Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary (aka “Mr. Wonderful” on ABC TV series “Shark Tank“) recently compared gold mining and Bitcoin mining, and said that the latter is showing signs of becoming more environmentally sustainable.
On April 20, during an interview with Daniela Cambone, Editor-at-Large and Anchor at Stansberry Research, O’Leary criticized gold mining:
“There is no clean gold, you know. There’s just no green gold at all. It takes a tremendous amount of carbon to extract it from the ground…
“The amount of carbon that you create mining, digging, scratching, blowing stuff up, processing the gold, taking out you know the other elements of it is just brutal in terms of a carbon footprint. It couldn’t be worse.“
As for Bitcoin mining, he had this to say:
“There’s a whole new generation of [Bitcoin] miners emerging in the Nordic countries, in Northern Canada, in Sweden, in Switzerland, in France, where they are using hydroelectricity, sometimes excess hydroelectricity, and flaring off natural gas where it’s being burned already to create electricity...
“So they’re doing it on a carbon-neutral or reduced carbon footprint and creating an asset that doesn’t have as much, you know, sustainability issues as gold has.“
