In September, it was announced that the European Commission (EC) would undergo a year-long study into the sustainability of digital assets. The EC’s financial services directorate issued a tender for the project, aiming to develop methodology and sustainability standards for mitigating the environmental impact of digital assets.
“There is evidence that crypto-assets can cause significant harm on the climate and environment and generate negative economic and social externalities, depending on the consensus mechanism used to validate transactions,” read the tender brief. “The preparatory action intends to develop a methodology to measure the climate and environmental impact of the consensus mechanisms used by crypto-assets and assess the feasibility of establishing environmental sustainability standards for crypto-assets with a view to the adoption of future legislative action in the area of crypto-asset financial regulation.”
The EU passed the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation in April, which did not directly address sustainability issues after six member states voted down a proposal to limit the use of digital assets engaged in proof-of-work (PoW) processes.
Now, some in the digital asset industry are becoming concerned that the EC methodology, at the conclusion of its tender, may involve banning such energy-intensive processes.
The pro-BTC argument
On December 4, Daniel Batten, co-founder of CH4 Capital and self-described “Cleantech Investor,” took to X (formerly Twitter) to warn that the European Commission is going down a road that could lead to an effective EU ban on block reward mining and “far-reaching consequences for the entire global Bitcoin community.”
“The EC is developing a methodology to calculate and mitigate the environmental impact of Bitcoin. It includes a proposal to measure all crypto-assets resource consumption ‘per transaction,’ and only evaluates the negative impact of Bitcoin using a suite of suite of reports that have been financially backed by Central Banks and Ripple Corporation,” said Batten, who also called the methodology in question “draconian and unscientific.”
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The aim of Batten’s post was to mobilize BTC supporters to write to the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), a human rights and rule of law advocacy group, arguing against the supposed, or feared, EU anti-PoW agenda. He didn’t specify what the requested drafts will be used for, but presumably, the ODF will compile the responses and then advocate in the hopes of affecting the EC methodology development.
The key talking points he wanted readers to hit included why and how BTC can be a net benefit to the environment, examples of how BTC mining can help meet the EU’s sustainability goals, highlighting that every technology initially has a carbon footprint, and using evidence to show that “emissions are not increasing and that there is a realistic chance Bitcoin can become the first industry to fully mitigate emissions without offsets.”
Batten also encouraged those writing to the ODF to point out that a framework that only evaluates “negative externalities of a technology” is incomplete.
Read the full article on: coingeek.com
See also:
- RFE/RL: Behind the glass wall. How to turn a dissident into a terrorist and a fraudster (November 5,2023)
- WebEconomy: How Bitcoin Becomes a Lifeline for Victims of Repression and Financial Exclusion – Explains Lyudmyla Kozlovska [INTERVIEW] (October 5,2023)
- Bitcoin Policy Institute: 21 Human Rights Leaders Urge Congress to Learn About Bitcoin (June 7, 2022)
