Block Chain - The New Climate Savior, Or Kicking The Can 6.0
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Tom Baumann co-chairs the Climate Change Coalition. He led a recent event in San Francisco to spread awareness about blockchain. So ... What is blockchain? If you ask someone like Bauman, you often get an answer like this: “Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, really references a larger ecosystem of technologies like artificial intelligence, big data and the internet of things. Those technologies, coupled with the blockchain technologies, are very synergistic.”
OK, synergy aside, the distributed ledger is the key element of blockchain. With blockchain, the ledger, or record of transactions, is not held by a central authority, like a bank, but instead on the individual computers of everyone on the blockchain. It’s like an accounting book that everyone can see and where every transaction is recorded. This shared accounting creates transparency and verifiability.
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(Ed. - UCSB researcher Douglas) McCauley says before blockchain, artificial intelligence and big data were the hot new things. They were in the headline of every other paper or panel on climate change. These have proved to be valuable tools for climate research, but in each case McCauley says it took scientists a few years to cut through the hype. “We need to look past the shiny thing,” McCauley says, “and start talking about exactly how to apply it usefully.”
McCauley says blockchain could help, especially with the transparent accounting of something like carbon credits. Katharine Mach, a climate scientist at Stanford, agrees. She says blockchain is interesting, but there’s a danger in assuming it, or any other new technology for that matter, will be some kind of miracle cure for climate change. “It’s essentially can-kicking ethics,” Mach says, “where we won’t be putting into place the solutions that are actually more important to make the entirety of the problem more solvable.”
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https://www.kqed.org/news/11697942/add-climate-change-to-the-list-of-things-blockchain-is-supposed-to-solve