Hey folks! KlimaDAO has been working with us for a while to help us estimate our carbon emissions 
. 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 - Toucanās Base Carbon Ton $2.01
UBO - C3 Universal Base Offset $2.78
Nature based Offsets:
NCT - Toucanās Nature Carbon Ton $4.52
MCO2 - Mossās Nature-based Carbon Ton $5.81
NBO - C3 Nature Based Offset $4.08
Thereās 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 Kilmaās response here, and Toucanās response here). Itās still unclear what implications this has for web3 carbon projects, and for the moment Toucan is asking itās 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 arenāt 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
Itās 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. 
