To many, the very premise of a blockchain climate solution would sound nonsensical, especially as cryptocurrency’s impact on climate has begun to dominate headlines. According to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, created by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam PhD researcher Alex De Vries, at current rates the bitcoin market alone has a carbon footprint of 97.14 megatonnes of CO2, similar to the entire annual carbon footprint of Kuwait.
And as with any growing project, Toucan are not without their critics. For one, the traditional carbon credit registries themselves. One of the largest, Veera, recently issued severalcriticizing the movement and even suggesting that the anonymity provided by blockchain could lead to projects being used to launder money.
The downside to their approach is that the group aren’t creating any new carbon credits themselves – they only convert existing credits on traditional registries into blockchain entries. What that means is that if you aren’t building any new forests or hydroelectric dams, just trading tokens representing current projects, the number of projects and thus the net amount of carbon being offset is the same as it would be if the same tokens were credits on physical registers.
. Only 2 per cent of the actual projects analyzed were judged to have a “high likelihood” of delivering new emission reductions. While the voluntary carbon markets Toucan works with have improved on the back of those early UN projects, most projects remain at risk of additionality.
WiredUK ToucanProtocol is just half of the solution. The second half KlimaDAO is not even mentioned in this story. Nor moss_earth, important player as well
WiredUK Dumbest thing I’ve ever seen