Musk is right that dirty bitcoins and clean Teslas don’t sit well together

The currency is an environmental abomination and investors should be pleased the founder has said so

Elon Musk moves in mysterious ways, so it would be foolish to assume that his new sceptical stance on bitcoin will last longer than his previous cheerleading. But he has now landed on the right spot: bitcoin is an environmental abomination.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance have been chronicling as much for ages. At last count, electronic mining of the cryptocurrency was consuming the same quantity of energy as economies the size of Argentina or the Netherlands. That matters because the super-computers in China, the ones doing the bulk of the mining, are running mostly on electricity generated by coal - the point referenced by Musk.