Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and long-time environment advocate, suggested in a Twitter post on Sunday that Bitcoin may not be as bad for the environment as people think. Kennedy Jr. wrote, At the very least, environmental argument should not be used as a smokescreen to curtail freedom to transact, reiterating a point he made last week at a Twitter Space hosted by bitcoin investor Scott Melker.
Some environmentalists and policy makers have expressed concerns around bitcoin’s environmental impact due to the massive amounts of energy used to mine bitcoin. However, Kennedy has been courting bitcoin supporters lately, as well as advocating on their behalf. Last month, the presidential candidate said that if elected, he planned to exempt bitcoin from capital gains tax when it is converted to U.S. dollars and that he would back the U.S. dollar with finite assets like gold, silver, and bitcoin.
Kennedy is a bitcoin investor himself. Right after the bitcoin conference, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and bought two bitcoin for each of my seven children, Kennedy said during last week’s Twitter Space. He is also known for trying to combine good business policies with ambitions to improve the environment, once saying at a conference in 2016 that “good environmental policy is good for economic prosperity.”