Greening Ethereum: The Crypto Climate Accord

Transcript

good morning my name is stephen haft and i work for a company called consensus um a full house i love to speak to a full house in 2015 in this city representatives of 191 countries negotiated the historic u.n paris accords for the global environment within a few weeks of that agreement also in 2015 a technology team some of whom are here in this room launched a web 3 innovation

which we celebrate this week the lead designer he goes by one name vitalik gave this innovation a name which he said derives from and i'm going to quote an invisible medium which allows light to travel across the world during those weeks starting in april 2015 the un launched a movement they called climate change soon after in miami toronto and zug vitalik charles gavin joe launched ethereum it should be no surprise but in the nature of things that those two

contemporaneous movements shared a good number of ideas both the climate accords and ethereum design called for radical transparency in regards to data both sought to redistribute power to the many on the periphery from the few in the center both sought to end financial duplicity both envisioned a global transfer of technology and its benefits at an unprecedented scale both committed to the long-term transformation of business industry and society from their inception the movement for a

trusted system of global tech shared a common language with the movement for a trusted ecosystem for a sustainable life i'm not going to waste your time repeating the statistics that now seem to show up everywhere on crypto's energy consumption measured in kilowatt hours or carbon emissions suffice it to say that both are significant and i hope we can agree in this room that the ecology attack on crypto has a basis in fact

and we can see we felt it it plays a role a vital role an unfortunate role in the recent calls by government over regulators to constrain our industry and the look at the tesla the china moves which have crippled the assets on which we grow our companies and i think the real headwinds that nfts are going to face in the green challenge that nft uh ip owners are insisting we address immediately in april of this year my friend amri

lovins and his rocky mountain institute called for the companies in our space to collaborate actively to green crypto in record time to further that goal they created the crypto climate accord a coalition at the outset of over 50 of our colleagues committed to decarbonize the global blockchain industry and achieve net zero emissions in the next very few years as a founding member of the crypto climate accord my colleague joe lubin said on behalf of consensus quote blockchain systems are about building better and trustworthy infrastructure for humanity

a critical aspect of this upgrade must involve our being better stewards of the environment for years i've had the privilege of working on behalf of green issues and human rights in various capacities thanks to the patience of my colleagues at consensus it's been my further privilege to represent the company at the united nations in new york at the secretariat of the un climate agency in europe and at meetings of the paris accords conference of parties it's for this reason that i'm here this morning with the indulgence of the ethereum europe jerome bettina i'm here to urge every single company represented

at this conference to join the crypto climate accords the information is on the screen behind me and let's together find solutions to blockchain's immense carbon footprint i realize that there's an easier path and it may be tempting let's blame brown blockchain on bitcoin let's blame it on chinese coal let's assume the proof of stake teams the amazing proof of stake teams at the ethereum foundation consensus and elsewhere and the great work being done by layer twos innovations like ibft that this is going

to solve the problem for us and we can continue our businesses as usual but i ask us to pursue a better path we're today launching a green ethereum working group within the crypto climate accord with the goal of decarbonizing ethereum in record time this working group can be a hub for innovating and resources all of our climate solutions to work as a group to prioritize opportunities to divide tasks to develop new strategies to measure our energy use to procure renewables and offsets

and verify the impact not just pursue proof of stake implement it in the coming weeks but to verify the impact of this work in a fully digitized fashion i ask you don't join this effort because it makes good press don't join it to impress the regulators where your company's based or to seed the next rally in the price of our coins don't do it to sign the next nft store or come up with some green gesture and then get back to work please do it because we aspire to be the

world's trust layer and we need to earn the right to be the stewards of that trust do it because there's a vital role for blockchain in the implementation of our clean carbon future do it because these two movements which began together six years ago in 2015 within weeks of each other were meant to be aligned and we at this conference have the unique opportunity to restore that alignment do it finally to allow us to be as vitalik said at the outset quote the invisible medium which allows light to travel across the globe and with that biannual

parity thank you jerome and bettina have a great conference i'm happy to take the question maybe downstairs and return 10 minutes to you thank you you