The End

23:03Diamonds come out of the earth? Yeah, you find them here in Syria. This is so crazy sounding, I checked it. It's true. There's a layer of nanodiamonds, tiny, almost diamond particles that have been found on the ice sheet. Scientists think it's evidence that some kind of space object struck here 13 ,000 years ago. But then also, there are a lot of expensive diamonds that have been found in Greenland recently, because as the ice sheet melts and recedes, it exposes land that has never been mined. And so the beginnings of climate change have actually opened up economic opportunities for Greenlanders, who are not a wealthy country.

23:41It's complicated, though. Sasha and Kim tell me about this story they've heard.

24:01Foreigners coming to Greenland, stealing precious gems, and then selling them abroad. Kim elaborates.

24:11Who has diplomatic? Diplomats. Not only the ice sheets, but like in Greenland. And they come in and collect all like diamonds, gold. That's crazy. I can't verify this story. I listened to it, less wondering if it were true or not. More just thinking about what had drawn these people to it. I find myself doing that a lot these days. Like when Coolio told me he believed there was an unspoiled part of our planet guarded by alien beings who weren't flawed the way we are, I'd wondered why someone who said he didn't worry about the end of the world was still drawn to a story like that. Here, it made sense to me why these Greenlanders were sharing a story like this one.

24:55Outsiders have pillaged Greenland for centuries. Even this year, a team funded by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates had sent drones to Greenland to look for valuable heavy metals. So, you know. 56 ,000 people live in Greenland. Almost 90 % are Inuit. Inuit people survived here before those early explorers showed up, and the Western explorers depended on, and in some cases badly exploited them. Sasha told me another story, how as a kid she would hear about Mother of the Sea, a goddess who, if you hunt an animal and you don't use all the parts, Mother of the Sea would gather all the animals into her fiery hair, and there wouldn't be anything left for anyone to eat.

25:36So that was like a way to tell kids that like we don't hunt for fun and we don't like... Waste. Yeah. Do you think about global warming a lot living here? Yeah. Yeah. Also because it's like we see the effect right now in here and we see it every day, every year. Sasha says she's been seeing animals migrate north and last year was a Christmas without snow. in Greenland. Here, as in other Arctic places, temperatures are rising four times faster than anywhere else in the world. Sasha says she can't actually easily get to the ice sheet from her home, and so despite living in a country defined by the ice sheet, she'd never actually gotten a visit it.

26:24So this is your first time on the ice sheet? Yeah.

26:31I feel I should have come here a little time ago. Yeah.

26:42We get back to the airport town, the town that's in an airport, Kangaroo Sack. And for dinner, reindeer sausage. As I eat it, I feel ashamed, which makes me realize that somewhere inside of me is a person with unresolved feelings about Santa Claus. I crawl into bed. I can see the runway from my little hotel window. I pull the blinds tight. The sun doesn't set here till around 10. Then I go to sleep. After the break, Act 3.

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29:42In the morning at the hotel after Greenlandic breakfast, we engage in the difficult crypto climate conversations that are planned for the trip. Before coming, my dream had been that I would get to see, like, I don't know, a Greenpeace activist and a Bitcoin miner actually really talking to each other. I wanted to capture on tape one of the rarest sights you can behold on Earth. A person changing another person's mind. That wasn't happening here, but not for the reasons you'd expect. Turned out the crypto people here agreed with the climate people here. Climate change? Very bad. Crypto should be more energy efficient.

30:20So what transpired were these conversations that, to my non-engineering brain, just felt kind of dry. Like, if you took a shot of whiskey every time someone used the word stakeholder, you would be dead by noon. Who are the stakeholders that are part of this transformation? How do we create synergies and connections amongst them? Who are the stakeholders? What other chains? What other activists? Youth? Certainly more women. Can you go back to your last or second to last slide? The last slide? Oh, second to last. It's the one where you're talking about all the stakeholders. There is one very interesting big discussion.

30:53The panel that people here are calling the 800-pound gorilla panel, which addresses probably the thorniest question of the trip. How should we think about crypto's effect on the environment? How do we judge all the consequences that spewed forth from Satoshi's white paper? Satoshi's utopian dream was to break down the sort of centralized nature of the geopolitical system that we're in and the financial system that we're in. The people here, they believe in Satoshi's vision of a decentralized world, but they are not his most orthodox adherents. I've talked in previous episodes about how crypto is not a monolith, but a bunch of warring factions.

