Proposal: Carbon-Neutral Policy at Gitcoin

Hey folks! KlimaDAO has been working with us for a while to help us estimate our carbon emissions :green_heart:. The working doc can be found here

From the report by Klima there are two main numbers to focus on:

715 tCO2e - Our total carbon impact from the trading of GTC at the date of the report

1352 tCO2e - Our total carbon impact from the running of Gitcoin Grants (donations and payouts inclusive)

These emissions represent our total on-chain emissions to date, representing all trading of GTC, all donations made during our grants rounds, and our grants payouts across Mainnet, zksync and polygon.

Note: these do not address Bounties, Hackathons, Kudos, or any other on-chain emissions we may have produced to date.

Proposal for a carbon-neutral policy at Gitcoin

I am proposing that we do two things:

Ratify the intention to become fully carbon-neutral at Gitcoin DAO, and implement Phase 1 of a carbon-neutral policy

In Phase 1, I propose we fully offset our on-chain energy usage for our Grants program and GTC token to date, and to agree to continue to offset our energy consumption for grants and GTC going forward.

out of scope for this proposal. In a Phase 2 to be described in more detail pending completion of Phase 1, I believe we could pursue full carbon neutrality by reducing and offsetting our scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. This would require that we consider our total operational emissions, and the emissions of our products. These emissions would include all sources of greenhouse emissions we produce in the operation of our DAO, including the energy consumption from our other on-chain activities such as governance, treasury actions and contributor disbursements, usage of AWS or other SaaS products, air travel and resources consumed for our conferences and events, the emissions from producing and shipping swag, and potentially others. The effort to build a holistic emissions reduction and offsetting strategy would mostly likely require us to engage an outside group for consultation, the specifics of implementing this phase would require additional time and resources that are out of scope for this proposal.

What needs to be decided to complete our offsetting

1. Choose your Token

We have several options for tokenized carbon credits available to us at this time.

Prices as of 5 June 2022

Standard Offsets:

BCT - Toucanā€™s Base Carbon Ton $2.01

UBO - C3 Universal Base Offset $2.78

Nature based Offsets:

NCT - Toucanā€™s Nature Carbon Ton $4.52

MCO2 - Mossā€™s Nature-based Carbon Ton $5.81

NBO - C3 Nature Based Offset $4.08

Thereā€™s been some controversy about BCT and while these are Verra standard offsets many have critcized these as virtually worthless: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

But we would be able to cherry-pick particular projects from the BCT pool, this is in some ways a benefit to help the market find the true price of the BCT pool, and would allow us to offset with credits that come from some potentially worthwhile projects.

Furthermore there have been some recent actions taken by Verra (their statement here) that have disrupted the tokenization of carbon credits (see Kilmaā€™s response here, and Toucanā€™s response here). Itā€™s still unclear what implications this has for web3 carbon projects, and for the moment Toucan is asking itā€™s community to pause bridging Verra credits on chain). For this offset, we could decide to avoid Verra credits altogether, and opt to offset via Redd+ projects only for this first initial offsetting program.

We should also note that we have already had some offsetting done on our behalf by our friends at Toucan, and some carbon credits in our treasury with an early gift from Toucan: https://twitter.com/ToucanProtocol/status/1501520217100283912

This was a gift of 152 NCT burned on our behalf, as well as 54 tons deposited for us to use in the future: Polygon Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | PolygonScan

ā€¦and a nice NFT to commemorate: Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan

So for our total footprint for GTC trading and the Grants rounds of 2068 tCO2e, less the amount already offset and in the treasury, we have 1862 tons to purchase.

If we do this with NCT our offset for Phase 1 will cost $4.52 * 1862 = $8416.24

I would welcome discussion on this approach, and if we believe we should choose a different mix of tokens, offset GTC separately from the Grants program emissions, or any other approaches the community might recommend.

2. Burn your Tokens

Once we have purchased the tokenized carbon credits, all that remains to complete our offsetting is to burn those tokens.

3. Proof of Offsetting

The beauty of doing this on-chain is the full history of the burning, purchase, and original tokenization is traceable back to the carbon credit, and the proof is all available on-chain.

But we do have the ability to publicly dedicate our offsetting. For those that arenā€™t familiar, Klima offers their love letters project https://www.loveletter.klimadao.finance/ I really like this project and suggest we source our message here from the community.

