Two things I didn't expect to see at the London Climate Technology Show
The Saudi British Joint Business Council and... ...a Perpetual Motion machine! I spent yesterday wandering around the London Climate Technology Show, and I had many interesting conversations. There were way too many middlemen selling questionable climate offsets. These all provided an account and a fancy online dashboard for companies wanting to demonstrate their carbon neutrality. At least 4 of the companies were using Blockchain as a buzzword. The idea is that you write a contract with the farmer/landowner/whatever to improve soil carbon/not cut down trees/whatever and then you sign that contract and put it in an online ledger like the Ethereum blockchain. This prevents the existence of the contract being denied and enables ownership to be transferred, like with digital coins. Although in principle this can work it requires a single joined up database. With multiple companies offering the same service, but on incompatible systems, the...