PANews reported on August 16 that according to Cointelegraph, Shafik Hebous, deputy director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Nate Vernon-Lin, an economist in the Climate Policy Department, said that a tax of 0.047 yuan per kilowatt-hour "will push the crypto mining industry to curb its emissions in accordance with global goals", and if the impact of miners on local health is taken into account, the tax will rise to 0.089 US dollars per kilowatt-hour. Raising taxes will increase the average electricity price for crypto miners by 85%, increase global government revenue by 5.2 billion US dollars per year, and reduce emissions by 100 million tons per year, equivalent to Belgium's emissions.
They claim that one Bitcoin transaction consumes about as much electricity as the average Pakistani uses in three years, while the AI ââmodel ChatGPT requires ten times as much electricity as a Google search. The two also proposed a $0.032/kWh energy use tax on AI data centers, which would rise to $0.052 if pollution costs were taken into account because "these data centers tend to be located in places with greener electricity," IMF officials said. The tax could bring in $18 billion in revenue for the government each year.
Hebous and Vernon-Lin said targeted taxes could encourage crypto miners and AI data centers to use more energy-efficient equipment and could see crypto miners adopt less energy-intensive operations. However, they said taxes need to be coordinated globally, "as strict measures in one place could encourage companies to relocate to jurisdictions with lower standards."
