Here’s a video introducing what we’re doing at the Hyperledger Carbon Accounting and Certifications Working Group:
Here’s a transcript of the video:
Hello. I’m Si Chen from Open Source Strategies in Los Angeles, California.
My background is on the business side. I run an ecommerce company and have also developed open source ERP and CRM software.
So when I look at the climate change problem, I see a large-scale problem of data, trust, and coordination. The biggest one of our lifetime.
We’re past the denials. We have the technology to solve climate change. But what we don’t have is a way to get all the parts of our economy — businesses, investors and banks; consumers; and regulators to work together effectively.
This problem is even harder because we have to work together across traditional boundaries of industries and countries and integrate together vast supply chains around the world.
Well, blockchain is the perfect solution for large scale collaboration, because it can create trust in networks of data and transactions that scale without the need for central authorities.
Open source software is a big part of that trust. They’re also built from collaborative networks. They’re a fundamental part of all blockchains. And for climate accounting, they assure us of the quality of the results because they’re open for analysis.
In our Climate Accounting and Neutrality Working Group, we’re building the software for a global collaborative network for climate accounting.
We’ve come up with a multi channel architecture for integrating with lots of data sources, calculating emissions from them, and then publishing those emissions calculations for supply chain partners, regulators, investors, and the general public.
We’re starting with standards such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and audited data such as the eGRID utility emissions database in the United States.
We take data from utility bills, travel records, driving apps, shipping data feeds, and purchasing records. We can apply models to calculate their emissions. And then we make those results available.
Our goal is to make trusted greenhouse gas emissions accounting available for every business activity and every company of our economy. That way, companies can know how to reduce their emissions. Consumers could reward the companies that are taking positive climate action. Regulators and investors can see what’s really happening.
Once we have this accounting, we could then integrate it together up to the level of national and even supra-national regulators who are working on emissions trading. We could also make it available on apps designed for private individuals to reduce their own emissions. And we could link everybody together to take climate action.
What we’re asking is for people to help us integrate our software into more activities. Climate change is happening because every little thing that is happening is contributing to it just a tiny bit. We want to be able to get data on those activities, model their emissions, and start making people aware of their impact and work together to reduce emissions. Whether you’re an experienced developer, from the business side like myself, or a private individual, we could all work together to stop climate change.
Thank you.