Some reports say carbon offsets suffer from widespread fraud [1] - if you emit pollution, pay someone to 'protect the rainforest' and they 'protect' some rainforest that wasn't at risk anyway? Your emissions haven't actually been offset.
Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's still in the atmosphere.
So putting your data centre right next to a hydroelectric or nuclear power plant is the gold standard.
Where do you get the 1.6% figure from? It's not mentioned anywhere in the attached link. Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year so 1.6 seems exceedingly low
Hard to find the original numbers since China, which accounts for ~70% of mining, cracked down in summer of 2021. But according the US Energy Information Administration, crypto mining in 2024 accounted for 0.6% to 2.3% of all US electricity consumption.
According to the UN, China's share of mining dropped from 73% in 2020 to 21% in 2022. They also state
> The greenhouse gas emissions of Bitcoin mining alone could be sufficient to push global warming beyond the Paris Agreement's goal of holding anthropogenic climate warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
Someone less lazy than me could probably take some of these statistics to get an estimate of global energy consumed by crypto mining at its peak in 2020
Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's still in the atmosphere.
So putting your data centre right next to a hydroelectric or nuclear power plant is the gold standard.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...