A Ben and Jerry’s store in London is partnering with the Poseidon Foundation to make their business carbon neutral. For every ice cream sold, the store will purchase a penny of carbon credits and offer customers the opportunity to buy an additional penny of carbon credits. Poseidon has its own native cryptocurrency on the Stellar blockchain.
Stellar was chosen because it has practically no transaction fees, facilitating the microtransactions of one penny. Additionally, Stellar is environmentally friendly, only releasing 0.000015 kg of carbon dioxide per transaction, as opposed to Bitcoin which currently releases an estimated 310.75 kg of carbon dioxide per transaction due to the electricity consumption needed for mining.
Carbon credits are used to offset carbon dioxide emissions, a gas released by the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon credits fund projects like planting trees and protecting the rainforest which naturally decreases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the top cause of anthropogenic global warming; it increases global temperature by decreasing the amount of longwave radiation that escapes back into space.
It is feared that global warming will cause the planet’s polar ice caps to melt, causing sea levels to rise which will flood low lying areas. Most of the world’s cities are built next to the ocean and are at risk in the event of a catastrophic collapse of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets. Additionally, global warming will change weather patterns and possibly cause floods and droughts in abnormal locations.
The Poseidon platform makes carbon credit transactions fully transparent and stores them on the immutable Stellar blockchain. It calculates the carbon credits needed to make a purchase carbon neutral and then purchases them with a small fraction of the customer’s payment, and then informs customers that their purchase is carbon neutral.
Customers can then track where exactly their carbon credits are spent, like how many trees were planted from their carbon credits, which is expected make customers and retailers feel like they are having a positive impact on the environment and more likely to keep using Poseidon.
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