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.
Ok, I hear you. You say currency is about competition too, not just what is scarce today. It is who can own more of that scarce stuff.
So here is another thought. And don't hold against me that I'm an engineer who only accomplished cursory reading of a couple of books on finance and the market. For a while Samuelson's hefty tome of Economics was traveling with me even on summer holidays. That's how highly esteemed those thoughts were.
What follows, however, are the words of one who also tries to follow things with open eyes and verify things empirically.
Because you will be hard pressed to find stuff more empirical these days, than over-polluted air and over-consumed earth. You can almost touch those stuff.
So if currency is about competition too, than we would all want to see folks competing in who can MAKE MORE clean air, clean water, etc. Now, one can do that by bidding to save them for tomorrow, not overuse them and if possible clean them.
And at heart of it, clearly, that is the positive idea behind the carbon credit system. More recently, that's the idea behind 'cap and auction', instead of 'cap and trade'.
But to trade or bid for who can pollute air and who can't - like it is inevitably done with the currency called carbon credit - makes no difference in one important aspect. It already makes fresh air for people scarce here, and in abundance there. And you can bet that this makes a lot of folks happy and comfortable here, and a lot of folks very uncomfortable there. All in the while the ecosystem ties their interest strongly together.
They should out-compete each other to make more fresh air overall. We should have an unprecedented and exponential growth in goodeys. Surely, nature is not a zero sum game that should or can be controlled with artificial and forced scarcity. Nature is an open sum game not amenable to our will: it controls us.
Here I follow on with a thought from a previous post titled "Scarce Money or Scarce Resources?", or why I think that carbon credit is deeply flawed.
The notion of money is strongly tied to the notion of currency. We value what is scarce, and we value today what is scarce today. We value what is hip, what is cool, what is funny -- pretty much what makes us healthy and happy.
So if real, natural, and free market is based on scarce resources (as we discussed this previously) and what really matters to us right now, then currency should be tied to good air, good water, good forest, good reef - stuff that is scarce, not stuff that is in abundance.
In short, currency shouldn't be money, it should be all the natural goodies of earth that are currently at risk to be in very short supply. Then, may be not 'open money' is the best way to call it. Open goodie perhaps? You decide.
But if it to become a household name frequent use will erode it into one shortened label to be sure. In fact, you could in your mind shorten open money in just one word right now. Imagine making this a household name: goodey to give us some reminder of what it meant to replace.
Do you think it could work?
A new wind is blowing. Yes, there is a new idea in the wings. And when you think about the story that pushes it forward, it all makes sense.
An eco-Republican is about economy AND ecology, and about security AND citizenship.
Or more simply it defines someone who Cares about what is healthy in nature but also about Protection against trespassing. That's just how I think it can be defined, you may have your way. Note that what is healthy in nature is a consensus product and a moving point in focus and intensity. All in a field that is defined by those four poles: economy, ecology, security and citizenship.
When you look around, public servants frame their important messages so they can be moved around by how you interpret them in a smaller patch in that field. Note that that patch itself also moves around quite a bit for conservatives, moderates and liberals alike.
But to find the public servants who may qualify as eco-Republicans we need to know where to look for them. I would most probably position them somewhere between the Nationals, Greens and Liberals/Republicans in Australia. In the US they are probably the shifting shades of moderate Reps and centrist Dems. And in the UK they might have been the promise of what was called once the 'New Labour'.
At any rate, I believe what is good citizenship in democracy used to be quite well represented by Roosevelt's Republicans in the US and Menzies Liberals in Australia. These movements established a proud and pragmatic heritage. But until very recently, the citizenship pole in the field experienced a more or less steady decline in focus, intensity and gravity. The economy and security poles experienced a strong pull and the ecology pole was simply ignored.
However, more recently, a worldwide green movement with the added power of public concern about Global Warming and Irreversible Climate Change moves the above mentioned streams of conscious sense of purpose toward the political center where there is now heightened emphasis on citizen participation. In other words, the pull was ecology, but the field now once again extends toward another pull: citizenship.
However, there is only so much interest in the public field and some other poles pull got to give. The problem is, neither economy, nor security can be ignored or diminished in importance. No administration in their right mind would do that. They can only juggle between them. Some public servants, who realize just that pay lip service to citizenship, some others - to ecology.
They are pressured by public opinion to polarise their actions to reflect the integrity folks obviously expect of them. We need predictability in a politician to trust them.
