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If we're going to pass a law for that reason, we should pass a meaningful price on carbon. Then all the bitcoin miners using fossil-based electricity will go out of business.

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It's true that it's actually the differential in power prices that leads to its rapid expansion. The underlying tech will raise or lower difficulty based upon market incentives. So forcing mining onto renewable sources of energy by putting a price on carbon would benefit everyone.

Except the poor

Make it a fee-and-dividend program and the poor would come out ahead.

Laws have been passed for that, and we should keep passing them, but it hasn't had the effect you posit on bitcoin mining.

We do not have a high, global carbon price. If it's not global, the miners will just relocate to areas that don't have it.

But a ban on bitcoin would just relocate miners to places without the ban so I think it's a fair comparison.

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