Ethereum 2.0 the environmentally-conscious blockchain?

The introduction of "Casper" in order to make Ethereum better for the environment, this blockchain is looking to cut down power consumption and its impact. Hence the shift to a completely new transaction validation and recording process with Ethereum 2.0 — Proof of Stake

Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent The cryptocurrency is going on an energy diet to compete with more efficient blockchain

Due to their reliance on a processing-power-intensive validation method known as Proof of Work, early blockchain implementations are — notoriously affected by performance issues like high transaction costs and long periods of delivery — caused by network congestion.

The problem is all that mining. Like most cryptocurrencies, Ethereum relies on a computational competition called proof of work (PoW) . In PoW, all participants race to cryptographically secure transactions and add them to the blockchain’s globally distributed ledger. It’s a winner-takes-all contest, rewarded with newly minted cryptocoins. So the more computational firepower you have, the better your chances to profit.

PoW mining is difficult by design. The idea is to prevent any one entity from controlling the blockchain. For example, if a bitcoin miner’s computer system had more than half of all the mining power on the network, that miner could perpetrate frauds, such as revising long- completed transactions. Bitcoin users would have little recourse because miners are anonymous.

The Ethereum 2.0 staking mechanism allows all those network participants who have deposited 32 ETH and meet the necessary technical requirements to become validators. 

Then the algorithm chooses a validation node to verify the transaction by performing cryptographic work with a considerably lower level of complexity than with the Proof of Work. 

Not only does this approach offer massive output gains for the entire network, making the native currency more performant and cost-effective, but it also reduces the amount of energy required to perform the validation cycle. 

“That’s just a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers—real people—whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff,” says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/ethereum-plans-to-cut-its-absurd-energy-consumption-by-99-percent

https://blog.aikon.com/2021/02/ethereum-2-0-proof-of-stake-what-is-the-real-impact-on-the-environment/