Robert P. Berrens – författare

The first combined social and ecological look at how institutions in New Mexico intentionally built the Rio Grande Valley through the heart of Albuquerque to create “natural” corridors of green spaces in a modern American city. Dry one year, overflowing the next, the Rio Grande has sustained its arid valley for millennia. In Ribbons of Green, John Fleck and Robert P. Berrens seek to understand twenty-first-century Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande by exploring the social and ecological interactions that describe how this high-desert city developed astride a capricious river. In every phase of the Duke City’s history, living with the Rio Grande posed problems that required collective action by its stakeholders to irrigate, build river crossings, drain the valley’s floor, and protect residents from flooding. These collective decisions ultimately changed the course of the river, resulting in intentionally designed “ribbons of green” that dominate today’s cityscape. The Rio Grande in turn altered the collective psyche of Albuquerque. For many residents, the city’s bosque is their only interaction with nature, but these green corridors are very much a human creation. Ribbons of Green explores how Albuquerque built its environment to create a valley floor that its residents have come to adore and how, in a climate-altered world, we might keep it.

This book provides a unique introduction to Bitcoin mining’s energy use and environmental impacts. Bitcoin, the largest and most well-known cryptocurrency, has ignited the world of decentralized finance and digital currencies. However, Bitcoin has a major problem: it uses massive amounts of energy to produce or ‘mine’ the coins, and this energy use has tremendous environmental consequences. By recent estimates, Bitcoin mining’s global electricity use is larger than entire countries such as the Netherlands and Argentina. In this book, the authors explain the process by which Bitcoin is mined, why it requires significant energy, and what we know about where that energy comes from. It also explores the environmental impacts and associated monetary damages of this energy use. Further, the book presents the current state of scientific knowledge around these questions and provides original economic damage estimates from the authors and compares them to those of other goods and services. The book discusses links between Bitcoin and climate change, public health, air pollution, ‘e-waste’, water, and land use. It concludes by discussing alternative ways in which Bitcoin mining can be made green by using less energy, as well as the policy and regulatory challenges that may hinder progress toward this goal. Innovative and insightful, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and industry professionals who are researching and working in the areas of cryptocurrencies, economics, business and finance, engineering, energy, and environmental studies more broadly.