Search Engine - 09 The End

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

A trip to Greenland, a chance encounter with Coolio, and the end of the world. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So you may have already heard, but while he was away, there was some news in the world of crypto. FTX, the crypto exchange run by former billionaire philanthropist Sam Bankman Freed, has collapsed spectacularly. It's a big story. It's one that's going to unwind for a while, as it makes its way into criminal and civil courts. It's a story I intend to cover it in my news show next year, which is not all about crypto. It is not, however, the story I have for you today. Today's story is, well, it's about a very strange experience I had, which started a few months ago. It's a story I'm going to tell you in five acts. That's after the break.

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I was sitting at the airport, delayed flight, a red eye getting redder. I was thinking, as I so often do, about the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the white paper where he'd laid out how Bitcoin would work. I was at the airport because of that white paper, actually because of what I consider to be a pretty crucial flaw in it. A flaw that, like a bad piece of code, had replicated itself over and over, helping cause some real-world destruction, which I was about to go witness up close. The flaw had come about while Satoshi was actually designing Bitcoin. Satoshi had to decide how new Bitcoins would be issued to the public over time. With normal money, a government has a central bank that can release more currency.

But Bitcoin wasn't normal. There was no central bank. So what to do? In 2008, Satoshi decides computers on the network will compete to guess at the answers to complicated puzzles. The winner will receive Bitcoin and the chance to write the next few transactions on Bitcoin's ledger on the blockchain. Which means essentially, Satoshi is creating a system where you trade your computing power and your home electricity for the chance to earn Bitcoin. As Satoshi writes in the white paper, quote, The steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation.

In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended. The incentive can also be fine. In Bitcoin's early years, that electricity will belong to hobbyists on their home PCs. A decade and a half later, there will be multi-million dollar companies with giant warehouses filled with state-of-the-art computers burning energy, all in the hopes of winning more Bitcoin. Bitcoin, even now, after all the crypto crashes this year, consumes somewhere over 100 terawatt hours annually, in line with a small country. Think Finland or Argentine. Satoshi created a world where for some people, pursuing their rational self-interest, meant essentially

leaving giant, powerful computers turned on 24-7, helping cook the planet. I would call that a flaw. And I wondered, how would you fix a flaw like that? I was at the airport that night because a guy named Dave had told me that he had an idea for how he might at least begin to chip away this problem. Dave had summoned a bunch of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and some climate change activists to Greenland. Greenland, very important site of climate change. It's the home of the second largest ice mass in the world.

Dave's idea was to put these crypto people, whose technology contributes to climate change, at the site of the disaster, and put them directly in difficult conversations with the activists who were trying to stop it. The idea was that these crypto people could be part of the solution. I was intrigued, and so I bought my plane ticket. a flight to Greenland via Denmark. Except now, my flight was many hours delayed. And so here I was stuck at the airport, thinking about this white paper.

And in my preoccupation, it took me a moment to notice the man, sitting just 10 feet away from me. He was wearing a lime green track suit and a lime green baseball hat. Two holes were cut out for his dreads, which angled into the sky like antenna. This man had the incandescent shine of celebrity about him.

And I realized pretty quickly he was a celebrity. He was Coolio, the rapper. Gangsta's Paradise. One, two, three, four. Coolio, who would actually die a month later in Los Angeles. But tonight, he was at my gate, looking, frankly, magnificent. Gainly chatting with Grant, a 20-year-old he just met. Okay, say your names.

Coolio. Coolio. Grant. And where are we right now, Coelio and Grant? We are in New York at JFK. We've been sitting here for like three hours for a delayed flight to Copenhagen, Denmark. My trip had not even begun, and I was already in a detour. We started talking about, well, crypto.

Coolio, it turned out, had done his own research, gotten involved. I am actually heavily invested into the Metaverse. I have a nice swath of land in the Metaverse. and, I mean, barring the internet crashing or somebody dropping an EMP on the whole world and there being no power, it should be a good deal. And I asked him, you know, speaking of possible apocalypses, how worried was he about climate change?

