Reposted from the main BTT thread, if anyone missed it
EvilDaves totally non-evil Carbon-offset program for NXTWelcome to my proposal for a carbon-offset program to be implemented by the NXT community in order to offset some/all of the environmental costs of the energy used by NXTs network infrastructure. This is a long bit of reading, but it's all important:
The GW problem.It’s difficult to make a proposal like this without getting into the more controversial aspects of the Global Warming debate, as we have seen before on the BTT forum.
So I am going to
ignore the GW debate almost totally, except for these points:
Weather patterns are changing, the world over. Even in my lifetime I’ve seen the weather in northwest Europe change. New weather records are being set every year, extreme weather events seem to be more frequent.
These changes
may (or may not) be due to human activity. One undeniable fact is that the amount of
CO2 (and other pollutants) present in our atmosphere has been steadily rising since the Industrial Revolution. This is probably not a good thing.
Anyone seen the
air quality in Beijing lately ? Or Athens ? Or Indonesia ?
Forests are being destroyed all over the world, and while there are re-forestation projects in place, we are still gradually losing forest cover globally. Forests can be seen as one of the lungs of the planet, pulling in CO
2 and other pollutants and locking them up their own biomass, and providing us with lots of lovely oxygen.
I am not going to say that rising CO
2 levels are responsible for global warming, you guys can make your own minds up about that.
I am going to say that we need to stop burning so much shit and throwing it into the atmosphere, and we need to maintain forest cover to soak up our CO
2/pollutants and provide the oxygen we breathe.
With that in mind:
How does NXT contribute to atmospheric pollution/CO2 levels:Very simply: the NXT network runs on computers,
computers use electricity, electricity is made (mostly) by burning fossil fuels and throwing the resulting emissions into the atmosphere. Depending on where you live, the electricity to power your computer may come from a clean nuclear or hydro-electric plant or, more likely, from an ancient 1950’s coal burning power plant.
One of the many good things about
NXT is that it has a much
lower power consumption than other crypto-currency networks. There are estimates of NXT vs Bitcoin power use that project that NXT will use 5% of the energy used by Bitcoin, assuming that NXT and BTC are of equal size.
Low energy use is good, but it is also possible to
completely eliminate the environmental impact of even those low emissions, by funding carbon-offset projects. This would result in the NXT network, as a whole, contributing no CO
2 emissions/atmospheric pollution at all.
Zero emissions will not only be good for the planet, but will also be a very powerful marketing point for NXT and (AFAIK) a unique aspect of NXT that no other crypto can claim.
WTF is a carbon-offset program, EvilDave?Very simply: NXT burns electricity, releasing a small amount of CO
2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere. A carbon-offset program then compensates for those emissions by lowering (or capturing) emissions, for example by planting trees, investing in clean technologies, scrubbing CO
2 or various other techniques.
Because the atmosphere can be seen as a single big ball, the carbon-offset techniques can be applied anywhere, not just locally.
So, for example, we could compensate for the US NXT network emissions by planting trees in Cambodia, or Fiji…u get the picture, think global.
The two most interesting carbon-offset programs:Plant trees. Trees are basically big atmospheric filters, who spend all day pulling in CO2 (and other pollutants), then locking these nasty emissions up in themselves and releasing oxygen for us to breathe. Reforestation projects are a classic carbon-offset project and appear to be quite effective. In any case, more trees can never be a bad thing.
Clean stoves. Much of the developing world (2-3 billion people) still cook using crude, inefficient wood/coal/cow dung/whatever burning stoves. This gives rise to huge emissions and local air pollution which brings health and quality of life issues with it. Recently several groups have begun to develop much cleaner and more efficient cooking stoves, which not only cut emissions and need less fuel, but make a serious improvement in the quality of life for a lot of very poor people. Again, this can’t be a bad thing.
There are quite a few other options, such as investment in wind/solar/nuclear power or cleaner refinements of existing technologies, or even science-fictional projects to scrub CO
2 (and methane) out of the atmosphere and bury the liquefied gases.
I vote to ignore all of these and concentrate on the trees and clean stoves.
