The report released on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contains warnings about future climate risks.
Environmental Risks from GHG Emissions
IPPC, an intergovernmental panel on climate matters in the United Nations, published a series of reports on climate risk mitigation efforts.
“Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C beyond reach is needed,” the panel said.
In the report, cryptocurrency networks were highlighted as carbon emission risks. The report indicates:
Large improvements in information storage, processing, and communications technologies …. will affect emissions. They can enhance energy-efficient control, reduce transaction cost for energy …and reduce the need for physical transport.
In the report, IT-related systems, includingblockchain, are expected to grow the demand for energy because they are electricity-intensive. Crypto networks could become a global source of CO2 when electricity production is not decarbonized.
Governments/ Administrations Joining Hands
In the IPCC report, governments have a big role to play in defining the ability to cut down emissions. The challenge is enhancing the synergies and cutting rebounds and trade-offs. These efforts must take into account distributional and ethical dimensions.
Notably, the report indicates that digitization and artificial intelligence (AI), among other emerging technologies, can result in many new applications and products, which might be efficient but with undesirable changes. Here is what the report highlighted.
The energy requirement for cryptocurrencies is also a growing concern, although considerable uncertainty exists surrounding the energy use of their underlying blockchain infrastructure.
However, governments across the globe are working hard to reduce energy consumption, and their efforts are laudable.
Environmentalists have consistently called out Bitcoin for its large power consumption. However, major efforts have been launched toward promoting greener BTC mining.
