Bitcoin has had more than its fair share of headlines over the past couple of weeks, with stories of bubbles about to burst, exchanges shutting down  and new ones opening up for business. To be sure, there’s an awful lot of sensationalism right now as the cryptocurrency draws more attention and tech geeks like myself get caught up in the excitement of it all. But in no way does the current buzz condone one of the most ridiculous stories to emerge over the last few days – that Bitcoin mining, the process of creating Bitcoins, could somehow be damaging to the environment.

Writing in Bloomberg, well-known Bitcoin skeptic Mark Gimein makes the ludicrous claim that mining the cryptocurrency consumes such vast amounts of energy, it’s actually having a serious impact on the environment, consuming essential resources and contributing to climate change.

Here goes Gimein’s argument:

“Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour (a little higher than the U.S. average, lower than some high cost areas like California). That, of course, is in addition to the money devoted to buying and building the mining rigs. The site estimates the profits from the day of mining at about $681,000, based on the current value of Bitcoins. So mining, at least for the moment, is a lucrative business.

The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used up. About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.”

The figures that Gimein pulls out of his hat might be pretty damning at first glance, but such sensational claims demand closer scrutiny. And when we take a closer look, it becomes all too clear that Gimein is talking absolute drivel. Here’s why:

As Forbe’s Tim Worstall rightly points out, the 31,000 households claim is a pretty trivial one to make. It sounds a lot, but really it isn’t. 31,000 homes equates to just 0.025% of all US households, and that’s not even taking into account power hungry businesses and industrial centers.  To put this into perspective, Google’s data centers use six times as much energy as the global Bitcoin mining industry does, according to the New York Times. Seriously, if Bitcoin mining can be labeled an “environmental disaster”, then Google must be on the brink of wiping out mankind forever.

Moreover, as Ars Technica reveals, Gimein’s stats are extremely questionable anyway. For one thing, Blockchain freely admits that the 650W per gigahash estimation of power consumption is exactly that – an estimate dependent on the efficiency of the hardware doing the Bitcoin mining. In addition, Gimein makes the rather presumptive claim that mining costs exactly $139,236.07 a day, basing this calculation on the fact that electricity in the US costs 15 cents per kilowatt hour. Of course, Gimein completely ignores the fact that Bitcoin mining is performed all over the world, and that electricity doesn’t cost anywhere near that much in some countries  – here in Thailand where I reside, for example, my electricity works out to be around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, five times cheaper than what Gimein is presuming.

Finally, we need to look at Gimein’s last, most foolish claim, that “If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically”.

This comment betrays a complete lack of anything more than a rudimentary knowledge of how the cryptocurrency works. Fact is, Bitcoin mining will almost certainly cease within the next ten years – once the 21 million Bitcoin milestone is reached, it becomes impossible to mine any more. No matter what kind of impact Bitcoin mining is having on the environment, it’s really not going to last for that much longer, certainly not enough to bring about the ‘dramatic rise in power demands’ that Gimein foresees.

To put it bluntly, not only is Gimein incredibly well uninformed, but by making such nonsensical claims he’s actually insulting anyone who has been unfortunate enough to suffer the negative effects of a genuine environmental disaster. It could even be argued that he is the ‘environmental disaster’, publishing utter garbage on one of the most widely read news sites on the web – how much precious bandwidth and energy was consumed by people reading that fiction, I wonder?

Seriously, there are lots of reasons to discourage investment in Bitcoin as it is. The recent plummet in its value against the dollar, or the thousands of Instawallets compromised in last week’s hack are just two examples. On the other hand, the threat of climate change really isn’t one of them.