As world leaders discuss what needs to be done to tackle climate change at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, companies around the world are striving to achieve carbon neutrality. Environmental impact has been a hot topic in the crypto sector, and rebranding has become a top priority.
Earlier this year, electric car maker Tesla began accepting payments in Bitcoin (BTC) and invested $ 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, and a few months later withdrew from Bitcoin payments due to concerns about “the rapidly growing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining. and transactions, in particular … coal. ”
Efforts to greener the crypto area have grown since then, in part given Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s announcement that the electric carmaker will accept Bitcoin payments when there is “reasonable confidence (about 50%) that clean energy is used by workers.” with a positive direction for the future.
As part of this effort, the BitMEX cryptocurrency exchange became one of the first exchanges in the sector to announce carbon-neutral status, and promised to compensate for the emissions from all bitcoin transactions to and from the platform.
BitMEX said that it has entered into a partnership with the AI carbon tracking company Pachma that it has bought 7,110 tonnes of carbon credits worth around 100,000 dollars. Carbon credits are certification certificates issued by official legislators that allow companies to use one tonne of carbon dioxide in an approach that improves accountability and data tracking.
This move from BitMEX ensures that the platform will maintain operations in the coming calendar year, while compensating for all emissions related to bitcoin transactions to and from the servers. When it comes to exchanges, the “overall effort” should include research on environmental impacts as well as basic education on “the possibilities that cryptographic technology provides”.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Alex Salnikov, co-founder and product manager at NFT Rarible Marketplace, said that part of the reason why the cryptocurrency industry examines the carbon footprint so closely is because of its “transparent design”, not necessarily environmentally friendly. The effect.
“The extra pressure is good, as space accelerates its quest to become energy efficient through stock blockchains,” Salnikov added. According to Salnikov, the ultimate goal is to ensure that most, if not all, Web 3.0 tools “have minimal or no carbon footprint”.
According to Salnikov, it is absolutely important to compensate for carbon emissions as a starting point. However, not everyone agrees with this, some claim that these compensations can do more harm than good.
Are carbon expansion joints washed off with green?
In early October, Greenpeace CEO Jennifer Morgan spoke at a Reuters Impact conference about the growing trend of carbon offsets, noting that companies are evading carbon credits.
Morgan argued at the conference that “there is no time for compensation” because we are in a “climate crisis” and therefore there is a need to phase out fossil fuels. “Budgeting schemes are a pure green wave that allows companies to” do what they do and make money, “she added.
Martha Reyes, head of research at the cryptocurrency exchange Bequant, spoke to the Cointelegraph, agreed with Morgan and said that carbon credits “are not the ideal solution to reduce carbon emissions.” She added that both investors and regulators “are really starting to wake up to the green color that is a problem in traditional markets.”
When it comes to what crypto companies can do to reduce their influence, Reyes argued that a more sustainable approach to bitcoin mining is to use more renewable energy. The ban on cryptocurrency mining in China meant that miners using carbon energy sources were forced to leave the country and emigrate.
According to Morgan, offsetting carbon emissions allows companies to continue to pollute the environment without reducing their emissions, simply because they buy loans from projects that reduce or avoid carbon emissions, such as solar farms.
In April, according to Reuters, the Carbon Compensation Research Group said that 29% of the forest’s carbon compensation analyzed under the $ 2 billion program overestimated emissions to about 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
