Greenpeace took advantage of the Ethereum Climate Platform (ECP) event, which took place in Egypt from 6 to 18 this month, to attack bitcoin and its investors.
“Bitcoin falls further behind as others in the crypto industry work to tackle the climate crisis”said Greenpeace in a statement, adding:
“Instead of taking the initiative to reduce energy consumption by changing the code, most major Bitcoin players refuse to acknowledge the problem.
While other cryptocurrencies are making changes to become more efficient and coming up with approaches to address historic climate pollution, Bitcoin mining has gotten dirtier in recent years, with coal being the main source of electricity.
Greenpeace provides no sources or studies to prove its accusation that coal is the main source of electricity for bitcoin mining as this is naturally a highly biased organization but on this occasion Greenpeace has not failed to praise one and tout the other fall. For Greenpeace, Ethereum is good and Bitcoin is bad.
“The Ethereum Climate Platform (ECP) is another example of cryptocurrencies taking the initiative to mitigate the climate crisis”said Greenpeace, “Leaving bitcoin further behind as the world grapples with the climate crisis.”
“Ethereum is good”
ConsenSys, Aave, Microsoft and other major companies announced who will invest in climate projects that promise to reduce Ethereum’s past carbon emissions.
Ethereum no longer uses energy in its mining process after upgrading to Proof of Stake in September, but for the past seven years it has been based on Proof of Work with this consortium now trying to offset the carbon emitted at that time.
“Financing high-quality green projects is critical in the fight to combat human-induced climate change.” said Bill Kentrup, co-founder of Allinfra, one of the participants.
They will invest in green startups and they call it offset as they take the opportunity to attack bitcoin, why not.
However, the role that cryptocurrency technology could play in these startups is not very clear, with several experiments since 2017 still in development regarding any conclusion.
Some of the most interesting projects revolved around a local electricity grid based on solar panels with cryptocurrencies connected to it as a means of exchanging energy that was sent to the grid or even extracted.
There were also ambitions to connect solar panels to electric car batteries and to connect them to the grid via these batteries.
You can do this through a sort of centralized database where you log into bank accounts, but you can also use tokenization for initialization to jump-start adoption.
“Bitcoin is bad”
For bitcoin, the focus is more on energy science. The highly competitive nature of bitcoin mining means that energy prices are a huge competitive advantage and can therefore drive the construction of more efficient renewable projects, including solar parks.
In poor countries they may use coal, but today the focus should be on increasing production capacity while stimulating or even mandating demand for renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and even hydrogen.
Because bitcoin won’t change its mining engine and arguably it won’t, because the network needs to have a way to access it directly through computations without having to receive bitcoin from someone else.
The scapegoat rhetoric can therefore scare people off and make this issue seem politicized, when it would probably be much more effective to take an industry neutral approach with more focus on everyone and every industry moving to renewables.
For Europe in particular, this is now also a national security issue, so instead of just handing over money to poorer countries like Egypt, Europe should come up with an investment and construction plan to become completely independent of renewable energy. sources, possibly within five years.
It can be done with a hands-on attitude and the market would probably be happy to contribute or fund it through debt or otherwise as this is also a potentially very lucrative business.
That investments in ethereum and startups are at the forefront is no surprise as this space thrives on innovation and would naturally love to partner with innovation in the renewable energy industry.
Bitcoin has room for that, too, as the climate change debate gains general consensus with the hard work of building everything it needs now to move full steam ahead.
Source: Live Coins
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
