Are We Funging Up Our Planet?

If you’re not an art connoisseur you’d be forgiven for missing the history making moment that happened last week. A work by the artist Beeple entitled Everydays: The First 5,000 Days sold for a whopping $69 million at Christies. But here’s the catch, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days isn’t a traditional artwork at all. It’s nothing more than a digital file, made up of zeroes and ones. While this is excellent news for Beeple, Christies, and possibly the future of digital art, it may not be great for the planet.

That’s because Everydays: The First 5,000 Days isn’t just any digital artwork, it’s a non-fungible token. A non-fungible token allows an artist, or in this case an art aficionado, to record and maintain ownership over a file via blockchain, the same technology that underwrites cryptocurrency. While anyone may copy or make use of the file in theory, the proof of ownership lies with the artist (or owner) in this case, the piece’s purchasers, Vignesh Sundaresan, and Anand Venkateswaran.

But blockchain is not without its faults, and a big one is climate. The technology only works due to frequent sophisticated computer puzzle solving. That problem solving takes up a tremendous amount of energy, so much so that one analysis found that the average NFT has the carbon footprint equivalent to more than a month’s worth of electricity for a person living in the EU. That’s not the footprint to create the art mind you, merely to track ownership. This is compounded by the fact that like Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, these purchases are largely made using cryptocurrencies, which, powered by the same technology, have large carbon footprints of their own. We’re burning a whole lot of fossil fuel on a technology, which wracked by instability, has yet to see benefits fully crystalize.

That being said, that’s not to say those benefits won’t fully crystalize. As has been the case with many technologies in the past, we won’t know its full potential until we get close to achieving it. Furthermore, the issue posed by NFT’s energy usage is less an indictment of the technology than it is an indictment of our energy system itself. If we were fully embracing and supporting renewable energy as opposed to fostering an outdated system based on digging a limited supply of poisonous substances out of the ground and burning them, we might not have this problem at all.

However, that is the system we’ve fostered and that is the problem we have. With time rapidly running out to fight the climate crisis every bit of fossil fuel burned is speeding up the clock. Perhaps it might be better to hit pause on this exciting new technology, at least until we can find a better way to power it.