31:31And the factions who have shown up here belong to newer cryptocurrencies. Greener ones, which were engineered differently from Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies that do not include Satoshi's big flaw. Remember, Bitcoin's network uses a system that is very energy intensive. It's called proof of work. Newer crypto uses something called proof of stake. In proof of stake, new coins aren't issued to energy-guzzling supercomputers. Instead, they're just given to people who have pledged not to spend some of their existing coins. This new system uses 0.01 % of the energy of the old system. Which is great, but it also means this gathering?

32:08It's sort of like if R.C. Cola held a big meeting to solve the soft drink industry's carbon problems without talking to Coke. Bitcoin in crypto is still twice as popular as its nearest competitor, Ethereum. One of the speakers here is Ken Weber, who works at Ripple. Ripple, which has recently landed in the SEC's crosshairs, a whole other story. But on the subject of sustainability, Ken points out that in this room right now, they're missing a big, hate to use the word, stakeholder, the Bitcoin contingent. The gorilla in the room, and I'm not even sure that it's in this room. I think everybody here is pretty aligned on this, is there's a group of maximalists at the core of the proof-of-work system, the Bitcoin system.

32:52There are 30 or 40 dudes who are the engineers, and there are a bunch of whales that hold and have vested interests in Bitcoin's dominance. This group Ken's talking about, I know these guys, Bitcoin maxis, like the ones I met in Miami, whose stance towards the environment was very defensive and pugnacious. Their one panel on climate, you may remember, directed at fellow Bitcoiners, was called You Are the Carbon They Wish to Reduce. So it did make sense to me that none of them were here. But Ken goes on to tell a story about a moment I never heard about. How in 2021, there was an attempt to reach a cryptocurrency climate accord, basically to get crypto to net zero emissions.

33:35What surprised me was that that moment actually included Bitcoin maxis. There was a brief period of engagement. There were some, you know, some maxis that kind of came into the tent and said, hey, yeah, we think energy efficiency is good. We think getting to, you know, two or near 100 % renewable energy use is good. Not sure we'll ever get to net zero, but like we'll join the team. I found this surprising, this moment so recent of crypto kumbaya. It turned out, though, things had quickly gone south. According to Ken, the wing of Bitcoin climate reformers lost out to their energy-consuming fundamentalist brethren.

34:12They either saw that they weren't going to win the day within those working groups, or maybe they were never in it to win it in the first place. But their attendance at meetings started dwindling, and their Twitter feeds, you know, became more and more antagonistic. The Maxis departed. The status quo returned to its familiar state. I don't know how anyone solves a problem when the people who are driving it barely agree it's a problem at all.

34:42One night at the bar, though, I happen to meet a couple people who haven't given up, who've spent a large part of their lives figuring out how to get even the most stubborn people on Earth to be part of the solution. And these two have been doing this longer than Bitcoin has even existed. I was with Sea Shepherd before. Oh, cool. Oh, wow. You de-radicalized. It starts out because I'm eavesdropping on a conversation between a couple people from a big, relatively green cryptocurrency and a couple pretty serious environmental activists, Kassin and Rolf. Kassin used to work with the Sea Shepherd, a group that's been called eco-terrorists by a few governments.

35:17But he knew Rolf from their days together at Greenpeace USA. They were talking about bulletproof vests, which perked my ears up. Wait on it, they're telling a story, can I record it? Sure. I'm waiting. The Forest team is definitely, they're definitely the most exciting. They're the only ones that have to wear bulletproof vests. It turns out that some of Greenpeace's frontline workers wear bulletproof vests because in places like Indonesia and Brazil, environmental activists are sometimes murdered. Greenpeace's MO is basically this. They try to find bad things that are happening to the planet. And when they do, they study the complex system causing the bad thing to happen.

35:52And then they strategically try to find a place to intervene. Here's Rolf. We had a campaign against Mattel, the maker of Barbie. What did Barbie do? Barbie was being manufactured in China and Indonesia, and in Indonesia, the box was being wrapped with illegal rainforest destruction. Like, we did a fiber analysis on the paper, and there was actual rainforest fiber in there that wasn't supposed to be there. Did you get, like, a tip, or were you guys just testing Barbie boxes? We tested the boxes. There are people with microscopes who can look at fiber and tell if it's mixed tropical hardwood, which means they just raised the rainforest down, put it into a blender and made paper out of it and destroyed it forever.

36:34And this was something that was largely illegal as well. So, yeah, we reached out to them. They didn't really have anything to say. Things escalated. And so, yeah, we had like a 2 ,500 square foot banner on their headquarters in El Segundo near the L.A. airport. And what did the banner say? Well, Ken was breaking up with Barbie because of her rainforest destruction. and Barbie was driving around at a pink bulldozer downstairs obstinate she wasn't going to change her ways was there a real Barbie in a bulldozer yeah it was a little mini bulldozer uh we painted it pink my idea was I didn't have enough money uh to buy a bulldozer I just made the pitch I'm like look we can buy a bulldozer and then we can sell it later like it's just a cash flow issue just give me enough money to buy one of these little bulldozers Later we tried to sell it and my associate was on the phone with someone who wanted to buy it.

