With real-time tracking of global emissions, decentralized technology is more important than ever
Last week saw the launch of an exciting new global coalition: Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions). Its members include former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Energy Web co-founder Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), RMI subsidiary WattTime, and six other organizations in the nonprofit and tech arenas spanning three continents.
“Our first-of-its-kind global coalition will leverage advanced AI, satellite image processing, machine learning, and land- and sea-based sensors to do what was previously thought to be nearly impossible: monitor GHG emissions from every sector and in every part of the world,” explained Gore and WattTime executive director Gavin McCormick. “Our work will be extremely granular in focus — down to specific power plants, ships, factories, and more. Our goal is to actively track and verify all significant human-caused GHG emissions worldwide with unprecedented levels of detail and speed.”
This is a big deal for anyone working to accelerate a low-carbon energy future. And from where we sit, this also makes the role of digital and decentralized technologies more important than ever. As Climate TRACE makes its measurements public and assuming it is open source and easily accessible, we intend to oracalize the data (likely via a Chainlink architecture) to the Energy Web Chain. Such an integration with the Energy Web technology stack could unlock a number of use cases.
For example, on the clean energy side, today we use EW Origin help to stand up renewable energy markets from North America with PJM-EIS; to Central and South America with Mercados Eléctricos, UTE, Fohat, and AES; to Europe with TEO by Engie, Acciona, Iberdrola, and Flexidao; to Asia with Foton, PTT, and SP Group. But in many cases there is no way to track emissions in a unified way across platforms and geographies.
Pulling oracalized Climate TRACE data onto the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS) could solve this problem. Corporate GHG accounting could paint a fuller picture of both attributable emissions and renewable energy procurement — all with the transparency and auditability that comes with decentralized identifiers anchored to a blockchain.
Climate TRACE, combined with the Energy Web stack, could also have a major impact on the next generation of carbon “offsets” from, for example, re- and/or a-forestation projects (and land-use / land-change projects more generally). Applying decentralized technologies to individuals, organizations, and assets is a great way to establish and track identity and identity attributes for real-world objects. But they don’t necessarily help with verification that a certain physical event, such as reforesting a given acre of land, actually took place. This is where Climate TRACE can fill the gap. If Climate TRACE can confirm via satellite imagery and AI that real-world events take place, those confirmations can serve as the basis for identity updates and transactions on the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System.
Finally, let’s look at one more example: catching polluters in the act. Per last week’s press release, “For any organizations polluting illegally who might seek to keep their emissions hidden from public view: the tool will provide pioneering transparency and validation to make it easier for governments that have enacted environmental laws to immediately identify any activities that violate those laws.”
Climate TRACE could expose polluters and fear of exposure — whether for specific polluters or even national governments — could make Climate TRACE a top target for a variety of cyber attacks aimed at data manipulation and/or obfuscation. But if some of the data generated from Climate TRACE were anchored onto a decentralized network, it would be much more difficult for any such obfuscation to take place. In fact, these very benefits are behind Chile’s 2018 move to push its energy-market data onto blockchain.
These are just three simple examples for how an integration of Climate TRACE with EW-DOS can accelerate our mission to decarbonize global energy systems, and we share the world’s excitement for what Climate TRACE hopes to achieve.
