If you think this “scientific” study qualifies as a contributor to intelligent discourse think again.
The analysis can be generalized to say anything that uses 0.05 electricity creates these large harms. Perhaps true, but it’s not going to be unique to Bitcoin
This ignores the USE of the train station, and just focuses on energy costs to build it.
This study is only focused on mining new coins. Heads up, some of the (wildly inflated) value of bitcoin is tied to (arguable) uses and the ability of the blockchain to operate as a non-repudiation public ledger that allows global transfer of value with strong guarantees totally independent of any other central party.
Some quick math.
1 bitcoin is lets say worth $50,000. Let's assume $10K in electricity to mine this. So for every $1 in bitcoin, you need 20 cents of electricity.
Reduced to it's simplest, the claim here is that for every 20 cents of electricity, there is another 50 cents of health impacts.
Fair enough, but if you believe this, then a lot of other things have huge damages.
Pointing out other things also have an environmental impact just dilutes the discussion about Bitcoin and doesn't add anything to it.
If you applied this same damage model to something people had fondness for (ie, driving an electric car) you'd realize we should be working as HARD as we can to kill EV cars dead, because there is a MASSIVE unaccounted for cost to charging them (using this model).
Reality though is bitcoin chases low cost power, and that is currently often actually green (hydro, excess solar during day when their is curtailment and negative pricing etc). I can't imagine the economics making sense to mine using coal power.