Make a simple assumption : The economic system is a one way ticket to climate hell. Then the question becomes : How do we escape it. The answer is : Make sure you don’t need its money.
The economy is a system of trade, it assumes we all participate and contribute something of value to others, which we can then exchange using the money/currency available. The economy assumes that people will find and offer for sale the raw materials, half products, products and lots of other things because opportunites are visible, money can be made and money can buy anything.
This all works fine if you don’t think beyond how to make money and what you want to buy. If your mind is that limited you are the perfect consumer. If you think beyond that for instance about the long term effects of using natural resources you run into a problem because depletion of those resources is unavoidable and you can’t really prevent it. As a participant in the economy you find the economic machine is completely without brakes or controls. At least so it seams..
There is control in the system, and it comes from banks. Strangely banks control trade in nearly every square km of the planet, simply because we use the currency they create. In countries like Holland it is especially clear banks control the price and trade of land for agriculture and housing. You can not build a cheap home in Holland, you have to price it against the market price. Why? To protect the average home ‘value’. The home owning public largely supports this, but for those that rent or simply don’t have enough money it becomes a real nightmare. Everyone will fight you building for a lower price, even the builders. If you do it yourself you find a home never has to cost much more than 100.000 Euro.
So in Holland, how come banks have all this power and how do you break through it. After all we are all born naked and without any property. There is no immortal banker, these guys are just trying to make a living, yet the system is rigged so that more money is better, and this puts pressure on everybody without a real benefit. The system does not optimize the right to a place to live, instead it reduces building, it creates expesive homes and also reduces the reserve of cheaper homes and appartments for rent. All to sell more mortgages at the highest price.
This pressure by itself is enough of a problem, but because of it the methods used are not easy to change. Banks don’t like disruptions, innovations that alter cashflow. This means that fossil using technology is fine and centralized energy generation without storage (batteries) as well, just as long as money flows through the banks when the resources and technologies are used. Ones that do not generate cashflow, like off grid solar powered mining for example, make banks obsolete.
So we are captured in a system that wants to be cashflow intensive, and therefore fossil fuel or centralized energy intensive. We are stuck in this system everywhere we go, because the money is used everywhere and all land is priced in Euro’s and sold through bank-allied brokers. The resources that the economy makes available to us are enormous, but the cost is equally gigantic and tragic, we sacrifice humanity.
The opposition to this would have to come from people that own land without debt. Suprisingly it can also come from people that own renewable energy sources without debt. The challenge is often to pay annual cost to the municipality or state, and those costs are usually adapted to the exitence and use of banks. A home owner pays a home tax that is proportional to the estimated market value of the home. This continues even if the home is payed off.
What is needed is a group of owners of land, resources, production installations, to team up and protect each others ownership as well as use their own currency in their own territory. The catch is that whoever manages that currency does not allow it to be exchanged into the wider economy nor be used to buy or trade fossil fuels or nuclear energy. The idea is that you only use the currency between the members of the group or to pay people that work for the group. Of course those people would have to spend the money in the territory of the group.
The amount of money should be proportional to the actual primary resources that can be purchased with them, so food, energy, water. If that is the case you can hand out a salary to all workers from the central bank, and then tax the producers for the full amount after salaries. This is not a problem because a producer of a primary resource does not have to pay anybody to produce. The actual mechanism of payment and taxation is complex, because you want to avoid concentratio of power yet allow people to live and thrive and enjoy benefit from their efforts..