Moss CEO Luis Adame believes blockchain technology will play an important role in saving the planet from environmental disaster
The CEO of Moss, a prominent carbon credit tokenization company, Luis Adame, shared his opinion on how blockchain technology can help environmentalists fight the impending climate catastrophe.
We are facing the greatest problem in the history of our existence: climate change. The risk of human extinction (in a very short time compared to previous threats) has never been higher. Emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are twice as high as they were in 2008. If things continue at this rate, scientists expect global temperatures to rise by 2.5–3°C in 50 years, by 2070.
⇒ This may seem like a marginal temperature increase, but in fact even such changes could lead to the following scenarios:
- (a) All coastal areas, such as Rio de Janeiro and New York City, would be underwater;
- (b) The tropical zone of the world, which includes Brazil, Africa and Southeast Asia, would become uninhabitable: even in the shade, temperatures would reach 65°C;
- c) Global food production would fall by 50% or more, starving the poorest half of the world’s population, or 5 billion people.
→Technology comes to the rescue
There is a school of thought — Moss is part of it — that believes that emissions will be reduced by technological changes (such as the use of electric cars instead of internal combustion engine cars), but it will take longer than humanity has time to get an effect from such a method.
And, according to CEO Moss, it will be possible to increase the speed of the fight against the ecological crisis by trading carbon credits. Carbon credits are digital certificates that prove that a company or environmental project has isolated or prevented the emission of a metric ton of carbon.
Carbon emissions are a negative external effect of the fossil fuel economy (an unintended “side effect”). Thus, they are not accounted for in the system. An oil company emits millions of tons of carbon per year, but if that company does not show itself in the carbon market by buying carbon credits, then it is not paying for the pollution of the planet. Nearly 8 billion people will pay for companies that are not interested in the environment, and the price is deteriorating air quality and climate change.
The market for carbon credits has expanded dramatically in the last 3 years. For example, in 2021, investment firm Skybridge Capital teamed up with Moss and purchased carbon credits to offset about 38,436 tons of carbon from its bitcoin holdings. In the same year, cryptocurrency company Amber Group purchased 250,000 Moss MCO2 carbon offset tokens.
The increased activity in the carbon credit market is due to the fact that climate change has become more evident around the world. Millennials — people born after 1980 — have replaced baby boomers as the most important demographic in the world. Millennials have begun to demand that companies offset their carbon emissions.
CEO Moss believes that there are now some problems in the carbon credit market, which prevent this sphere from fully manifesting itself and affecting the climate situation on the planet.
→The Problems of Carbon Credits
It is often said that blockchain technology has made a sector more transparent and secure. But what does this really mean?
Historically, the carbon credit sector has had legitimacy problems because of some (very rare) cases of fraud. Because a carbon credit is a digital intangible certificate, some projects have sold the same asset multiple times. Projects may also have sold credits from Brazil, claiming to be from Indonesia. They could also be selling 2012 credits, claiming they were 2015 credits. Or they could “cancel” the loans after clearing (non-cash settlement) and not register it on the global credit registries. Or sell ten loans that should be written off, and write off only one. Unfortunately, the activity of such unscrupulous projects has led to the industry becoming notorious.
Even today, as can be seen on the websites of clearing companies that do not use blockchain technology, there is little trust in clearing — it is easy to commit fraudulent activities with it. The user calculates a carbon footprint, buys carbon credits, for which a certain amount is debited from his card, and receives a pdf file or email confirmation of the transaction.
And really, what guarantee is there that the credit was actually sold and not just a charge-off that ended up going to some platform rather than being used to improve the environment? Or that the clearing companies actually canceled the loan? Or even that the transaction was put on the global credit registry so there was no “double counting”?
→A blockchain solution to increase trust in carbon credits
The use of blockchain eliminates all of the above doubts. Once a transaction is executed, it can always be viewed in cryptocurrency records, which is very easy and 100% secure.
Blockchain transactions also avoid “double counting” or “double spending.” A transaction recorded in blockchain does not allow another record of the same transaction. And the data is verified in real time using global credit registries to rule out fraud.
Perhaps humanity can make a technological change in the global environmental sector. We need to stop trying to offset carbon emissions manually, that is, without the use of new technology. Emissions offsets must go through APIs and software (SAAS), and they must be digitized and recorded on a blockchain. If this happens, the chances of people being able to avoid a climate catastrophe will increase dramatically. Everything is in our hands — we can work together to keep the planet habitable for future generations, or we can ignore the problem, leading to an ecological crisis.
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