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The Agenda podcast chats with Energy Web on how to fight climate change with the help of blockchain

July 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Biogas

Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris explains why blockchain can make “going green” more efficient, how fighting climate change is easier, and why Energy Web is building on Polkadot.

This summer, parts of the United States are wilting under a multimonth stretch of sweltering heat, and data suggests that summer temperatures will continue to creep up in the coming years. The planet is on what seems to be a pretty clear path to soon reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming for the first time since the preindustrial era, a milestone number that the world’s countries pledged to try to remain under in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Humanity’s continued burning of fossil fuels combined with the return of the El Niño weather phenomenon has created a dangerous cocktail of rising temperatures that have been breaking records all around the world. In fact, July 6 was the world’s hottest day ever recorded — and possibly the hottest day in 100,000 years — with the month of July on track to be the hottest in recorded history.

Scientists say that short of drastic and monumental geoengineering projects, the only way to prevent the planet’s warming from remaining under 1.5 degrees Celsius is to rapidly phase out and ultimately stop the burning of fossil fuels. But modern society requires massive amounts of power to operate, so where will all that energy come from if fossil fuels are no longer practical?

The answer, according to organizations like Energy Web, lies in clean energy, or energy that does not release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

On Episode 15 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond speak with Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris about his views on climate change, decarbonization and how blockchain technology can help facilitate the move to clean energy.

The tech is actually already built and readily available

A particular highlight from the conversation was Morris’ comment that it’s the economics of the climate change industry that need adjustment. Morris said:

“Let’s just make it so that all these technologies that can help us decarbonize are cost-effective, and businesses will just adopt them.”

Of course, it’s slightly more complex than that, but according to Morris:

“One of the big overarching challenges is we just need our electricity to be green. And one of the ways we can make the electricity to be more green, the entire electric system, is to take this concept where, let’s say we have all of these different technologies that I was talking about earlier: electric cars, batteries, solar systems, heat pumps.”

In Morris’ view, better public policy messaging couched in digestible data and a more reasonable approach to governments’ climate change and environmental preservation objectives are needed. Morris said the first step is to “electrify everything” and:

“We have all those assets out there, which is kind of a naturally decentralized, distributed landscape with all of these assets that are out there. If we can network those things together digitally and basically use those to actually balance the grid instead of these big natural gas or coal-powered facilities, that’s a really efficient way to manage the electricity system — basically telling all of those different batteries and electric cars precisely when to and when to not use electricity. It’s kind of like a big distributed, decentralized battery that’s a really efficient and incredibly economically powerful tool for balancing the grid.”

What’s blockchain got to do with it?

Given the fact that environmentally friendly solutions are already in existence and ready to roll out, both DeYoung and Salmond were curious about the actual role and need for blockchain in these technologies. Morris explained that after six years of building and trialing different solutions, Energy Web honed in on “Green Proofs’ as the primary solution with a good product-to-market fit.

Green Proofs have applications ranging from green biofuels to Bitcoin (BTC) miners using only renewable and green energy and tracing how green the materials were that came in to create a battery.

According to Morris, “Blockchain plays a pretty key role. We use blockchains to actually represent those assets.”

“So basically, if I’m a fuel producer, I log in, I register, I upload data. An on-chain representation of that data is then used and can be moved around that ecosystem to sort of track who owns the digital certificate representing that unit of green fuel, for example.”

To hear more from Morris’ conversation with The Agenda, listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

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Can blockchain help combat climate change?

March 5, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Carbon Emissions

Blockchain’s transparency and traceability can aid sustainability and reduce carbon emissions for climate change.

With rising temperatures, melting ice caps and more frequent and intense extreme weather events, the effects of climate change are becoming more and more obvious. There is an urgent need to prevent climate change, and numerous technologies and methods are being investigated to do so. Blockchain technology is one of these possibilities, and it has the potential to be very effective in the fight against climate change.

At its core, blockchain is a decentralized ledger that can securely and transparently record transactions and store data. This technology has already been used in a variety of applications, from cryptocurrency to supply chain management. However, its potential applications in combating climate change are still being explored.

Here are a few ways in which blockchain can help combat climate change.

Bring it on, Global Warming!

