Micro "Carbon-Credit"

[onewhouse]

How meta-currency replenishes scarce resources
Update: we have first reincarnation: @ecoTwollar on Twitter. Hope more to come...

Thought-time-bank in this discussion to help make that happen. Carbon credit is a predictive and rigid top down design if it only focuses on one resource and by big players only. It is known to allow abuse and speculation in pollution, not resource saving. And there is the problem of adaptation to uncertain changes in your neighborhood. Issues, open money meta-currency and LETS may have the capacity to address and influence. From this perspective the focus is not on what causes warming, but how to rein in over-consumption.

Perhaps the goal could be making community currency available to exchange acts and information of saving and preserving endangered and scarce resources and not just cleaning air. May be similar, may be not even close. Please generously contribute a little time and add your thoughts and insights.

[Anne Aster]

Carbon credit, carbon taxes and carbon market = merchandizing air. It's agains't common good in my opinion. It's a creative idea and a wrong solution for a false problem. We need to stop focusing on symptoms and start dealing with the root cause of the real problems. The monetary system is at the root. Lets improve it by adressing the real issues (interests, who creates the money and how, common good and freedom).

[onewhouse]

Thanks Annie for the like minded reply. This practice of "thought time banking" is great. You put in a little, you get out a little. And you put in a lot of heart in this, thanks. What I deeply don't like about CarbCred is that it puts our vast population on notice -- it says we live on borrowed time. That's a guilt reinforcing message and far from being positive. it generates anguish and that blocks voluntary contribution. You don't get voluntarism with propaganda, something else is needed.
I invite you to read this article: it speaks volumes to what you said about CarbCred and what else may be wrong with it.

[Sepp]

Let me add my voice against the rapidly developing practice of trading the right to pollute in the form of "carbon credits".

First of all, CO2 is not the cause of global warming, whatever that is. It is merely a minor "greenhouse gas" if even that. From the geological record, increases in carbon dioxide have followed, rather than preceded, the frequent warm periods in the earth's history.

I agree wholeheartedly that trade in carbon credits is a wrong solution to a false problem. What we do need are clean energy technologies and monetary systems that allow stable economic activity. We should not be forced by economic necessities to produce more and more, polluting and exhausting resources in the process, nor should we be using dirty fuels or be allowed to trade the rights to use such fuels.

[onewhouse]

Have been thinking about it since, and If I understand it well, you make the points of current unsustainable practices in global over-consumption and in free markets' inability to analyze and predict why it is unable to counter major perturbations and as a result periodically collapse. And why those are actually part of the problem and not the solution. See if this article about "crazy money" [NewScientist] will support some or many of your points along those lines. (In part, it follows a complex system simulation made up of investors, banks and hedge funds and makes a conclusion that I find quite interesting.)

From what you say, I think it may be fair to consider Geoff's approach here also. I believe his point is that there is a strong empirical evidence that the current market and it's followers bear resemblance to a past-oriented (eco-nomical) Cartesian linear system trying somehow trying to evolve into a future-oriented (eco-logical) designed complex system to be more relevant to how markets actually should work. And, perhaps, my point can come into here, that a natural resource-linked micro-exchange could actually point in the direction of such an attempt. And a sour note about possible ineffectuality: There is the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index that, it appears, registered rising stocks for the following companies: Whirlpool, Lockheed Martin, Alcoa...Of course I read that in a 2006 news...
btw
Have been meaning to find the reference to a thought provoking article about an observation similar to yours re (CO2 relating to warming) over at WeChangeClimateBack, and your highlight made me getting it off the backburner.

[Sepp]

Thanks for taking a deeper look than most are willing to risk on this.

Yes, our economy - I would call the stock market and its extensions a casino economy - is in no way equipped to be sensitive to any of the externalities connected with the physical behaviors it dictates. I haven't been able to find the New Scientist article (I'm not a subscriber and they have hidden it away behind a wall you can only scale by taking out a subscription) but I get the gist from some comments about it I encountered on the New Scientist site.

I like Geoff's approach, especially as he brings in a concept that is sorely missing from all our understanding of physics and therefore our technologies. Syntropy is the necessary complement of entropy and the two form a pair of oscillating forces that drive the universe. Our technologies, unfortunately, are largely and I'd even say almost exclusively, based on entropy (explosion, radiation) rather than syntropy (vortex-contractive). I see that as a major factor to be amended before we can "fit into" our environment as a part of the whole eco-system.

Human-emitted CO2 of course goes back to our use of heat-and-explosion based technologies, instead of the cool-and-contraction based syntropic cycle version that is out there to be discovered.

