Tuesday, February 17, 2009

More Musing on Measuring Environmental Wealth in Complementary Currencies

This silly question has been nagging me: - If we need more and more value, and growth in activities reducing pollution, but also measured in some kind of currency2.0 today, then how that currency might relate to inflation? Because, obviously, it needs to be inflated a lot and fast - pollution cleaning can't wait.

Now, conventional money - the paper money - becomes worthless when inflated too fast. When there is way too much of it, the incentive is lost to back it up with increase in real products or services and they become next to worthless.

So to make a value system work for the environment and to acknowledge rapid improvement in that area, it may not be based on what can potentially be worthless - wealth that is only valuable if scarce. It should be based on what is also valuable when in abundance.

Whether or not it is to be based on what should be freely available, like clean air, or something that needs to be paid for to remove - like CO2 in the air, that's another question.

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