11 sustainability efforts announced in July 2019

From the earliest days of Bitcoin, the famed cryptographer and computer scientist Hal Finney, a pioneer of early Bitcoin development and a close collaborator of Satoshi, tweeted his concerns about the long term CO2 emissions from widespread bitcoin implementation.
 
As Bitcoin adoption accelerates, the energy required to power the network has exponentially accelerated. In turn, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is contributing to climate change, leading to an increasingly negative perception from media, society, and governments.

The Amazon rainforest is the tropical, broadleaf forest which covers most of the 7 million km2/2.7 million mi2 drainage basin of the Amazon River in South America. Of this the forest covers 5.5 million km2/2.1 million mi2,or 79% of the basin (roughly the size of the continental US!) It stretches through nine countries (60% in Brazil, 13% in Chile, 10% in Ecuador, and smaller amounts in other countries) and 3344 indigenous tribal areas. However, in recent decades the existence of the rainforest, despite all its environmental and cultural importance, has come increasingly under threat from deforestation driven mostly by agriculture, particularly cattle farming.

What started as a 10-year-old child’s persistence has become  a career for Elisabeth Pesavento ’21.  “I told my mom that I really wanted to play the horn,” Pesavento said. “And you know, like all mothers, she’s said, ‘Oh that’s nice. It’s a very beautiful instrument.’ But I just kept asking and kept asking until finally she was like, ‘Wow, I guess she really does want to play the horn.’”  After Pesavento finally got her French horn, she traveled the world with the instrument.