Carbon Economy; Benjamin Spock De Vries Interview w/ Profs. Karatzogianni, Matthews
Channel: Permaculturedesigner
Date: 2023-02-07

Raw video, unfortunately desynched by the end, but it's good for audio.

"In order to overcome this problem and make realistic sense of a currency system or an economic system, it has to have some relation to material reality. In this case, we're looking at carbon. Now, for basic purposes, it could be that this could be backed by anything material, could be a tree spice, it could be a metal. The big difference between a metal and an organic basis is that in the organic basis, it grows. A metal is static. You have the same amount and that doesn't change it. It doesn't reproduce, it doesn't grow. So you can never increase the amount of currency. Assume it was all hard currency and all issued in gold, that the amount that you have can never change because that's the amount of gold that you have when you're talking about things like carbon, the best carbon uptake is still trees, regardless of what any of the technology and patent people tell you, that trees are still winning, that there is that we can determine the atmospheric cycling necessary for carbon and achieve targets based upon real geomorphological numbers as far as atmospheric cycling. And what we need to maintain a predictable atmosphere, basically."

"The first obstacle with central bankers is convincing them that they are allowed to have more than one currency. That's the first obstacle. Say, well, you've already done this one currency. What's stopping you from issuing another one? The pound has the pound in circulation and it also has pound sterling. Pound sterling is backed by silver. The pound in circulation is not- it’s currency by fiat. So if you already have currency by fiat and you and you could have a metal standard currency, pound sterling, for example, then there is nothing stopping you from also having a carbon based and or biodiversity based currency also issued. And so one big thing with the carbon markets as they currently stand is that everyone is concerned with uptake because they're working on a model of emission and uptake. So no one is counting the current carbon stock. Which would put a place like Brazil or the DRC on a very good footing if they were allowed to count their standing carbon stock. A lot of jungle there, which is a lot of biomass. But under many current regimes, you can only count this for carbon credit if you cut it all down or burned it and then planted more trees in order to demonstrate your carbon uptake. This is insane."

#carbon #currency #economy #economics #climatechange #biodiversity