An Index of Cryptocurrency Environmental Attention (ICEA)

A concern often expressed in relation to cryptocurrencies is their environmental impact associated with increasing electricity consumption which is currently unregulated. To assist researchers and policy makers, we developed a new Index of Cryptocurrency Environmental Attention (ICEA) based on news coverage, that captures the extent to which environmental sustainability concerns are discussed in conjunction with these new assets. We show that the ICEA index, similar to the cryptocurrency price and policy uncertainty index, reacts to major events in the cryptocurrency space. We believe that ICEA can be used for environmental policy development to assess environmental pressure and attention to the growing energy consumption problem of this new digital payment network