He was candid in a way people usually aren't in just saying he did believe water levels are rising, but he didn't think of it as his problem to solve. I'm not so much worried about it, for one thing, the time it gets enough to be a serious problem. I'll be long dead. I feel like I'm going to spend this week talking to people that want to convince

people like you to be more worried, basically. I mean, listen, there are so many other things to worry about that that I need to worry about right now versus worrying about the future, but I got to worry about what's happening right now. What's your biggest worry right now?

My biggest worry right now is when we get into Denmark. Yeah, exactly. I got a soda borrow. Coolio was 59 years old. Grant was only 20, which meant climate change was a problem he'd very directly inherit. So I asked him.

Grant, do you worry about climate change? This goes back to what Kulio said. I don't really worry about, like, what's going to happen, like, in the future. I mean, it probably is, like, a big deal. Like, stuff's going to happen in the future with, like, the ice caps and whatnot melting. But I'm more focused on what's going on right now. now in our lives compared to our future. And listen, I'm going to tell you another thing.

Yeah. Nobody will never tell you. Okay. There's another continent that they're hiding from us. Kulia, what are you talking about? There's another continent that is being hidden from us right now. If you go 50 miles out into the Antarctic Ocean, do you know that ships and helicopters and military come from everywhere and they tell you to turn around and go back or you'll be destroyed?

you'll be killed. Grant, you're nodding. Have you heard this before? I've heard something similar. Have you ever heard about the pyramids in Antarctica? No. I've never heard of any of them. There are pyramids.

You've got to do some research, man. There are pyramids in the Grand Canyon. This conversation, one of the strangest I've had this year, which is saying a lot, went on for a while. Most of it, I will not play for you today. But the gist was, Julio and Grant, were both excited about the idea that there was an ancient race of aliens, more enlightened than us. who are protecting parts of the planet from humans.

I'm a reporter who covers the internet. I encounter a lot of misinformation. Some of it bothers me. This particular theory, I have to say, did not. It was not political. It was not hateful. It was just very unusual. And to me, the most incredible part

was that these two very different people had somehow ended up in the same internet conspiracy theory rabbit hole. So much so that now they were just fully completing each other's sentences. Like, they just, just walked out of the same Star Wars movie together. There's probably a highly advanced civilization before us that had like an interconnected mind that created all this shit. That's some crazy shit.

I can't believe we're talking about this. No. Bro, you're dumb. You're cool you. You're cool you. I mean, not dumb, but you need to educate yourself. Do some research. Watch like ancient aliens.

We talked some more and then just before midnight, we finally bored. 20E? 20E? That'll be straight to answer right. Okay. I pass a sleepy cool, Leo. Safe flight. Go to sleep. He's in first class. I'm on my way to coach. All right.

And I sit down. That conversation I just had would stay with me. For the obvious reasons, but also because underneath the weirdness, I think it points at the allure of literally any distraction. Secret aliens, sure. But if you're me, the latest goings on of San Beckman Freed. any problem shinier than the big one, that we've accidentally created a world

where our consumption is gradually killing us. There are always going to be a lot of other more fun things to think about than that. But when the opportunity of this trip it appeared and I'd been motivated to go, partly that was just out of a desire to lock myself in a room with this problem. A room where, for once, my life,

with all its dumb urgencies, would be the thing that finally felt distant. On the flight, I read a book about Greenlandic climate history and I fall asleep. After Smads, Greenland. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart. Instacart is more than a grocery technology platform. It's really about giving you back time and making everyday tasks feel a whole lot easier.

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Although, even calling this a town feels like an exaggeration. 475 people live here. It's a settlement. established by the U.S. Air Force during World War II, after the Nazis had taken Denmark. Conger Lusak is almost entirely contained in its own airport. The hotel is in the airport, the bar is in the airport. Outside, a runway, and on a gray flat plane under some gray hills, there are a few brightly colored buildings scattered like Monopoly houses. That night, the group I'll be traveling with gathers for dinner.

the Greenland blockchain climate expedition. We're going to do a little exercise. Can everybody's catching over here? All right, so first off. There's Dave Ford, the man who's organizing the trip. He's standing at the head of the table. And then at the table itself, the two sides were here to have difficult conversations

about crypto and the climate. What is your name again? PJ. Pige. Yeah. N-T. Sun. These sides are much bluerier than I pictured.

