What Can the Blockchain do for Our Environment?
By: Chris Douthit
Tags: Economics, Environment, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

An example of this might be a town somewhere in the United States having a limited resource, say water for instance. A finite amount of “water tokens” would be issued and people would earn them for any activities conserving water. These tokens would be spendable elsewhere as tokens or traded for fiat currency. This incentive would not only change people’s minds about conservation but, in time, would change the mindset of the community towards the preservation of natural capital. If we create an economy around this notion, we can incentivize all kinds of activities needing serious and immediate changing.

Another instance would be in the realm of carbon emissions. A token economy would allow the creation of “carbon coin(s),” and every time you emit carbon it would cost you some of your coins, and every time you sequester carbon you would get paid in these carbon coins which could also be used for other things or turned into fiat currency. When all the carbon coins have been redeemed, we would know the world would run at net zero for carbon, and this would be a great thing for the planet.

As you can see, they can apply these kinds of tokenized incentives to anything needing to be fixed, and the fastest way to get people on board would be to give them an opportunity to earn assets for their time and efforts. For those who want to do things, like cutting down trees, for example, that is hurting the ecosystem, those people would have to purchase tokens from those who have them to make this happen and if no coins are available, or people don’t want to sell their tokens to people for this activity, then the activity, theoretically, wouldn’t happen.

The decentralized nature of a tokenized economy will exert peer, and financial, pressure on those not acting in good faith, and eventually those people would be in such hot water with the rest of the world, who will be trying to earn money by saving the environment, that they wouldn’t be able to operate because their activities would be monitored. Not only by a few people working for an understaffed and under-funded centralized government agency or non-profit, but by a world government of people who, as a whole, will stop such activities. Assets, in a token economy, would have to be verified using the blockchain, which would also foil those not acting in good faith. Transparency would be their number one enemy, and unfortunately for them, this transparency is built into the system in such a way it can’t be circumvented.

So, as you can see there are many potentials for the blockchain to change the world at its most basic levels to ensure the continuation of mankind. While saving the environment would probably be this technology’s greatest achievement, it will only be one of the many changes that it would bring about, and the faster we get out of the way and let it happen the better off we will be as humans.

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