In his keynote address to the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, venture capitalist Peter Thiel said environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is “perhaps the real enemy” of the cryptocurrency, likening the movement to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “I think that ESG is just a hate factory. It’s a factory for naming enemies, and we should not be allowing them to do that,” said Thiel, co-founder of both PayPal and Palantir, to cheers from the audience. Bitcoin has met with criticism from environmental activists at the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), among other groups. They typically cite its energy footprint, arguing that its proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism for validating transactions is worse for the environment than the proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism used by some other cryptocurrencies. In “Crypto Has a Climate Problem,” a recent Explainer from the organization, NRDC financial expert Alfonso Pating asks of Bitcoin, “Is …