There are crypto people who are obsessed with their carbon footprints. There are climate activists who really love to talk about their NFTs. And the people here, they come from all over, the U.S., Greenland, Ecuador, Bermuda. Here's our plan for the week. Pretty much every day, we'll go visit a site of visible climate damage, and we'll spend the rest of the day in debate and conversation. The first day in Congreau-Lusack, the whole group, 22 of us, clambers onto a big bus. We start the long drive to the ice sheet. And on the right side, you see the Watson River.

All the water is from ice. Before preparing for this trip, I never really wondered what Greenland looked like. Arriving, I realized I've never seen a place like yet. It's a bizarre landscape. Scrubby, mud-brown, dark green. We see a copse of trees that have only grown to the height of your knee. They are not very high. There's this new genre of video game where an algorithm randomly generates fantastic planets for you to visit, each one with its own attributes.

I keep thinking, that's how Greenland feels. A procedurally generated world. Like something out of a sci-fi novel. At 1.30 in the afternoon, we parked the bus at a little turn off. We are going out of the bus now and bring everything that you want to take up on the ice sheet. We get out of the bus and strap these crampons on our boots. metal teeth that grip the ice more securely. How does this string go through?

It takes me about 10 of a minus 15 more minutes than anyone else, partly because I'm trying to both balance myself and a microphone so I can describe the extremely dramatic scene of putting my ice shoes on. And then we start walking. This is just dried cod. I've never seen this before. Somebody shares a big hunk of dried cod, which is sort of Greenland's version of jerky.

It's pretty tasty. We walk across through the muddy gray area onto the giant white napkin of the ice sheet proper. And I run into Dave, the guy organizing the trip. So you've been here once before? This is my first time on the actual ice sheet. I've been to Greenland before, but it was like negative 19 in November when I was here, so we couldn't get anywhere close. Can you describe what you see?

I see white everywhere. It's like 180 degrees in front of us. Have you ever seen you see? see more in the natural war than I have you ever seen anything that felt that's infinite you know I've been to Antarctica and I've been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean so maybe that would be the closest comparison but just looking out and just knowing that just keeps going to the other side of the continent no I don't I don't know that I've experienced anything quite like that and to think that this essentially controls the fate of the entire world is also all inspiring

have identified several tipping points. Strongholds on Earth that when or if they fall will signal a tumble into real irreversible calamity. This ice sheet we're standing on is one of them. It covers 1.2% of the Earth. If it were all to melt, sea levels would rise 23 feet. We're walking on a bomb, albeit one that has already begun exploding. Have you read it about the explorers who went out here first, like in the 1880s and stuff? I read a lot more about the Antarctic explorers, and I think stories are similar. A lot of pain, a lot of pain. A lot of people eating their dogs and horses and then dying.

I felt pretty deep into a few books before this trip. My favorite was called The Ice at the End of the World by John Gertner. He chronicles how in the late 1800s these lunatic explorers began mounting expeditions where they simply tried to walk across the ice sheet from one edge of the country to the other. Nobody had ever done this without dying. These men called themselves scientists and explorers, but crucially and absurdly, they were trying to do this decades before there was really anything scientifically useful about these expeditions. It's only really in the 1950s that scientists would figure out that they could drill deep into the ice, remove ice cores, and by studying them extract historical climate data, which would begin to show evidence for man-made climate change. But this was happening 70 years before that.

So what drove them onto the ice? Despite the grandness of what these explorers were attempting, their motives, I found them disappointingly human. Being the first man across the ice sheet could get you headlines, speaking engagements. You risked your life, but in return, you were given the thing everyone seeks and no one really admits they're after. Status. But there were other explorers with, stranger, more interesting motives.

