WASHINGTON—The White House is supporting a plan that would impose a 30% tax on the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining. The tax, which would potentially be included in the next federal budget, seeks to minimize the nascent industry’s impact on climate change, Yahoo News reported.
“Cryptominers’ high-energy consumption has negative spillovers on the environment, quality of life, and electricity grids where these firms locate across the country,” the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) argued in a blog post on the White House website, Yahoo News said.
The post laid out the case for the Digital Asset Mining Energy (DAME) excise tax, which the CEA writes is an “example of the Administration’s efforts to fight climate change and reduce energy prices,” according to the report.
‘Environmental Pollution’
“Currently, cryptomining firms do not have to pay for the full cost they impose on others, in the form of local environmental pollution, higher energy prices, and the impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions on the climate,” the CEA stated in its post. “The DAME tax encourages firms to start taking better account of the harms they impose on society.”
Burning fossil fuels to create electricity accounts for 25% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and releases harmful air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, Yahoo News noted.
Feeling the FOMO Fever? CUToday.info Has a Prescription
Are you missing out on the latest news in credit unions? Missing the trends and developments you need to be aware of? We can help. Each morning CUToday.info delivers its daily Fresh Today news update offering the latest headlines and breaking news right to your email, with the easy-to-read headlines format allowing you to click on the stories that interest you most in order to learn more.
And it’s free!
If you haven’t yet signed up for the new email solution on which CUToday.info has partnered with ResponseGenius, you can do so here. Signing up requires less than one minute of your time—and it’s free!
Please note that after signing up you may need to go to your Spam/Junk folder and mark the morning headlines email as safe. CUToday.info does not provide its list of readers and emails to outside parties, and we will not be contacting you to sell you an extended warranty or sending you any links so you may cash in on an inheritance you didn’t know was coming.
And did we mention it’s free?
Please note and/or make your IT department or email administrator aware the emails will be coming from the domains CUTodayinfo.com and CUTodayinfoReply.com