Eco Penguin Seeks to Limit Carbon Emissions in Crypto

Eco Penguin – a company designed to offset carbon emissions in the crypto industry – is partnering with a non-profit company known as Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty (COTAP). It is the first carbon-offsetting company to accept crypto as a method of payment.

Eco Penguin Is Hoping to Limit Carbon Emissions from Crypto

The goal is to help all crypto firms accept responsibility for the damage they allegedly cause to the environment. This has been a heavy topic over the past year or so, with men like Elon Musk and Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame getting involved. Musk initially decided that his company Tesla would accept bitcoin payments as a method of payment for electric vehicles. However, he later rescinded this decision claiming that miners were not watching their emissions enough or utilizing their energy correctly.

Kevin O’Leary also said that he would no longer be buying any more BTC mined in China given that the country was not known for its environmentally friendly extraction methods.

Eco Penguin co-founder Joshua Aakash said in an interview:

Eco Penguin advocates shifting to PoS as the best near-term path to decarbonization, but it won’t happen immediately, and not everyone will do it. Before long, we may also see a carbon tax of $40 to $60 a ton on major energy consumers, which might get reluctant crypto actors to take lowering their emissions seriously, but the regulatory approach would cost large tokens hundreds of millions of dollars and add considerably to the cost of transactions. It remains to be seen how these various approaches will play out. Meanwhile, by partnering with COTAP, we’re able to offer verified carbon offset solutions for crypto tokens, projects, traders, or anyone in the crypto space who wants to take responsibility for their carbon footprint here and now.

Why the Partnership?

COTAP founder and CEO Tim Whitley also threw his two cents into the mix, claiming:

Crypto is growing explosively, and it’s urgent to head off its potentially massive climate impacts. Other burgeoning industries have become more efficient and greener as they’ve matured, and crypto can, too. Switching it to sustainable energy sources is the paramount goal, but that takes time, so in the interim, offsetting is an important part of the solution. A lot of cryptocurrency offsetting activity today is speculative, and/or it converts carbon credits into tokens and keeps them tied up on the blockchain for years, as opposed to the tried-and-true approach of permanently retiring credits on existing carbon registries. The Eco Penguin concept really resonated with us because they share our belief that there’s a huge crypto/carbon leadership gap, and that crypto can be a force for material good if it adopts the right approaches, so we’re excited to be working together to bring the crypto community verified, high-quality offsets that will do tangible good today, creating real-world benefits for the climate and low-income communities.

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