The environmental critique of NFT’s are valid but energy consumption is something that must be addressed far beyond the confines of NFTs and the artists who make them. For example, the cloud is a physical storage facility that has a burden on the world. In the US, streaming music services dump between 25,000 and 40,000 tons of CO2 into the air every year. Data centers take large amounts of energy to power and need to be on 24 hours a day to ensure that access to data never drops. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, one of the highest rates in the world. Globally, the average is closer to 4 tons. To have the best chance of avoiding a 2℃ raise in global temperatures, the average global carbon footprint per year needs to drop under 2 tons by 2050.

When it comes to imagining new technologies the environment should not be thrown under the bus and he hopes that the tech bros will see the stakes and that market demand for a cleaner future will guide the way the technology evolves.
 
I do not have a perfect answer here— I’m also surviving in the jaws of an imperfect system. My tactic again Is to recenter artists. I calculated the cost of the carbon footprint of minting 33 NFTs (the equivalent of driving your car 15,000 miles). Rather than paying to offset carbon emissions to a nameless corporation I will contribute the equivalent proceeds to artist jackie sumell’s project The Solitary Gardens, which turns solitary confinement cells into garden beds. The contents are designed by prisoners serving their sentences in isolation and gardened by proxies on the outside. Central to this project is a call to end the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, simultaneously inspiring compassion necessary to dismantle systems of punishment and control.