Our first meeting with the expert Carbon Footprint working group has taken place on the 9th of March.
Michele from ImpactScope and Thomas from Blockcarbon alongside our own experts from the CNC team (Stefan from CO2 Pool, Rick from RCADA Pool, and of course myself from SHIFT Pool) lend their ears and minds to the challenge of Cardano carbon accounting.
We looked at the challenges with current blockchain carbon accounting for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other Proof of Stake Blockchains such as Algorand or Tezos. Clearly they all estimate emissions, but most of them haven’t applied the background of Carbon accounting principles, such as the GHG Protocol.
To move this work forward, we are writing a manuscript that can be reviewed by multiple people to pinpoint flaws and find alternative solutions. The current manuscript work tries to combine the learnings from existing blockchain estimations, the Cardano infrastructure and integrate it with the existing GHG standards.
During the meeting, we looked at our initial estimations for direct and indirect emissions and discussed what to include and what not. As Cardano hardware does not use large amounts of electricity, other aspects of emission of the blockchain become larger and can’t be excluded.
A common theme always coming up in discussions, and came up again in the meeting, is whether or not home heating of a Stake Pool Operator should be included for the time an SPO works on maintaining the pool. Or would you leave your heating on anyway?
Another is, whether or how to account for the well knowns institutions providing important inputs for Cardano, but are not by itself essential to run the blockchain – i.e. IOG, Cardano Foundation.
These aspects will be captured in our initial manuscript and we then seek to refine these through review and discussion in working groups.
Currently, the manuscript is in the works… and has been for a while, however the conversations with the team help to refine the core and help focus on the essential aspects.
More to come soon! 🙂
SHiFT to positive 