As The Economist recently pointed out, if humanity is to avoid potentially
cataclysmic climate change in the coming decades limiting carbon emissions is simply insufficient. Even if tomorrow we all drove electric cars and generated electricity with wind and solar exclusively, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already too high. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere now a necessity.
There are many, many obstacles to this imperative as their front cover article discusses. Notwithstanding climate change deniers awaiting the four horsemen, a massive global collective action conundrum, and feeble/nascent R&D, this is a problem that will not wait for a next election cycle. We need to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere yesterday.
Planting trees is a simple and elegant natural solution. Unfortunately, trees are slow to grow, compete for water and land that is needed for human sustenance, and at risk of pouring carbon back into the atmosphere when the trees burn or are harvested for human processing.
Chemical solutions, like calcium hydroxide, have been shown effective at capturing CO2, but no scalable application has demonstrated that it can deliver a minimum viable product. Innovative solutions such as Swiss Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) plants are beginning to show the economic viability of capturing and selling carbon. Unfortunately, start up costs are in the millions of dollars, thus likely requiring concerted political/governmental effort to scale globally. As we have seen, focusing the minds of politicians beyond their next election is futile and unelected leaders have almost no incentive to act as the brunt of climate change is falling on the non-elite.
Enter blockchain and the potential for global decentralized ‘mining’ of economic value by demonstrating effort. Right now, Bitcoin is an environmental disaster, burning through astounding amounts of energy to compute proof-of-work solutions on specialized hardware. The original idea of the decentralized network of Bitcoin mining nodes was that people could use their home computers to run cryptographic hash guesses in a race to confirm blocks of transactions on the network. The winning nodes are rewarded with bitcoins.
Skeptics of this borderless economic enterprise abound, but what can be said with confidence is that Satoshi Nakamoto opened some box or squeezed something out of a tube. Today there are probably over a 1,000 cryptographic tokens modeled on the Bitcoin blockchain concept. These tokens are traded and speculated on by a new community of young tech-savvy pseudo-investors. I use the term ‘pseudo’ because the economic activity around these tokens is extremely gamified, almost entirely stripping out Warren’s value fundamentals. For regulators this is a shocking and dangerous, but it offers an important insight that could be harnessed for the good of the planet.
People (at least in countries where I have lived) like making money, especially easy money. Lifting things and showing up at the office are falling out of favor as a social value. We increasingly want winning lottery tickets, instant American Idol fame and fortune, or a least some quick bucks from swapping digital tokens or video game swords and shields. So proof-of-carbon-capture.
Perhaps we could develop a network where normal people with a few thousand dollars could set up small DAC filter systems and join a global network that rewards them economically for demonstrating that they are pulling carbon out of the air. There are lots of issues to work out, such as how to verifiably connect ‘on-chain’ representations of carbon-capture, with
‘off-chain’ actual real-world carbon capture, or how to ensure that the energy
used isn’t being stolen from the local coal plant or that captured carbon is not improperly dumped or otherwise used to game the system. There are lots of problems and maybe the idea is completely unworkable, but much smarter people than me are already working on how to make crypto assets more environmentally friendly.
Are you one of them?
