to the Cambridge tracker, though no one really knows. But that hasn’t gone up since the crypto winter. Schneps said that bitcoin mining could help with the energy transition: Renewable-energy companies can always sell their energy to bitcoin miners when demand is otherwise low, keeping them profitable enough to stay in business and grow. But it’s not clear if mining operations that run only at certain times would be profitable.

For now, bitcoin will remain an albatross on the planet at just the moment that the energy transition ramps up. Cambridge predicts that its environmental impact in 2023 will be worse than it was in 2022. The Super Bowl ads and awkward late-night celebrity endorsements may be gone, but crypto is not dead. Still embraced by true believers and international criminals, the hard drives grind on, in shipping containers and empty warehouses and back lots of power plants, endlessly calculating, spinning money out of carbon and faith.

Lots of other digital activities do consume power and cause greenhouse-gas emissions—questing with pals, hoarding years of work emails on the cloud, making friends with a hallucinating AI. One analysis in 2019 suggested that our online lives were responsible for 3.7 percent of planet-wide emissions; the number may have gone up since. Schneps likened bitcoin’s global electricity consumption to “roughly the same as video games.” But even if that’s true, while two-thirds of Americans play video games, just 21 percent of Americans own crypto, and even less bitcoin in particular. The massive environmental impact of bitcoin is harder to swallow because it is part of an industry that is, in essence, “smoke and mirrors,” as the crypto blogger James Block put it in an interview with Charlie Warzel. “There’s nothing produced by these companies.”

Finance experts around the world largely agree with Block. In December, a director-general at the European Central Bank, Ulrich Bindseil, called for serious financial institutions to stop legitimizing cryptocurrency, saying bitcoin was “not suitable as an investment.” If the world is going to continue to burn fossil fuels, it makes sense to do so for things that genuinely contribute to people’s well-being, not for risky virtual tokens untethered to any real thing of value in the world.

In an interview with Fox's Piers Morgan, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responds to some of the nicknames former President Donald Trump has given him. The Atlantic's McKay Coppins joins CNN This Morning to discuss.

Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”

[Trent McNamara: Liberal societies have dangerously low birth rates]

In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.

Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.

But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.

The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has been the world’s leading overpopulation hawk since the publication of his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich did warn about food shortages, but as an entomologist and a conservationist, his primary concern was our influence on the natural world. “The progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than the food-population gap,” he wrote.

In a description of a trip to New Delhi, he was vividly forthcoming about his distaste for the living, breathing individuals who make up a population:

People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.

If people, people, people are the primary threat to the natural world, what is the solution? Uncomfortable as it is to say, conservationist and eugenicist theories have long been intertwined. Indeed, in his newly published autobiography, Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics, Ehrlich credits the early-20th-century thinker William Vogt, whom he calls “a liberal conservationist,” as inspiration for his work on population. Here is how Vogt explained his proposal to offer “sterilization bonuses” to the poor:

Since such a bonus would appeal primarily to the world’s shiftless, it would probably have a favorable selective influence. From the point of view of society, it would certainly be preferable to pay permanently indigent individuals, many of whom would be physically and psychologically marginal, $50 or $100 rather than support their hordes of offspring that, by both genetic and social inheritance, would tend to perpetuate the fecklessness.

In the beginning of the previous century, there was simply no contradiction in being a “liberal conservationist” and being a eugenicist. Vogt was the national director for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has recently reckoned with the eugenicist commitments of its founder, Margaret Sanger. The Sierra Club, which was initially led by a number of avowed eugenicists, commissioned Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb and for decades operated a program focused on ways to reduce fertility and immigration.

Now 90 years old, Ehrlich still takes pride in the work he did turning population growth into a global concern, even though the mass famine and pestilence that he predicted in the ’60s never came to pass.

“I must admit,” he writes in his autobiography, “that in 2019 I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future.’”

And Ehrlich remains a venerated figure. In January of this year, CBS featured Ehrlich on an episode of 60 Minutes on species extinction. The climate scientist Michael Mann called the memoir a “wide-ranging, wondrous, and pleasantly amusing account of his amazing life—as a scientist, thinker, communicator, influencer, and champion for a sustainable world.”

Intellectual descendants of Ehrlich’s in the environmental movement continue to sell old Malthusian wine in new bottles.

Oreskes draws attention to the same problem that Ehrlich did in his day: biodiversity loss associated with high-fertility, low-productivity societies caught in the Malthusian trap. Because subsistence farms have low yields, and because the farmers tend to rely on wood and other biomass for energy, they remain a major driver of deforestation, land-use change, and wildlife extirpation.

