Member-only story

Building a “Carbonshed” Framework for Climate Action

Steve Hinton
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)
6 min readJun 23, 2021
“Home at last” Photo by Steve Hinton

Retooling our economic engine to meet the on-rushing climate challenge will take more than just tweaking market forces at the margins. It will take a fundamental rethinking. It takes a framework that can drive incentives capable of rippling throughout our daily lives. Rippling in ways that can subtly, yet dramatically drive our individual economic choices. I firmly believe there is a means by which we can realize a new economic future and it’s not as complicated as you might think.

Any keystone to a cleaner economy capable of moving us toward net zero emissions must rest on building economic incentives. We must somehow create a framework that leverages the sources of carbon to provide for the creation, stewardship, protection, and restoration of carbon sinks. In principle this is the “offset” concept we often hear about today. Yet thinking about offsets after the fact does not go far enough. We need to retool our thinking such that sinks are incentivized and rewarded in advance and independent of the sources being created. Not after the fact. For this to happen a common accounting and transaction framework must exist that allows us to gauge each side of the ledger equitably.

An accounting framework that allows for such restructuring requires three key components. First and foremost, the framework requires an ecological basis…

--

--

An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

Published in An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

No Matter What People Tell You, Words And Ideas Can Change The World.

Steve Hinton
Steve Hinton

Written by Steve Hinton

Advocate for the environment and sustainability. Pacific Northwest prodigy seeking strength in diversity and local community.

Responses (2)