Proceeds from this auction will be used to offset its carbon footprint and create the second item in this series. The nature of those offsets will be determined by the collection’s creator and the owners of NFTs in this series, starting with the first new owner of this item.

Subsequent editions in this series will reflect actions taken to offset emissions from this series, updated estimates of the carbon footprint of blockchain technology, the latest authoritative data on climate change, and other citations and transformations as warranted by the unfolding climate crisis.

What does this image depict?

• “Gas” is the fee required to conduct a transaction via Ethereum. Because cryptocurrencies consume electricity, sometimes in the form of fossil gas, this term is both figurative and literal.

• The background color is represented by the hexadecimal code #398413. This encodes the 39.8 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent that can be attributed to each transaction on the Ethereum blockchain as of 2021, according to the company Offsetra and the 413 parts per per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 2020, as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• The pixels represent future emissions scenarios from the sixth United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (SPM-16), ranging from rapidly moving to renewable energy and deploying negative carbon technology to dramatically increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels, destroying forests, and various feedback effects.

• The emissions scenarios have been reduced to a pixelated form using the Pixelit algorithm, with a block size of 13, representing the nature of risk, uncertainty and luck in projecting future climate change.

• The transparency of the background represents the percentage of the world’s global energy supply derived from renewable energy, which is 28% as of 2018, the latest year data is available via the International Energy Agency. If the world transitions to 100% renewable energy, this NFT would be a solid green block.

About the Artist

Aaron Huertas is a science communicator based in Washington, DC. He has worked in climate advocacy, government and electoral politics for many years.

Sources

• https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/
• https://www.notion.so/Carbon-FYI-Methodology-51e2d8c41d1c4963970a143b8629f5f9
• https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2742/Despite-pandemic-shutdowns-carbon-dioxide-and-methane-surged-in-2020
• https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf
• https://giventofly.github.io/pixelit/#tryit
• https://www.iea.org/fuels-and-technologies/renewables