In Oreskes's recent Scientific American op-ed, she acknowledges that her ideas have a tarnished legacy. “Population control is a vexing subject,” she writes, “because in the past it has generally been espoused by rich people (mostly men) instructing people in poor countries (mostly women) on how to behave.” Her workaround is to emphasize educational opportunities as a “reasonable” way to “slow growth.” In an email, Oreskes said that she does not consider herself a Malthusian and that she focuses on education “because we know that it can work, and unlike some other approaches it is good for women, and non-coercive.”

The Overpopulation Project (TOP) also highlights education, arguing that governments in every country should “make population and environmental issues and sex education part of the basic educational curriculum.” Likewise, Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth, which Ehrlich co-founded in 1968) develops “K-12 curricula and secondary education materials for teachers and professors so they can easily incorporate population studies into their classes.”

Access to education—in general, or to sex ed and “population studies” in particular—is certainly preferable to Vogt’s forced sterilization. But what about solutions to environmental decline that emphasize better growth instead of slower growth? Solutions such as modern energy infrastructure, high-productivity agriculture, and access to global markets?

Proposals of this sort, which Oreskes refers to derisively as “cornucopianism,” are the alternatives to Malthusianism that have proved effective across history. Rough contemporaries of Malthus, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, argued that improvements in economic productivity would allow humans to grow enough food to meet rising population levels, and they were right. Vogt’s pessimism lost out to the ingenuity of, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, as the historian Charles Mann recounts in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. Borlaug’s innovations in wheat and maize cultivation helped stave off the famines Vogt and other eugenicists had predicted. Ehrlich, infamously, lost a bet with the libertarian economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity. (Simon goes completely unmentioned in Ehrlich’s autobiography.) And “cornucopianism” can do more than fend off famine; it can serve conservationist ends. Thanks to innovation and technological decoupling, an average American today is more than twice as wealthy as an average American was the year The Population Bomb was published, yet generates 30 percent fewer carbon emissions and uses 50 percent less land for their diet.

Like Oreskes, the scientists at TOP and Population Connection insist that their proposed solutions to the population “problem” are noncoercive. They just want to nudge people in the direction of fewer people. Another of TOP’s priorities is to “reduce immigration numbers” to developed countries with low fertility rates. Additional ideas include proposals to lower government support for third and fourth children and for medical fertility treatments.

But Ehrlich said the same thing. “I’m against government interference in our lives,” he told an interviewer in 1970. How that sentiment squared with Ehrlich’s demands in The Population Bomb for “compulsory birth regulation” and “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children” remains unclear. And it didn’t stop powerful institutions from taking his warnings about overpopulation literally as well as seriously. As Betsy Hartmann recounted in her 1987 exposé, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other organizations funded fertility-reduction programs that, in tandem with sometimes coercive government policies, led to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

When the problem is defined as too many carbon emissions, the solutions will be optimized to reduce emissions. When the problem is defined as too little education and bodily autonomy, solutions such as schooling and birth control make intuitive sense. When the problem is defined as too many people, the “solutions” will surely once again go far beyond the gentle, humane approaches that the neo-Malthusians emphasize. As The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas put it, “Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The people who hate people]

Fortunately, much of civil society has gotten wise to the new, friendly Malthusianism. Ehrlich’s appearance on 60 Minutes was met with widespread condemnation. Last year the Sierra Club shut down its long-standing population-control program, writing, “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures.”

And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and decline later this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenges that nations including Germany, Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.

Given that the Malthusian dream—a peak in global population—is already in sight, one might think that single-minded efforts to further suppress population growth would wane. But the old population-control movement is still alive and well today.

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The near-collapse of the global banking behemoth Credit Suisse, shortly following two high-profile American bank failures, complicates regulators’ efforts to restore confidence in the banking system. It’s also stoking fears of a contagion effect across the financial sector worldwide. Experts say it’s not a crisis—but we’re not in the clear just yet.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Nobody likes Mike Pence. The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies The one cause of poverty that’s never considered

Swimming Naked

On Sunday, one of the world’s biggest banks, Credit Suisse, narrowly escaped annihilation when it was bought by an even bigger Swiss bank, UBS Group, in a government-brokered deal. The hasty move did the job of averting the “too big to fail” lender’s, well, failure. But in the aftermath of the insolvency panic that triggered the falls of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in the U.S.—not to mention the current precarious standing of First Republic—it’s fair to say that the world’s financial institutions, and their customers, are spooked.

Shaky confidence in global financial markets could spell further trouble, potentially setting off a massive cascade of bank runs that destabilizes the entire system. Right now, that possibility is not off the table. But is it a crisis?