Conclusion

Itā€™s time we take our green pills.

I hope with the conversation we will have here that we can refine the proposal, gain sponsorship, and ratify the proposal to declare our intention to become fully carbon-neutral, and to execute on phase 1.

I look forward to your feedback. :robot::green_heart:

27 Likes

This is great! Thanks for putting it together @kevin.olsen!

Personally Im a fan of going with the NCT over the BCT but it would be good to discuss all the options in more detail.

6 Likes

Thanks @M0nkeyFl0wer - I agree completely! I would love to see us support the Nature-based tokens over others. The total cost I projected here is just using Toucanā€™s NCT:

5 Likes

I think this is a great initiative and something which helps ā€˜greenā€™ cryptos image. Iā€™d be in favor of selectively offsetting from the BCT pool (for cost reasons) or utilizing NBO, UBO, or MCO2.

Would Gitcoin also want to hold KLIMA tokens to have a voice in the emerging on-chain carbon market?

5 Likes

Hey great to see this come forward Kevin!

As for highest quality iā€™d opt for UBO/NBO as they dont inherit the problems of BCT of Toucan.

Glad we could help at Klima!

7 Likes

Great! Iā€™ve been following both projects and I think UBO and NBO they have much higher quality. iā€™d go for that

3 Likes

Hey, awesome proposal, just wanted to point out:
Beyond the loveletters campaign, weā€™ve been working hard to strengthen transparency and the Proof of Offsetting user journey.

Now, when you create a retirement, you will get a shareable page for it like this:
klimadao.finance/retirements/0x293ed38530005620e4b28600f196a97e1125daac/2

You can also explore retirements per-beneficiary 0x address, like this:
klimadao.finance/retirements/0x293ed38530005620e4b28600f196a97e1125daac

We are also working on a shareable public ā€œhome dashboardā€ for your carbon neutral commitments and retirements, which we call a ā€œPledgeā€ (coming very soon!)

5 Likes

great idea. All carbon types of good; BCT is most cost effective while UBO,NBO, or MCO2 are higher quality!

4 Likes

Great to see this proposal. I think a combination of token types would be best. Say, selective retirement of certain BCTs paired with a nature based asset (NBO or MCO2).

3 Likes

It was a pleasure to work on this together @kevin.olsen . I encourage Gitcoin folks to drop by our discord if you have any questions about our retirement aggregator, offsetting methodologies, or the Gitcoin emissions analysis linked in the proposal.

2 Likes

I think this is a great initiative and a well written proposal. Fully support and glad Klima could help. I agree with KTOR, selective retirement of certain BCTs paired with a nature based asset (NBO or MCO2).

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Gitcoin and KlimaDAO would make a great fit here IMO! lets get Gitcoin fully green pilled :green_heart:

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Great idea - should definitely proceed with this. I personally would offset historical emissions with BCT and then move on to NBOs, MCO2s, etc moving forwards.

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This match was made in Heaven. Would be amazing to see Klima spreading and integrating with OGs of the space such as Gitcoin.

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Hells bells, this should happen all over the defi world!

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All for more ecosystem integrations. Iā€™d love to see adoption of UBO/NBO please.

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This would could be a fun community exercise.

Overall, Iā€™m very in support of your proposal.

3 Likes

Yes and No, NCT is BCT which are TCO2ā€™s(verra credits), its confusing. NCT were extracted from BCT, the pool.

UBO and NBO, well klima has governance rights in C3 to analyze and vote on changes unlike what happened above.

I am for all. BCT will be cheapest path to carbon neutrality then MCO2 NCT UBO NBO will put Gitcoin above and beyond going forward. The onchain carbon market will only succeed with quality offsetting and removal onward and that is the priority.

Proving to verra that on chain carbon gets retired when ā€˜transferredā€™ from verra registry will improve our relationship with them.

1 Like

Great initiative :sunflower:

Iā€™d like to mention that with Toucanā€™s TCO2ā€™s the underlying credits that are in NCT/BCT you can retire the credits (which burns these carbon ERC20s immediately) and leave a message behind and specify a wallet address that is the beneficiary of the offsetting. You will get an on-chain RetirementCertificate NFT that will show the project data and amount you have retired :blush:

5 Likes