I'm just going to take a moment to tell you about my favorite, Friedhof Nansen, a scientist explorer who started his adventures at the age of 20, same age as Grant from the airport. People would describe Nansen as fearless, heroic. The image I get of him reading his journals is a bit more complicated. I see one of those people born with that kind of deep melancholy, the kind that makes you seek out death because being close to it somehow makes you feel more okay. This is how Nansen describes the icy that I'm currently standing on, the place that he would return to again and again.

Quote, a weird beauty, without feeling, as though of a dead planet built of shining white marble. And everything so still, so awfully still, with the silence that shall one day rain. When the earth becomes desolate and empty, when the fox will no more haunt these moraines, when the bear will no longer wander about on the ice out there, when even the wind will not raise. Infinite silence. Isn't that beautiful? He ate a polar bear heart, and he wrote that. Nansen and I dissimilar in probably any discernible way.

He, a chiseled blonde adventurer, braving an unexplored expanse in a wool jacket. Me, 150 years later, visiting with my preferred asthma inhaler. Except, I swear to God, I can feel that same tug towards death that pulls through his writing. Self-destruction. Out here, it was like the call was coming from the landscape itself. I'm thinking about this and other similarly model and thoughts when we pass a clump of really weird dirt. Is that dirt? That might be 40,000 years old soil.

Wow. From down there. What's happening here is that the ice is constantly shifting, and in that process, some dirt has slowly made its way all the way up to the surface over thousands of years. It's like the world's oldest popped. pimple. Forty-thousand-year-old things. Yeah.

Yeah, there you go. I'm standing next to a Greenlandic youth climate activist who's on the trip. Sasha Bledov. She and another Greenlander, a guide named Kim Falk Peterson, start talking about another one of the ice sheet's mysteries. How diamonds sometimes appear here. Diamonds are quite often here on very small. Have you found out of the earth?

Yeah. This is so crazy sounding, I checked it. It's true. There's a layer of nanodiams, 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. It's complicated, though.

Sasha and Kim tell me about this story they've heard. I heard that a lot of people come from other countries and collect diamonds and then leave again because there's nobody who's controlling it. It's just like pick it up and leave and sell it in other countries. Foreigners coming to Greenland, stealing precious gems and then selling them abroad. elaborates. And they have diplomatic immunity, so you can't, they check their luggage. That's what? Wait, who 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 Kulio 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. Outsiders 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 metal.

little's. 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. So 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 and here and we see it every day, every year. So... Saja says she's been seeing animals migrate north. 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 to visit it. So this is your first time on the ice sheet? Yeah. I feel I should have come here a lot of time ago. Yeah. We get back to the airport town, the town.

that's in an airport, Congarulusac. 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 until around 10, and I go to sleep. After the break, act three. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like Waif, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and free people. Plus, free shipping and returns and freestyling appointments make everything so easy.

Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening, alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Three, the activist's dilemma. In 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 sites 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. So 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 a second to last slide? The last slide? Oh, second. It's the one where you're talking about all the stakeholders. There is one very interesting big discussion.

The panel that people here are calling the 800-pound gorilla panel, which addresses probably the thornyest 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 seduce? Toshy's white paper. Satoshi's utopian dream was to break down the sort of centralized nature of 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 adherence. I've talked in previous episodes about how crypto is not a monolith, but a bunch of warring

factions. And the factions who have shown up here belong to newer cryptocurrencies, greener ones, which were engineered differently from Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency, 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,

it'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 guerrilla 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. There 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, stands towards the environment was very defensive and pugnacious. Their one panel on climate, you may remember, directed at fellow bitcoins, was called, You Are the Carbon they wished 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. What surprised me was that that moment, actually included Bitcoin maxis. There was a brief period of engagement. There were 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, of Bitcoin climate reformers lost out to their energy-consuming fundamentalist brethren. They 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. On the end of the bar, though, I haven't met a couple of 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 C. Shepherd before me. Oh, cool. Oh, wow. You de-radicalize. It starts out because I'm eavesdropping on a conversation between a couple of people from a big, relatively green cryptocurrency, and a couple pretty serious environmental activists, Casson and Rolf. Casson used to work with the Sea Shepherd, a group that's been called eco-terrorists by a few governments.

