China wants to go carbon neutral by 2060, which could mean kicking out some tech
Inner Mongolia is under pressure from the Chinese government to reduce its energy use, and the province has responded by cracking down on high-energy activities. It’s curtailing new steel and methanol production and big data centers, and it’s banning cryptocurrency mining. That’s notable because Inner Mongolia is a huge hub for crypto mining, which requires a tremendous amount of electricity, as supercomputers run millions of calculations to generate new coins. Molly speaks with Jennifer Pak, Marketplace’s China correspondent. She said the environmental effects of cryptocurrency mining were, in some ways, an economic trade-off.