Bitcoin and Climate Change

Bitcoin and Climate Change

What Climate Advocates Are Missing

I’ve heard the arguments that Bitcoin will “rape the planet” and destroy the climate, leaving us in a barren wasteland where hardware wallets don’t work. But even before Bitcoin existed, I kept asking myself whether the folks sitting in the street obstructing traffic understood the root cause of the climate disaster.

Let’s break it down. Maybe we can save someone from being flattened by a truck.

Everything, and I mean everything, we do is downstream of money. Like the FBI says: want to solve the crime? Follow the money. The same is true for those destroying the climate. The poor slob trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital, held up by someone with too much time and a protest sign, is not the evil overlord destroying the planet.

Follow the money.

This is where things get complicated, so strap in:

1. Our monetary system is designed to extract wealth from the many for the benefit of a few.
2. If you want to preserve your wealth, you have no option but to engage in speculative investments, stocks, bonds, the sanctioned casino.
3. That casino only stays in existence by issuing more debt-financialization for wealth extraction rather than value creation.
4. The powers controlling this broken system, government, bankers, and assorted swindlers, are not incentivized to change it.

This self-reinforcing spiral plays out everywhere you look. Cheap debt finances the fossil fuel projects you’re protesting. It funds rushed AI data centers consuming entire power grids. It enables legislation prohibiting states from interfering with the latest gold rush. Every paper investment adds to a national debt now exceeding $36 trillion, and that debt demands growth at any cost, environment be damned.

Yes, Bitcoin uses energy. So does the existing system, bank branches, data centers, armored trucks, and the military apparatus that enforces dollar hegemony. The question isn’t whether energy is spent, it’s whether that energy perpetuates a system that incentivizes waste, war, and extraction, or helps replace it.

When the rules of the game are rigged to reward short-term plunder, it’s time to stop playing and change the rules. You know the outputs: war, crony capitalism, corruption, and yes, climate destruction. These aren’t bugs. They’re features of a monetary system with no long-term horizon.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: you cannot build a sustainable economy on a currency designed to be debased. You cannot incentivize long-term thinking with money that punishes savers and rewards speculation. The very environmental outcomes you’re fighting for require what our current system structurally prevents: the ability to plan, to wait, to value the future.

Bitcoin offers that. Not as a silver bullet that stops war or makes politicians honest. But it is a monetary system that doesn’t require endless growth to survive. One that can’t be printed to finance the next pipeline or bailout. One that aligns incentives with the long-term thinking the climate crisis demands.

You want sustainability? Start with the money. With Bitcoin, your vote counts. Cast your ballot today, tell your government they’ve abused your trust for too long. Every sat is a middle finger to the money printer and a vote for a future worth inheriting.