[Answered] Do you think Blockchain technology can help alleviate global warming and climate change? Provide reasons for your arguments.

Blockchain is a shared structure, having irreversible ledger for recording transactions, tracking assets and building trust through several databases, known as chains, in a network connected through peer-to-peer nodes. Blockchains are being used in global supply chains to build efficiency and resilience, but they can also be used to measure and reduce the carbon footprint caused by them.

Help alleviate global warming and climate change:

• Blockchains can be effectively used to create peer-to-peer electricity sharing mechanisms for local communities. This helps reduce transmission losses and encourages to produce and consume clean power through solar, wind, biogas etc. e.g., Brooklyn Microgrid Project.
• Tokenized electricity helps us reward and encourage recycling of industrial and electronic waste, as well as help incentivize regenerative agriculture.
• Smart contracts, a core feature of many blockchains, can be used to reward people for using ecologically sustainable practices.
• The ‘track-and-trace’ property of blockchains enables us to track environmental treaties so as to enforce action, decrease fraud and prevent manipulation.
• The greenhouse gases discharged by producers, as well as carbon credits and carbon tax mechanisms, can be tracked, traced and audited much more effectively using blockchains.
• Other technologies like sharding and non-tech methods like carbon offsets are being used to create green crypto or green blockchains.

However, it doesn’t mean that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency mining is eco-friendly. They are also fuelling climate change to a great extent:

• A report, Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, by the University of Cambridge says that Bitcoin mining alone used up more energy than Belgium and Finland. E.g., Ethereum uses as much power as Switzerland.
• The Bitcoin network generates huge amounts of carbon dioxide, as much as Turkmenistan.
• The outdated ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) mining equipment that crypto miners use produces a massive 36,000 tonnes of electronic waste every year.
• The ‘proof of work’ algorithms that make crypto and blockchain decentralized, secure and open, consume vast amounts of energy due to heavy computing power.

Despite its significance, regulatory uncertainty is hampering the growth of blockchain. Blockchains are also double-edged. Depending on how we humans use them, they can either help destroy our planet or aid us in saving it from annihilation.