37:30And she's like, oh, one last thing, we painted it. And the fellow said, that's fine. It's not pink or something, is it? And she had to break the news to him that it was, in fact, Barbie pink. Did they change the box? They did. And then Hasbro called up right away because we'd sent them a letter and they hadn't responded. They're like, hey, we want to talk to you. I'm like, that's good because you were next. and Disney and Lego did as well.

37:58And do you like, how does it change the way you move through the world and consume products in this like broken world? Like do you, I don't know if you have kids, but like if you have a kid and they want a Barbie, do you buy them a Barbie? Like how do you participate? Well, that was some feedback. People were like, what are you saying? Barbie's good? You know, there's young girls and body image issues and oh, Barbie's made of phthalates and toxics. And I'm like, OK, well, look, isn't it better that with all those bad things, it's not also wrapped in destroyed rainforest that was illegally destroyed and polluting the climate on top of that?

38:34Like that part is a little bit better. And I'll take that win. Yeah, it's a broken world. I try to live with integrity. I don't walk on water. This is the paradox. Again, Kassin, who used to work with Sea Shepherd. This is the paradox of the professional environmental activists. is you try to do your best, but because you are trying to do your best, people expect you to be better than other people. So when you don't live up to this sort of impossibly high standard, you get a lot more pushback than other people would get. Well, I was thinking about this, and no one would mistake me for a better-than-average person.

39:14I'm like a solid 5 out of 10. Yeah, like C-minus. On a good day. But I was talking to a friend of mine about the strip, and she was like, I don't know, it seems interesting. She was like, I don't understand why people have to get on planes to fly somewhere to talk about climate, which I think is a fair point. But the other thing I thought about it is like, I will be flying for vacation two weeks after this. And no one is asking me whether or not I should fly for vacation two weeks after this. It's like this thing where as you get close to doing a good thing, the level of criticism goes up a lot.

39:49This is the paradox. Yes, you try to use the same resources in a mindful way, and somehow you start getting criticism that it's not mindful enough, rather than the first totally mindless way getting any criticism at all. Right, which slightly incentivizes some of us in the world to just not do very much good. I asked Rolf how crypto had ended up on the Greenpeace radar, and he said it actually started with China. In 2021, China had been the leading country for Bitcoin mining. These mines in China often drew power from hydroelectric plants, which, as far as energy goes, hydroelectric is at least renewable.

40:28But then the Chinese government banned Bitcoin mining. And we were surprised to see that after China banned Bitcoin mining, it moved to the U.S. And when it moved to the U.S., fossil fuel power plants that we thought were being sunsetted or were idle or were on their way out suddenly came back to life. Like waste coal plants in Pennsylvania, coal in Kentucky and Montana, other states, suddenly roaring back to life when we thought the fight over coal for electricity was sort of won, like it was on its way out. So it was going in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go. It became a big enough problem for us to be concerned to start to work on it.

41:11So we're focused not on crypto. We're not anti-Bitcoin. We're anti-burning coal to make electricity. And Bitcoin is doing that right now in the U.S. And we've got to make a change. There's actually a recent precedent for that kind of change. Ethereum, this year, actually just a few months ago, converted from proof of work to proof of stake. That's partly possible, though, because Ethereum, unlike Bitcoin, has a leader, a hierarchy, dedicated teams working on improving the protocol. But Rolf said there's always a way. Greenpeace will look at the system. It'll find the pressure points. Maybe he convinces a consortium of Bitcoin miners to come together and agree to change the code.

41:52Or else maybe Greenpeace pressures the big financial institutions that invest in Bitcoin and pushes them towards greener crypto instead. Yeah, we look for leverage points. And some of that's just testing, trying things, see even if it works. We have a saying, which is like, no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. It's like, if we can work together, we'll do that. Like no hard feelings. You know, this is about getting things done. I don't have time, you know, to like, play these games about what side are you on? Like, the climate doesn't care. Like the physics of carbon accumulation, and the climate really doesn't care.

42:34Act 4. Revolution and Industry. We travel to the third largest city in Greenland, the Lulissat. About 4 ,700 people live here, slightly outnumbering the 3 ,096 sled dogs. The sled dogs have their own sort of town outside of town. Some live in doghouses, some in kennels. Others are kept on long chains in open fields. These dogs are huge white wolfy creatures that smell worse than most things on earth. Even my youngest sister. They howl almost constantly. God, there's like hundreds of these dogs.

