Greta Thunberg has done a great job mobilizing the next generation, the youth who will live a larger part of our shared future. She read the IPCC reports and they are pretty clear, we need a cut in oil consumption (and emissions) like we accidentally see today, and more. Because emissions are down does not mean the past emission have been neutralized. Emissions will need to be negative for a long time to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels, and this is very hard, because the CO2 has diffused all over our atmosphere. Best is not to cause CO2 emissions, stop them ASAP.
The trouble is that kids haven’t got much power. They would if they took up arms, weapons and started killing, but of course that would end in slaughter. It sounds crazy, but you know now that people that understand their lives are at risk can do pretty radical stuff (like practically locking themselves in their homes for weeks). Banks are no help, because banks live off the fossil “economy” they created. The fact is kids don’t have cash nor credibility (except if they become students, then banks will gladly push them into debt, after first having upped the cost of education by putting the universities into debt). How is the will of the next generation going to triumph over the will of the banks and fossil economists?
The answer is really as simple as the violence mentioned above, but its actually non-violent. It is radical : Create a currency for the kids to sell. Banks have feared this move and have been fighting cash in order to increase control over citizens (this is perfectly demonstrated in China already). You see, a currency is also a tool to create organized effort. The reason is that when you reward labour with some kind of currency, and the labour results in some kind of product, you can give the workers the right to buy the product with the currency. That way you have had their help at a time you had nothing! A perfect example is a farmer who pays planters of crops with IOUs for a piece of the harvest. A variation is a farmer that sells grain futures to get money to pay his workers,
But to get back to Greta, she has no cash, the kids have no cash, they can’t initiate any usefull project or start institutions. Maybe with some donations but when will that run out. And in fact they want real older people to do stuff to help them NOW. How can this inability to reward people now be solved? The answer is simple. Create a currency, the ‘climatecoin’ (just a name). Accounts could be administered by any bank, or a stock market could do it. Banks will likely not cooperate, in fact you can only create crypto currency freely these days, anything else and you find yourself opposed by bank regulators. We are not sure if crypto is the best option but a blockchain could be used to safely store information of account balances for sure, even if the balances themselves are not blochchains. A coin can be started with a simple ledger, even one on paper. The coin could be sold for Euro, treated to be equal to a Euro. There is however also another way to look at how the coin is backed.
If you compare the coin to a IOU handed out by the farmer, so really an UNBACKED promise, and not exchangeable with Euro, then what would be the promise implied? The promise would be political dominance of the “Greta movement”. With political dominance the coin/currency could be given value by changing the law. The coin could be a bit like a 10 year bond. It would be similar to the paper dollars once created by (broke) Boston to pay of roughneck furr trappers, incidentally the origin of paper money in the US of A.
With Greta there are a lot of other young and older people who understand reality and desperately want action. All these young people would have to work together to gain REAL poltical control. This would take time, but of course their number is huge and growing. The mission would be to make up a deciding part of politics in about 10 to 15 years from now. They would have the goal of becoming the stewards of society and then they could -by law- assign value to their currency. It is a modern version of a Napoleontic war made possible by the promise of its spoils. It would require Greta and those that share her motivation to fight climate change to reach political dominance in the next 10 years or so. This is a certainty.
The Greta bank would finance the construction of renewable energy projects, the money could be used to take climate action. The mere plan to give the currency value by conquering political positions would be enough to enable her to use it to sway people that are now being corrupted by the banks. Her demand is : “How fucking fast can you change the emissions curve” “How fucking fast can you start doing things that increase the chances of a better future”. If you are a poltician and you know this movement is real and determined to rule then wouldn’t you be smart to act along its lines, along its principles? The reality is that this is SUPER EASY once you don’t care about profit anymore and banks are forced to help with the climate transition. However there is really no time to wait until all bankers have died, all those living of fossil cashflow have left the system.
A young girl will give you 1000 climatecoins, and you wil act as if its 1000 Euro, and in time you will be returned this value for those coins, because the girl has made it law. Thus the girl becomes climate banker and all euro’s in Europe can make a choice to move towards fighting climate change, or back into the coffers of the fossil industry and banks.
This approach requires carefull choice of how many coins to emit, with clear record of the purpose they will be used for. This would have to be based on shared models of outcomes of actions, not profit based business plans but real world practical goals, but also to get rid of fossil lakeys and help people that get the climate threat.