Taking away the excuses for Climate Inaction

If climate action was free, would we do it?

What? TheCoin is still going?

Well, it’s been an eon since the last update. For those (anyone?) who read these, I’m sorry, it’s been… challenging, and I’ve prioritized building the project’s next stage over telling anyone what I’m doing. Now, however, the next stage is nearing completion, so here goes nuttin’.

First, what is TheCoin for?

The last time I wrote, I claimed that the goal of TheCoin was to solve Climate Change. That’s an unbelievably (literally, from the feedback) ambitious goal, so it’s time to clarify.

Climate Change is a crisis, and we should all be doing “something”. That word “something” is doing some very heavy lifting. For most of us, it’s tough to see what we can do because individual effort is kinda pointless. For an individual, there is a personal cost and no personal benefit. The math is simple, and it doesn’t work. As a result, we all sit back and hope that the government and corporations will figure it out. That’s not working out for us.

Let’s imagine for a second that there was a button that magically eliminated an individual’s carbon footprint. Pressing the button doesn’t cost anything, and this button was available to everyone. Imagine that everyone wakes up tomorrow and makes a choice — press this button, and you stop making Climate Change worse. What would happen? If enough people pressed the button, real change would happen. If nobody pressed the button, well… that’s our choice, but we could no longer blame the governments for not acting.

This is the true goal of TheCoin. Sure, it doesn’t solve climate change; that isn’t up to me. That bit is up to you. All TheCoin does is take away the excuse.

Wait, what’s this about a button?

I quickly realized after completing the last stage of TheCoin that it just wasn’t good enough. TheCoin works by earning tiny amounts off small transactions. These tiny fractions build up over a long period and become a lot of money. The problem is that it’s a lot of work now, and it’s difficult to get excited about a payday ten years away.

That was a valid excuse. The cost of time and effort was just too great. I couldn’t sell it because I struggled to do it myself.

So, I created an app to automate the whole process and eliminate the excuse. The nice thing about software is that it is very good at doing repetitive work, day in and day out, year after year. Rather than teaching people how to work with a system and spending hours to earn a few bucks, there is now a button that takes care of everything. You press it, and get paid to stop making climate change worse.

Wait, so does TheCoin earn me money or solve Climate Change?

The philosophical answer to that is that Climate Change is about money. The more prosaic answer is that it’s a trade. There will always be some cost — in time and trust — and we can succeed only when the benefit outways that cost. Climate Change — and TheCoin — is a game of tiny numbers repeated an enormous number of times. Neither game works on altruism.

Where to from here?

I’ve made many bold claims here without explaining them. The details are dense, and I’ll go into more detail in an upcoming post, but the basic concept is here. Our goal now is to find some brave souls to test the system. So what would it take for you to press the button? We’re offering you (mostly) free money; in exchange, we’ll offset your carbon footprint. If this sounds like a good deal to you, get in touch, and I can explain all the details of how everything works.

And if not, then get in touch anyway. If you tell me how this is a terrible idea, then there is probably a valuable objection I could learn from. And the goal of this project is, after all, to eliminate -all- the excuses :-)