Investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary says gold mining is harmful to the environment while Bitcoin mining’s carbon footprint is falling.
In a new interview with Daniela Cambone of Stansberry Research, the entrepreneur argues that gold mining disrupts the earth’s fabric in an alarming way, leaving a giant carbon footprint in its wake.
“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.”
The Shark Tank star points out that Bitcoin mining is, on the other hand, becoming more environmentally friendly as some miners turn to renewable or less harmful sources of electricity such as natural gas.
“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.”
O’Leary warns that gold investors could in the future face scrutiny over the yellow metal’s environmental sustainability concerns just like Bitcoin has.
“I think that’s going to start to be an issue for institutions as they allocate.
Even though they have no regulatory concerns with gold, they’re going to have sustainability concerns just like 64% of the coin that’s been mined in the world today is now being flagged by institutions that have sustainability and ethics committees saying they do not want to own Chinese blood coin.”
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