Climate Marketing and NFTs: What Kind of Electric Racing Series Do We Want?
(copyright: Extreme E)
This week at the time of writing, Jean-Eric Vergne launched his first NFT. The token, which was termed a car-generator for the multiverse, created as much consternation as excitement online, a response which reflected a sense of disappointment that one of the three most successful drivers in Formula E by most metrics was willing to jump on a bandwagon, seemingly in spite of its environmental impact.
That’s not to mention Formula E’s own NFT-driven interactive game, which seems about as joined-up in its environmental thinking as the Positively Charged campaign was tightly focused. Vergne seems, from his recent tweets, to be a fully paid-up fan of NFTs, discounting the possibility that this is all just a poorly-advised decision by a social team trying to appeal to a young audience.
Coming in the same month as the launch of Extreme E’s second season, with considerably less fanfare than the first, and a starting point on what is marked out as a future city gigaproject, the developments again raise a question. Specifically, it raises the question of the extent electric motorsport, and its participants, take into account the environment before they make decisions, and what it is that followers of the series and drivers want from them.
Why is the blockchain so bad for the environment?
One of the attractions of the blockchain, and one of the factors that make NFTs possible, is the singular nature of each transaction. The blockchain is decentralised, meaning that everything that occurs on there has its own value. That value is determined by computers, often in vast data centres, solving complex problems, the like of which will identify, for example, a buyer of one of Vergne’s NFTs as the owner of their specific configuration of “metaverse” car.
The problem comes in the energy cost to the planet of the computers and data centres operating 24/7 to solve those mathematical problems. The energy expended by the mining of Bitcoin, the world’s oldest and most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, is thought to have already exceeded that of the entire nation of Argentina. NFTs, while a separate matter to cryptocurrencies, rely on the blockchain, and on decentralised data-crunching, as crypto does, and so add another layer of environmental peril.
While some NFT exchanges and blockchain companies have pledged that their offerings will be carbon-offset, in reality the planting of trees alone does not fully address carbon emissions, and not all of the NFT and blockchain providers being used by Formula E organisers and participants have pledged carbon neutrality.
Avalanche, who partner with Andretti in Formula E, might have bought one of the slickest liveries in the category (anything that harks back to the Scuderia Italia Dallara F1 cars is aesthetically a good thing), but on the company’s website it is cagey about the smart-contracts platform’s environmental credentials.
The Algorand Foundation, which sponsors Envision Racing, has rather more documentation on its environmental credentials, and has done a great deal of research into the climate impact of NFT-minting through Algorand, along with its other blockchain-based activities. However, they do admit that there is still a carbon cost to what they are doing. Some form of environmental damage, at this stage in the blockchain’s development, seems to be an unfortunately unavoidable component of the actions being performed.
People can learn and progress
Away from the blockchain, Lucas di Grassi seems to have gone on what is, depending on your viewpoint, either an environmental journey or a damage limitation journey. Having supported current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro prior to and following that far-right retired general’s rise to power in 2019, di Grassi seems to have changed his mind since.
It had felt incongruous to say the least that such a cerebral racing driver, who was prepared to go toe-to-toe on environmental and electric mobility issues with his sport’s leaders and with politicians, had maintained his support for Bolsonaro while the President was enacting policies deforesting the Amazon rainforest at a faster rate than ever, and damaging the lives and livelihoods of indigenous peoples. Bolsonaro was alleged, by a coalition of indigenous associations who went before the International Criminal Court in 2021, to have caused the death of at least 1,160 people through actions he enabled.
Di Grassi, perhaps tiring of the constant associations having been drawn between him and Bolsonaro when he opened his Twitter mentions, publicly disavowed his country’s leader last year.
Whatever reason was behind this disavowal, it at least shows that drivers, stereotypically focused on their own careers, are capable of learning and of making progress in their worldview. And yet, for every step forward made by a participant in Formula E or other forms of electric motorsport, we see a decision made which prioritises short-term profit over long-term climate impact.
Where’s the campaigning?
Extreme E announced its second-season calendar at the end of January, with the opening race still taking place in Saudi Arabia, but moving to NEOM, a new desert city-project. As the press release said:
“Plans are well underway for the Season 2 opener, which begins in the deserts of NEOM, Saudi Arabia's giga-project featuring cognitive cities and a premier visitor destination and inspirational location for all adventure sports, with its expansive red sands, spectacular sandstone formations and historic wall art from civilisations millennia ago.”
The original brief for Extreme E was that the series would go to parts of the world threatened by climate change, with a major accent on the work that would be done by the Scientific and Legacy teams in helping lessen environmental damage in the region. Though the team of scientists who originally signed up are still, according to Extreme E’s website, on board, the series is no longer going to places like Greenland, and rowed back from its original intention to go to the Indian Ocean Islands and to the Amazon in the first season, in great part due to COVID-19.
NEOM, viewed from the Red Sea (TariQ, Unsplash)
The new calendar seems a lot more flexible than the first, with, for example, the Ocean X-Prix going either to Senegal or Scotland, two clearly very different countries. There were questions at the end of last season as to whether Extreme E was remaining true to its founding mission of bringing racing and climate action to remote areas, given that it eventually went to a military training ground in Dorset which had an on-site Gregg’s and a Tesco within easy access.
Has the mission changed? At what price?
NEOM is an endlessly ambitious city-building project which aims to create a civic utopia without cars and with other, sustainable, forms of transport taking their place, with easy access to the Red Sea, and an enormous new international airport. Members of the nomadic Huwaitat tribe, which lives on the site marked out for NEOM, have been allegedly threatened and forced out of their homes due to the Saudi government’s singular focus on making this project work. Is this the kind of news that Extreme E wants to be associated with?
This leads to the broader question: what sort of electric motorsport do we really want? And if the environmental credentials of that electric motorsport do not withstand the most basic levels of scrutiny, what does that mean for those who enjoy motorsport, but want it to take the climate emergency seriously?
Clearly, boycotting only does so much good. Taking a dissenting voice out of the equation means there is one less person providing a check on what is happening. Even so, it can be sobering to encounter so many contradictions between what championships and drivers say they are racing for, and the true negative impact of some of their actions. “Do better” is an overused social media response, but at some point, some sponsorship paycheques have to be refused, if more people are to be convinced that electric motorsport is doing something valuable for the future of the planet.