The free will of the public has always demanded pragmatism. It is only when that will is distorted or suppressed that a few can feed them ideology. But ideology is nothing without a propaganda. One needs catechism and demagoguery to make it work. It needs to dumb down public mind and free will - hence dumb down natural public pragmatism and citizenship.
Today that pragmatism again dominates the policy agenda, but with two very important modern distinctions. First a hard-wired international monetary instinct makes economy trump ecology -- scarce money is overemphasized and not just for those who need to manage people as well as resources well. And second, defense security trumps climate security due to another hard-wired and legitimate survival instinct that naturally goes stronger in this time of perceived crisis.
On the first count, international monetary instruments experience a clear crisis in solving problems in a dominant way, let alone by themselves. On the second count, emergency and the associated desperate fire fighting effort that are due to climate change disasters and refugees are on rapid and possibly exponential increase compared to traditional defense security planning. And they both draw heavily on the military budget, which in turn can be a huge burden on the economy --- and presently is.
What is missing is the mutual understanding and policy interest to support that voters and representatives are part the Ecology first, before they are part of a (hopefully Peace and not War) Economy and only then part of a regions Security. I think an eco-Rep must have these priorities sorted out.
So how about Australia, our Nature's Republic? --- that would nicely wrap it in one neat package. The political will is shaping, or is it just a thought...?
The sun for some reason is getting hotter. Much hotter in fact than it was to be expected. Across the globe children today paint a white sun - we were painting yellow suns back in my youth.
According to the New Scientist (will look up article for reference) warming over time enormously increases CO2 in the atmosphere as it has done several times over in previous geological eras. It had likely become a feedback already. The output of this circuit is presently small but may grow rapidly. On this both deniers and Global Warming supporters agree.Update: here is the reference: http://www.newscientist.com/article/..-rising-temperatures-bring-their-own-cosub2sub.html , just found following Sepp's reply in the discussion about reconsidering Carbon Credit on openmoney.ning.com.
Another point of agreement it seems is that a huge amount already in the atmosphere has been caused by human activity. Where the two party don't agree is what may be the primary cause of runaway CO2 increase. Warming of the sun - as the entire solar system moves onto higher energy plains in our galaxy - or the industrial level output of humans.
My take is that this Warming - however inconvenient - comes at a crucial point. For years, we have ignored that Earth resources have been over consumed. (Check out my other blogs on the subject.) If we don't stop that practice, we will surely keep adding to the warming feedback circuit by the virtue of unmitigated economic growth. And again, this feedback circuit is directly coinciding with major climatic changes in Earth weather system -- a point that both deniers and supporters agree on.
So the truth about Global Warming is that no matter how unpredictable the final outcome may be, that one of the very first steps of intervention should aim at evening out consumption between nations of the opposing ends of the production chain. Out of mutual interest, these nations will likely be willing to agree on similarly mutual CO2 targets. (See my other recent post on forced Population Reduction - the planetary alternative that has a different approach to life altogether.)
Population Reduction to counter Over Consumption? Think of it this way.
According to Nick Bostrom on TED Talks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd9cf_vLviI , today 90% of all humans who have ever lived have already died. This means that through selection and inheritance the human civilization has progressed to a point when the 6 billion who lives today is in fact only the 10% of us -- we are the incredibly few left who carry forward the legacy. You may not think of it this way, but every single one of us is a winner and carries irreparably important traits carefully advanced and nurtured throughout countless generations.
So in this light, if some were to say that the cure to over consumption is population reduction - what they mean to say is this: let's cull down that remaining 10%. It doesn't make sense; not if we consider life to be precious, and who doesn't. What would make sense is to even out consumption a bit so that polluting countries from the opposite ends of the development spectrum would be a little more interested in cooperating then just paying lip service.
And, as an aside, perhaps make it another planetary effort to populate other planets with our most pioneering spirits. A population boom on Mars some day, would mean that the 10% remainder of us today can some day start to grow instead of whittling further away. This would enormously improve the gene pool for further successful planetary endeavors.
Encouraging signs? The international space station (ISS) is already a fantastic International effort. And during the sinister years of the Cold War, no one would have thought this to ever happen. Today, many nations move into the multi-trillions of dollars in national debt thanks largely to a global credit crisis.
Economic stabilization between competing nations of continuing vast populations will point to forgiving large amounts of this gigantic debt. This way, future widespread debt forgiveness for nations with great productive population capacity - such that the ones were done for Mexico and Poland in modern times - may be inevitable.
But such moves could create a very favorable environment for the kind of planetary endeavor that really respect life now and into the future.