The advantages of both are very, very clear, and the clean stoves project has the added benefit of making lots of peoples lives better in the very poorest parts of the world.
What will it cost ?I’ve made a very, very rough estimate of the total energy use by NXTs network infrastructure for a year. Any corrections are welcome, but for now this is good enough:
Assuming a NXT network of 1000 RaspPi (non-solar) and 1000 small VPS:
RaspPi power consumption is 4 Watts (from ebereons numbers) = 35 kiloWatthours/year x1000 = 35,000 kWh per year
VPS consumption is around 10 -25 Watts (Amazon EC2+guess work) = 88 - 220 kWh/year x1000 = 88 - 220,000 kWh per year.
This gives a total for my hypothetical 1000 RP/1000 VPS network of somewhere between 123,000 and 255,000 kWh per year.
Taking these figures and plugging them into various carbon emission calculators gives us total CO
2 emissions, which vary between country, of between 88 and 176 tonnes per year (in the US or China) or as low as 20 - 40 tonnes in Switzerland (because of the Swiss use of hydro-power)
I’m going to aim high here and make some more rough estimates:NXT network of 1000 x RaspPi and 1000 x VPS/home PCs will emit
200 tonnes CO2 per year worldwide, plus other pollutants.
If we choose for the Swiss MyClimate offset program, which varies from 30-90 CHF per tonne, the cost of an offset project to cover 200 tonnes CO
2 per year will be somewhere between 6,000 to 18,0000 CHF (Swiss Francs,btw) per year. This will go to Swiss, European and worldwide projects, mostly in reforestation and clean stove technology.
1 BTC is around 780 CHF right now, which makes 1 NXT worth 0.0625 CHF, giving us a cost in NXT from between
96,000 to 288,000 NXT to cover all of NXTs pollution for a year, and allow us to (truthfully) market NXT as a 100% green, zero emissions technology.
Last few points:Administration/personnelA carbon-offset program is not very difficult to set up and maintain, one person could probably handle the initial set-up and administration, because we would simply be buying into an off-the-shelf project portfolio. I’ll be happy to volunteer, but I do want 1 or 2 other people to share the responsibility for any NXT accounts. Don’t want me heading to Costa Rica, now, do you?
The future.Right now forging income is low, but when NXT rises to take over the world, that will change. It makes a lot of sense to pay for an on-going expense like the carbon-offset program out of forging income, rather than just spending NXT capital on it.
I would like to see a fairly large chunk of NXT unclaimed coins set aside in a forging fund, to provide an income stream to finance carbon-offset (and possibly other) projects.
Are there any projections for forging revenue over the next couple of years ?
What is the current forging revenue from 1 megaNXT ?
What's needed: I would like everyone in the NXT community to give this some thought and criticism. I particularly want someone to provide some better numbers, esp. on the number of computers in the NXT infrastructure now and in the future.
I think that my guessed numbers are good enough to start with, and that I’ve got the cost estimates in the right area. Precise numbers are not so important, the important points are that NXT will be reducing pollution and doing good things, and that we can then market NXT as 100% green and zero-emissions, as well as helping the poorer folks.
So, please allow me:First: to grab a large chunk of the unclaimed coins, from
100,000 to 300,000 NXT and use them to buy one years worth of carbon-offset.
Second : to put aside another big chunk of NXT (500,000 – 1,000,000) as a
forging fund, to provide finance for this and other projects in the future.
That’s it, sorry for all the reading.And, oh, yeah,, I do want some bounty for this, obviously, I’m very fond of money.
TL:DR version:
Global Warming ignored by EvilDave, think air pollution bad, too much CO
2 probably bad.
Trees good, clean cooking in poor countries good.
NXT runs on computers, computers burn electricity, electricity making dirty.
Compensate dirty electricity, plant nice clean trees, make clean cookers.
Give EvilDave much money, he make happen.
Make big pile money work forging, make more money for future. Buy beer.
But if one runs into real life economic issues you just have to sell some NXT, but at least then the person decides himself how much of his salary is being invested and how much is being spent on food ^^ 
