The arrival of President Donald Trump’s second term has injected fresh momentum into the crypto industry, boosting Bitcoin to an all-time high of almost $109,000 and promising friendly policies for an industry typically accustomed to battling hard-line U.S. lawmakers and regulators.
Bitcoin mining is also poised for a boom under President Trump, who last year promised to mine all remaining Bitcoin in the U.S. But despite his support for the sector, industry watchers suggest President Trump’s laissez-faire approach to climate issues could give a pass to a mining industry that for years has struggled to clean up its carbon footprint.
“I think it’s safe to say Trump’s administration is going to mean less scrutiny for the Bitcoin mining industry in the U.S.,” Alex de Vries—an anti-mining activist, energy analyst, and founder of Digiconomist—told Decrypt.
Trump’s return to the White House came with a sweeping rollback of President Biden’s sweeping climate regulations, and a pledge to use the “largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth,” Trump said in his inaugural address last month.
Lee Zeldin, a former New York Congressman and Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, also said shortly following January’s California wildfires that the federal regulator is not required to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
“It was not a decision of the Supreme Court that if there was a fire in 2025 in California, that if that fire creates a danger to people… then that triggers the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide. There’s just more to that,” Zeldin said.
Given the Trump administration’s early signals that the EPA may not be particularly focused on environmental protection on the whole, that makes it even less likely that much regulatory attention will be paid to the impact of Bitcoin mining.
“It’s a killer. We were hopeful that the Biden administration would at least listen to us, but now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, it feels hopeless,” Jackie Sawicky, the Texas citizen behind the National Coalition Against Cryptomining, told Decrypt. “He has put someone in charge of the EPA that doesn’t seem to want to enforce environmental protections.”
Bitcoin mining has long been a controversial practice. Proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin’s require powerful computers to work 24/7 in order to secure the blockchain—and the demands only grow over time. The scale of that electricity consumption is tracked by terawatt hours (TWh), a unit of energy equal to one trillion watts per hour.
According to Cambridge University, the Bitcoin network consumes roughly 174 TWh—in the same ballpark as the total energy consumption of Egypt or South Africa.
The U.S. currently boasts over a third of the world’s total Bitcoin mining industry, which industry participants claim has made the sector cleaner and more transparent.
“Increased Bitcoin mining in the U.S. can be a net positive compared to more opaque jurisdictions like Kazakhstan,” Compass Mining Chief Mining Officer Shanon Squires told Decrypt. The firm provides Bitcoin mining hosting and operational services.
“The U.S. offers legal protections, industry transparency, and reliable data collection, promoting energy efficiency and environmental responsibility,” he added.
Wolfie Zhao, head of research at TheMinerMag, also said that the dynamics of Bitcoin mining are largely unaffected by Trump’s climate policies.
“Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption is fundamentally driven by market forces—mainly electricity costs and profitability,” Zhao told Decrypt. “They inherently gravitate toward cheap energy, which increasingly includes renewables.”
But if the U.S. is able to gain a larger share of the Bitcoin mining market, as Trump intends, the absence of legal protections under President Trump may result in a more opaque mining industry that is set to face fewer disclosure obligations than ever before.
In 2022, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) proposed a bill that sought to require miners who are consuming over 5 megawatts of electricity to disclose energy sources. Experts suggest that the political will for similar initiatives simply won’t be there for the next four years.
“Biden even tried to put a mining tax in his budget,” said de Vries. “That never made it, but we don’t even have to expect that kind of effort from Trump.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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Source: https://decrypt.co/305861/trump-bitcoin-mining-us-environmental-impact
