Republican Congressman Pete Sessions from Texas has come out with a bold statement about the impact Bitcoin mining will have not just on his state but on the United States as a whole. The Texan representative, a proponent of Bitcoin (BTC) mining, tweeted on March 22 that “Bitcoin Mining will play a critical role in rebuilding energy independence in the USA.” His statement drew a mixed bag of reactions from both supporters and critics. Wyoming’s Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis was among the supporters who responded to his tweet with a succinct “Indeed.” #Bitcoin Mining will play a critical role in …

The energy usage and environmental impact of Bitcoin (BTC) mining have been frowned upon and been under the scanner by various international financial institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) mentions how Bitcoin mining consumes “vast amounts of computing power and electricity.” Bitcoin mining is an energy-consuming process, as it is a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network that involves providing cryptographic proof to the network that a quantified amount of a specific computational effort has been used. The information used to verify this is stored in a block to be accepted into the network by other participants. Elon Musk, one of the …

The HBAR Foundation, a philanthropic and independent subsidiary of distributed ledger firm Hedera Hashgraph, has announced the launch of the environmentally-conscious Sustainable Impact Fund, SIF, conceived to foster the development of climate-conscious solutions within the Hedera ecosystem. The first recipient, a Welsh blockchain company called DOVU, will be granted $100 million to pursue their open-source Guardian technology to develop publicly transparent mechanisms, such as their audit trail, to verify carbon-offsetting data. A supporter of the Crypto Climate Accord, Dovu's carbon-centric market capitalization platform aggregates an abundance of real-time quantitative data on all Ethereum-based projects, tracking and openly publishing their carbon …

The Iota Foundation and Imperial College London recently announced the launch of a four-year distributed ledger technology, or DLT, initiative designed to research and develop solutions to foster socially conscious, circular economic models and businesses around servitization. The Imperial-Iota-Infrastructures Lab, known as the I3-Lab, will operate within the Dyson School of Design Engineering and has adopted the tagline “infrastructure powered by Iota; analytics powered by Imperial; use-cases powered by the community; and impact powered by partnerships.” Expected to commence this summer, the I3-Lab has been initially funded by a $1 million philanthropic grant from the Iota Foundation and will soon …

Bitcoin (BTC) mining generates a lot of “waste” heat. As energy prices spiral out of control in Europe, miners have come up with creative ways of recycling the heat generated by solving valid Bitcoin blocks. Whereas in Norway, a miner is drying wood from the local timber mill, across the North Sea in the Netherlands, a miner is heating greenhouses to grow produce and bloom “Bitcoin flowers.” In a win-win partnership between a Dutch farmer and a Bitcoin miner, Bitcoin Bloem mines Bitcoin and bud flowers in greenhouses in the province of North Braband, southeast of Rotterdam. It works like …

International oil and gas giant ConocoPhilips is dipping its toes into Bitcoin (BTC) mining as a way to eliminate the wasteful practice of flaring. According to a report from CNBC, the company is currently operating a pilot scheme in the oil-rich region of Bakken, North Dakota. Instead of burning excess gas, a byproduct of oil-drilling known as flaring, the company is selling it to a third party Bitcoin miner to be used as fuel. Speaking on the environmental impacts of “routine flaring”, a representative from the company stated that the decision to move into Bitcoin mining reflected the company’s overarching …

As concerns for environmental impact rose, the market started to require a framework that allows projects to showcase their ecological implications accurately. Because of this, climate-focused data tracking project Hyphen has found a market gap that it’s very eager to fill. With the support of a Chainlink grant back in 2021, the project is now launching a decentralized oracle network (DON) that allows smart contracts to have access to a verified resource, providing greenhouse gas data starting with nitrous oxide (N2O). This sparks the creation of a reporting ecosystem that holds corporations accountable for their emissions and allows climate disclosures …

It's a controversial topic in the blockchain community that comes up from time to time — just how much impact Bitcoin (BTC) mining has on the environment. Last year, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk brought forth a sharp correction in the cryptocurrency market by tweeting that his namesake car company would abandon plans to accept BTC, citing "rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions." However, a recent report published by CoinShares notes that despite the widespread use of coal, oil, and gas for Bitcoin mining, the network accounts for less than 0.08% of the world's CO2 production. …

In a new report published by CoinShares on Monday, the firm estimated that the Bitcoin (BTC) mining network emitted 42 megatons, or Mt, (1Mt = 1 million tons) of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in 2021. In context, the number amounts to less than 0.08% of the world's total emissions of 49,360 Mts of CO2 in the same year. CoinShares came to such figures using a variety of estimates regarding the efficiency of the Bitcoin network, its energy use, hardware, etc., on a global scale. As a result, it may not reflect the actual CO2 emission of the network. But the …

Back in 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation started accepting crypto donations through Bitpay, but three years later, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia is facing pressure from contributors to disable the option over environmental concerns. A proposal submitted by Molly White (GorillaWarfare) urges the foundation to stop accepting crypto. According to White, accepting crypto does not align with Wikimedia's commitments to making active efforts to improve environmental sustainability. White suggested that the acceptance of crypto echoes as an “endorsement of the cryptocurrency space” by Wikimedia and its members while noting that there are risks of damaging the organization's reputation because of its …

Carbon offset protocol KlimaDAO has now accrued over 14 million on-chain carbon offsets and is causing waves in the more traditional carbon offset industry. The aim of KlimaDAO is to acquire as many carbon offsets as it can in order to drive up their value and make offset-generating activities more profitable. The Mark Cuban-backed project’s treasury has added over 5 million carbon offset tokens since late Nov. 2021, bringing the total to 14.5 million as of the time of writing. Its offsets are tokenized and bridged to Polygon (MATIC) in the form of Base Carbon Tonnes (BCT) by Toucan Protocol …

It seems as though the potential benefits of cryptocurrency are often overshadowed by the technology’s inherent vulnerability to exploitation. And it’s true, crypto adoption does come with risks. Over the past year, governments from around the world have raised concerns that crypto could be used to finance terrorism or other illicit activity like money laundering. There have been prohibitive measures everywhere from China to Nigeria, with many crypto exchanges forced into a legislative chokehold. While crypto has its challenges, it has also become a tool for policymakers and activists wanting to make the world a better place. The climate crisis …