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13 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 30 JUNE 2021 OPINION NFTs: why digital art has such a massive carbon footprint Peter Howson Peter Howson is Senior Lecturer in International Development, Northumbria University, Newcastle theconversation.com HOW much would you be willing to pay for a one-of-a-kind work of art? For some collectors, the limit lies somewhere in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars. What about a work of art that has no tan- gible form, and exists only as a digital to- ken that's no more "real" than a JPEG file? Welcome to the strange world of crypto art collectibles, also known as NFTs. Like Bitcoin, NFTs (non-fungible to- kens) are cryptocurrencies. But whereas individual bitcoins all have the same value, NFTs are more like baseball cards. Each token has a different value and they can't be used to buy things. They exist on your computer as digital representations of art- works, songs, films and games, among oth- er things. NFTs have been around since 2017, when the first mainstream experiment in crypto-collectibles emerged: CryptoKit- ties. The average price for one of these cat cards was about US$60 back then. But that's chicken feed compared to current takings. Rights to a single digital image recently sold at auction for US$69.3 mil- lion (£50.2 million). CryptoPunk 7804 (a crudely drawn alien with a pipe) sold for US$7.5 million. A house on Mars was pur- chased for US$500,000. A digital house that is, not one that you might live in. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, recently sold his first ever tweet as an NFT for just un- der US$3 million. "But how can someone buy a tweet?", you may ask. After all, anyone's free to click on, look at, print out and frame the tweet as many times as they like. When you buy an NFT, you're buying a unique certificate of ownership, which is locked away on an immutable distributed database known as a blockchain. The cre- ator of the artwork generally retains the copyright and in most cases, you own little more than bragging rights. Creators are al- so likely to pass the costs for creating your NFT files (or "minting" them) on to you (around US$100 as I write this). Most of the time, what you'll also be re- sponsible for is an enormous carbon foot- print. Counting the carbon cost of NFTs Because they depend on a blockchain, NFTs use a lot of energy. Most creators still use Ethereum, a blockchain secured using a similar proof-of-work system to Bitcoin. This involves an energy-intensive computer function called mining. Special- ist mining computers take turns guessing the combination to a digital lock (a long string of random digits). The computer that correctly guesses the combination wins a reward paid in a cryptocurrency called Ether. The digital lock resets rough- ly every 15 seconds, and the competition continues. Ethereum uses about 31 ter- awatt-hours (TWh) of electricity a year, about as much as the whole of Nigeria. It's very difficult to calculate exactly how much responsibility the NFT industry should take for Ethereum's carbon emis- sions. Ethereum was going to run with or without NFTs. But with the growing de- mand for digital art, NFT buyers and sell- ers are becoming liable for an increasing share of Ethereum's total energy use, and some artists are starting to think twice. The French digital artist, Joanie Lemerci- er, recently cancelled the sale of six works after calculating the associated energy costs. The sale would use, in just ten sec- onds, enough electricity to power the art- ist's entire studio for two years. ArtStation, a site for digital artists to showcase their portfolios, recently de- veloped an NFT marketplace. But with- in hours of telling the world about the planned launch, widespread condemna- tion on social media forced ArtStation to scrap the project. Alternative technologies exist that enable NFT markets without the carbon head- ache. Sidechains use negligible amounts of energy to process NFTs because these transactions occur on a more centralised platform where costs (and carbon foot- prints) are much lower. Damien Hirst is due to release a collec- tion of NFTs called The Currency Project using the Palm sidechain. Hirst will still be accepting payment in Bitcoin though, so his NFTs could still come with hefty car- bon baggage. Taking artistic license with climate solutions NFT enthusiasts argue that the increas- ing popularity of blockchain technology, with its voracious appetite for energy, provides incentives for upgrading energy grids from fossil fuels to renewable sourc- es. Similar arguments have been made by the airline industry: in order to fund the efficiency innovations that could make aviation greener, people should fly more, not less. For NFTs, evidence shows this approach is unlikely to work. Due to the competitive nature of proof-of-work min- ing, booming NFT markets are encourag- ing the construction of reliable coal-fired power stations, so that crypto miners don't have to suffer intermittent access to re- newable generation. Some NFT creators are trying to have their crypto-cake and eat it by using car- bon offsets. Buying offsets funds conser- vation work, with each carbon credit pur- chased equivalent to one tonne of carbon saved, which is either stored in a tree or theoretically prevented from escaping into the atmosphere through some sort of in- dustrial innovation. The Offsetra company provides an emissions calculator and sells carbon credits to offset emissions caused by NFT transactions. The NFT market- place Nifty Gateway recently auctioned eight carbon net-negative NFTs "inspired by Earth and the climate crisis". The art- works received 60 carbon credits. Each off- set was itself an NFT. NFT carbon credits (or any carbon credits for that matter) depend on clever account- ing and a belief that carbon, like NFTs on a blockchain, can be immutably locked away in trees forever. It cannot. Nifty's website explains that offsets make sense for neu- tralising our unavoidable emissions, "after we've done all attainable actions" to reduce our carbon footprint. But does acquiring bragging rights to a digital image that anyone with an internet connection can enjoy constitute an una- voidable part of one's carbon footprint? NFTs are unique, collectable digital tokens