Sec. 2. Findings
360 words·~2 min read·
/bill/117/s/5210/is/section-2A research copy — for the controlling text, always check the official state or federal source. Not legal advice.
Congress finds that— human activity is the dominant cause of observed climate change in the past century; climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires, droughts, severe storms, heat waves, rising of sea levels, and severe weather events; the Federal Government has— committed under the decision of the 21st Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in Paris, France, December 12, 2015 (commonly referred to as the Paris Agreement ), to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030; and a responsibility to mitigate current and future impacts of climate change to protect the health, safety, and welfare of individuals of the United States; crypto-asset mining operations— can be energy intensive; and unlike most other technologies, are often designed to generally increase computing requirements over time, which can lead to increased energy consumption; a crypto-asset network, Bitcoin, consumes more energy annually than countries such as Chile or Bangladesh consume; crypto-asset mining operations often rely on fossil fuels for power, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions; the carbon dioxide emissions of the United States from Bitcoin mining were estimated at 21 to 35 megatons per year in 2022, which is equivalent to the annual emissions from more than 4,500,000 to 7,500,000 gasoline-powered cars driven for 1 year; crypto-asset mining can also cause local noise and water pollution; the number of crypto-asset mining facilities in the United States is increasing, and the share of the United States of global Bitcoin mining rose from 3.5 percent in 2020 to 38 percent in 2022; crypto-asset mining is an emergent industry, and the potential of crypto-asset mining to exacerbate systemic racial, social, environmental, and economic injustices is not sufficiently understood; there is no comprehensive, independent study of crypto-asset mining operations in the United States, including the energy use, resource mix, and greenhouse gas emissions of those crypto-asset mining operations; and one of the primary recommendations of the report of the Office of Science and Technology Policy entitled Climate and Energy Implications of Crypto-Assets in the United States and dated September 2022 was to obtain detailed data on energy use and emissions from crypto-asset activity.