UPCO2 is a very marketing-advertising-heavy ERC20 token that is pegged to a complex financial and political thing.

It wants to be consumer-tradable carbon. It can be burned, held for speculation, traded, and so on. It's a Universal Protocol project. UP is the company associated with Uphold.

Essentially UPCO2 a stablecoin pegged to carbon credits. For reference, carbon credits let polluters balance greenhouse gas output by paying projects that store carbon or participate in reforestation. The coin currently uses REDD+ credits.

What is UPCO2?

Here's Uphold's blurb on it in the main wallet dashboard:

The clean crypto is here

UPCO2 incentiveises sustainable living. By buying UPCO2 tokens, anyone can offset their CO2 emissions and contribute to preserving the Amazon rainforest.

I get a 404 error after clicking the"learn more" link. I navigate to "environmental assets" under "products" in the menu bar on the 404 page. After another clickthrough I learn this:

Created by the Universal Protocol Alliance and leading voluntary carbon credit managers, UPCO2 is backed by underlying certified REDD+ carbon credits on a leading registry.

There is also a link to the UPCO2 website. The site contains this quote: "Every single organism depends directly or indirectly on trees for their survival."

Even deep-sea-trench microbes? Ok.

There isn't much on the main page besides marketing copy. The FAQ goes into more detail about how the token is backed, how assets are verified, and how everything is managed. For example:

UP Alliance is establishing its own Carbon Foundation, which creates another layer of control on the carbon credit certification process. Its advisory board consists of eminent conservationists including Ricardo Bayon, author of The State of Voluntary Carbon Markets, Mike Korchinsky, Founder of leading REDD+ program manager, Wildlife Works, and Alexander Matthiessen, former special assistant in the Office of U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

Wildlife Works was the source of the "every single organism quote", by the way.

What is REDD+?

REDD+ is a program in the UN's farming branch, the FAO. It wants to save forests through "reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation".

To do this, it makes them commodities. The process of doing this basically involves estimating

• How much carbon is locked up in the forest and
• How much carbon would be released from deforestation.

How do they estimate these things? In lieu of an explanation I direct you to the 333-page methods and guidance document, "Integration of remote-sensing and ground-based observations for estimation of emissions and removals of greenhouse gases in forests", available for download on this page.

Editorial

Yes, forests are definitely necessary for human survival. And saving them is good. They take a long time to grow back.

If you intend to speculate with UPCO2, I would hope you would also take direct action to combat greenhouse gas emission.

Write to government representatives, support (real) environmental protection NGOs, and stuff like that. As an UPCO2 holder, you could even consider yourself financially motivated to become a climate activist.

Unfortunately, just burning a carbon credit will probably not do the trick. At best, the only direct result is a deflationary effect on the market for the prevention of emissions. I'd assume polluters operate with high tolerances for changes in this market. Holding is similar, except instead of destruction you just remove that prevention of emission from the market temporarily.

I see this less as a radical green thing and more as part of the trend to make everything into a consumer-direct or derivatives market. It comes along with news of California water futures hitting the market, for example. 

Also, just throwing this in there, but the fact that it's on a congested proof-of-work blockchain is counterproductive to the purported carbon reduction. Yes, ETH2.0 will solve this. Let's hope it comes soon.

Anyway, the whole ball of wax also involves a lot of bureaucrats, analysts, regulatory agencies, brokers, professional service providers, exchanges, speculators, and so on. I'd love to do more research on where the money's going, but I got stuff to do. Sorry for the rush.