Bitcoin mining in China is projected to peak in 2024, per a new study. Researchers claim that Bitcoin's growing energy consumption could undermine global sustainability efforts. If left unchecked, China's Bitcoin mining industry could generate as much as 130.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2024, according to a study published in the scientific journal Nature. Per 2019 aviation figures (the last year not impacted by COVID travel restrictions) this would equate to roughly 14% of the world's annual carbon footprint from flying. The Nature study, "Policy assessments for the carbon emission flows and sustainability of Bitcoin blockchain operation in China," predicted the impact of China's Bitcoin mining industry through to 2024. There's a related article from BBC News from Februray 2021. This article mentions another study from the University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF). It calculates that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours. The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels. Huge computing power - and therefore energy use - is built into the way the blockchain technology that underpins the cryptocurrency has been designed.