And good for finding that article again. It does show, I agree, that historically, when we look at the ever-changing climate on earth, the rise in CO2 was a consequence of warming, rather than the cause of it.

[onewhouse]

Hi Geoff, was looking for the NScientist article myself. This discussion about that article is the closest I could find. Hope it will prove interesting in itself.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926680.100-crazy-money.html
Warmly,

[onewhouse]

Thanks Sepp for the input. It would be good to brake down the way meta-currency can be applied precisely to those points you raise about conserving more energy and wasting less:
"We should not be forced by economic necessities to produce more and more, polluting and exhausting resources in the process."
I see you have an interest in the global warming issue and the words "carbon credit" can call up quite strong emotions. Have renamed the thread to micro carbon-credit though perhaps the better title would be micro resource-exchange to capture bottom-up qualities better. It also speaks better to the need to focus on more resources in danger of becoming scarce.
Yes, perhaps part of it is to find a good punchy definition to the problem as well as a practical goal to solve it that involves the power and the promise of community based exchange.
I've come to think that it could encourage more and more peoples peer-2-peer voluntary contribution in their broader neighborhood. But how could it be made both viral and robust?

[Sepp]

As I see it, Otto, we are being forced by (today's) economic realities to exploit ever more and to not consider our impact on the environment. If we were to voluntarily limit our highly resource-exploitative and environmentally destructive activities, "the economy" as dictated by today's systems, would crash.

Well, in a way, that crash is already underway, not because we voluntarily limited our activities but because the inherent systemic imbalance of debt-based interest bearing money ballooned out of all manageable proportion.

That said, it appears to me that ANY currency that will not force continual expansion will be a large and potentially healing step in the right direction.

We do not even have to specifically work out what should be done and what should be avoided. People will make sense of it in their local exchanges, once the constraining economic factors introduced by our economic system are removed.

What we DO need to consider is how to make the new monetary systems that are developing here and there sufficiently ubiquitous to have a measurable impact on our actions at the humankind level. So it won't be sufficient to have islands of local activity - we need something that potentially spreads to the majority of human beings and releases them from the grip of debt-based economics.

[onewhouse]

Thanks, Sepp, for weaving this along. Just read a very enlightening analysis about social capital building and it had a very interesting argument that there are dangers in both bonding, as well as bridging. It is great to imagine freely trading individuals not bound by any boundary condition, but the historic reality is that folks coalesce in communities that are more or less stable. To tell you the truth, it would be a grate step forward if all existing trading communities had interoperable and ubiquitous protocols to trade. Coming to this from the CAD world, I saw and used the open source IFC schem at a fairly advanced level, but it has it's own problems.

That said, it appears that we are using here open money to cover two different notions. A kind of force that will move new trades, as well as the technological something that will be applied to them. If this is true, than it is somewhat confusing. But I am not sure if I follow this correctly.

[Sepp]

Not being one of the originators of the open money meme, I can't help in clarifying what exactly open money stands for. But I see you asked the question also in a separate post. There might be some enlightening responsed to that.

For me, open money incorporates the principle that money should not be a monopolistic affair as it currently is (issued by banks as an interest-bearing credit, to some degree controlled by a central institution of government) and it also is a move to define what the alternative should be, that can - little by little - take over the function of keeping track of exchanges. That definition, as I understand it, will set down parameters for the alternative, which are based on the experience accumulated with Michael's LETS.

But keep in mind that I'm by no means the expert ... ;)

[Michael Linton]

Sepp,

You are addressing this issue in a reactive manner - "..money should not be ..." and "...the alternative should be ..."

But the main thing you need to understand is that open money is not about definition. Simply, open money is the realization that all sorts of definitions are possible. It's about getting out of boxes, not about building new ones.

Your difficulty seems (to me) that you want open money to be something that fits inside your world view. You want me to explain open money in your terms, and that's not where it's at.

[Sepp]

You are right, Michael, I may well be stuck in an old rut here.

To me, money serves a function, and my current thinking is that the function of money is to mediate exchange, which implies some form of definition, at least at the level of practical implementation. Granted, there may be a number of systems that differ greatly from one to the other but that would equally serve as an economic lubricant.

Your comment makes me think that open money is about getting the concept of money (and perhaps that of exchange) unstuck from the fixed and highly regulated state it has been in for a long time.

But once we're unstuck, would then not any new type of arrangement of economic exchange (where 'economic' is seen as constituting our interactions with others in a very wide sense) fit into the new understanding that money is 'open'?

Or would be there be some kind of criteria, some kind of definition, that lets us distinguish which one fits the idea of open money and which one not?