Bitcoin Forum

Have thought about a systematic approach to solve climate change. After having my head and time stuck into this topic very deeply from an engineering, political and game-theory perspective since ~2019, I came to the following solution:

Here is the plan:

• Every nation has its CO2 budget, based on the Paris agreement and has to deposit a pledge in Bitcoin to participate in this program
• Satellites etc. track which country emits how much CO2 and give the result e.g. every week to an assembly where every nation looks at its collected data (can be done fully automatically as well).
• Every nation has its own anonymous key to a multi-sig wallet (e.g. 150/195 wallet). If the data of a nation from step 2 comes to the conclusion, that another nation emitted more than it has certificates, it can sign a transaction on the multi-sig wallet to move the according pledge from the nation who emitted too much CO2 to the rest of the nations who emitted less than it actually needed. This forms the consensus mechanism. As the votes are anonymous and the CO2 source location are transparent.

-> So if a country emitted more CO2 than its theoretical budget allows, it needs to buy certificates from others - thanks to the in advance deposited pledge full automatically, if enough countries come to the same result. And if a country emits less CO2 than it needs, it can make money by selling some certificates to other countries.

Done.
What do you think?

Questions, some of you will probably have:
„Why should countries participate in this?“ Answer: If e.g. the USA and EU start this and only trade with nations who participate in this program, you could force others to join. You can make a lot of money with this.

Open problems / questions that came to my mind, that may need a solution:
What if every country emits too much CO2?
How should we distinguish between natural and anthropogenic CO2 sources?
Does it matter if the bitcoin price fluctuates much?
What if a key of a nation gets hacked / lost?
Can you track CO2 sources via satellites and planes precise enough?

I see a number of issues; here are some of them.

• Politicians don't like Bitcoin, because it's something inherently fighting against 'their system'
• CO2 certificates are a whole problem in and of itself, since they don't reduce the amount of CO2 emitted
• How to account for our CO2 that is emitted elsewhere? Even today, a lot of 'our CO2' is emitted in the production of our gas or electronics overseas
• To make this work, the amount of money 'pledged' into BTC would need to be in the billions for every country - I don't see them ever investing that much money, if at all (see point 1)

Governments would not be bounded by Bitcoin. They will not even use fiat to run this program considering that they would need to put a ridiculous amount of money in for it to be significant enough to not want to lose.

USA produces the second highest CO2 emissions globally, it is a little hypocritical for them to make a clarion call to other nations to clean up their mess until they have done their own homework.

- Jay -

Current tracking technology, assuming that you're talking about NASA's only tracks localized emissions and is actually not accurate enough. We are still far from tracking verifiable CO2 emission of an entire country accurately.
Transaction has to be initiated by someone, and signed by others. It would be clear who initiated and signed it.

By and large, ratified climate change agreements are without teeth and it is as good as nothing. Whilst there are significant improvement in the shift to cleaner energy and certain countries having made significant progress to reduce carbon emissions, we should also acknowledge that there is still a good portion of the countries that isn't compliant with the agreement and merely treating it as a lipservice.

Beyond thinking about whether Bitcoin can even serve as an incentive for countries to do so (remember 500 billion isn't enough to cover a lot of the GDP of the worlds' largest economy), we have to first consider if we can even have the countries agree to put their funds into a locked account all together.