43:50and then they all just stopped barking and then they all start up again.

43:58Past the dogs, there's this building everyone keeps calling the Glacier Museum. The official name is the Elulisat Ice Fjord Center. Not a museum person, but I love this one. It's all about climate change and the glacier here. This is just an exhibition where you can press a button and watch this glacier break out from the ice sheet to the sea. In another section, they have a bunch of ice cores on display. The oldest ice is over here. I've read about these. The ice samples first collected by scientists in the 1950s. Each core is about two feet long, ice suspended in a cylinder of water. I was looking at them with this photographer named Vaughn, trying to figure out if we could see any differences between old and older ice.

44:40I actually would say this looks a little different. Like it looks... The texture's different. Yeah, it's more glittery. Yeah. And like harder packed. So this is ice from 124 ,000 years ago. 124 ,000 BC, so it's even older. You can actually see, well, scientists who are trained to can actually see moments in human history in this ice. Financial crises can be traced in the ice core. 1930s. 1950s, you can see radioactive fallout in the ice sheet. Some of it's pretty grim. The signs of us inventing ways to kill ourselves and each other, registered silently by the planet. But mostly looking at it just feels fascinating.

45:23You can see the end of the Ice Age. You can even see the Great Depression in these ice cores. The depression can be observed in the ice core through there being less sulfuric acid. Fewer fossil fuels are being burned because people couldn't afford them. So while it's mostly a record of various crises, there is one exception, although the exception starts with acid rain. In December 1952, a suffocating poisonous fog descended onto London and resulted in the deaths of 12 ,000 people. I'd never known this story. So in 1950s London, you kept your house warm by burning coal. Coal. In an open hearth in your living room.

45:59An unusually cold winter led to more coal burning than usual, and a smog rose over the city. Hydrochloric acid is a byproduct of coal combustion, and every day the smog over London contained 140 tons of it. Modern estimates suggest that 12 ,000 Londoners died. It was a tragedy and you can see this smog recorded that year in the ice cores. But you can also see the problem get solved. The event became known as the Great Smog and led to the British Parliament introducing the Clean Air Act in 1956 and shows that political initiatives have an effect. God, that's crazy. I leave the museum. There's a path from the exit that takes you on a short walk.

46:43Okay, wait. We're walking down a wood path in Illusat? Illusat? I start walking with Austin Federa, a guy who works at the Solana Foundation. Solana, a newer, greener crypto. And what does it say here? You are now entering the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Illusat Ice Fjord. Ice Forge? Every cryptocurrency attracts its demographic. That Solana true believers I've met, well, former true believers, they all lost their money. They were all Obama-era Democrats. And Austin would fit in at their dinner party. He's a left-of-center, former public radio guy who found himself working in crypto. Do you, have you, have there been times like, as a person who has like gradually become more and more excited about cryptocurrency, are there moments you have where you just feel conflicted like this sector is not great for the climate yes constantly really yeah i mean and i think in general a lot of our web 2 services and web 3 services are not thinking about this in the right way i'm kind of ascribed to the philosophy of like the work I'm doing now has the potential to help.

48:00It's not helping now. Like I'm not delusional about that. Reducing emissions in like different kinds of blockchains is important, but it's still not actually like making progress. It's reducing harm. Austin saying that working at a low emissions cryptocurrency, while he believes that that could help the world one day, he knows right now he's not doing very much to save the planet. I found that feeling relatable. Pretty much everybody I know, I can see the little bit better that they're trying to do. Buying an electric car instead of gas, putting solar panels on the roof, or if you're a crypto person, trying to buy greener crypto.

48:41But it all kind of feels like a Diet Coke at McDonald's. Like, whatever the small ways we cut back, there's just so much other consumption that we're participating in. One Solana transaction uses about as much energy as two to three Google searches. And a Google search is like something no one thinks about as being detrimental to the environment. It is a little detrimental to the environment. It is running in data centers that do take electricity, that do take this whole massive internet infrastructure to run. Unless you're willing to live a very specific kind of life, it's going to have a sizable detrimental environmental impact until we like get shit under control.

49:21What Austin means by getting shit under control is some combination of government intervention and new technology. The great smog over London did not end because people made incremental changes to their consumer behavior. It ended because the government intervened. It intervened in the face of obvious consequences. Burning coal was banned and England in the decades after transitioned to central heating. It was a very necessary moment of technological revolution. Now, of course, central heating, often powered by natural gas, is a huge part of our current problem. Holy shit, look at this. And then you just come over a hill and there's a mountain of ice.