But he knew Rolf from their days together at Greenpeace USA. They were talking about bulletproof vests, which perked my ears up. Wait on, if you'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. And 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 box? We tested the boxes. There are people with microscopes can look at fiber and tell if it's mixed tropical hardwood, which means they just raised a rainforest down, put it into a blender, it made paper out of it, and destroyed it forever.

And 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 Sagano near the L.A. airport. What is that? What is the banners at?

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 and a bulldozer? Yeah, it was a little mini bulldozer. We painted it pink. My idea was I didn't have enough money 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. And 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. They changed the box? They did. And then Hasbro called up right away because we 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. And 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've kids, but like if you had a kid and they want a Barbie, do you buy them a Barbie? Like, how do you participate?

Well, that was some feedback. People are like, what do you say? Barbie's good? You know, there's young girls and body image issues. And oh, Barbie's made of thallates and toxics. And I'm like, okay, 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. Like, 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, Kasson, 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. I was thinking about this, and no one would mistake me for a better-than-average person. Like, I'm like a solid five out of ten.

Yeah, like C-minus. On a good day. But I was talking to a friend of mine about the trip, 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. This 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.

But 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 one, 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.

So 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. Or 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 in the climate really doesn't care. Act 4. Revolution and Industry. We travel to the third largest city in Greenland, the Lulisat.

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.

Stop barking. And then they all start up again. Past 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 icy to the sea. In another second, 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. I 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. packed. So this is ice from... 120,000 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 science of us inventing ways to kill our and each other, registered silently by the planet. But mostly looking at it just feels fascinating.

You 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 were 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. An 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 course. 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. Okay, wait. We're walking down a wood path in Alusat, Ilyssat. I start walking with Austin Federa, a guy who works at the Salana Foundation. Solana, a newer, greener crypto.

And what does it say here? You are now entering the UNESCO World Heritage site of Lucid IceForge. 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. It'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's 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 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. But 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 Salonanan 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. to have a sizable detrimental environmental impact until we like get shit under control. What 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. We 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. We head back to the hotel. The last night in Alulisat, I get to bed pretty early. And watching the sun glitchily refused 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? Those 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 are 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. Crypto, 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. 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 ralph 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 ralph have you ever seen anything like this

I'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. It's polished. It's like marble with a crack and... Yeah.

You like see the section that's cut out like a like as like a wedding cake. The sense of scale is impossible. Like how big is that cube back there? Yeah, that one? boat approaches. The captain cuts the engine and now it's quiet and we behold the ecchi glacier. How tall is it? Two hundred meters. Between 120 and 220 meters. 600, that's, how many feet is that? About three and a three and a quarter feet to a meter. It's a multiple three. Ah, okay. It's a track field. It's a track field but

vertical. Two hundred up. Meets, yeah. On five hundred. 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. Is 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 the distance you can just hear it sound like thunder. Ice is just pouring down the side and water. It looks like it's bleeding. I'm not sure how long we just stare 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 live or fail. It feels like watching consequences. We watched consequences for a while, and then some people decided to brave the cold water. We have love. Ow! Yes. They jump in, they jump out, whiskey's passed around, and we turn the boats back towards Alulisat. Alu Lassat, and then home.

Crypto Island this year was me, with Shrewthy Pinnaminani, Stephen Jackson, Phil Demahovsky, Elizabeth Moss, Garrett Graham, and Christine Andrews. Thanks this year to Gabriel Concha, Dr. Colin Reef, and Kayama Glover. If you enjoyed Crypto Island, you might like our new show, Search Engine. You can find it here on this same feed. We are applying our same curiosity and our desire to tell stories experimentally, but to the entire world, not just a cryptocurrency. Search Engine. Check it out.

Thanks for listening.