The United Citizens Organization launched an initiative during Cop26 to help combat climate change with blockchain technology. https://t.co/4FPlyHP2qb
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) November 11, 2021

Creation and management of carbon credits

The creation and administration of carbon credits is one way that blockchain technology can help fight climate change. A tradable permit called a “carbon credit” permits the holder to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. To reduce their emissions, businesses and organizations can buy carbon credits, which can be traded on a market.

The management of carbon credits may become more transparent and effective with the use of blockchain. All carbon credit transactions can be tracked in real-time and documented using a decentralized ledger. By doing so, fraud can be avoided, and the intended use of carbon credits can be guaranteed.

Promote renewable energy sources

By establishing a decentralized energy infrastructure, blockchain technology can also encourage the adoption of renewable energy sources. Without the aid of a centralized organization or utility company, people and companies can buy and sell renewable energy directly from and to one another using a decentralized energy grid. This can support the adoption of renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, and lessen dependency on fossil fuels.

Supply chain management

Supply chain management is another area where blockchain technology is being used to tackle climate change. Businesses can find opportunities to lower their carbon footprint and make more sustainable decisions by utilizing blockchain to track the carbon footprint of products and materials across the supply chain. By promoting sustainable production and consumption practices, greenhouse gas emissions can be significantly reduced.

Monitoring and reporting carbon emissions

The monitoring and reporting of carbon emissions from numerous sources, such as businesses, vehicles and structures, can also be done using blockchain technology. Governments and organizations can more precisely measure and report on their emissions and monitor progress toward their emission reduction targets by utilizing a decentralized ledger to track emissions.

Challenges to implementing blockchain to reduce carbon emissions

Using blockchain technology to address climate change is not without its difficulties and restrictions. The requirement for standardization and compatibility is one obstacle. Blockchain needs a uniform set of rules and protocols that all stakeholders can agree upon in order to manage carbon credits and track emissions effectively.

The scalability of blockchain technology presents another difficulty. Many blockchain networks currently only have a modest amount of capacity and can only process a small number of transactions. If blockchain is widely utilized to manage carbon credits or track emissions, this might become a bottleneck.

Last but not least, there are issues with the energy usage of blockchain technology. Some of the environmental advantages of adopting blockchain to fight climate change may be outweighed by the energy consumption necessary for blockchain transactions.

The road ahead

Although blockchain technology is still in its infancy in terms of adoption and development, its prospective uses in halting climate change are promising. Blockchain can hasten the shift to a low-carbon economy by enhancing transparency, efficiency and accountability in regulating carbon emissions and encouraging sustainable practices.

Yet in order for blockchain to be successful in addressing climate change, there are also difficulties and constraints that must be overcome. Ultimately, a combination of technologies and solutions will be required to address the complex and urgent challenge of climate change.

Flare gets NFT platform to increase use cases for interoperability protocols

March 2, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The NFT marketplace Sparkles launched on the layer-1 EVM oracle platform Flare for interoperable protocols to expand use cases for NFTs and their holders.

Flare, the layer-1 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain, went live on Jan. 10 after it launched two core protocols for decentralized interoperability applications. The blockchain network allows developers to create applications that are interoperable between various blockchain ecosystems and internet platforms.

Less than one month later, on March 2, Flare welcomed the nonfungible token (NFT) platform Sparkles on its layer 1 oracle network.

According to the announcement a primary goal of the Sparkles NFT platform is to hone in on the interoperability of native Flare protocols to increase use cases for NFT utility.

The NFT platform has plans to target other major issues in the space such as intellectual property (IP) rights via attaching on-chain IP licensing to future collections. Sparkles also has plans of decentralizing its core technology and infrastructure after it transitions into a DAO.

Since its launch on Songbird, the canary network for Flare, in Jan. 2022, Sparkles has handled 90% of NFT sales, which accounts for $3.5 million in sales. It currently hosts over 3,200 collections.

Additionally, in 2021 Sparkles joined the Crypto Climate Accord with a pledge to become net-zero by 2023. The platform reports to have achieved an environmentally positive status via carbon credits, which it retired on-chain via the Toucan bridge.

Interoperability is a big theme for the decentralized space going forward in 2023. It is one of the major focuses of many companies and communities in the space to help with scalability and onboarding more users. New tools like trustless bridges have been implemented in order to create safer options for the implementation of interoperable solutions.

The Web3 Domain alliance recently expanded with an addition of 51 new members, after which it named interoperability as one of its main focuses for the year.

Sustainability