50:00We find ourselves standing in front of a bay filled with a mess of giant pieces of ice. This is water normally, instead of ice? It looks like the bottom of the ice maker in your freezer. That's the ocean? Act 5. The most beautiful thing. Oh, wow.

50:23We head back to the hotel. The last night in Olulisat, I get to bed pretty early. And watching the sun glitchily refuse to set, it occurs to me for the first time that here, at the end of the Crypto Island series, I've finally found myself on an actual island. Just not the kind I'd pictured. In January, I saw a video online that nearly broke my already pretty fragile brain. It was a commercial by this oddball who was shilling his promise of a real-life physical crypto island. A utopia for digital coin worshippers. I'd wondered about the audience this video was addressing. Who were they? What did they want?

51:05those questions sent me on a journey a journey i'm grateful for these days my friends will still ask me come on what do you really think of crypto and i tell them my best guess is that in 10 years if i look back at 2022 and ask what was this year's most important tech story i think it was probably ai computers that can suddenly draw and talk to you and will soon do god knows what else AI, or actually really? Decarbonization. Batteries powering cars and hopefully semi-trucks. Planes that might run on hydrogen. A power grid that can run on solar and wind. These technologies hold more potential to change the world for the better than anything else I can think of.

51:48Crypto, for all the attention it's garnered this year, particularly for me, maybe a distant third? 14 years in, the technology is still mostly just an unfulfilled promise. And yet, at its core, that promise is just so enticing. We're all going to make it. That it's hard to imagine it being extinguished. As long as our world feels compromised and brutal, there will be a market for a new world. It's just around the corner. Maybe just around the corner forever.

52:25This is my assistance. We're going up to Igrie. Takes about two hours from here. Normally, the next morning, the last big event. We pile on two boats, which will take us a couple hours up very cold water to an actual glacier. As you did, you can see in the front, stand in the back, rock around the boat. Also, when we are sailing, it's fine with me. It's pretty cold on deck, so most people stay in the cabin, except Rolf, the Greenpeace guy. For the whole boat ride, he'll just sit on the front of the boat, watching small and large pieces of sea ice glide by. Rof, have you ever seen anything like this?

53:00I've been on glaciers before, I've never seen this much sea ice. And there's more today than there was yesterday when we were looking out. It's amazing how dynamic it is. It seems like it's all stuck in place, but it's clearly constantly moving. We keep passing these enormous pieces of ice. Beautiful. It's polished. It's like marble with a crack in it. You see the section that's cut out like it's like a wedding cake.

53:27The sense of scale is impossible. How big is that cube back there? Our boat approaches. The captain cuts the engine, and now it's quiet. And we behold the Ecke glacier. How tall is it? 200 meters. Between 120 and 220 meters. 600. How many feet is that? About three and a quarter feet to a meter. No, not 600. It's a track field, but vertical. 200 meters, yeah. 500. No, no, no. It's funny listening back to this tape now. Everyone on the boat takes turns trying and failing to capture what they're seeing in words. It's just not possible. A glacier up close is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, probably will see, in my time here on Earth.

54:23Is that the calving? Eki is a very active calving glacier, meaning if you visit, there's a good chance you'll see chunks of it falling into the water. It looks like a mountain of blue meringue or silly string, and then off in the distance you can just hear a sound like thunder.

54:52Wow, the ice is just pouring down the side in the water.

55:01Looks like it's bleeding.

55:11I'm not sure how long we just stared at the thing. 45 minutes to watch it calve, break apart. I think that even an animal watching this would feel uneasy. A glacier calving can be natural, but out here, knowing what we all know, it doesn't feel that way. It feels like watching teeth rot, or a liver fail. It feels like watching consequences.

55:40We watched consequences for a while, and then some people decided to brave the cold water. Dave does this every day. We in love.

55:59Yes! Woo! Dave!

56:08Ow! Ow! Yes! It hurts after... They jump in, they jump out, Whiskey's passed around, and we turn the boats back towards Alulisat. Ilu Lissat, and then home.

56:35Crypto Island this year was me, with Shruti Pinamanani, Stephen Jackson, Phil Demachowski, Elizabeth Moss, Garrett Graham, and Christine Andrews. Thanks this year to Gabriel Concha, Dr. Colin Reif, and Kayama Glover.

56:59That is our final summer rebroadcast. We will be back next week with a brand new episode of Search Engine, season two. We can't wait to see you.

57:28Thank you.

58:04We'll see you next time.

58:22But now we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music, Lemu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save, we say. That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.