Another difficult choice

[Like all Virunga hydro plants, the Mutwanga project employs a river-run design; it will provide electricity for industry in a nearby town of over 30,000 people. Brett Stirton/Getty Iamges for WWF-Canon. Comment: presumably the rivers in question are rather bigger, but perhaps not as photogenic as this one]

Following the difficult choice noticed yesterday at reference 1, we have another one today at reference 2. What does the team think about an important national park, a fully fledged world heritage site, as detailed at reference 4, making a crust by selling surplus hydro-electricity to bitcoin miners? With bitcoin, as I understand it, being the currency of choice of big time gangsters, drug dealers and other undesirables.

Another downside to bitcoin being that its creation - mining in the jargon - consumes huge amounts of electricity. So usually a very un-green activity in the service of very un-pleasant people. A view confused in this instance by the use of surplus hydro-electricity generated using low impact technology called river-run which does not involve dams and big new lakes.

The national park of around 3,000 square miles is in the mountain borderlands between the Congo to the west, Uganda and Rwanda to the east. Borderlands which are home to a lot of large animals, a lot of mainly poor people, some of them refugees from Rwanda, and a lot of violence, around thirty years of it. There is also oil and oil companies are looking to drill. In the past the national park managed to exist on its income from tourists and the present hope is that the shortfall of tourists will be made up by sale of bitcoin.

The rain forest of the Congo basin is second only to that of the Amazon basin as a bastion against global warming. So development involving chopping the forest down not good for the rest of the world.

All very difficult, not least for the people who live in and around the park.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/difficult-choices.html.

Reference 2:  Gorillas, militias, and Bitcoin: Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto: In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what the hell crypto has to do with conservation - Adam Popescu, MIT Technology Review - 2023.

Reference 3: http://www.brentstirton.com/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virunga_National_Park.