“I would say no,” Arthur Dong, an economics professor at Georgetown University, says. But we’ve gotten a preview of what could happen next, he told me.

In short: After years of very low interest rates, the decision in the U.S. and elsewhere to begin raising interest rates in order to curb inflation led to lowered asset value. That, in turn, led to depositors’ whisperings of relocating their holdings and not-totally-unwarranted fears of bank insolvency. For SVB, and other lenders that similarly serve a narrow band of customers (who are likelier than a more diverse pool to react in unison to market shifts), these conditions can add up to a major stress test of client confidence. And as SVB has shown, bank failures don’t exactly alleviate wider anxieties—even if federal governments and regulators step in to protect customers’ holdings, as was the case for SVB.

Dong acknowledged that, although the sagas of SVB, Credit Suisse, et al., have certainly created “shock waves through the financial markets” (and inspired worry in the average consumer about whether their deposits are safe), the present climate of economic uncertainty is probably more aptly viewed as a momentary shake-up than an existential disaster. “There are other institutions out there that might be imperiled, in the way that SVB was imperiled, but I don’t think it’s a global crisis,” Dong explained.

But although it isn’t a full-blown crisis, it might be a “mini-crisis,” suggests Paul Kupiec, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Could it get worse? Yes. Could it be just a bump in the road that goes away? Yes.”

Kupiec says that if the Fed continues to raise interest rates, many institutions’ mark-to-market losses will get worse. More people might be moved to pull out their deposits, which could have far-reaching consequences—especially if multiple banks find themselves in a position of needing to replace those deposits (that they’d collected minimal interest on for a long time in the first place) with Federal Reserve loans whose target rate range is already 4.5 to 4.75 percent, and projected to climb higher.

“We’re not totally out of the woods,” Kupiec told me. “We might avert a panic. There’s going to be some pain going forward, though.”

“This is what happens in this type of environment with higher degrees of volatility, as well as very rapid interest-rate increases around the world,” Dong noted. “And it will very quickly expose the weaknesses of banks that were not necessarily in a state of failure, whose balance sheets were kind of creaky to begin with.

“As the tide goes out, you kind of see who’s swimming there naked,” Dong added with a chuckle, borrowing a well-known aphorism from the investor Warren Buffett. “I think that’s more of the issue here, rather than a widespread or global financial contagion like we saw in 2008.”

For now, we can expect more damage control. Earlier today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a conference of American bankers that she was willing to protect depositors at smaller U.S. banks in the event of future bank runs, if necessary.

We can’t know what will happen next. But the picture of what’s happened up to this point, and how to read it, is coming into focus. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last week on the SVB collapse and bailout:

There’s no success story here. The complexity of financial regulations and the dullness of balance-sheet minutiae should not lull any American into misunderstanding what has happened. Nor should the lack of a broad meltdown make anyone feel confident. The bank failed. The government failed. Once again, the American people are propping up a financial system incapable of rendering itself safe.

Related:

You should be outraged about Silicon Valley Bank. The end of Silicon Valley Bank—and a Silicon Valley myth

Today’s News

Classes for nearly half a million Los Angeles students were canceled as bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, and other educational-support workers launched a three-day strike. Surveillance video from a state psychiatric hospital in Virginia shows a group of staff and sheriff’s deputies pinning a Black man named Irvo Otieno to the floor for about 11 minutes before his death. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared their economic partnership and signed 14 agreements.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson argues that all the ChatGPT predictions are bogus.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Atlantic; source: Library of Congress

Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal

By Adam Serwer

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.

On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important. Much of the utility of woke as a political epithet is tied to its ambiguity; it often allows its users to condemn something without making the grounds of their objection uncomfortably explicit.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone. A major clue to COVID’s origins is just out of reach. Is this the singularity for standardized tests?

Culture Break

Getty / The Atlantic

Read. Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions for You probes the line between justice and revenge.

Watch. Living (available to rent on multiple platforms), a movie by Kazuo Ishiguro that interacts richly with the universe of his novels.

P.S.

If the current banking saga has you scratching your head, or you’re asking yourself why global finance seems kind of made-up and strange, I have the book for you—Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism, by the University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Heath. Don’t be fooled by the title; you don’t need to hate capitalism to appreciate Heath’s reasoned, ideologically balanced takedown of a dozen beliefs (or as he frames them, misconceptions) about the global free-market system.

When Filthy Lucre came out in 2009, I was a college super-senior preparing to graduate from the University of Toronto and into the roaring global recession, a fluke of timing I would not recommend. Several of my friends had been students of Heath’s, and a copy of his book made its way onto my shelf. That hardcover edition was lost to the years. But lately, I find myself wanting to revisit it.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.