Climate Solutions
Only legislation can fix this, and the silver bullet might be a Carbon Coin
Bill Gates thinks innovation will solve the climate crisis. There are some very clever technologies out there offering hope, but the crisis is so big, so imminent, and requires 8 billion people pulling in the same direction, I think Bill is mistaken.
It’s not really a crisis either. It’s an extinction emergency. 2023 was 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial average, which was the limit deemed safe by scientists. Above that, not safe. And the trendline isn’t good.
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future’, Uttar Pradesh in India breaks first. An unsurvivable wet bulb temperature and a failed electricity system leads to millions dying in a near-future fiction. On the 29th May 2024 in the real world, temperatures in Delhi reached 50.5ºC.
If we breach the known planetary boundaries, billions of people will die. The danger of an extreme runaway greenhouse effect to a hot house earth would wreck civilisation outright. Food shortages will be part of it, but it’s quite possible that our ability to hold together as a community of 8 billion people would be shattered.
The narrative for fixing this is on individuals to change our behaviour. Recycle everything, eat less meat, fly less often. They’re great habits, but unless we focus on big industry and the finances of it, we’re still doomed.
At this point, only legislation will work. And in that sense, there is hope.
A paper in Nature from 2009 listed 9 planetary boundaries that we must live within. Six years later the Paris agreement was signed.
In Egypt’s COP in 2022 it was the loss and damage bank account. A fund built to compensate nations that are being hammered by climate change. It’s explicit that the rich nations are to do more to help the poor nations.
All nations also signed up to a treaty at the biological biosphere congress. This is to leave 30% of Earth’s surface to the wild by the year 2030. Jennifer Norris states California is at 24%, and they’ll get to 30% by 2030. She’s now pushing for 50% of the land to be protected by 2050.
These are great legislative iniatiatives. They are progressing things, but the world runs on money.
We have to pay ourselves for doing the right things, rather than the wrong things. We currently pay ourselves to do the wrong things. We tear the Earth apart in doing so, and we also also create the 0.1% et cetera. The measure of GDP is geared up that way.
One proposal by Kim Stanley Robinson is the introduction of a carbon coin. A crypto currency disbursed on proof of carbon sequestration. Thus enticing loose global capital into virtuous actions on carbon reduction.
Created by central banks, new carbon coins would be backed by 100-year bonds with guaranteed rates of return, underwritten by all the central banks working together.
Essentially this idea is quantitative easing. The banks would be giving money away, but this time targeted/directed to good causes. Banks would guarantee a minimum price, supporting a floor so it wouldn't crash.
Let’s say for every tonne of carbon not burned, or sequestered, in a way that could be certified, you’re given one carbon coin. Competing and tradable with fiat currencies, the carbon coin would eventually out-perform other currencies.
If we combined this with carbon taxes (progressive of course), you would get taxed if you release carbon into the atmosphere, but paid if you sequester carbon.
Modelling shows the two combined does not make the benefit twice as good, but ten times as good. The synergy of carrot and stick. When you align both negative and positive reinforcements towards a certain behaviour, we do that behaviour. It’s just Pavlov.
About $2 trillion of money is created each year. If it was paid out for good green work, that would be enough to see us through this climate emergency.
The gross product is about $75-$100 trillion per year, so $2 trillion is a lot of money, but it isn’t not outside the bounds of ordinary fiscal and monetary policy.
There would be intense resistance. A lot of shouting and freaking out about it, in our fractured political landscape. It will be hard to get a majority sometimes. There will be losses and set-backs that will make it look like it’s not working.
Battle on, we must. Like the cross-chop on the water, between wind and tide and waves and swells. The question is, where is the current underneath going?
